1.1 Introduction

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was both a celebrated novelist and an exceptionally original philosopher. At a time when moral philosophy in both Europe and the Anglophone world was in thrall to subjectivism, Murdoch went another way entirely, drawing on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Sartre, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein to recast the idea of virtue, or goodness, as knowledge. Murdoch identified goodness with the ability to see things, situations, and, above all, people in ways undistorted by how one fears them to be, or expects them to be, or would like them to be. And she linked this capacity for clear-sightedness to a loving awareness of human variety, vulnerability, and limitation. Readers of many different kinds have found in Murdoch’s development of these ideas an especially living and life-giving picture of moral life.

Such a picture certainly seems well-suited to contribute to our thinking about politics, about how we can best live with others in the social world, or worlds, we share. Murdoch herself was close to politics in many ways, beginning with her Anglo-Irish heritage. Her parents moved from Dublin to London shortly after her birth, to escape the Northern Ireland conflict, and never fully integrated into English society. Murdoch was, and remained, keenly aware of being Irish in England. As an adult Murdoch lived through World War II, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of the postwar liberal world. She worked with war refugees through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), first in London and later in Austria and Belgium. She supported the Republican cause in Spain. She wrote with passion and acuity about the nuclear bomb, the Vietnam war, public education, socialism, and the legal status of homosexuality. She was a lifelong advocate for women’s equality and gave special attention to their access to education.Footnote ² She discussed liberalism and engaged with Marxist ideas and philosophers throughout her half-century long career. She was at once perceptive and prescient when, at the age of twenty-eight, she described herself as having a mind “on the borders of philosophy, literature, and politics.”Footnote ³

Nevertheless, it has proven very difficult to bring the political significance and contours of Murdoch’s ethics into focus. There are many reasons for this, beginning with the sheer complexity of her writings. There is also the fact that her view of the relationship between politics and ethics (along with her political views themselves) shifted over time. Above all, there is the fact that Murdoch’s moral philosophy focuses, as novels often do, on the inner life.Footnote ⁴

1.2 Approach

One way to develop the case for the political significance of Murdoch’s ethics is to show that there is a happy convergence between what Murdoch sees as going into good moral agency or character, on the one hand, and what turns out to be needed for political progress, on the other.Footnote ⁵ This approach to Murdoch is accurate and illuminating on one condition: that we think of political progress as progress toward a society of free and equal people, that is, a society in which one’s religion, gender, sexual orientation, ancestry, race, or worldview has no bearing whatsoever on one’s political standing. In other words, what we might call “the convergence approach” to the political significance of Murdoch’s ethics succeeds only if our idea of political progress is based on Enlightenment values.

This qualification marks a limitation, of course, but also potentially a strength. Precisely because Murdoch’s ethics is keyed to Enlightenment political values, it helps us see these values and helps us to consider, in particular, the kind of mindset and practices that might serve them. This is where Murdoch’s focus on the inner life arguably pays dividends.Footnote ⁶ How do individuals avoid attaching undue significance to differences in the way others look or think, especially when those differences have been stigmatized or glorified in the culture? How do they manage to keep self-interest or self-concern in some kind of check if they are not forced to do this? Murdoch’s moral philosophy not only helps us to consider such questions, it was intended to help us to consider them. From this point of view, the political significance of Murdoch’s ethics is both broad and deep. It is also timely. Climate disaster, information technology, historic income inequality, and a growing awareness of the way that liberal values have been deployed over the centuries to justify domination and exploitation, have all given new life to illiberal attitudes and movements within liberal democracies.Footnote ⁷ They have also made it more difficult for those who embrace liberal values to live up to them, or to be sure what doing so means here and now.

Commentators have noted the affinity between Murdoch’s concept of attention and civic virtues of toleration and respect for difference.Footnote ⁸ In this Element I start further back, as it were, with Murdoch’s concept of the individual. I bring out how this concept is keyed to Enlightenment values and how it brings many of Murdoch’s other concepts in its train. Instead of beginning with attention, I end with attention. The main goal is to see Murdoch’s ethics with fresh eyes and to appreciate more finely the coherence, the complexity, and the political ambitions and potential of her view.Footnote ⁹

1.3 The Liberal Spirit

In pursuing this course, I will not be defending a position about whether Murdoch’s philosophy is politically progressive or conservative. I examine Murdoch’s philosophical writings in relation to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and the sanctity of the individual that have traditionally been shared by progressives and conservatives alike in modern liberal democracies and that Murdoch herself embraced throughout her career.Footnote ¹⁰ There are, of course, many different understandings of these ideals and their interrelations, but it is central to the modern interpretation of these ideals that they assign a high value to the individual’s ability to frame the plan of his life to suit his own character (paraphrasing J.S. Mill), and that they assign this value equally to all individuals.Footnote ¹¹ Crucially, this interpretation rules out zero-sum (or positional) conceptions of liberty or equality, that is, conceptions which treat liberty or equality as goods which some members of society must lack for others to possess. (The American Confederacy, for instance, conceived of liberty and equality in a way that required the existence of enslaved persons; only in contradistinction to enslaved persons, it was thought, could a white laborer be considered the equal of a white landowner.)Footnote ¹² The ideals, then, entail a broad readiness to see all people as mattering and to allow them to lead their lives in the way that makes the most sense to them, consistent with others being allowed do the same. Murdoch called such readiness “the Liberal spirit” and took it to be at the heart of the way that great novelists approach their characters. In her words:

We should not conflate the liberal spirit with liberalism as Murdoch thought of it or as we do.Footnote ¹³ The liberal spirit refers to a broad sensibility that can be held by people from all over the social and political spectrum: resolute socialists as well as neoliberals, Christians as well as atheists. It is compatible with thinking that capitalism must (to borrow a phrase from Murdoch) “grind the faces of the poor” or that it is the best solution to poverty (HT: 172). It is not compatible with thinking that men should rule over women or Europeans over non-Europeans. It is anti-caste, protective of the individual, deeply democratic.Footnote ¹⁴ It recognizes the dignity of individuals per se, of their “having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves.”

Such a sensibility holds a special – all-important – place in liberal democracies. As John Dewey put it:

One of the standing threats to the liberal spirit is the desire to organize society into groups of insider and outsider, higher and lower, ruler and ruled – a desire that can be sparked or heightened when people feel disoriented, insecure, or aggrieved. In this Element I show how Murdoch offers a way for human beings to conceptualize or “picture” one another that speaks to this difficulty and that serves a liberal sensibility in other ways.

1.4 Context

Let me provide some context for this idea and then address some potential difficulties. It will be helpful to distinguish, very broadly, three periods in Murdoch’s writings.

The early writings (1950–1961): These writings critically examine behaviorism, Sartre’s existentialism, Anglophone moral philosophy; further topics include Kant’s aesthetics and aesthetics more generally, socialism and liberalism.

The middle writings (1962–1975): These writings develop Murdoch’s critique of behaviorism, existentialism, and Anglophone moral philosophy, and reflect the increasing significance for Murdoch of Plato and Simone Weil; they include the celebrated essays that comprise The Sovereignty of Good.

The later writings (1976–1992): These writings extend earlier themes and develop a critique of postmodern thought; they include The Fire and the Sun and the monumental Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. They are the most Platonist of Murdoch’s writings.

Political themes are present in each of these periods and most pervasive in the early writings. There Murdoch warned that liberal democratic societies lacked, or were at risk of losing, the concepts required to honor the ideals they stood for (SSR; HT; TSM; SBR; AD). We can relate this idea to three of Murdoch’s wider commitments. (i) She took it that we naturally think in pictures. In our efforts to understand the world and our place in it, we inevitably use metaphors and imagery of various kinds (TL; NP; SGC).Footnote ¹⁵ (ii) The way that we picture the world is an extension of the concepts we use. So, for Murdoch, concepts shape our understanding of the world at a primal level. They shape what is thinkable for us, what we experience, and our sources of motivation (Panizza Reference Panizza2020; Diamond Reference Diamond2010; Reference Diamond, Antonaccio and Schweiker1996; Reference Diamond1988). (iii) Philosophers, among others, can improve the way we picture the world by revising, refining, and enriching the concepts at our disposal. Murdoch supposes, then, that a liberal democracy needs certain concepts if its members are to be able to picture human beings and their relations with one another in a way that befits liberal values. And she thinks that philosophers have an important role to play in fulfilling this need.

We should not forget that Murdoch’s concerns extended more broadly than this; she was concerned with values quite generally in the aftermath of World War II, and amid the rise of scientism and the apparent decline of religion. “[W]e are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself,” she wrote (AD: 293). One can read Murdoch’s entire body of work as an examination of this situation and an attempt to furnish (or rescue) some of the concepts that would enable members of liberal societies to come to grips, morally and politically, with life under late capitalism (Browning Reference Browning2018a; Forsberg Reference Forsberg2013).

It is in this context that Murdoch assigned special importance to the available conceptions of the individual. Much of her work takes aim at a “romantic” conception of the individual that she took to have had a major influence in the liberal world: in its philosophy, its literature, and its politics, as well as in everyday life. Her critique thus raises the possibility that modern liberal democracies had generated a picture of the individual that was inadequate to – or even at odds with – the liberal sensibility upon which they depend. Murdoch’s own conception of the individual can then be seen as an attempt to put liberal ideals on a more solid footing, while also speaking to the moral and spiritual needs of people in the modern West.

1.5 Difficulties

There are, however, some potential difficulties for the idea that Murdoch’s concept of the individual has political purchase.

1. 1. (a) Murdoch does not offer a definition of “individual” and this concept can merge, in her writings, with that of “human personality,” “consciousness,” or “self” (among others). (b) Her rich and evolving body of philosophical work naturally contains more than one concept of the individual.Footnote ¹⁶ So there is the danger of conflating different concepts in her work or different stages of her thought.

2. 2. Murdoch emphasizes the variety and historicity of concepts; her sensitivity to this was at the heart of her philosophical methods and vision. She leads us to expect that the conceptual needs and resources of a society will change over time. So even if we assign political value to Murdoch’s concept of the individual, it would be inappropriate to treat this concept as the concept of the individual that serves liberal democracy once and for all. We need to leave room for other concepts of the individual to arise both during different historical periods as well as at a given moment.Footnote ¹⁷

3. 3. Murdoch asks us to be careful about assigning political value to her moral philosophy.

Difficulties (1a) and (2) are basically caveats to bear in mind. (1b) and (3) require more in the way of explanation and strategy. Let’s begin by considering (3).

