Iris Murdoch

Josh Landy
Why is it so hard to do the right thing?

Ray Briggs
Are we just too lazy and self-absorbed?

Josh Landy
How can we learn to really see each other?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy.

Ray Briggs
And at the University of Chicago where I teach philosophy.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s the next episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re exploring the life and thought of Iris Murdoch.

Ray Briggs
She was one of the quartet of Oxford philosophers, along with Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley.

Josh Landy
We’ve got an episode in each one of them in our wise women series.

Ray Briggs
But back to Murdoch… she was famous for her novels like the bell “The Black Prince” and “The Sea, The Sea.”

Josh Landy
Right that one won the Booker Prize in 1978.

Ray Briggs
But she also made hugely important contributions to moral philosophy. She said morality is objective. There are truths about it, no matter what anyone thinks or does. The only problem is that doing the right thing is really hard to grasp.

Josh Landy
I don’t see why it’s that hard. I mean, just be good to other people.

Ray Briggs
Easier said than done, Josh. Even if you want to be good to someone else, you can so easily get it wrong. Like, let’s say you decide to surprise your friend with flowers, but then they turn out to be allergic.

Josh Landy
Yeah, okay, but that’s actually one of Murdoch’s points. If we want to be kind to each other, we have to get to know each other really. Seeing people—that’s a crucial aspect of morality.

Ray Briggs
Oh my gosh, that’s even more optimistic—how can you ever really know another person’s experience? You’re not them. You’ve never been inside their head. You’re trapped in the prison of your own subjectivity.

Josh Landy
So get untrapped! Murdoch really liked what Simone Weil had to say about that.

Ray Briggs
I remember that from our episode on Weil. She says we have to set aside our own wants and needs and biases and open ourselves up to other people.

Josh Landy
Exactly. And Murdoch felt the same way. Murdoch called it unselfing. She said, You need to unself yourself. You need to get out of your own head, get out of your own way, and really come to know the person you’re talking to. That’s when you can fully love and care for them, here’s here, as she put it, we cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else.

Ray Briggs
Oh, that’s a beautiful thought, but in the real world, people can’t be bothered to do all that. We human beings are lazy. We’re egocentric. We just don’t have the capacity. How is this magic meeting of the mind is ever going to happen?

Josh Landy
Well, Murdoch doesn’t say it’s easy. She agrees that we start out the way you say we’re lazy, egocentric, limited, selfish, but if we work hard enough, we can become better people. She’s calling us to a lifetime of work on our souls.

Ray Briggs
Okay, maybe if we work on ourselves, someday, we’re gonna have an easy time doing the right thing. But what about right now? How do we do the right thing in this moment, you know, with the kind of fallible people that we are?

Josh Landy
Well, that’s a reasonable worry, but Murdoch actually wanted us to kind of stop focusing on worries like that, stop focusing on these isolated moments of decision and zoom out so it’s true. Yeah, you do have to make choices in individual moments, but that’s not the most important part of morality. The key thing is gradually turning yourself into a better person.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but what’s the point of turning yourself into a better person unless you’re ultimately going to make better choices,

Josh Landy
Sure, but how do you make those better choices? You can’t just do it by focusing on moment to moment decisions. That’ll be like, I don’t know, trying to get better at sprinting by focusing really hard on the starting gun. That’s not the way to do it. You’ve got to train. You’ve got to practice on low stakes situations, so you’ll perform better in high stakes situations.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so let’s grant that you turn yourself into a better person and that you’re able to pay really close attention to other people. This is going to help you treat your friends and family well. But morality is about way more than just your friends and family. It’s about a whole bunch of people you don’t even know and will never meet.

Josh Landy
That’s a great point, Ray, and I bet our guest will have something to say about it. It’s Eva Maria Düringer from the University of Tübingen.

Ray Briggs
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sheryl Kaskowitz, to look into the relationship between Murdoch’s novels and her philosophical writing. She files this report

Sheryl Kaskowitz
in 1978 the British philosopher Bryan Magee hosted a series of interviews with prominent philosophers on BBC television. It was called “Men of Ideas,” and it was all men… except for one episode.

Bryan Magee
Iris Murdoch, when you’re writing a novel on the one hand and philosophy on the other, are you actually conscious that you’re engaged in two radically different kinds of writing?

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Murdoch doesn’t hesitate in her response.

