The Anglo-Irish novelist and Oxford moral philosopher whose Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) defended a Platonic conception of moral attention against the prevailing analytic moral philosophy, and whose twenty-six novels integrated philosophical themes with the literary investigation of moral life.
iris-murdoch
Anglo-Irish novelist and moral philosopher (1919–1999), Oxford fellow and tutor, whose moral philosophy defended a Platonic conception of attention to the good against the prevailing analytic moral theory of the postwar period and whose twenty-six novels are among the major achievements of twentieth-century English fiction.
Life
Jean Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July 1919 in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish Protestant family. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, was a civil servant who had been wounded in the First World War; her mother Irene Alice Richardson, before her marriage, had trained as an opera singer. The family moved to London soon after Iris's birth, and Murdoch grew up principally English in cultural identification while always retaining the Irish elements of her family background.
She was educated at the Froebel Demonstration School in London, then from 1932 at Badminton School in Bristol — a progressive boarding school whose headmistress Beatrice May Baker was a Quaker pacifist who shaped Murdoch's early political sensibility. From 1938 she read Classics, then Philosophy and Ancient History, at Somerville College, Oxford, completing her degree with first-class honours in 1942.
The wartime years were politically engaged. Murdoch joined the Communist Party as a Somerville undergraduate (she left in 1942, disillusioned by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) and worked from 1942 to 1944 as a civil servant in the Treasury, then as an administrator with UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) in liberated Europe — Belgium, Austria, and the displaced persons camps in the post-war period. The UNRRA experience, particularly the months in the camps, shaped her sensibility for decades and provided material for some of the later novels (most directly The Flight from the Enchanter).
In 1947 Murdoch was awarded the Sarah Smithson Studentship at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she spent a year studying philosophy under Wittgenstein's last students (Wittgenstein himself was rarely in residence by this point). The encounter with Wittgenstein's pupils and the indirect engagement with Wittgenstein's late thought left lasting marks on her philosophical work.
In 1948 she was elected fellow and tutor in philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford — the position she would hold for the next fifteen years. The Oxford years brought the central philosophical and personal relationships of her life: with the philosophers Donald MacKinnon (her supervisor and an early major influence), Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Mary Warnock; with the writer Elias Canetti (a passionate and difficult romantic involvement); and from 1956 with the literary critic John Bayley, whom she married that year and with whom she lived for forty-three years until her death.
The first novel, Under the Net, appeared in 1954 to immediate critical recognition; over the next forty years Murdoch produced a novel every eighteen months on average, twenty-six in all. The fiction and the philosophy proceeded in parallel; in 1963 Murdoch resigned her Oxford college fellowship to write full-time, though she continued to teach occasionally at the Royal College of Art, the University of London, and as a visiting professor at various American universities.
The major philosophical works appeared at long intervals: The Sovereignty of Good (1970), a collection of three previously published essays; The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977), the Romanes Lecture on Plato's aesthetics; and the major late work Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), Murdoch's culminating philosophical statement, derived from the 1982 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh.
The last decade was shadowed by Alzheimer's disease. The diagnosis was made in 1994; her decline was rapid by literary standards, and Jackson's Dilemma (1995) was her last novel. John Bayley's memoir Iris (1998) and its film adaptation by Richard Eyre (2001) made Murdoch's final illness a matter of public attention in a way that would have, by all accounts, troubled her in good health. She died on 8 February 1999 at Vale House nursing home in Oxford, aged 79.
The Sovereignty of Good
The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 1970), a slender book of three essays — The Idea of Perfection, On 'God' and 'Good', and The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts — is Murdoch's principal philosophical statement in compressed form. The arguments depart sharply from the prevailing analytic moral philosophy of mid-century Oxford.
The central diagnostic claim: postwar Oxford moral philosophy, particularly the existentialist-analytic synthesis that R.M. Hare had articulated in The Language of Morals (1952) and that ran through Sartre, the early Stuart Hampshire, Stevenson, and others, had constructed a picture of the moral agent as a free-willing chooser exercising will in moments of decision. Moral philosophy had become the analysis of the moment of choice: deliberation between alternatives, weighing of reasons, decision, action.
This picture, Murdoch argues, is wrong because morality is not principally a matter of moments of choice. The morality of an agent is constituted by the quality of attention she brings to her ordinary experience — the care with which she perceives others, the truthfulness of her understanding of her own situation, the disciplined attention by which she resists the constant operations of fantasy and self-protection that distort moral vision. Choice is the last moment of a process whose work has been done long before by attention; what we choose is determined by what we have come to see.