In Murdoch’s early writings, as Lawrence Blum notes, she “looks to morality to supply the ideals and values that should guide the crafting or reform of the political realm” (Reference Blum, Hopwood and Panizza2022b: 427).Footnote ¹⁸ Beginning in her middle period, Murdoch becomes more wary about morality playing this role. She comes to think that a very good moral philosophy could make for a very bad political philosophy.Footnote ¹⁹ An unpublished postscript to OGG sheds light on her thinking.Footnote ²⁰ In the original essay, Murdoch speaks of the need for a moral philosophy “out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated” (OGG: 46). She then goes on to say a great deal about ethics in relation to art and almost nothing about its relation to politics. In the postscript she explains that morality and politics – unlike (in her view) morality and aesthetics – “can never quite form a single system.” She continues:

In this rich passage, Murdoch expresses reservations about transferring concepts from her moral philosophy to the political domain. We need, then, to be careful about making this kind of move. At the same time, we need to be careful not to posit too sharp a separation between the moral and the political. There is, after all, a clear commonsense connection between the two. And there are three additional reasons to allow for such a connection.

First, Murdoch considered it an essential feature of morality that it could not be neatly segregated from other areas of life or study.Footnote ²²

Second, Murdoch insists on the necessity of bringing moral standards to bear on politics, and she takes it that doing so is perfectly compatible with political liberalism.Footnote ²³

Third, even in MGM, where Murdoch is most cautious about mixing ethics and politics, she recognizes vital connections between them. She maintains, for instance, that the modern democratic state depends for its survival on “an atmosphere of moral good will and high ideals” and that our political and moral lives constantly – and often properly – intermingle, “as when we argue about pornography, pacifism, abortion, medicine and hundreds of topics which are in the newspapers every day” (MGM: 362–363 and ch. 12, passim; MGM: 358). For Murdoch, “morality enters politics in an unsystematic way,” but it enters it (MGM: 378). She affirms their interconnection in the very passage from the postscript in which she calls for their separation. It is precisely the commitment to individual freedom that Murdoch sees as necessitating “a certain severance” between morality and politics. “If the axiom implied is the axiom of individual freedom … this in itself effects a certain severance ….” Murdoch here affirms the antecedent of the conditional and treats it as the implication of a moral viewpoint.

Given these considerations, it seems best that any political significance we attach to Murdoch’s concept of the individual be sensitive to the value of individual freedom.Footnote ²⁴ Accordingly, I assign to the concept a purely informal role in supporting the liberal spirit and in nourishing thereby “the atmosphere” that makes liberal democracy possible. I do not treat this concept as the basis for institutional design or government policy. This minimizes the possibility that it could be used coercively.

That leaves difficulty (1b): the possibility of conflating different concepts of the individual or different periods in Murdoch’s thinking. To lessen this possibility, and to keep things manageable, I limit myself in this work to discussing Murdoch’s early and middle writings.Footnote ²⁵

1.6 Preview

There are other reasons for restricting the scope of my inquiry in this way. Murdoch’s bold and brilliant early writings have received comparatively little scholarly attention.Footnote ²⁶ Reading them together with the writings from her middle period helps us to appreciate both what was initially present in Murdoch’s thinking and what emerged subsequently in The Sovereignty of Good. Doing so should also help us better to appreciate what is specific to Murdoch’s later writings.

I proceed by tracing different paths from Murdoch’s concept of the individual to the liberal spirit. In Section 2 I show how Murdoch develops a “naturalistic” frame or background for the individual agent that primes him to experience the value of other persons without slighting or subordinating his own value. In Sections 3 and 4 I move within this frame to examine three features of Murdoch’s “naturalized” individual: his uniqueness, his transcendence, and his dependence on the exercise of love to reach a knowledge of others or to be known by others. The aim is to illuminate the affinities between Murdoch’s picture of the individual and the ideal of a society in which human beings live together as free equals.Footnote ²⁷

2.1 Introduction

Tony Bennett was once asked whether Ella Fitzgerald ever talked about the epic hostility directed at American Blacks in their own country. He replied: “She never made a political statement … except when I heard her say three words … . She said, ‘Tony, we’re all here’” (Woodhead Reference Woodhead2019). An evocative comment – but where is here? We can think of Murdoch’s first published papers in moral philosophy as comparing two ways to conceptualize the “here” in which humans are placed, corresponding to what Murdoch calls the “liberal” and “naturalistic” outlooks.Footnote ²⁹ Murdoch takes these outlooks both to shape and to reflect the moral thinking of ordinary people in the West, as well as philosophical theories of morality and mind. They represent, in her words, “total differences of moral vision and perspective” (ME: 71).Footnote ³⁰ In this section I sketch these two outlooks, consider Murdoch’s reasons for thinking the liberal outlook to be inadequate to Enlightenment ideals of the liberal world, and show how she adumbrates a modified version of the naturalistic outlook to offset the liberal outlook’s deficiencies.

2.2 The Naturalistic and Liberal Outlooks

On what Murdoch calls the naturalistic outlook, morality is seen as continuous with “some sort of larger structure of reality,” which may be religious, social or historical, and which both “contains” and “transcends” the individual agent (ME: 65). The Marxist, for instance, understands morality in terms of a wider historical process that includes distinct stages of class struggle and culminates in a genuinely communist form of society. The Christian views it in relation to the ultimate reality of the Christian God. Murdoch stresses that one who holds a naturalistic outlook (the “naturalist”) sees fact and value as joined in important ways; he sees his conception of how to live as connected to, or implicit in, certain facts about the world.Footnote ³¹ In Murdoch’s words:

Importantly, for the naturalist, some of these facts are elusive or hard to reach. What is more, “freedom” for the naturalist is connected to increasing one’s understanding of these essential and elusive facts. Such gains in understanding may have practical force. Murdoch continues:

I’d like to represent the naturalistic outlook in terms of four interdependent postulates. This is an expository device. The postulates capture the main commitments of the naturalistic outlook, as Murdoch conceives it, and they will be useful to refer to going forward:

1. (1N) Morality is part of a larger structure or reality that transcends the agent; it presupposes a transcendent background to the individual.

2. (2N) Fact and value are interlinked; value is a genuine part of the world or universe.

3. (3N) Freedom originates in knowledge of self and world; such knowledge is necessarily partial and possesses practical force.

4. (4N) Moral activity may be purely inward; it need not issue in observable behavior.

By contrast, Murdoch associates what she calls the liberal outlook with the attempt to eliminate metaphysics and psychology from ethics.Footnote ³² In Murdoch’s words:

The image here is that of an individual who inhabits a straightforwardly empirical world. The individual introduces value into this world through his choices and in so doing he exercises his freedom.

The liberal outlook mirrors that of the naturalistic outlook. It can be thought of in terms of the four postulates that I introduced above, but (roughly) inverted. This, again, is an expository device that will prove useful. According to the liberal outlook:

1. (1L) Morality precludes the idea of a reality that transcends the individual; there is no transcendent background to the agent.

2. (2L) Fact and value are entirely separate; value is a product of the will, not a genuine part of the world.

3. (3L) Freedom consists in choosing for oneself how to connect facts to values; the facts are wholly available to any rational observer and motivationally inert.

4. (4L) Moral activity is perforce observable; a person’s morality is (purely) a matter of outward actions.

Although Murdoch views both outlooks as originating in Kant, there is an important sense in which they are not equally modern.Footnote ³³ The naturalistic outlook takes up Kant’s commitment to a transcendent background to moral life, to something above and beyond the will of the individual.Footnote ³⁴ The liberal outlook takes up Kant’s commitment to securing the individual’s autonomy by excluding value from the world (and locating it in the will).Footnote ³⁵ It is the second idea, not the first, that is quintessentially “modern,” in the sense of belonging to the Enlightenment. We can say, then, that the liberal outlook represents for Murdoch the Enlightenment (or officially modern) worldview and the naturalistic outlook represents the modern face of a premodern worldview.

2.3 The Naturalistic Outlook and the Liberal Spirit

Given this, one might expect the liberal outlook to support the liberal sensibility (or “spirit”), that is, the disposition to regard others as “having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves” (SBR: 257/271). This is, after all, an Enlightenment ideal, perhaps the Enlightenment ideal. One would expect the Enlightenment worldview to serve or support Enlightenment ideals. As we will see, the liberal outlook does indeed support the liberal sensibility, in Murdoch’s view, but only to a point. To locate that point, it will be helpful to look first at the naturalistic outlook and the degree to which it supports a liberal sensibility.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the first postulate of the naturalistic outlook.

(1N) Morality is part of a larger structure or reality that transcends the agent; it presupposes a transcendent background to the individual.

The OED tells us that “transcend” can be traced back to the Latin term tran(s)scendĕre, meaning to climb over or beyond, to surmount or surpass. What does it mean to say that a background transcends the agent? What does Murdoch mean by this?

On the reading presented here, Murdoch’s analyses in ME and VC provide us with importantly different answers to this question. In this section I’ll focus on ME, the earlier of the two papers. I’ll turn to VC, and spell out the relevant difference, in 2.9.Footnote ³⁶

In ME, the naturalist assigns more importance – categorically more importance – to the background structure than to the individual. In Murdoch’s words:

Murdoch continues (returning to a passage I quoted in 2.2):

This is a picture in which the background reality transcends the individual in a hierarchical sense, in the sense of endowing her with value (and so, by implication, surpassing her in value). Again: “[W]hat is important and valuable is the framework, and the individual only has importance, or even reality, in so far as he belongs to the framework” (70). Here the framework confers value on the individual; the individual’s value is conditional on, and subordinate to, the framework’s value. In short, ME offers us a hierarchical way of interpreting the idea of a transcendent background, a hierarchical version of the naturalistic outlook.

Hierarchical naturalism (as I shall call it) can be developed in different ways, as Murdoch’s grouping together of Thomists with Marxists and Hegelians suggests (ME: 70). It is, if you like, a species (hierarchical) of a genus (naturalistic) of moral outlook. It has a notable affinity, however, with premodern ideals of social or political order, wherein the individual properly derives her standing and identity from her position in an authoritative and pre-existing hierarchy (e.g., caste, feudal, patriarchal). It is good to remember that hierarchical forms of society were the norm in the West prior to the Enlightenment, and to appreciate that they continue to appeal to a great many people. Hierarchically ordered societies have the potential to furnish individuals with a stable sense of identity, purpose, and connection by linking those things to a wider natural or metaphysical framework.Footnote ³⁷

Hierarchical naturalism is not consistent with, nor is it meant to be consistent with, a liberal sensibility. For the hierarchical naturalist, as we have seen, the individual has no value (or even being) apart from the whole. The background reality is the source of the individual’s value. Should it require the sacrifice of one’s life, as God demanded the sacrifice of Isaac’s life, or of one’s agency, as patriarchal societies often demand of women, there is no question within this outlook of what, in principle, one ought to do. To put it plainly, individuals per se are not important to the hierarchical naturalist; they derive their value from the whole.