Iris Murdoch
Oh, very much so, yes. These two branches of thought have such different aims and such different styles, and I feel very strongly that one should keep them apart from each other.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
This interview happened the year that Murdoch published her 19th novel, “The Sea, TheSsea, which earned her the Booker Prize. She also taught philosophy at Oxford for 15 years, but she had left that teaching post in 1963 to focus on her fiction writing, and now it was clear that she didn’t see any overlap.

Iris Murdoch
I think as soon as philosophy gets into a novel, it ceases to be philosophy. It becomes something else. I mean, I perhaps put things about philosophy into my novels because I happen to know about philosophy. I mean, if I knew about sailing ships, I’d put sailing ships in. If I knew about hospitals, I’d put hospitals in.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
It’s true that Murdoch had been steeped in philosophy since she was 18 and a student at Oxford, so it’s hard to imagine that she could keep it out of her novels completely.

Miles Leeson
Iris was always very keen that people didn’t see her novels as philosophical.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That’s Miles Leeson. He’s director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, and the title of his book shows that he’s one of many scholars who actually don’t agree with Murdoch’s view of her own work. It’s called “Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist.”

Miles Leeson
I think, primarily that she didn’t want to put off a general readership that would think, Oh, well, if they’re philosophical novels and they’re not for me, then they will be far too difficult to understand. And she was very keen on having a general readership that would read her novels and just enjoy the story.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That’s what Murdoch told Brian Magee in that BBC interview.

Iris Murdoch
Literature is for fun, literature entertains.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Her literature certainly does, using elements of Gothic romance and sexual farce to draw readers in, though that doesn’t necessarily make it philosophy-free.

Miles Leeson
If you go looking for the philosophy in many of her novels, it’s right there underneath the surface.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
As an example, Leeson points to “The Bell,” Murdoch’s fourth novel, published in 1958. It was the first one that Leeson read, and it drew him in beginning with its famous opening line.

The Bell
Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She returned him two weeks later for the same reason.

Miles Leeson
That’s a really punchy opening, isn’t it.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Dora is an aspiring artist who’d given up art and married an older professor. She’s one of a trio of narrators whose lives intersect at a religious community in the English countryside. It’s an engaging and moving story, luring the reader into the inner lives of its characters and the ups and downs of its intricate plot. So the bell succeeds in being entertaining, but Leeson also sees it as connecting directly to Murdoch’s philosophical thought about moral realism, specifically her argument that paying attention to other people’s experiences and to beauty and art allows people to understand themselves and their own realities.

Miles Leeson
The novel is really about the progress of moral development and the perception of other people.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
He points to one scene after Dora has spent time with other people in this community, out in the country, and she’s still not sure whether she should stay with her husband, Paul.

Miles Leeson
And Dora has this wonderful experience when she returns to London, and she goes into the National Gallery and has a kind of a transcendent experience in front of gainsborough’s portrait of his two daughters.

The Bell
Dora was always moved by the pictures today. She was moved, but in a new way, she marveled with a kind of gratitude that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvelous generosity, their splendor. It occurred to her that here, at least, was something real and something perfect. Who had said that about perfection and reality being in the same place?

Sheryl Kaskowitz
A student of philosophy could tell you it was the 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, but Murdoch lets the question stay unanswered. Here’s Leeson again, explaining what that moment at the museum meant for Dora.

Miles Leeson
She realizes that she has to start acting as if she is in control of her own destiny, and that she needs to make her own decisions, and whether that’s to go back to her husband or to have a different life entirely, is one that she has to work out for herself.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
And this scene is just one example. Murdoch’s novels are full of what Leeson calls intertwined relationships that allow characters to learn about themselves, and he says that readers can think about how we might deal with similar situations.

Miles Leeson
I’m not saying that our novels are self help books, far from it, but they certainly do open up those major questions around how we respond to each other, to other individuals, how we get outside of ourselves, and how we pay attention to the good things in life, rather than those that sort of drag us down to a more base level, if you like.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Miles Leeson and others have discovered these deeper philosophical questions in Murdoch’s fiction, despite her own claim that they’re completely separate.

Iris Murdoch
I would be very pleased if it was impossible to tell it was the same person writing.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sheryl Kaskowitz.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that super interesting report, Sheryl. It’s always wonderful to hear about great novels by a great novelist. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking you about the life and thought of Iris Murdoch.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Eva-Maria Düringer. She’s professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and author of “Evaluating Emotions.” Eva-Maria, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Eva-Maria Düringer
Hi there. It’s great to be here.