The positive doctrine is Platonic. The Good, in Murdoch's reading of Plato, is the absolute reality toward which moral attention is properly directed — the magnetic source that draws the soul out of egoistic fantasy into accurate perception of what is. The famous illustration of M and D in the second essay: a mother (M) initially dislikes her daughter-in-law (D) and judges her vulgar; over time, through sustained attention to D and to the operations of her own jealousy and possessiveness, M comes to see D differently, recognizing the qualities she had missed and the projections she had been making. Nothing has changed in D or in M's outward circumstance; what has changed is M's vision. This is, on Murdoch's account, what moral progress fundamentally is.
The argument has affinities with the simultaneously developing virtue ethics of Anscombe and Foot — the three were Oxford colleagues and friends — but Murdoch's distinctively Platonic emphasis on the absolute reality of the Good and the magnetic attraction toward it distinguishes her position from the Aristotelian frameworks of her colleagues. Her relation to religion was complex: she was a non-believing Anglican by formation, sympathetic to Christian theological vocabulary and practice but unable to affirm the central doctrines, and she repeatedly attempted (most fully in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) to articulate what could be retained of the religious vocabulary of the Good and the Holy in the cultural conditions of the late twentieth century.
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
The long late work of 1992, derived from the 1982 Edinburgh Gifford Lectures, is Murdoch's most ambitious philosophical book — over 500 pages, ranging from the foundations of moral consciousness through engagements with Plato, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Schopenhauer, and the major modern moral and political philosophers, to a sustained reflection on religion, art, and the place of the Good in late twentieth-century cultural conditions.
The organizing argument: the standard postwar attempt to separate moral philosophy from metaphysics — to treat ethics as autonomous from any view of the nature of reality — cannot be sustained. Morality requires a metaphysical framework, however minimal, that locates the moral life within an account of what is real. The framework Murdoch favors is a non-dogmatic Platonism: the Good is a real attractor, not merely a projection of human valuation; the disciplined moral life is the soul's response to this real attractor; the religious traditions of the past have been the cultures within which this response has been articulated, and the cultural impoverishment of their loss is itself a moral fact requiring response.
The book's range is enormous and its structure is correspondingly unsystematic by Anglophone analytic standards. Reviewers were divided; the academic philosophical reception was mixed; the broader intellectual reception (in literary criticism, in theology, in the wider readership of philosophically inclined readers) was substantial.
The Novels
Murdoch's twenty-six novels, from Under the Net (1954) to Jackson's Dilemma (1995), constitute one of the major bodies of twentieth-century English fiction. The novels are philosophical in their substance — each engages with moral, religious, or aesthetic questions that her philosophical writing addresses in different mode — but they are not philosophical fiction in the schematic sense; they are novels whose ambition is to depict the moral life as moral life actually is, with the variety, opacity, and unmastered character that the philosophical essays argue characterize moral experience.
The major novels include The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Italian Girl (1964), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno's Dream (1969), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Black Prince (1973, Booker Prize shortlist), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), A Word Child (1975), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, The Sea (1978, Booker Prize), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), The Green Knight (1993).
The novels' continuing scholarly attention is the work of Peter Conradi (whose authorized biography Iris Murdoch: A Life, W.W. Norton, 2001, is the standard biographical source), Anne Rowe, Avril Horner, Maria Antonaccio (whose Picturing the Human, Oxford University Press, 2000, is a major philosophical study of Murdoch), Sabina Lovibond, and others.
Reception
Murdoch's philosophical reception was sharply divided in her lifetime and has remained mixed. The mainstream analytic moral philosophy of the postwar period regarded her position as obscurantist and her engagement with religious and Platonic vocabulary as a regression from the proper philosophical task; the literary and theological reception was more sympathetic. The late twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics under Anscombe, Foot, MacIntyre, and others recovered Murdoch as an important precursor whose Platonism complemented their largely Aristotelian framework.
Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1990), Cora Diamond's work on the moral imagination, John McDowell's later moral epistemology, and the broader recovery of moral perception as a topic in moral philosophy have all developed in conversation with Murdoch's position. The increasingly broad recognition that the analytic moral philosophy of the mid-twentieth century had narrowed the discipline's range has produced, over recent decades, an increasingly favorable assessment of Murdoch's resistance to that narrowing.
The novels have remained continuously in print; the British Academy has issued the Iris Murdoch Society newsletter and conferences for over twenty years; the Iris Murdoch Centre at Kingston University maintains the principal scholarly archive.
Significance
Murdoch's importance is dual. As moral philosopher, she developed the most worked-out Platonic position in late-twentieth-century Anglophone moral philosophy, against the prevailing existentialist-analytic synthesis, and helped initiate the revival of moral perception, virtue, and the imagination as central topics in the discipline. As novelist, the twenty-six books are one of the major achievements of postwar English fiction — ambitious in moral and intellectual range, formally inventive, addressing serious philosophical and religious questions through the realist novel's resources. The integration of the two modes — philosophical and literary — was Murdoch's distinctive contribution to twentieth-century intellectual life and remains one of the defining models of how the two can be combined in a single career.