This way of thinking can be, and has been, deployed to sanction systems of gross exploitation, but it need not be so used.Footnote ³⁸ The core idea can be seen in Bessie Head’s story, “The Lovers” (Reference Head1990). The protagonists, Keaja and Tselane, belong to a village that follows traditional ways of life that are (thought to be) patterned on the cosmological order; to violate these traditional mores is to rupture this order and thereby to imperil the community. Strictly prearranged and “emotionally sterile” marriages form a critical part of the traditional ways. Any personal unhappiness that might arise from such marriages passes quickly (or ought to); daily life in the community is peaceful and harmonious. Keaja’s family has already planned a marriage for him when he and Tselane – who is not his appointed marriage partner – fall deeply in love and feel compelled to marry one another. Because they were brought up within a hierarchical naturalistic outlook, they struggle in a very fundamental way to make sense of their situation. As Tselane tells Keaja:

Murdoch neither endorses nor rejects hierarchical naturalism in ME (or VC). In these papers, her chief concern was to argue that philosophers should not dismiss views of this sort simply because they appeal to transcendent entities or “metaphysics.” In addition, she was concerned to show that the liberal outlook was just that, an outlook on morality – albeit an outlook that came naturally to members of postwar Britain.Footnote ³⁹ Murdoch argued that the failure of philosophers who operated within this outlook to see it as such – as one possible outlook among others – had led them to neglect the variety of moral thought and, in particular, the importance to much moral thinking of a belief in something that transcends the individual. But in a roughly contemporaneous piece that Murdoch published on T.S. Eliot, she rejects hierarchical naturalism precisely for its devaluation of the individual. It is worth quoting her at length:

In this rich passage we see Murdoch’s embrace of the Enlightenment ideal of “respect for the human person as such” and her identification with a liberal sensibility (or “attitude”).Footnote ⁴⁰ “[T]here are certain things which cannot be done to human persons” – for any reason, Murdoch implies, because the individual is precious, and because the individual should be permitted to live the life that she desires, provided that she allows others to do the same. Murdoch considers these ideals to be “aspects of liberalism” well worth preserving, and she rejects hierarchical naturalism because it does not and cannot support them.

2.4 The Liberal Outlook and the Liberal Spirit: Part One

Let’s turn now to consider how well the liberal outlook supports a liberal sensibility. This is more complicated and will occupy us for the next five sections (2.4–2.8). As before, I’ll approach this matter through what I have characterized as the first postulate of this outlook.

(1L) Morality precludes the idea of a reality that transcends the individual; there is no transcendent background to the agent.

In considering this postulate, it is helpful to note that Murdoch distinguishes two philosophical versions of the liberal outlook in her early work.Footnote ⁴¹ First, what might be called the Francophone or Sartrean “existentialist” version, which dismisses the notion of any substantial (natural or metaphysical) background to morality. It pictures the individual as making choices in a complete vacuum. There are plain empirical facts on one side and values on the other and no connective tissue – no social, rational or other natural or metaphysical “structure” (such as religion) – linking the two. Discussing Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Murdoch presents the view this way:

Things look a bit different according to what might be called the Anglophone or empiricist version of the liberal outlook (SBR: 253–256/264–270).Footnote ⁴² Here there is a notable background to morality; it consists in the network of ordinary language and the ordinary reasoning that the agent uses to formulate and communicate his choices. On this picture, the agent surveys the facts and then connects them to evaluative properties, whose valence is fixed by the common language, based on his principles. The principles are his to choose, but he is answerable to others for the accuracy of his factual survey or for the consistency of his choices relative to his chosen principles (Jamieson Reference Jamieson2023: 123–131). The ordinary language and ordinary forms of reasoning supply the agent with a shared (and social) background and a common currency with which to formulate and reflect on his choices.

Nevertheless, Murdoch stresses, the empiricist agent faces the same basic predicament as the existentialist agent: choosing how to act in a world that cannot itself sanction one’s choices. The world cannot sanction the empiricist agent’s choices any more than it can sanction the existentialist agent’s choices because, by 2L (according to which fact and value are entirely separate), the world is not a source of value; we bring value to it. Murdoch connects 2L to the view, now known as scientism, that the world contains only what falls under the purview of the natural sciences; by these lights, the world is unable to contain any value properties.Footnote ⁴³

But now one might wonder why, on the liberal outlook, the world can’t be said to transcend the agent. After all, the world that is revealed by the natural sciences is truly impressive – in its magnitude, in its complexity and, of course, in its importance to human life. It is certainly “greater than” than any one individual; individuals, after all, depend upon it. One might wonder, then, why it can’t be said to transcend the individual. This is to ask, in short, why 1L is essential to the liberal outlook and how exactly to understand this postulate.

Earlier, in discussing hierarchical naturalism, we isolated one way for a background to transcend the agent – by conferring importance on him: “What is important and valuable is the framework, and the individual only has importance, or even reality, in so far as he belongs to the framework” (ME: 70). The world as it is known through science, however, does not look like a good candidate for this kind of transcendence. While many religions and cultures worship the natural world and see it as value-conferring, what they’re worshipping is not the natural world as conceived by science. Still, one might wonder, isn’t there some other morally relevant (and less draconian) way for the world to transcend the agent on the liberal outlook?

The answer to this question, on Murdoch’s account, has to be “no,” because the stipulated absence of value in the world (2L) precludes any constituents of the world from having moral relevance, and because this absence is essential to the outlook. On the liberal worldview, “however grandiose the structure may be … the moral agent is responsible for endowing the totality with value” (ME: 71).Footnote ⁴⁴ The background must leave the question of value wide open because only then, by 3L (which identifies freedom with untrammeled choice), can we think of the individual’s will as autonomous. As Murdoch (later) puts it: “if the will is to be totally free the world it moves in must be devoid of normative characteristics” (IP: 40).Footnote ⁴⁵

The lesson here is twofold. First, the ultimate background to the agent on the liberal outlook, the “here” in which she moves, is a morally empty and inert world. Second, in such a world, there is nothing to transcend the agent in a morally significant way, whether by according her importance or by properly conditioning what she cares about and what she chooses. This is the significance of 1L.

2.5 The Liberal Outlook and the Liberal Spirit: Part Two

Murdoch thinks that the liberal outlook’s conception of the individual’s background goes with a picture of the individual herself that is unwittingly “romantic.” On the liberal outlook, there is nothing in the world to seriously challenge or compel the self: there is just the self with its chosen concerns, confronting a world that is (taken to be) devoid of value. It thus invites a kind of romantic bravado.Footnote ⁴⁶

Murdoch sees the liberal outlook’s romantic picture of the individual as something that may work with, as well as against, a liberal sensibility. Let’s consider first how it can support a liberal sensibility.

In a remarkable passage in SGC, Murdoch likens the romantic individual to Milton’s Lucifer (!) and yet deems him both “the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants,” and the inspiration of political liberalism (SGC: 78–79).Footnote ⁴⁷ We could read this as a withering condemnation of liberalism tout court, but this would be to oversimplify. Murdoch is registering that despite its rather serious failings, this picture of the individual also embodies the Enlightenment ideals that she cherishes.

Murdoch doesn’t spell out how she sees the romantic individual as embodying or supporting these ideals, but here is one distinct possibility. This picture liberates the individual from the structures of external authority that had, historically, been sources of oppression (most obviously religion). The liberal outlook views every individual, rich or poor, Protestant or atheist, as a source and arbiter of value. It precludes any framework or authority to which he should defer or from which his value derives. No transcendent realities “such as God, or History, or the Church” are allowed “to overshadow the moral life” (VC: 55/95). Nor are they allowed to overshadow, or outshine, the individual. The liberal worldview not only permits Keaja and Tselane to recognize each other’s importance independently of the socio-cosmological order, it enjoins them to do so. It plainly expresses the idea of the individual as valuable per se. This, we could say, is a dividend of 1L (which rejects a transcendent background to the individual).

Relatedly, the liberal worldview seems to encourage tolerance because it disallows one who holds it from regarding her own morality as a kind of fact about the world or universe (ME: 66). In other words, a dividend of 2L (which separates fact from value) is that one cannot make one’s values out to be compulsory for others on the grounds that they follow from “the way things are.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Accordingly, the romantic individual will seek to live and let live, provided that others do the same, because he recognizes that his own way of doing things is just that. In short, he will neither claim undue authority for himself nor suffer it from others. He would thus seem to be “the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants.”

It is more difficult to see how the liberal outlook and its romantic picture of the individual might work against the liberal sensibility (or “spirit”). In considering this, I take my lead from remarks that Murdoch makes in her essay “Against Dryness”:

A few passages later, after noting the dearth of convincing pictures of evil in contemporary literature, Murdoch continues this thought as follows:

So: Murdoch sees the romantic individual as both the ideal citizen of the liberal state and, at the same time, as somehow in tension with what she takes to be liberalism’s “fundamental tenet.” And she takes that tenet to be the belief that persons are substantial, distinct, impenetrable, and indefinable – as well as important in their own right. As we will see, this is the very belief that her own conception of the individual is meant to capture. But this is to get ahead. In the next section I show why Murdoch thinks the heroic romantic individual envisaged by the liberal outlook turns out to be weirdly insubstantial. In 2.7 I then sketch how Murdoch links this cipher-like image of the individual to attitudes that are conducive to intolerance. Finally, in 2.8, I consider how to fit together the relevant strengths and weaknesses of the liberal outlook’s romantic picture of the individual.

2.6 The Liberal Outlook and the Liberal Spirit: Part Three

The liberal outlook identifies the agent’s freedom with the ability to confer value in a way that is wholly unconstrained. In this way it aims to guarantee the authenticity of the agent’s choices, to ensure that they are truly his. This is the force of 3L. Murdoch points out that to secure this type of freedom, the outlook isolates the part of the agent that chooses. It identifies the agent with his will, that is, and then quarantines the will in order to ensure that it is not influenced by forces outside of its control. On the one hand, the will is isolated from other aspects of (what we ordinarily call) the agent’s self: “immense care is taken to picture the will as isolated. It is isolated from belief, from reason, from feeling, and yet the essential center of the self” (IP: 8). On the other, it is isolated from its material surroundings: there can be, as we saw, nothing in the world to compel it. “If the will is to be … free the world it moves in must be devoid of normative characteristics” (IP: 40).

In short: the self is reduced to will, the will is sealed off from the world and from other parts of the self, and value is removed from the world. Murdoch was struck by the way that this combination (reduction, isolation, removal) ends up depriving the individual of vital substance and individuality, even as it attributes to him god-like powers. The romantic individual, for all his self-emphasis and because of it, turns out to be a “solitary and substanceless” being, nothing like a distinctive locus of experience with a rich history of perception and thought (IP: 16). Nothing, that is, like an actual person or self. Such a figure, Murdoch notes, is scarcely recognizable as an agent. One who sees herself as an isolated will can’t see her choices as warranted by anything in the world or as expressive of her vision of objective reality. Is she really even choosing then? “If we are so strangely separate from the world at moments of choice are we really choosing at all, are we right indeed to identify ourselves with this giddy empty will?” (IP: 35).Footnote ⁴⁹

Instead of presenting us, then, with a life-like agent in a life-like world, the liberal outlook presents us with “a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world” (AD: 290). Murdoch wants us to see that these simplified notions of self and world complement each other. For the world to be easily comprehended, the individuals populating it must themselves be easily comprehended: free of internal depths, readily compassed. And, correspondingly, to view people in this way, the world in which they make their choices must be morally inert and simple. But in such a world – coming full circle, now – there is little to occasion the kind of inner life we associate with persons or agency. The figure suggested by such a background is neither substantial nor distinctive nor in any way out of reach. This, we could say, is the price of freedom as it is construed by 3L: identifying freedom with choosing one’s values, it leaves no one to do the choosing.Footnote ⁵⁰

Murdoch criticizes this reductive picture of the self (and its world) on various grounds. Our concern is with how she sees it as itself working against the liberal spirit, against a readiness to see others as having their own valid paths in life, however different those paths might be from one’s own.