Josh Landy
So Eva, as we just mentioned, you’ve written a whole lot about the philosophy of emotions, but how did you first get interested in Iris Murdoch?

Eva-Maria Düringer
That’s a good question. It was an emotional matter as well, but not in the context of academia, but a more private context. It was actually in the pub about five, six years ago with Rachael Wiseman, a good friend of mine who was also on your show a while ago, speaking on Anscombe. She was working on the Quartet at the time. But we were talking about private matters, common acquaintances, and we were talking about one person in particular that I had a hard time being fair to. I was telling her I found it really hard to not prejudge whatever that person was doing in a negative way. And I said to her, I really would love to work on myself, but try to be fair to that person, and I really don’t know how to go about it. And that’s when she said to me, Well, you have to read Iris Murdoch, which is what I did a little while later.

Josh Landy
And sure enough, you still hate them.

Eva-Maria Düringer
Hate is a strong word, but it is a very, very hard task indeed, as Murdoch herself says, to really pay just and loving attention. But I do have some clues as to how to work on it.

Ray Briggs
Eva, this actually brings me nicely to my next question. So Murdoch’s novels helped you. We heard about them in the roving philosophical report. How do her philosophical ideas show up in her fiction?

Eva-Maria Düringer
That’s a good question. They do show up in various ways in her fiction. One way is that, Murdoch said, the academic milieu, you know, the Oxford people, they’re the kind of people I know about and people who’ve studied philosophy. So they are naturally, the people who will be her protagonists. So very often we find people who have studied philosophy or who are priests or retired teachers who are working on a grand work of moral philosophy themselves. Within the novels, sometimes we find people having very deep metaphysical conversations with one another. We have people really asking these questions, how can I be a good person? And we also have that, though, in a more subtle way, that they’re trying to be be better people, but failing miserably. Very, very often, we have stories about how they fail. And this, I guess, is one theme that very often comes up. Murdoch shows us how they should be paying attention better attention to their friends and circumstances, but they can’t, and that’s where their lives go, not very well.

Ray Briggs
So can you give us an example from one of Murdoch’s novels about somebody failing at morality?

Eva-Maria Düringer
Well, the last novel I read, and I haven’t read them all, I have to say maybe two thirds, but the last one I read was “Henry and Cato.” And Cato is somebody who, again, is one of these people who really he wants to be a good person, and he decides fairly late in life that he wants to become a priest, and he goes into this really deprived area and lives there and has an open house for people to come there to. To talk to him about their problems, and he lets them rob him. You know, they take everything he’s got, but he’s fine with that. And what happens is that he falls in love with one of the people who regularly comes to his house, a young criminal. And he doesn’t really want to face up to this fact, though, that he’s actually falling in love with him, and that it’s a sort of selfish love, I guess, that he gets absorbed in and he sees himself still as this good person who’s trying to help somebody else. And that ends in disaster. I don’t want to spoil too much, but it just goes horribly wrong.

Josh Landy
Tou’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re talking about the life and thoughts of Iris Murdoch with Eva Maria Düringer from the University of Tubingen.

Ray Briggs
Does human life have a purpose? Is morality created or discovered if you want to do the right thing? Is it enough to obey the rules?

Josh Landy
Attention, affection and action—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Doja Cat
It fiends attention, it needs and it seeks affection, hungry and it fiends.

Josh Landy
How can we make sure everyone gets enough attention and affection? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…Except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re discussing the life and thought of Iris Murdoch. Our guest is Eva-Maria Düringer from the University of Tübingen.

Josh Landy
It’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for Humanities. You can listen to all the episodes in the series at our website, philosophytalk.org/wisewomen. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and lose yourself in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Eva, we have a question from our audience. Carl on Bluesky asks, I wonder which of Murdoch’s novels you think reflects her philosophical ideas most closely or presents them most clearly. And I wonder whether you think reading the novels really does bring her philosophical ideas to the reader or actually not much.

Eva-Maria Düringer
That is a very difficult question, and it’s very debated among Murdoch scholars, what the relationship between her novels and her literature and her philosophy actually is.

Josh Landy
She denied there was it right? Occasionally.

Eva-Maria Düringer
Well, occasionally—not at the very beginning, when she wrote her first novel, “Under the Net,” she did agree that there was a philosophical idea very much at the center of it. But later on, she really was very keen on saying, I am not a philosophical novelist, which, by which she means, I think that her novels should not be taken as pieces of philosophy. They are not there. She once made this distinction between philosophy trying to clarify and explain matters, whereas novels, literature mystifies matters. So very different jobs and job descriptions?

