Readers Write In #853: All You Need is Love
- Trinity Auditorium
- Sep 10
- 3 min read
By Karthikeyan (RK)
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality – Iris Murdoch, The Bell (1958)
In western philosophy, right from Plato every major philosopher who established a system gave considerable importance to morality. Though pre-Socratic philosophers were more interested in metaphysics and cosmology, some of them like Pythagoras had a moral system. And each philosopher’s take on morality was different. For Plato ethics was all about getting knowledge of the ideal form of good & so virtue is equated with knowledge. Aristotle’s ethics was also about virtue but his focus on achieving it is not some mystical ideal form but a practical golden mean, that is moderation between extremes. Both cowardice & foolhardiness is bad and the golden mean is courage. For Immanuel Kant ethics is duty based on reason & intention to do right without worrying about the consequences.
But no philosopher before Iris Murdoch had ever equated morality with love. Murdoch defines morality as our vision towards the world & others. Murdoch says that the first step towards seeing the world and the people as they really are is attention. Attention is the just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.
And the biggest impediment to seeing the world as it really is, is our self-aggrandising ego. Ego is anxious, self-centred and constantly fantasising. Ego makes it difficult for us to truly give attention to others because it builds fantasises instead of seeing the other person as they really are. This fantasy can be negative or even positive but both are damaging. Murdoch calls failure to give attention to others as a moral failing.
Only by deflating this ego and giving attention to the reality of others, can we ever become moral. Murdoch calls this unselfing. Moral actions are not a choice but a result of the attention we give to the world & others. It is love that makes us give attention to others.
Murdoch equates morality with art and says that the chief enemy of excellence in both is the practice of fantasising. Loving attention is what can lead us away from this fantasising. Love is a strong force against fantasising.
Murdoch says that the best way to improve loving attention is through daily engagement with art or a skill/ craft.
Irish Murdoch (1919-99) was a British novelist & philosopher and the quote above is from her novel. She was one of the four British women philosophers who all studied in Oxford in the 1940s and were good friends. All of western philosophy is extremely self-centred and all morality is also self-centred whether virtuous, hedonistic or concerned with duty. May be only a woman could break this self-centredness and situate morality in the way we see others. And may be only an artist could have done this.
PS: Thanks to Rahini David for asking me to write on philosophy. I was thinking about writing something that could serve as an introduction to philosophy, like ‘What for philosophy’ but BR’s comment on social media making all of us take the ‘I am always right’ tone made me want to write on Iris Murdoch.
Sources/ Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBG10XnxQaI – Iris Murdoch’s interview to Bryan Magee on philosophy & literature
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