2.7 The Liberal Outlook and the Liberal Spirit: Part Four

Murdoch’s comments on this point are more suggestive than explicit. However, they point in a certain direction that we could summarize in this way: one who pictures herself as a “solitary, substanceless” chooser in a morally simple world is not poised to take an interest in the lives of others or to be modest about her own grasp of things, and – Murdoch thinks – a person must possess both of these qualities if she is to be reliably tolerant of others and respectful of human difference.Footnote ⁵¹ In Murdoch’s words, the liberal outlook fails to provide its possessor with “a stand-point for considering real human beings in their variety” or “any technique for exploring and controlling our own spiritual energy” in relation to others (SBR: 255). Similarly: “A simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and free, engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it” (AD: 293).

The concepts of convention and neurosis, which correspond to the Anglophone and Francophone versions of the liberal outlook discussed in 2.4, help to articulate Murdoch’s thinking in this connection. Very roughly, these designate pathologies that Murdoch associates with the liberal conception of the individual (S&G: 215–218; SBR: 254–255/268–270). With “convention,” Murdoch is not targeting conventional understandings or mores per se; she is targeting excessive reliance on conventional ways of thinking, that is, “groupthink.” She suggests that one who is guided by the liberal picture of the individual in its Anglophone version will be susceptible to groupthink because, lacking a sense of the rich inner life that distinguishes individuals from one another, he will too readily trust in “the network of moral conceptual activity at its most common and universally accepted level” to provide a suitable standard or medium for thinking about other persons (SBR: 254/268).Footnote ⁵²

“Neurosis” indicates a condition of anxious self-absorption that Murdoch associates with the Francophone (or Sartrean) version of the liberal outlook. The neurotic becomes wrapped up in angst over his radical freedom, his need to make decisions, while lacking any objective basis for what he decides. He is thus drawn into hyper-reflection in lieu of a properly engaged consideration of the world and people around him; he closes in on himself since (by his lights) there is nothing in the world to ground his values (SBR: 254–255/268–270; also S&G: 216; Holland Reference Holland and Broackes2012). Murdoch sees neurosis and convention as mutually reinforcing conditions (SBR: 254/268). Absent the sense of a rich inner or outer world, she suggests, efforts to break out of self-absorption (should they occur!) lead one to conventional views and vice-versa. Both conditions make it hard, or impossible, for one to grasp what Murdoch calls “the reality” of other persons/individuals.Footnote ⁵³ What does this mean?

Murdoch associates the reality of persons with their importance, their substantiality, and their difference (e.g., SBR: 261/275; HMD: 149). These are all qualities, we should note, that figure in her description of liberalism’s chief tenet. The concept of an individual’s reality highlights the gap, or distance, between what one sees when one regards another and what is there to be seen. The person in the grip of neurosis or convention is one who is not sufficiently alive to this gap. His problem, on Murdoch’s account, is not that he sees others through the prism of conventional or personal categories but that he reduces others to what these categories make of them. Murdoch thinks that such a person does not grasp that other persons are real.

A passage from Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (Reference Kincaid1990) might be helpful here. Mariah, for whom the narrator of the novel (Lucy) works as a nanny, is a very warm-hearted person. The two of them have just arrived at the summerhouse that belongs to Mariah’s family. Lucy says:

Mariah’s view of Gus is deeply affectionate but, if Lucy is right about her, it misses something important.Footnote ⁵⁴ It misses that Gus is not just what he means or has meant to Mariah, that he is necessarily more than (and so at variance with) that. “Still, he was a real person.” If Mariah has been afflicted by either convention or neurosis, as Murdoch conceives these, she will persist in this reductive conception of Gus, this obliviousness to his independent reality. And this will attenuate Mariah’s sense of his dignity. Should Gus wish to retire from his caretaker job earlier than anticipated, someone in the grip of convention or neurosis might well be unable to see this as anything but betrayal or irresponsibility. Such a person need have no sense that there might be something wrong with the script she is working from, or that there can be no definitive script, that Gus’s mode of being is neither the same as hers, nor necessarily congruent with hers, nor fully comprehensible to her, nor hers to decide.

Let me draw together the different points here. Murdoch suggests that one who pictures himself or others as “free choosers in an empirically straightforward world” will be ill-prepared to be tolerant of actual individuals – who turn out be substantial, and various, and who inhabit a morally complicated and challenging world. Such a person will be susceptible to excessively conventional or self-referential ways of thinking, disinclined to approach others with a modicum of curiosity and modesty. Not because he takes himself to have privileged access to the moral truth – as one who holds the naturalistic outlook might – but because he greatly underestimates the complexity of others and of the world as it bears on morality. He isn’t well-prepared to recognize “the reality” of other individuals, where this includes their distance from his own ideas of them and from his own way of being in the world. This, Murdoch implies, is not a recipe for tolerance.

2.8 The Liberal Outlook and the Liberal Spirit: Part Five

Stepping back. We’ve been considering how well the liberal outlook supports the liberal spirit that is the lifeblood of liberal democracy. We noted that the liberal outlook affirms the importance of the individual per se, but also loses sight of the individual’s substance and depth. It thus, by Murdoch’s lights, works both for and against the liberal sensibility. How are we to fit these opposing tendencies together? Murdoch doesn’t exactly tell us. Let me suggest one way to integrate them that follows the lead of Murdoch’s remarks but also goes beyond them. I take Murdoch to be inviting the thought that while the liberal outlook’s romantic image affirms the absolute value of the individual, it doesn’t sufficiently prime us to experience the value of others in concreto.Footnote ⁵⁵ One can sincerely endorse the idea that others deserve respect but feel quite differently in their actual presence. This is particularly so in certain situations, such as when one has been conditioned to view members of a certain social group as inferior, or when one is dealing with disorienting cultural changes.

The wider idea is that members of liberal societies need to be able to picture themselves in more ways than as monarchs of a disenchanted world. It’s as if a picture of the individual fitted to certain contexts overstepped its bounds and threatened to become the picture for all contexts.Footnote ⁵⁶ Murdoch thinks that however essential the liberal outlook’s romantic picture of the individual might be (or have been) to liberal ideals, it is far from sufficient. It doesn’t do justice to what she takes to be the bedrock of liberal democracy: the idea that persons are not only valuable but also substantial, unique, and only partially accessible (AD: 294). She thinks that liberal democracies need a picture of the individual that reflects and reinforces this underlying tenet, that encourages a modicum of curiosity and modesty, and thereby primes us to experience the reality of others.

To conclude this section, I examine Murdoch’s own sketch of such a picture. This takes us back to the naturalistic outlook – with a very important modification.

2.9 A Liberal Naturalism

In a memorable passage, Murdoch describes herself and her readers as “heirs of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Liberal tradition” who have not yet recovered from two world wars or the experience of Hitler and who “have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality” (AD: 287). After briefly rehearsing the liberal outlook she says:

In this exceedingly rich passage, Murdoch sums up what is missing from the liberal picture of the individual “as it stands”: a background of values, of realities, that transcend the individual. The liberal picture surrendered such a background, Murdoch observes, to protect the idea of the individual as free. We’ve examined why Murdoch thinks that this strategy achieves, at best, mixed results. A satisfactory picture, Murdoch maintains, will not choose between the freedom of the individual and the richness of his background. It will provide for both. It will supply the individual with a background that is rich and transcendent while preserving the idea of him as free and separate. To put this a touch paradoxically: an apt “Liberal theory of personality” will be a naturalistic theory, albeit one that fits with liberalism’s commitment to the sanctity of the individual.Footnote ⁵⁷ The difficulty is how to envisage a background that transcends the individual without eclipsing him, or how to conceive of the naturalistic outlook in a way that is not hierarchical.

I find Murdoch’s solution to this difficulty to be both powerful and elegant. It can be broken into two simple ideas. First, the idea that the background to the individual consists (primarily) in other human individuals and their relations to one another. Second, the idea that these others transcend the individual in the sense of lying beyond, or exceeding, what he can fully comprehend.

Murdoch drew the first idea from her reading of classic liberal thinkers (she mentions Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and especially Mill). In this respect, we can see her as attempting to help the liberal world to “regenerate itself out of its own resources” (TSM: 168). These thinkers pictured the individual not as vacuous and alone, she notes, but as surrounded by “a plurality of other persons, who are quite separate and different individuals who have to get along together” (SBR: 251/265–266). Murdoch appreciates the social implications of this picture – it envisages “separate and different individuals,” but individuals “who have to get along together,” “a plurality” of such persons. But she found nothing in the classical thinkers’ conception of this plurality to suggest transcendence. She found their conception of it to be “undynamic and naïve” (SBR: 252).Footnote ⁵⁸ Given Murdoch’s rejection of hierarchical naturalism, the question thus becomes how to conceptualize the human surround in such a way that it transcends the agent without subordinating him. In answer to this question, Murdoch developed what I am calling the second idea. To appreciate this stretch of her thought, we must turn to “Vision and Choice,” the sequel to “Metaphysics and Ethics.” It is here, I suggest, that we can see an important and neglected difference in their two treatments of the idea of transcendence (2.3).

In ME, as we saw, Murdoch interprets the transcendence of the background hierarchically; the background transcends the agent in that it is the very source of his own value. In VC, Murdoch’s language is more ambiguous. On the one hand, she describes the naturalist as one who “believes that as moral beings we are immersed in a reality which transcends us and that moral progress consists in awareness of this reality and submission to its purposes” (VC: 56/96). “Submission to its purposes” is, admittedly, about as hierarchical as it gets. But Murdoch’s language also points in a different direction when she describes the naturalist as one who “believes that moral values are visions, inspirations or powers which emanate from a transcendent source concerning which he is called on to make discoveries and may at present know little” (VC: 56/96). Her language also points in this alternative direction when, earlier in the paper, she associates the naturalistic model with views “which emphasize the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming that one has got individuals and situations ‘taped,’ the connection of knowledge with love and of spiritual insight with apprehension of the unique” (VC: 46/87).Footnote ⁵⁹ She associates these views (and so the naturalistic model) with the belief that “we live in a world whose mystery transcends us and that morality is the exploration of that mystery in so far as it concerns each individual” (VC: 47/88). The language here is less hierarchical than it is perfectionist and mystical. We are invited to think about knowledge in connection with love, about the apprehension of what is unique, about mystery as it concerns the individual, and about the “endlessness of the task of understanding.” Readers of Murdoch will recognize this as a pretty good rough description of the view that she will go on to develop in subsequent writings. The point for the moment is that it suggests a different way for morality to have a background that transcends the agent. Instead of the background transcending the agent by endowing her with value – per hierarchical naturalism (and ME) – the background here transcends the agent by surpassing what the agent can fully understand while stirring the agent’s desire to understand. That is, the background transcends the agent not by being above her but by being in an important sense beyond her. Transcendence in this second sense entails epistemological distance as well as some kind of attraction to what is distant: “a transcendent source concerning which he is called on to make discoveries” (VC: 56/96). In VC, Murdoch joins this epistemological-erotic sense of transcendence to the empiricist idea that the background to the individual is other individuals who are “quite separate and different” yet connected to one another.