Ray Briggs
So Carl asked which of her novels you think does the best job of presenting her philosophical ideas.

Eva-Maria Düringer
So the best job is tricky, but one that I think does a very good job for sure, is “A Fairly Honorable Defeat.” We find a lot of her themes in that one. We find people who are bad at paying attention properly, who are deluded by their ego. We find we have an enchanter figure, which is something somebody that very often comes up in her novels, who is playing with these delusions and sets up narratives that manipulate these people in ways that work best for the enchanter. We also have people trying to be good. We actually have somebody, and that is fairly rare in Murdoch novels, who is a very good person and who nicely illustrates what it means to be good for nothing, because he is a good person, but he’s not leading a very happy life.

Josh Landy
That’s so interesting, because it’s almost as though that novel is sort of raising some potential objections against Murdoch’s own view. I mean, in particular, this idea of manipulation, because as I take it, the core view turns around the importance of seeing other people, because seeing other people is what’s going to allow you to be truly good to them. But hey, what if you’re a con man? What if you’re a manipulator? What if you’re a torturer? Seeing other people can actually help you, quote, unquote, to do harm to other people. So would you see a fairly honorable defeat as actually almost Murdoch testing something out, trying out a problem for part of her own view?

Eva-Maria Düringer
Possibly, possibly. That’s a very interesting question. Yes, because the enchanted figure is indeed very good at reading these people’s thoughts. I guess one could. Question whether he’s actually seeing them in the light of the good which he would have to do in order to pay proper attention to them. But what does that mean? Is maybe the next question. But as I said before, she is not seeing her novels as pieces of philosophy. So it’s not like I think that she’s trying out philosophical ideas here already more, but it might well have been in the back of her mind to see which problems might arise, actually, with her view, I would not deny that, and that is a very interesting one.

Ray Briggs
What does it take to treat other people well? Like it’s clearly not enough to just know a lot about other people, because then you can kind of deceive them. So like, what does burdock think that we should actually be doing?

Eva-Maria Düringer
What we should actually be doing is pay attention, which is very, very hard. So maybe we can talk a little bit about what that means, and we should pay attention, not only to people, but to all of reality. And sometimes it’s easier not to talk about other people first, but about maybe inanimate objects even, because it might be easier to understand how to pay attention. Because it does get really muddy and difficult when it comes to attending other people, but quite generally attending. And I think you had that in your episode on Simone Wei quite nicely. And Iris Murdoch takes this concept from Simone Wei that we, in order to attend to reality properly, we need to Simon Wei talks about the creation, and Iris Murdoch about unselfing, so we must keep in check somehow our fat, relentless ego, as she calls it, which is the self protective mechanism in us that makes us it puts kind of like a filter on our vision or on perception, and makes everything we see not very demanding on us, maybe flattering, not worrying. And this is what we should try to stop, if we manage to stop it and at the same time, we kind of make space right in our mental lives for the other. Really pay attention to the other, really give them the space and the time to impress themselves on us. I guess then Murdoch says we will see what is needed, right? What should best be done, what the other people need, or what their reality is like.

Josh Landy
Okay, but let’s drill down on that little bit. Eva, I mean, that’s a really interesting claim, and I there’s a part of it that I like a lot. I mean, I think this idea of getting yourself out of the way, getting your own biases, prejudices, selfishness, out of the way, so as you can, so you can, I tend to other people. I think that’s very compelling. And then the idea that if you really want to help someone you know, don’t give them the flowers they’re allergic to, you know, Ray’s point earlier, is a really good one. But isn’t there more that’s required? Aren’t there situations where you know, you can see everything, but it’s still really difficult, because the you know, the moral sphere is complicated, and they’re competing interests. Let’s say you have two friends who both want things, but they’re different things. How are you supposed to decide? Don’t we need some set of moral principles, or something like that?

