Iris Murdoch’s Pictorial Metaphysics

A little over a decade ago, a volume dedicated to one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century was titled Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. It remained necessary to make it explicit that Murdoch must be considered a philosopher and not merely a novelist. Today, Murdoch’s philosophical work is being rediscovered at an accelerating pace. Philosophers are revisiting her reflections on love, attention, and unselfing, her blurring of the boundaries between ethics and aesthetics, and her resistance to highly technical academic vocabulary in favour of a focus on our everyday, pre-philosophical experience.

Another less explored but core Murdochian idea is her characterization of human beings as ‘fantasizing imaginative animals’ and of cognition as a constant ‘breeding of imagery’ (MGM, p. 323/330). I use this blog post to show how her imagination- and image-based views result in what I call a pictorial metaphysics, a unique moral-philosophical methodology resonating throughout her philosophical oeuvre.

Analysing and Describing Images

An embryonic version of Murdoch’s pictorial metaphysics is already present in her first paper, ‘Thinking and Language’ (1951). There, Murdoch observes that metaphor is “not a peripheral excrescence upon the linguistic structure, it is its living centre” and that “we do not ‘suddenly’ have to adopt the figurative mode; we are using it all the time.” (TL, p. 39)

This was quite an unusual position in Anglophone philosophy at the time. The idea that metaphors are essential to our thought became widely known only three decades later in cognitive linguistics, through George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) – which does not mention Murdoch once.

In line with her emphasis on realism as a moral attitude, Murdoch strives to develop a realistic moral philosophical methodology that reflects the centrality of imagination and imagery in human cognition. In ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ (1957) she offers the first explicit development of this moral-philosophical method. Murdoch criticizes the then popular linguistic analysis approach holding that moral philosophy should only concern itself with observable facts. Whilst this approach presents itself as scientific, Murdoch shows it is anything but neutral:

“What the modern moral philosopher has done is what metaphysicians in the past have always done. He has produced a model. Only it is not a model of any morality whatsoever. It is a model of his own morality.” (p. 67)

Murdoch discerns liberal individualist ideology in the model of linguistic analysis: persons are represented as independent moral agents with their own values, who tolerate those of others, and who engage in rational debate supported by factual claims. Such a model, for Murdoch, works just like a metaphor. It is basically an image: something that represents something else (a human being) in a certain way (a liberal-individualist representation). Murdoch concludes with two key observations. First, all moral-philosophical theories carry such metaphoric imagery—there is no way around this. Second, the task of moral philosophy is to ‘analyse’ and ‘describe’ these images (ME, p. 75).

From Analysis to Alternatives

This conclusion sets the stage for her early and middle work, in which she analyses and describes the dominant moral-philosophical images of man, e.g. “Sartre’s Man,” “Kant’s Man,” “Ordinary Language Man” (SBR, p. 268) – this not merely to critique them but to propose a better alternative. Most famously, Murdoch suggests in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ the metaphor of vision as a more truthful image of moral life than the “solitary omnipotent will” emphasized by e.g. Kant, Sartre, and Hampshire (IOP, p. 8). In its precursor ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, she clarifies that while she finds this image more promising, it is not exclusive:

“Philosophers have been misled (…) into seeking a single philosophical definition of morality. If, however, we go back again to the data we see that there are fundamentally different moral pictures which different individuals use or which the same individual may use at different times. Why should philosophy be less various, where the differences in what it attempts to analyse are so important?” (VCM: 97, my italics)

Murdoch takes the last question seriously, especially in her later work. Her mature pictorial metaphysics does not rely on just one picture (the metaphor of vision) but draws upon a rich conglomeration of different pictures that must reveal (aspects of) our moral lives. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals bursts from the stories, myths, images and pictures of philosophical, artistic, and religious nature. One of her favourite images is Plato’s imagery of life as a pilgrimage from appearance to reality and his image of the Good as the sun, that shows human life as an always-incomplete search for knowledge of reality.[1] There is Simone Weil’s image of Void, representing moments of suffering, emptiness, loss and despair in life. Metaphysics contains innumerable images of art. Even more than Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Murdoch adores Shakespeare. Murdoch is convinced that his tragedies – especially King Lear – ‘break the ego’ as they do not offer the false consolation that suffering will be followed by some sort of reward (MGM, p. 104). Henry James’ descriptions of Maggie Verver’s thoughts in The Golden Bowl are used to describe the imaginative and evaluative qualities of our ‘moment-to-moment, minute-to-minute, and hour-to-hour’ consciousness (MGM, p. 330).

Phenomenology First

Murdoch considers these examples as guides to morals: they reveal, they can lead us – they are icons that illuminate moral life. The only condition they need to fulfil seems to be a phenomenological one: they need to ring true, to resonate with ordinary, pre-philosophical experience. About her own image of vision, she asks: ‘is it not the natural metaphor, for people without philosophical prejudice, to describe the situation?’ (IOP, p. 21). In the chapters on human consciousness, Murdoch chooses James’ literary descriptions (see above) over Husserl’s transcendental method, finding the latter too abstract and detached from lived experience.

With her image-centred method, her pictorial metaphysics, Murdoch aims to do justice to the ways we – image-making animals – naturally perceive the world through images that can bring illumination[2] but no total understanding. The only way forward for Murdoch, not only cognitively but also philosophically, is through an ever-ongoing process of clarifying, reshaping, and developing reality-revealing images.

© Yanni Ratajczyk

References

• Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark: Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Murdoch, Iris: ‘Thinking and Language’, in: Conradi, Peter (ed.): Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999, pp. 33-42.[TL].
• Murdoch, Iris: ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’, in: Conradi, Peter (ed.): Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999, pp. 59-75 [ME].
• Murdoch, Iris: ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, in: Conradi, Peter (ed.): Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999, pp. 76-98 [VCM].
• Murdoch, Iris: ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, in: Conradi, Peter (ed.): Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 261–286 [SBR].
• Murdoch, Iris: ‘Idea of Perfection’, in: The Sovereignty of Good, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 1-44 [IOP].
• Murdoch, Iris: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.

[1] Important remark: Murdoch is convinced that Plato intended his Forms as explanatory myths: they do not point to some metaphysical ‘elsewhere’, but rather illustrate the difficulty of acquiring knowledge of what lies beyond the self.

[2] Note the conditional ‘can’. I have not addressed this point but Murdoch thinks it is far from self-evident that images are illuminating. Humans — including philosophers — are fantasizing, imaginative animals; our images often (and usually) arise from egocentric and short-sighted representations of reality. Image-making is no idle business, but hard and serious work.