2.10 Liberal Naturalism Developed

In a pair of papers published three years later, in 1959, Murdoch develops this picture in a striking way (S&G; SBR). In these papers, Murdoch likens the plurality of persons to Kant’s sublime:

Like Kant’s natural (or mathematical) sublime, Murdoch’s “human” or “social” sublime both attracts and defeats the individual’s efforts to comprehend it. Somewhat more plainly than Kant’s sublime, it does this in a way that can be morally transformative.Footnote ⁶⁰ And in keeping with the alternative description of the naturalistic outlook provided in VC, it does not endow the agent with value, though it may well constrain her. It challenges and concentrates her. This is a way of construing the first postulate of the naturalistic outlook (1N) that preserves the individual’s unconditional value while supplying him with a morally rich background, one from which the individual “has much to learn.”

These papers also elaborate the idea, present but not developed in VC, that it is through love that individuals can come to discover or know – never fully – the human “manifold” that surrounds them (S&G: 215–220; SBR: 268–270/282–284; VC: 46/87, 51/91). The addition of this bold idea helps us to see how Murdoch’s reworking of the naturalistic outlook joins fact to value and so introduces value into the world (or restores its place there). It is through love (in part) that we come to discover the reality of other people, their actual density and uniqueness, their difference from our conceptions of them, and their independent importance.

On this picture, to repeat, the background transcends the individual not by endowing her with value or exceeding her in value, but by exceeding what she can fully comprehend at any given time while properly stirring the desire to learn more about what she does not fully comprehend. What comprises the background is not a deity, nor a social or historical process, nor a tradition, but other socially situated human individuals, conceived as unique, not fully surveyable, and in need of love to be understood—individuals who are themselves confronted by the same vast, intricate and exacting manifold. This, we could say, is Murdoch’s sketch of the “here” where we all are, a “here” which racism and other modern tribalisms seek to repudiate.

There is room in this picture for concepts such as “submission,” “obedience,” and (yes) “sovereignty,” but not as tools, descriptors, or props of social hierarchy. There is nothing here to suggest that individuals should submit to traditional forms of authority or that they derive their value from the background. In particular, the agent is called upon not to obey or to command other individuals but to “make discoveries” about them, to learn about them and to appreciate their separateness and difference from herself and from others. The agent is given to understand, moreover, that such gains in understanding will only be possible through an exercise of love. This is a naturalistic picture that has been deftly modified to capture what Murdoch took to be the regulative principle of liberalism, the idea that human beings are “substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable” (AD: 294).

On the reading presented here, Murdoch’s modified naturalistic picture of the individual is not meant to replace the liberal outlook’s romantic picture of the individual (as one who heroically imparts value to a valueless world through her choices). It is meant to condition and complement it, so that liberal societies are better equipped, at a conceptual level, to realize their ideals. The basic idea is simple: to conceive of others as unique, never fully within one’s grasp, and revealed in essential ways through love is to encourage a perpetual modesty about one’s understandings of them together with a modicum of curiosity. Such modesty and curiosity, in turn, prime us to experience the separateness of other persons, their importance, and their right to live in a way that makes sense to them even when it doesn’t make sense to us (or to others). In Murdoch’s more evocative terms: conceiving of others as unique, transcendent, and revealed by love primes us to experience their reality even, or especially, when we are prone to losing sight of it.

2.11 Summary

In this section I’ve sketched what Murdoch calls the liberal and naturalistic outlooks, considered how well each one supports the liberal sensibility or spirit that liberal democracies depend upon, and examined how Murdoch articulates a modified version of the naturalistic outlook to better support the liberal sensibility. At the heart of Murdoch’s analysis is the idea that the modern world needs to recover the premodern idea of a reality that transcends the individual if it is to realize its own ideal of a society in which individuals live together as free equals. On Murdoch’s modified version of the naturalistic outlook, human individuals conceived as unique, transcendent, and revealed by love constitute just such a reality. Although these three features of the individual coalesce in Murdoch’s account, it is useful to consider them separately.Footnote ⁶¹ Accordingly, in Section 3 I examine the uniqueness and transcendence of individuals, while in Section 4 I examine their knowability through love. Taken together, in these two sections I show how Murdoch understands, anchors, and interconnects these features, and I consider more closely their connection to the liberal sensibility that Murdoch cherishes.

3.1 Introduction

In Section 2 I compared what Murdoch calls the liberal and naturalistic outlooks and showed how Murdoch develops a nonhierarchical version of the naturalistic outlook to frame her conception of the individual and to better serve Enlightenment ideals. On Murdoch’s articulation of the naturalistic outlook, the individual is seen against a background that transcends him but does not eclipse or subordinate him; it thus preserves the individual’s unconditional value. The background itself consists in other individuals conceived as unique, transcendent, and knowable through love. In this section I examine the first two of these features of Murdoch’s naturalized individual.

It will be helpful to begin with an example, or foil, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (Reference Ishiguro2021).

Klara is the android friend of Josie, a young woman with a serious illness caused by the same creepy “lifting” procedure that earlier led to her older sister’s death. The novel asks whether, with enough mapping and programming, Klara can be turned into – literally “continue” – Josie, should Josie die. Or is there, as the character Mr. Capaldi puts it, “something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer”? Mr. Capaldi himself considers this a quaint idea, a piece of reactionary nostalgia. “There’s nothing there,” he assures Josie’s mom, “nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue” (2021: 207–208). Josie’s mom, of course, both does and does not want to believe him.

Murdoch’s conception of the individual affirms, precisely, that there is “something unreachable” and “unique” in each person. This way of thinking about persons is continuous with what Murdoch takes to be the core tenet of liberal democracy – the idea that persons are “substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable” (AD: 294). What Murdoch offers us, then, is a way of understanding ourselves that she takes to be at the heart of Enlightenment values. The idea that individuals are unique and transcendent (and revealed by love) is not, for Murdoch, a matter of empirical fact; it is a regulative ideal. It is an idea “that we need and use” (TL: 38).Footnote ⁶³ It captures a way of seeing ourselves that Murdoch takes to be ordinary, valuable, coherent, and at risk of being lost.

What exactly is at stake in how we see ourselves? A great deal, Murdoch believes. We conceptualize ourselves, she says, “at a point of great conceptual sensibility” (ME: 75). That is, how we picture ourselves has real consequences for what we become, for what we are (and so for everything else in the world). “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture” (ME: 75). A world in which we saw ourselves and one another as Mr. Capaldi sees Josie would, Murdoch implies, be a world in which Capaldi’s reductive picture of us was closer to the truth, just as a world in which we saw one another as machines would be a world in which we were indeed more machine-like. This, for Murdoch, is part of the immense importance of philosophy and the arts.

Murdoch doesn’t try to prove that humans in fact possess the features of uniqueness, transcendence, or knowability by love – features Mr. Capaldi rejects. Regulative ideals cannot be proven: they are the kind of idea “about which it makes no sense to ask, is it true or false that it is so” (TL: 39). We can, however, see her as doing something more subtle. With a bit of reconstruction, we can see the essays in Sovereignty (in particular) as filling in and grounding these features by showing how each one is connected to other ideas that are familiar, important, and plausible.Footnote ⁶⁴ Establishing these features is not Murdoch’s principal aim in these essays (or elsewhere), so reading her in this way does require reconstruction. But the materials are plainly there, and they bring out both a conceptual coherence and a political significance to Murdoch’s early and middle writings that might otherwise escape one. Murdoch doesn’t suggest that we always do (or should) think of others in the light of this regulative ideal. Her suggestion is rather that envisaging others in this way has an important place in ordinary life for good reason, and that members of democratic societies have particular reason to want it to continue to have such a place.

3.2 Uniqueness

Let’s begin by considering the idea of individuals as unique. We (seem to) apprehend the uniqueness of others in their faces, their voices, their body language, and countless other ways, and we take it to have depth, to reach into their thoughts and experience. We assume that identical twins who were raised together, for all their physical similarities, are different “inside.” When someone whom we love dies, we feel that a distinctive inner world dies along with them; this is part of what we grieve. Our sense that others are unique, and substantially so, helps explain why we’re both fascinated by and disturbed at the prospect of Klara “continuing” Josie. (Is it possible to replicate a being who is truly unique? What would this mean exactly?)

For Murdoch, the uniqueness of individuals is an important idea in its own right and something that helps to illuminate the differences between people. Uniqueness implies that differences between people are inevitable – a primitive fact, if you like – and that they run deep. Murdoch considers it a serious failing of the liberal outlook examined in Section 2 that it cannot do justice either to the uniqueness of individuals, as we commonly think of it, or to the gravity and extent of the differences among them. On Murdoch’s analysis, as we saw, the liberal individual is not much of an individual at all. The individuality of a person is confined to his will, understood as his explicit choices or outward actions (IP: 21). This leaves nothing for differences between individuals to be about, Murdoch observes, except differences of choice, and, more precisely, differences of choice where the facts are settled (as when we agree that the neighbor’s dog is barking at all hours but disagree about what to do about it.) For Murdoch, many cases of disagreement are nothing like this. Often, we disagree about how to construe the facts, how to describe a situation. We don’t just make different choices in such cases, she says, “we see different worlds” (VC: 41/82). That this is so, that we see the world differently from one another, is at the heart of the human sublime to which Murdoch appeals in SBR and S&G. What properly stuns us, she says there, “is not, as Kant imagined, the formlessness of nature, but rather its unutterable particularity; and most particular and individual of all natural things is the mind of man” (S&G: 215).Footnote ⁶⁵

3.3 Uniqueness and Democracy

Before examining Murdoch’s elucidation of the idea that individuals are unique, I want to consider first the potential political significance of her emphasis on particularity and difference. One worry we might have is that stressing the differences between people is often the problem where toleration and related attitudes are concerned. There is an arresting moment in the “Eyes on the Prize” documentary series about the U.S. civil rights movement when a white reporter speaks to a young white girl (perhaps ten years old) about the violent resistance of some whites to the admission of Black students into her school (Vecchione Reference Vecchione1987). By way of explanation, the girl remarks that (American) Blacks are “more different to us” than other kinds of people such as “Chinese or Spanish.” (It’s unclear if she is referring to Chinese- or Spanish- Americans.) But what’s being asserted here is precisely not the uniqueness of individual Blacks (or whites). Instead, the girl sees Black and white Americans as having immutable characteristics corresponding to their racial group. That is, she asserts what Appiah calls “racialism” (Reference Appiah and Goldberg1990: 4–5). She has been taught, moreover, that these characteristics make it inappropriate for Black and white children to share public space. This follows a familiar pattern for the creation of de facto social hierarchies. Members of one social group (e.g., Christian, male, white, European) are taken to be essentially the same as one another, and in a way that distinguishes them permanently from members of a competing social group (e.g., Muslim, female, Black, African). The alleged differences are then used to justify the domination or annihilation of the one group by the other (see, e.g., Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson2002: ch. 3). Murdoch’s emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals works against this. To see individuals as different from one another is to see them as not reducible to any social identity. In that case, the fact that a person is male or British or Jewish or nonbinary or wealthy will not exhaust who the person is (though such facts may be critically important in many contexts).Footnote ⁶⁶ Something essential will be left over, something that is the individual’s alone, and that distinguishes him from other individuals whose social identities are identical to his own.