Eva-Maria Düringer
Well, would they help us in that scenario? Is the question. So it is very difficult to see. I mean, it sounds deceptively sinful, right? That this is all we have to do to get to know other people and to pay attention. But it is so, so hard to actually do. This is one of Murdoch’s main points, right? It may sound easy, but it is incredibly hard. And then, let’s say you are actually quite good at it. And you do have these two friends and you have competing claims, what should you do? It is complex. It is muddled and messy. But what the principles really help us out here? I mean, we can play through this. You know, take a utilitarian or the ontological principle. Murdoch would say, No, right? They what really should guide you is these conflicting needs that you have perceived, right? And if you don’t find anything at all in order to make the call and decide who you should maybe give your your time to or help out here, then, well, the principles won’t help you out either. Then maybe you do have to flip the coin in the end, right? But probably this is a very rare case, I should think, but we should accept that reality is complex.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I guess another reason that I might be suspicious of moral principles is that I might use them in a way that’s kind of like self serving or self deceived. Like, maybe if the equal division of some resource is going to make me better off, I’d suddenly get really concerned with fairness when I wasn’t before. That seems kind of no better than just doing what I think other people need, if I’m wrong about what they need, like, I. Be Wrong also about what moral principles require. But then I’m kind of worried that this is a kind of general problem for moral reasoning that doesn’t have anything to do with like principles or like other people’s well being. What does Murdoch have to say about how I get around being self deceived? Like, how do I see myself properly so that I don’t act self interested.

Eva-Maria Düringer
That is, actually, that is a very interesting question. And one thing she says is, let’s not spend too much time trying to understand ourselves, right? Because that is, for one thing, probably not even very interesting, unless you know you’re on some kind of therapy, and it might be helpful to you. But usually, what happens if we really focus on ourselves and try to understand our own motives and our own desires, is that we get caught up in the ego. And even, even if we want to do it right and want to analyze ourselves and do it properly, we are so blinded by it. We find it so interesting that again, we are self absorbed and stop paying attention to reality, to the to the unself she actually calls if that’s what we should be doing, we should be drawn outside of ourselves and attend to other things. So how can I avoid being self deceived? Try to really stay with other things, other than yourself, and try to really maybe concentrate, stay with them. Leave the authority with them.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re discussing the life and thought of Iris Murdoch with Eva Maria Düringer from the University of Tubingen. So Eva, you were just saying something really interesting about, essentially, training yourself to get better at unselfing Gradually, sort of acculturating yourself to become less self deceived, less self absorbed. Does art play any part in this that is, as a spectator, as a reader, as a viewer. Can that help us in that process of training ourselves to get ourselves out of the way?

Eva-Maria Düringer
It can, indeed, and that is very important to Murdoch, art can nature can. But let’s stick with art for now. This is something that actually comes up in her novels a lot, that some of her protagonists have their favorite painting at the National Gallery, and they will go back to it and actually look at it. And whenever they do that, they sort of get almost like recalibrated. They are taken again outside of their little worries and self deceptions, and seem to get focused again. The question is, maybe, how does good art do that? And it’s only good art that does it, and not bad arts. And that is a very important distinction for Murdoch, good art is the art that manages to capture aspects of reality. And if we consume Murdoch speaks about consuming art, if we manage to consume it properly, we are able to follow the perspective of the artist that the artist had in creating that that painting, for example. And then we are taken with the artist viewpoint to that piece of reality. And we do get absorbed in it, and right then and right there, we are no longer self deceived, but with some aspect of reality that is worth investigating as well.

Ray Briggs
This brings me nicely, Eva, to a question from our listener, Karen in New Orleans. So Karen writes Iris Murdoch claimed that writing philosophy and writing fiction were two separate Enterprises for her. What do you think is the most compelling line of thinking Murdoch takes to the activity of working in studies of philosophy and literature together, whether in her fiction or in her philosophical writing, and where in her work do these pursuits come together most interestingly?

Eva-Maria Düringer
Thank you for the question. So if I just said that she conceives of good art as capturing some aspects of reality that we maybe do not get to see in any other way. So in her novels, I should think she was trying to do just that. You have to use your imagination. And here’s another important distinction between imagination and fantasy, but you use your imagination to capture certain aspects of reality, and then she tries to imaginatively create these situations and people with problems, and she sets them up with all their failures. And very often, as I said earlier, we here have the same problems that she’s also philosophically, very interested in. And maybe I’ll just give you an example that I came across very recently, I was philosophically interested in this question of, how do we attend well, to other people who are themselves, deluded at the moment, very much caught up in their ego. What do we actually attend to? Do we attend to the ego, or are we trying to look. Beyond, and if yes, how can that possible? How can that be possible? It seems impossible. And then I came across this little bit at the end of the Italian girl, where you have this little conversation between the two protagonists who have gone through various life changing experiences. And there’s this little sentence I can see now. That’s why you can see me. And then you think, ah, amazing. Here I have an answer. But of course, it’s like a fictional conversation that we have here. So you don’t know, is this Murdoch giving me a philosophical idea? You have to be very careful, but at the same time, it’s very hard not to. And I have to admit that I did take it as a philosophical idea and kind of ran with it. But and these moments, I think, are very occur very often to people who are interested in both Murdoch’s philosophy and her literature.