A subtler point: one who sees individuals as unique will expect to find a diversity of views within any social group, no matter how small or seemingly homogeneous. Such a person will trust that vegans (for instance) will not think exactly alike, any more than all Baptist Christians will. And this means that such a person will recognize the potential for disagreement among members within any one social group and, therewith, the potential for the formation of unprecedented political alliances between groups or their individual members. Such a person will recognize, that is, that some Baptist Christians may be receptive to animal welfare (and vice-versa). The potential for such new alliances is crucial to democracy because it ensures that there is no permanent majority, that is, no ruling class. Belief in this potential is also crucial to democracy because it gives people of divergent interests or camps a reason to talk and listen to each other, and a reason to think that their ends can be democratically advanced. Murdoch’s emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals underlines this potential.

3.4 Uniqueness and Historicity

Murdoch relates the uniqueness of individuals to their historicity. “[W]e are,” she says, “human historical individuals” (IP: 28). We can distinguish in Murdoch two senses in which human individuals are historical. First, humans are for Murdoch historical in the general sense that our lives unfold within a specific socio-historical moment, amid determinate material conditions, where the concepts at our disposal are conditioned by this moment and these conditions (VC: 43/84). That is, I will have a different concept of loyalty, or of gender, or of self, than I would were I living in the fourteenth century, and I will lack entirely some concepts that a version of me who witnessed the Black Death would possess (and vice-versa). This is to say that for Murdoch there is no “absolute” perspective for an individual or culture to occupy. Murdoch, however, is not a relativist. She embraces the possibility of moral objectivity; she simply doesn’t tie that objectivity in any way to a timeless perspective. Nor is she a determinist. She stresses that we’re able to reject or to revise the concepts we inherit, as well as to generate new ones; this, for Murdoch, is an important sense in which humans are free (ME: 71–72; OGG: 73).

Second, humans are for Murdoch historical in the sense that each of us has a personal history that distinguishes us from other individuals. This personal sense of the historical is important for our purposes because Murdoch takes it to be the case that one’s personal history gives a unique shape, or inflection, to the concepts one uses (IP: 25–33). We could illustrate this by saying that when my friend describes someone as “serious” I know what she means, but my use of this concept is somewhat different – my conception of what it means to be “serious” differs from hers – because my use of this concept has grown out of different life experiences. This is true even though my friend and I share a great deal in the way of culture and social identity and history. (We did not, e.g., share a family, or a hometown, nor did we share innumerable experiences.) She and I share most concepts, in other words, but these concepts have ramified somewhat differently in our two individual cases. The two senses of history to which Murdoch appeals are obviously related: we are born into certain sets of concepts, based on our socio-historical location; those concepts then undergo continual revision and ramification, based on our personal experience and in response to changes in the wider culture.

For Murdoch, then, every (adult) individual has a distinctive ramification, or network, of concepts tied to their life history, and this network is at the heart of that person’s sense of the world. In Murdoch’s terms, it determines their “total vision of life,” meaning their distinctive modus operandi, expressed in such things as “their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, … what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they find funny: in short the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation” (VC: 39/80–81). Murdoch also uses the metaphor of texture – “texture of a man’s being” – to describe what is at issue here. In insisting on the uniqueness of a person’s mindedness or mode of being, Murdoch is not denying that people may be highly conformist in their thinking, or suggesting that we are free to assign any meaning we like to words or concepts.Footnote ⁶⁷ She is saying, rather, that an individual’s way of seeing and experiencing things, like a person’s spoken or written language, possesses distinguishing features, even as it conforms to more general patterns.Footnote ⁶⁸

3.5 Transcendence

The idea that individuals transcend one another’s understanding, that they are in some sense “unreachable,” is, perhaps, less routine than the idea that individuals are unique. Let’s consider what Murdoch makes of it.

The idea is not simply that individuals are not fully comprehensible to one another. This would not be saying much: no one expects perfect knowledge of others and few would wish to be perfectly understood by others (John Reference John2013). The idea is rather that others elude our understanding in important ways. The story of Josie and Klara is again helpful in bringing out what is at stake.

Josie’s father (Mr. P) and Klara discuss Klara’s assignment to “continue” Josie, should Josie – like her sister – die prematurely. Mr. P asks:

After reflecting for a moment, Klara replies: “Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited. Even if Mr. P is talking in the poetic sense, there’ll be an end to what there is to learn.” For Murdoch, to say that individuals transcend one another’s understanding is to say – by contrast – that that there will never be “an end to what there is to learn” about others, to what it would be good to learn about others. So even if one were somehow able to capture a person’s life experiences – their distinctive history – in its entirety (as Mr. Capaldi seeks to do with respect to Josie), that person would still elude one in important ways. Murdoch effectively develops and grounds this idea of transcendence in three different ways: historically, existentially, and psychologically.

Let’s begin with the role of history in grounding the idea that we transcend one another’s understanding.

By any account, to live inside of history means not only that one’s concepts will bear the imprint of one’s past but that one’s concepts are subject to alteration in both the present and the future. My friend will have new experiences that bear on her sense of what it means for someone to be “serious.” Murdoch takes it that concepts ramify and interconnect: “It is especially characteristic of normative words … to belong to sets or patterns without an appreciation of which they cannot be understood” (IP: 32). Changes in one concept therefore betoken changes in others; as my friend comes to think differently about seriousness, she’ll also begin to think differently about other things (e.g., frivolity, small talk, tact). “[A]s we move and as we look our concepts are themselves changing” (IP: 25). To be a “human historical individual” is thus to be subject to perpetual alteration, to be in formation (and not necessarily for the better, in Murdoch’s view). Now it is impossible to comprehend once and for all a being whose development is ongoing, particularly when that development may be affected by our interactions with it (including very much the effort to comprehend the being in question). This is doubly true when those who seek to do the comprehending are themselves subject to history, and so to alteration, on an ongoing basis. These basic observations about what it is to be a “human historical individual” indicate one sense that Murdoch gives to the idea that individuals transcend our understanding.

A second, “existential” sense Murdoch gives to the notion that individuals transcend one another turns on the idea that ordinary reality itself is elusive, that it exceeds what we can compass. In characterizing the elusiveness of reality, Murdoch appeals to the idea that there is no pattern or figure outside of human life, such as God or the stages of History, that can make sense of everything that happens within it (OGG: 69–72; SGC, 77, 96–98). Unrepentant Nazis live out their final years comfortably in Argentina. A chance meeting changes the course of one’s life. There is, in short, an irreducible element of contingency, or randomness, to how things play out. Murdoch also ties the elusiveness of reality to the sheer magnitude, variety, and complexity of the world. It is teeming with concepts, wars, viruses, cultures, works of art, other species, volcanoes, and on and on, as well as possessing other persons in countless and evolving relations with one another. We can, of course, discern patterns in all of this. Murdoch’s point is that the patterns don’t exhaust the phenomena. The closest we can get to a master pattern, in Murdoch’s view, is the good. This provides a “shadowy” kind of order, an intimation of order, that leaves much to be explained and suffered (SGC: 77). From this perspective, we can’t definitively survey others, in part, because we can’t quite compass the situations and the larger world in which their lives unfold; we can’t nail down the big picture.

Although the idea that reality outstrips our understanding is hardly unfamiliar, it is contentious in a way that the notion that we live in time is not. Not everyone thinks of the world as “aimless, chancy, and huge” (SGC: 97). There are countless forms of the belief that everything falls into place when seen in the proper light. (A nineteen-year-old Murdoch seems to me to express a communist version of such a belief in a letter to a friend: “I feel now that I am doing some good, and that life has a purpose and that the history of civilisation is not just an interesting series of unconnected muddles, but a comprehensible development towards the highest stage of society, the Soviet world state” (Horner and Rowe Reference Horner and Rowe2016: 10).) So this is a juncture where it’s important to keep in mind that Murdoch is not trying to prove to sceptics that individuals transcend our understanding. It is more accurate to see her as working to elucidate and secure this tenet for those who have already made it a part of their lives, yet may – like Josie’s parents – feel pressure to relinquish it. Murdoch seeks to show that it is not rationally compulsory to abandon this way of seeing others.Footnote ⁶⁹ In this vein, she notes that works of tragedy leave the reader (or spectator) in intense doubt and that, curiously, this seems to be a part of their revelatory force (S&G: esp. 219). We can never be sure why Othello trusted Iago as he did or what drove Iago to such sadistic extremes, but we do remember these characters and our inability to fully fathom them or their destinies. Murdoch says, in effect, isn’t this real life? To think so is certainly no more contentious (or unusual) than believing that everything and everyone falls into place when seen in the proper light. What is more, Murdoch takes there to be something morally questionable about such certainty. She connects it, as we will see in the final part of this section, to escapism.Footnote ⁷⁰

The picture so far is that human individuals encounter one another in the midst of a larger and constantly unfolding scene, a scene that they do not view in the same way, neither exactly nor sometimes at all, and which is never thoroughly comprehensible to them. They are not only different from each other in significant ways. They are different from – more than – whatever conceptions other individuals may hold of them. No one’s conception of another fully maps that other, as Mr. Capaldi intends to map Josie. Nor are any two conceptions of a given individual incomplete in exactly the same way. In Murdoch’s words: “We have only a segment of the circle” (S&G: 216). Murdoch connects these aspects of our situation to two familiar and credible ideas: that we live inside history and that we’re not able fully to understand or explain the nature of our existence.

Let us now consider the third, psychological sense that Murdoch gives to the idea that individuals transcend our understanding. At this point, we encounter one of the most important additions that Sovereignty makes to Murdoch’s overall account: the idea of the psyche. Inspired by Freud, the psyche designates for Murdoch a powerful “energy system” or “mechanism” that influences one in ways that (often) escape one’s awareness and that are resolutely egocentric in nature (SGC: 81; OGG: 50).Footnote ⁷¹ “[M]ost of what is often called ‘will’ or ‘willing’ belongs to this system” (OGG: 65). Because the psyche is egocentric, and because it works in stealth, it severely threatens one’s ability to reach a clear perception of others, to appreciate their reality.