Josh Landy
So you mentioned a moment ago the idea that these novels are capturing aspects of reality, part of what Murdoch thinks is an aspect of reality is morality? I wonder if you could say a little bit more about this. Philosophers call it moral realism, the idea that there really is a morality out there to be discovered, as opposed to the idea that human beings, you know, collectively decide on it or invent it, or something like that. Why did Murdoch think that what does her her view about moral realism come to?

Eva-Maria Düringer
That is a very good question and a very difficult one. I think when she first starts talking about realism, she is not so much interested in the same metaphysical, ontological questions as you know, what are values that might be there independently of our feeling and thinking in the world. But she says, if we want to be moral people, good people, we have to be realists, in the sense of we have to attend to reality and really try very hard at it. But then, of course, this reality that we attend to is not a neutral one, right? It is one that is evaluatively rich, and this, I guess, is moral realism to some extent already you have, like, some forms of moral realism where people say values are really there, independently of our minds, right, of our thinking and feeling. And I’m not sure she would go as far as that. Obviously moral reality only exists where there are people who, for whom morality is an issue. But then the question is, what are moral facts right? How do we want to conceive of them? And that’s a tricky question, and I’m not even sure murder gives a very clear answer. There. There are people after Murdoch who have been trying to pick up her thought and develop this, like, for example, John McDowell, who picks up the comparison between values and secondary qualities, like colors.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So I have a question about this. I’m worried that reality has too many perspectives in it, and I think some of them are repellent. So my reality includes a lot of people who need to be taken care of, and like, who are my fellow humans? Somebody else’s reality might include a lot of enemies who could easily be neutralized by, I don’t know, marching them off into like, prison camps, in some sense, like that person can locate their enemies. And I want to say they’re wrong, but are they wrong because they’re misperceiving reality? Like, I think maybe they’re just wrong because they’re a jerk. And I think maybe Murdoch would disagree with that.

Eva-Maria Düringer
I think that goes together very nicely. Yeah, they are wrong because they’re misperceiving reality, because they are jerks, because they are caught up in their ego. Yes, and I’m not sure she would like that talk about different realities very much. You know, there is one reality, and it is very hard to understand it, and this is why I prefer to talk about aspects of reality. But this might be only a minor part.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Iris Murdoch with Eva Maria Düringer from the University of Tubingen.

Ray Briggs
Why don’t people always pay attention to each other’s humanity? Do you worry about hatred and discrimination in the world around you. How do we go about making things better for everyone?

Josh Landy
Seeing our way to a better world—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues. you

Steven Wilson
We are self, I only see myself now.

Josh Landy
Ccan we ever see past ourselves enough to un-self ourselves? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Eva Maria Drüinger from the University of Tübingen, and we’re exploring the life and thought of Iris Murdoch. It’s part of our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Josh Landy
So Eva, I want to pick up on Ray’s really interesting question about whether when people act badly it’s because they aren’t seeing what’s actually there, or maybe sometimes they are seeing what’s there, and they’re just being a jerk. How much Murdoch seems to place a fair amount of weight on almost an identification of seeing and goodness. She even has a phrase to love that is to see, but is loving really seeing? I mean, can’t you do good without seeing everything? Can’t you do wrong while seeing things? Can’t you do good by not seeing things? Sometimes it’s good to turn a blind eye. I mean, in the case that you mentioned you were discussing with Rachel in the pub, maybe occasionally you need to turn a blind eye to somebody’s faults. You know, how much stock do you place in this idea that really the secret to acting correctly is to perceive things accurately.

Eva-Maria Düringer
It’s a very good question. So I think what we need to bring in here, and that is very difficult, is the idea of the good and seeing things in the lives of the good. And that’s a very platonic thought, and that, I think, is very essential for Murdoch, and which would also answered the question from earlier, why Julius King, the enchanter, who seems to see and read people really well, but still does horrible, horrible things. And of course, that is possible. Murdoch doesn’t deny it in her novels, and not in her philosophy either.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So I want to hear more about seeing in light of the good. So Plato thought the good was a thing that existed no matter what anybody thought, and was, in fact, like, in some sense, like the realist thing. It was kind of that had the ultimate reality. Did Murdoch think that?

Eva-Maria Düringer
She is very hesitant to really affirm this metaphysical weight, but she’s very drawn to metaphysics, but she does talk about the good as a transcendent magnetic center. And she says, We have to, we do think of it like that, and we do experience it like that. And she says to to answer the actual metaphysical question, is it real? Should we imagine it as somewhere in the heaven of ideas, or something like that. This is very difficult, and she does not want to commit. And she wants to say, this is, I cannot answer this, but we cannot but think of it in these terms. And she has a very nice maybe this is worth putting forward interpretation of the allegory of the cave.

Unknown Speaker
Ooh, let’s hear it.

Eva-Maria Düringer
Okay, so you have your people trapped in the cave, and they look at the shadows on the wall. And then Murdoch says, the first step right, these people turn around and see the fire behind them. And then they realize, oh, this is actually what makes these appearances very interesting. So there is a first distinction between appearance and reality. And then she says, the fire is actually the ego. That’s what we should think of as the ego. We see things naturally in the light of the ego. And very often, she says, People feel very happy to have realized this. And then they sit down near the fire. It’s warm there. It’s comfortable, nice flickering lights, and let’s stay there. What we really have to do, of course, is get out of the cave and see things truly. And there she just takes over the image of the Sun, which is the idea of the good. And if we see things in that light, we see them truly. And that’s what we need to do.

Josh Landy
I’m a little worried about circularity here. If you’re good, you’ll do good, but, but nonetheless, I want to ask a different, a slightly different a slightly different kind of question. I want to sort of expand out from the kinds of cases we’ve been talking about so far, one person caring for one person, and think about broader issues, like, for example, xenophobia, you know, the fair amount of xenophobia unfortunately in the world. What if anything? Would Murdoch have to say about how to address that kind of problem?

Eva-Maria Düringer
Well, she would give us, certainly, the tools with which to analyze it. I should think that when things are tough, especially when there are lots of problems, maybe like all sorts crime, poverty, things are not going well. It’s very hard to face reality, and it’s very comforting to be given a narrative that finds blame with one particular group of people, say, and then that means for you, you don’t really have to address reality as it is, but you can just blame that group of people, and if only they were out of the way, things would get easier again. So it kind of helps you. It’s one of the self protective mechanisms of the ego, and how should we address that? How should we get out of it? One way to think of it, I was very impressed by a bishop Buddy the day after the inauguration, how she when she pleaded for mercy, and what she was saying, I think in an interview afterwards, all I was doing is. Uh, pointing to reality, saying there are people right now who are afraid, and sometimes it can be as simple as that, and at the same time as courageous as that, because what did it take to say these things? And yet it was pointing to a seemingly obvious piece of reality. There are people who are afraid. These people are our neighbors. We, we know them well. They, they don’t they. They mean well, and they are afraid now of having to leave the country tomorrow, of being deportated because they do not have the right documentation, or people who think they cannot be who they are. They cannot live their identity. So sometimes it can This is like a very courageous act that we can do, that Murdoch would very much support and admire. I’m sure.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask about another kind of bigotry, which is homophobia, which is also kind of on the rise, like homo and transphobia, both. But one thing that Murdoch does, that I really like in her novels, is she just like, has gay relationships as kind of normal relationships that are part of her social world. Do you have any insight into like, what enabled her to just create these characters and be kind to them?

Eva-Maria Düringer
It’s a good question. What enabled her? She herself was bisexual and had relationships with men and women, and she had a very happy marriage, and yet she had all these affairs on the side, and that didn’t seem to be a big problem anyway. I mean, somebody said that her portrayal of one gay partnership was actually the most successful portrayal of a marriage, even though, of course, they weren’t married at that time. In the English Literature at the time, I can’t quite remember who said it, but yeah, she was very good at depicting these relationships as very normal and successful.