There are different ways to understand Murdoch’s claim that the psyche is egocentric. One can take her to be saying that we’re all arrogant, that we suffer from delusions of superiority or grandeur (e.g., OGG: 57). I think Murdoch is more convincing, however, when she connects egocentricity to hedonism and, specifically, to the attempt to avoid the pain that comes from facing reality and the corresponding attraction to perspectives that offer more comfort (OGG: 62). Facing reality is bound to be painful (as well as exhilarating) on Murdoch’s picture. It presents us, as we have seen, with mind-blowing magnitude and complexity, as well as with immense suffering. Human beings are both limited in their ability to comprehend or command reality and intimately implicated in the suffering it contains. Reality also confronts us with the atomic smallness of our lives in the grand scheme of things. But what does this have to do with egocentricity? Murdoch suggests that the psyche deals with this state of affairs by casting its possessor as the subjective center of the world, thereby investing him with inordinate significance or power. This needn’t take the form of believing oneself to be superior to others; it could just as well take the form of an inferiority complex or paranoia.Footnote ⁷² At its most dangerous, the psyche generates self-centric “fantasy” versions of other people and events that one mistakes for reality and that thereby insulate one from reality. One’s perceived greatness or inadequacy, one’s personal experience or history and one’s fears or desires take center stage and everything else falls into shadow, seems less real.Footnote ⁷³ Such fantasies are, Murdoch thinks, part of our natural psychology, something with which we must contend in ourselves and in others (SGC: 77, 82). They form part of the “here” where we all are.

In addition to being egocentric, the psyche is “highly individual and personal” (OGG: 53).Footnote ⁷⁴ I take Murdoch to mean by this that the psyche exploits the individual’s personal history and infiltrates her outlook to pursue its ends. That is to say: individuals will have their own (evolving) ways of not facing up to reality, of centering themselves at the expense of others, their own specific imagery or chain of associations that resonate for them. This does not rule out the possibility that the psyche may work through collective systems of thought or imagery, but it implies that these systems must find a home in the agent (Panizza Reference Panizza2022: 70). In effect, Murdoch offers an account of why it is that we are often willing to accept remarkably pernicious and crude forms of conventional thinking: because to do so shields us from aspects of reality that we may find hard to bear. This is to think of such phenomena as racism or antisemitism or misogyny – instances of “convention” – as collective channels of reality-avoidance. Admittedly, these pathologies may play out very differently in members of dominant groups than in those who are dominated. In particular, they often lead members of subordinate groups to center others at their own expense. Murdoch’s account of the psyche does not seem made for such cases, but it does suggest an interesting approach to them. It is an approach, moreover, that allows us to recognize structural forces as part of the problem (insofar as those forces facilitate reality-avoidance). We can then see “neurosis” as a more purely idiosyncratic channel for reality-avoidance and treat these two channels as powerfully reinforcing one another, with conventional tropes feeding into personal obsessions and vice-versa, much as Murdoch suggests (SBR: 254/268).

The addition of the psyche to the picture means that not only will individuals necessarily have incomplete or partial conceptions of each other, they will often have distorted conceptions of one another. Misconceptions. Particularly in the right (or wrong!) conditions, such as when people feel frightened or disoriented, or when their access to information has been compromised. The existence of the psyche implies that we will not merely fail to see everything worth seeing about others. We will, in addition, sometimes see things that aren’t there to be seen, or distort them beyond recognition in spite of ourselves.Footnote ⁷⁵ This is the psychological sense in which, for Murdoch, individuals are transcendent to one another. It means that even if others weren’t unique and ongoing parts of a reality we cannot fully fathom, we still wouldn’t (normally) succeed in comprehending them – far from it. Murdoch grounds this darker sense of transcendence, as she does the historical and existential senses, in commonplace ideas – in this case, the notions that reality is often painful to face and that egocentricity helps us to avoid actually facing reality in ways that often escape our awareness.

3.6 Summary

Taking stock. We’ve been considering the transcendent background to the individual on Murdoch’s modified version of the naturalistic outlook. In Section 2 we noted that this background consists in other individuals and their relations with each other, conceived as unique, transcendent, and knowable through love. In this section we examined the first two of these features. We noted that Murdoch connects them to the historicity of persons, the elusiveness of the larger scene within which we encounter one another, and the difficulty, for human beings, of facing reality. For all of these reasons, Murdoch suggests, individuals properly present themselves to one another as unreachable, as beings who are not amenable to Mr. Capaldi’s ambitions. Unique and transcendent.

This way of thinking about individuals precludes reductive conceptions of them. It implies that each person is a unique world and that any representation of a person that we form (or encounter) can capture at most a fragment of the whole. It thus encourages a kind of agnosticism and curiosity that, as we noted in Section 2, Murdoch associates with toleration (2.7). This is presumably why the attributes of uniqueness and transcendence figure (in so many words) in Murdoch’s description of liberalism’s prime article of faith: the belief that persons are “substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable” (AD: 294).

What we have not yet addressed is the third feature of Murdoch’s concept of the individual: the idea that the individual is revealed by love. To this we turn in the next section. We should note that this idea does not appear in Murdoch’s description of liberalism’s prime tenet. What is more, love might seem out of place where politics is concerned. But, as we will see, Murdoch takes the idea that the individual is revealed by love to be naturally connected to the ideas that individuals are transcendent and unique, and just as ordinary as these ideas. In this way, Murdoch obliges us to consider the possibility that love, too, belongs with a liberal sensibility.

4.1 Introduction

In Section 2 I compared the liberal and naturalistic outlooks and showed how Murdoch articulates a nonhierarchical version of the naturalistic outlook to support her concept of the individual and to better serve the liberal ideals she cherishes. In Section 3 I examined the first two features of that concept: the uniqueness and transcendence of the individual. In this section, and to complete my analysis, I examine the third feature of Murdoch’s concept of the individual: his dependence on love for a knowledge of other individuals. This feature is epistemological: it concerns how we come to know other individuals and what it means to know them.

For Murdoch, any serious view of morality must recognize and elucidate the importance of love. One of Murdoch’s sharpest criticisms of the moral philosophy of her day – scholarship that she sees as unconsciously embodying the liberal outlook – is that it fails to find a place for love in the moral life (e.g., IP: 2; OGG: 45). Murdoch herself, by contrast, places love at the very center of her ethics.

Let me put this in perspective. In 2.2 I represented the liberal and naturalistic outlooks in terms of four postulates. It will be helpful here to compare their different versions of the third postulate, starting with the liberal outlook.

According to the naturalistic outlook, and in contrast:

Murdoch’s reworking of naturalism in effect tells us that the knowledge in question – the knowledge indicated in 3N – comes through (or consists in) love and that its prime object is reality in the form of other socially-situated human individuals. “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love … is the discovery of reality” (S&G: 215). Murdoch speaks of love equally as the knowledge of individuals and as the activity, quality, or disposition that seeks such knowledge.

There are naturally many ways to approach the concept of love in Murdoch’s writings and much has been written about it.Footnote ⁷⁷ We should note, too, that Murdoch recognizes more than one kind of human love. For these reasons and others, my discussion in this section will be highly selective. I will focus on the idea of love as knowledge, love as giving us a knowledge of reality that nothing else does. I’ll examine Murdoch’s development of this idea in her early and middle writings by tracing love’s relation to freedom, compassion, and attention.Footnote ⁷⁸

4.2 Freedom

For Murdoch, the serious exploration of reality – particularly when that reality is (or concerns) other persons – often involves the exercise of imagination, the conjuring of possibilities “which go beyond what could be said to be strictly factual” (DPR: 198). In our efforts to understand other persons and events we imagine, as best we can, what it would be like, say, to lose your job, or to discover that you were adopted, or to fly to the moon. Love, as Murdoch conceives it, plays an important part in such truth-directed exercises of imagination. This makes love a site of freedom.

Murdoch connects love to at least two kinds of freedom. First, and most straightforwardly, love frees us from powerful reality-avoidant forms of thinking (convention, neurosis, fantasy) and it frees us to explore what confronts us in creative and fruitful ways.Footnote ⁷⁹ Love frees us to investigate what we see, or think we see, in ways that are neither prefabricated nor simply a matter of fact-checking. This positive freedom is, for Murdoch, the flip side of freedom from the straitjackets of convention, neurosis, and fantasy. Let us call this “primary freedom.”

Importantly, on Murdoch’s telling, even as love frees us to investigate others in rich and fruitful ways – because it frees us to do this – it also confronts us with the otherness and difference of other persons. And in confronting this primitive fact, Murdoch suggests, we experience (or become aware of) a second and darker kind of freedom, what she calls “tragic freedom.” In her words:

Let me highlight some of the main points in this rather challenging passage. Murdoch tells us that love is the imaginative recognition of, respect for, the ways that others are different and separate from ourselves and from each other. That is, love is a recognition of difference and “otherness” arrived at, in part, through imagination. Through this exercise of love we are liberated from more limited ways of thinking, we enjoy what I called above our primary freedom. This loving recognition of difference, in turn, implies something further, namely that we have “an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others.” Why think that? Our capacity to imagine the being of others is indefinitely extended, Murdoch says, because others are different in ways “we never cease discovering.” That is – and contrary to what Mr. Capaldi and Klara suppose – we never finish learning the ways that others differ from ourselves or from our conceptions of them (3.5). Because we never finish learning these differences – to continue Murdoch’s thought – we can be said to have an unlimited capacity to imagine (and reimagine) the being of others. In exercising this capacity, we express a second kind of freedom, a freedom that Murdoch describes as tragic in character.

These ideas raise many questions. For our purposes, I consider two of them. First, why consider such freedom tragic? Murdoch tells us that the freedom that love implies is tragic because what we discover through love is, first, that individuals are truly different from one another and, second, that there is no “social totality within which we can come to comprehend” or reconcile these differences. We can think of such a totality as a systematic whole, such as the socio-cosmological order that shaped and ordered the lives of Keaja and Tselane. Murdoch compares such a totality to a circle. “We have only a segment of the circle” – meaning, I think, that we cannot grasp the whole that would make perfect sense of the individual parts (in this case, human individuals and their relations to one another). We cannot grasp the whole because what we discover through love is, as Justin Broackes puts it, “the boundless variety of free persons.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In other words, there is no systematic whole, or at least none that we can grasp. There is only a plurality of free persons, endlessly different from one another, in relationships that are also endlessly different from one another. Unique and transcendent.

Still, why should Murdoch (or we) consider this state of affairs to be tragic? Why should the boundless variety of free persons not be a source of delight or relief (or indifference)? It can seem positively illiberal to suppose that it must be grievous or distressing, and in our earlier discussion of the idea of uniqueness, we touched on one of the reasons why: democracy depends on citizens believing that the will of the majority can shift, that new kinds of alliances and relationships between people are always possible (3.3). Murdoch certainly recognizes that difference or diversity can be a deep source of pleasure (e.g., SBR: 269/283). But here she is registering that it also contains the potential for enduring conflict, misunderstanding, frustration, and fear. Real diversity means that harmony is not prefabricated or assured: it is something that must be achieved and that is precarious. This is particularly so when there is no given way to harmonize the different ends that individuals hold, no “social totality” within which to comprehend them. We might contrast this with a social hierarchy of the sort we discussed in 2.3. In a hierarchical society, differences can be “placed and reconciled”: everyone has her part to play in an interrelated whole and (when things go as they are supposed to) people find purpose and contentment in fulfilling their respective roles. One has determinate universal standards with which to make sense of serious differences (e.g., in ways of life, religious convictions, sexual orientation, or political ideals) and with which to hold others to account. Here, in contrast – where we take individuals to be endlessly various and free – we must continually find common purpose or ground, however temporary, and we must do it from positions that are limited: “[w]e have only a segment of the circle.” We cannot appeal to a socio-cosmological order, or some other form of systematic whole, to reconcile our differences nor to make sense of them. We have no guarantee, in the end, that they make any sense.

Those who aspire to a liberal sensibility may rightly celebrate diversity, then, but if we take that diversity to be radical – as Murdoch does – we may also find it, at times, to be disquieting. For one thing, it means that there is no guarantee that others will delight in diversity, or that we can reach a clear understanding of why this is so in any given case. We may find this tragic.

A second question is: why connect any of this with love? Why not simply speak of “tolerance” or “open-mindedness” or “respect”?Footnote ⁸¹ Murdoch has clearly drawn inspiration here from Simone Weil, who connected love to a recognition of the existence of others.Footnote ⁸² Still: why should we speak this way? Why associate love with knowledge at all? It’s true that people are more willing to confide in, or “be themselves” around, those they feel loved by. Murdoch is certainly registering this point, but she’s saying much more. She holds that even in contexts where the willingness to let down one’s guard is not relevant, a loving regard is capable of revealing deeply significant aspects of others, and of the world, that might otherwise escape one. She rejects the identification of “what is real” or “what is objectively true” with “what a clinical perspective discloses,” no matter how acute or sophisticated that perspective might be. She maintains that, as Broackes puts it, “[i]nstead of allowing into reality only what meets a ‘scientific’ requirement … we should allow the world to contain all that meets the gaze of a just and loving moral perceiver” (Reference Broackes and Broackes2012: 46–47).

Here again the postulates introduced in 2.2 may be helpful. Recall postulates 2L and 2N.

(2L) Fact and value are entirely separate; value is a product of the will, not a genuine part of the world.

(2N) Fact and value are interlinked; value is a genuine part of the world or universe.

When Murdoch links love to knowledge, she in effect rejects 2L in favor of 2N, and she shows us how she construes 2N, that is, how she links fact to value. Namely, by holding that certain facts are only available, or accessible, from within a loving (and so evaluative) perspective. In keeping with postulate 3N (which equates freedom with knowledge, rather than choice), Murdoch maintains that the knowledge so acquired is both freeing and partial. It frees us from limited ways of thinking about others and thereby makes us aware of our unlimited capacity to imagine their being.

4.3 Compassion

Murdoch’s commitment to the epistemological importance of love was, and to some extent remains, philosophically unorthodox.Footnote ⁸³ Murdoch embraces this controversial position because she believes that, given the kind of creatures we are, opening ourselves to reality is an operation in which compassion plays a decisive role.Footnote ⁸⁴ This is partly why, for Murdoch, knowledge of reality is a moral achievement and aspiration, as much as it is an intellectual one.

The root meaning of the (Latinate) term “compassion” is “suffering [pati] with [com].” The term ordinarily refers to a mental state directed at another who is suffering, which involves a concern about their suffering, a concern for the good of the suffering individual. How might such a state have epistemological purchase? In what way does Murdoch understand compassion to have epistemological purchase?

As the question itself suggests, for Murdoch, viewing others with compassion has nothing to do with seeing only the good in them, or emphasizing their good qualities, or assuming that they possess good qualities. Although she thinks that individuals as such have value, we should not equate this with the idea that every individual has good qualities. When she says, for instance, that “if apprehension of good is apprehension of the individual and the real, then good partakes of the infinite elusive character of reality,” Murdoch is not implying that individuals per se are good, but rather that it is always good to apprehend the reality of individuals (IP: 41). She affirms (among other things) the idea that “it’s better to know what’s real than to be in a state of fantasy or illusion” (OGG: 62).Footnote ⁸⁵

Compassion, for Murdoch, is realistic and judicious (e.g., IP: 37; OGG: 63–64; SGC: 85, 89). It involves “a clear-eyed contemplation of the misery and evil of the world” (OGG: 59). We can understand it as attuned, then, to the existential conditions that (on Murdoch’s account) make reality difficult for human beings to face: our fragility, our lack of immunity to the depredations of time and chance, our inability to make perfect sense of things.Footnote ⁸⁶ Seen this way, compassion has to do with viewing others in the light of these conditions, being present to these conditions in the lives of others and so, in a very real sense, to others as they are. It brings a depth of perspective, a steady recognition of the painful features of our condition as “human, historical individuals” (IP: 28; 3.4–3.5). It involves, Murdoch says, the sense that there is more to know about others: “[t]here is … something in the serious attempt to look compassionately at others which automatically suggests that ‘there is more than this’” (SGC: 71).

One can regard another compassionately in this sense whether or not the other is visibly suffering, and whether or not she possesses (or one takes her to possess) any good qualities. In regarding someone compassionately one is both oriented to the good of the other, as “love” or “compassion” imply, and one gives due consideration to the individual’s social and political context, as “justice” implies (Samuel Reference Samuel2021: esp. 321, n. 15). Such a form of love, finally, can be seen as working through imagination, through “reflection on people, events, etc., which builds detail, adds colour, conjures up possibilities,” as when we imagine what someone’s day, or childhood, might have been like (DPR: 198).

Many of these points come through in Murdoch’s lovely review of Dr. Zhivago. She writes:

Murdoch here stresses the contingency of life, the fact of human suffering, the absence of a systematic pattern with which to “make complete sense” of this suffering, and our ability to “vastly sympathize” with others in this context.

She continues:

We see in this passage Murdoch’s embrace of the idea that the knowing compassion that enables us to apprehend the reality of other people is identical to the knowing compassion that animates great art.Footnote ⁸⁷ And we see how potent she takes such compassion to be: it has the potential to deepen understanding and thereby “[join] dissimilar peoples to each other.”

4.4 Interlude

I’ve now considered love in relation to freedom and compassion. Let me step back and put things in broader perspective before considering love in relation to attention.

When Murdoch proposes that the individual is revealed by love, she is suggesting that we need love to get a true sense of what others are like and what it is like for them in situations of any complexity (Chappell Reference Chappell and Browning2018). This is not merely a matter of knowing facts (Mason Reference Mason2023; Cordner Reference Cordner2016). We can know countless facts about a person or about the Nigerian Civil War without understanding, or even trying to understand, what it was like for that person to live through that event. The knowledge that love brings is not a clinical knowledge; it involves feeling and imagining our way into the experience of others in light of the bigger picture. Murdoch insists that the idea of love as revelatory is not a revolutionary or esoteric doctrine but a perfectly familiar idea, one that is borne out in the details of our daily lives and relationships: “In particular situations, ‘reality’ as that which is revealed to the patient eye of love is an idea entirely comprehensible to the ordinary person” (IP: 40; Forsberg Reference Forsberg, Grau and Smuts2024).

We’re now in a position to appreciate one way that Murdoch considers her view to be importantly different from Kant’s (while profoundly indebted to it). Kant, she believes, failed to properly recognize the emotions “as part of the structure of morality” (SGC: 79). So even though he associates practical reason with love – rightly, in Murdoch’s view – he appeals to an emotionally sterile form of love (ibid.; S&G: 219–220). “He wants,” Murdoch says, “to segregate the messy warm empirical psyche from the clean operations of … reason” (SGC: 79).Footnote ⁸⁸ Murdoch does not think such segregation is possible for human beings, or not always (nor does she think that we should necessarily aspire to it). For Murdoch, fully fledged reason engages desire, imagination, and compassion, especially when other persons are its object.

We’re now also in a better position to see how, in keeping with the third postulate of the naturalistic outlook (which equates freedom with knowledge), the individual’s knowledge of self and world could be practical. Since Murdoch connects the individual’s knowledge to love, the conditions for arriving at this knowledge promise some degree of corresponding motivation. More plainly: for Murdoch, the work we must do to see other persons clearly – to circumvent fantasy – predisposes us to respond appropriately to what we see. Loving another, in Murdoch’s sense, involves a receptivity to them, a felt presence to their unique being, and such receptivity predisposes one to be motivated by what one discovers. Thus: “[t]he more the separateness and differentness of other people is realized, and that fact seen that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing” (OGG: 64). For Murdoch, love reveals to us the reality of others and this revelation is necessarily both freeing as well as constraining (and of course potentially motivating in other ways).Footnote ⁸⁹

4.5 Attention

Murdoch’s concept of attention further illuminates what loving another amounts to. In the process, it crystallizes the interconnections between the uniqueness of individuals, their transcendence, and their need for love, both to know others and to be known by others. It thus serves as a capstone for Murdoch’s naturalistic conception of the individual.

Murdoch’s early writings note the importance of the concept of attention in Simone Weil’s thought (KV; WG). In a notable moment in AD, Murdoch treats “attention” in a different way – as a desideratum for moral theory. She writes: “Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not will. We need a new vocabulary of attention” (AD: 293; Clarke Reference Clarke and LaFollette2013). It is not, however, until Sovereignty that the concept of attention figures in any substantive way in Murdoch’s own philosophy. There we learn that the love that brings us knowledge of reality is typically exercised through attention to individuals and that such attention constitutes the main form of moral agency. “I have used the word ‘attention,’” Murdoch says, “to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent” (IP: 33). We learn further that the love in question involves a kind of self-suppression, that it is infinitely perfectible, and that it is singular. It will be helpful to examine each of these features in turn.

4.6 Love and Politics

Having considered in this section the importance that Murdoch assigns to love for reaching an adequate perception of the individual, I want to return to issues I raised at the end of Section 3. We are now in a better position to see why Murdoch thinks that love belongs with her concept of the individual and why love is not necessarily out of place where politics is concerned.

On reflection, it makes a good deal of sense to view the idea that individuals are knowable through love, the idea that they are unique, and the idea that they are transcendent as jointly involved in a liberal sensibility. Seeing others as unique and transcendent does not guarantee an appreciation of their “right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves” (SBR: 257/271). For that, Murdoch suggests, one also needs to appreciate their fragility, a fragility one shares in. And this, she thinks, requires love. “We are all mortal,” Murdoch says, “and equally at the mercy of necessity and chance. These are the true aspects in which all men are brothers” (OGG: 72). Here we may remember that the motto of the French Revolution was not “liberté, égalité” but rather “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” The loving insight that Murdoch associates with the liberal spirit has a strong claim to be a form of brotherly – or sisterly – love.