Josh Landy
I want to change the subject slightly. I want to raise a line from Murdoch that’s always troubled me. She writes nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous. So this is on an essay about art and the value of art. I find that, you know, it’s certainly the case that the world does not need more. You know, selfish hedonists, reprobates, Julius King type people. I mean, I’m all over morality. Morality is great, but is it the only thing that’s of value in life, like, what about love? It almost seems like in Murdoch, love is just a way you get moral brownie points by being good to the other person. Ah, you know, I took care of you today. Cha Ching, I get another moral brownie point. Why on earth would she think that nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous? How about art that isn’t morally improving, that’s not morally degrading, but it’s just raising really interesting philosophical questions about love or whatever? How about love itself? How about other pursuits that are really valuable, but they’re just not relevant to morality. They’re not evil, but they’re just pursuits like philosophy,

Eva-Maria Düringer
Food and difficult question, I’m sure she wouldn’t have to say anything against these pursuits, right? That you should stop and only go for the moral brownie points. Obviously, there are a lot of things to enjoy that are fun and all that is great, but what is really of value is to actually, and I guess she means morally valuable. That’s what she must mean. I mean this is, this is the only thing that is truly good as trying to be a good person. And even that is not something that we can keep telling ourselves that, as we are becoming better persons, that we cannot pat ourselves on the back and say, hey, well done. Now I’m finally on the right track. Because as soon as we do that, we become self complacent again, probably right. When she says, We have to be good for nothing, I find that a very, very hard phrase, but this is what it is, because the good person really trying to be good, you will not get anything for it. It can be quite a dire life that you live. If you’re lucky, right? You can have fun and enjoy a lot of things, and that’s good for you. But what is truly valuable is that you try, not sure if I’m really answering your question, but she didn’t want us to just sit there and brood and be really boring and just try to be nice all the time, right?

Ray Briggs
So Eva, maybe this brings us to a good last question, which is, if our listeners want to live a good life the way that Murdoch thought they should like, what’s one big piece of advice you’d give them in order to do that?

Eva-Maria Düringer
Good question, what’s the piece of advice? Immerse yourself in as many pursuits and activities, maybe as you can, try to get away from yourself, not as a sort of compulsive thing to do, but really try to be in. Interested in everything out there, be this nature, be this art, and try, maybe in somewhere other, to relate it to what is good. Really try to understand it. Really get immersed. So maybe pick up. We don’t all have to go to the National Gallery all the time and try to really understand the great pieces of art, which sometimes you get the feeling you have to do when you read murder and especially in novels, but you know, music, nature, all of these things just immerse yourself.

Josh Landy
And maybe great conversations like this, on which note I want to thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much.

Eva-Maria Düringer
It’s been great.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Eva-Maria Düringer, professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen and author of “Evaluating Emotions.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m really going to take to heart this advice to stop doomscrolling and go look at some art. I think that’ll be good for everybody.

Josh Landy
Touch grass and I guess not touch paintings, but have a nice look at them.

Ray Briggs
I always get in trouble when I touch them.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I don’t know if Murdoch would entirely approve. We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And don’t forget, you can also listen to all the episodes in our wise women series at philosophytalk.org/wise women.

Josh Landy
Now… you can pay attention, but you’ll never see him—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Iris Murdoch is one of those writers I first became aware of when I was in college, though nothing in that awareness compelled me to actually read her. She was one of those writers like Stendahl or John Gardner or Walt Whitman that exhausted me just thinking about them. She also seemed very, I don’t know British in a way that was not Peter Sellers, which is my measure of what British should be back when I was in college. I don’t think I was wrong about her Britishness, but she was also quite Irish, with strong opinions about the IRA who knew yet here we are, well known as a philosopher these days. He was more known as a novelist. Back when I was a non stop book reader, 26 novels she wrote, she was also famous for her love life. And if her friend and biographer, a n Wilson can be believed, she was deceptive and a liar. Well, thank you. Mr. Wilson, with friends like that, her husband, John Bailey, however, wrote three largely well regarded Memoirs of life with her and her Alzheimer’s. And he thought she was swell. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. There was a movie of this made with Judi Dench, a sure fire indicator that you are a cultural treasure. It does seem that she was driven in her writing by both literature and philosophy, so that one informed the other. Her novels often feature what one reader called muddled philosophers and also enchanters. Another character is inspired by or even thinly veiled versions of people she knew, if you know what I mean, she got quite a swath through life. She seemed not to have boundaries between being a lover and being a friend, something of a polyamorous you might say. Yet she kept them all separate from each other, perhaps because they were each their own, deep one on one relationship that she didn’t want tainted by the outside intimacy seemed to be her forte. And reading novels is an intimate activity. It’s all about love. Philosophy is more of a conversation, of course, or even argument, if you will. Philosophy fed her novels to become, besides good fiction, extended thought experiments, incorporating themes like the consequences of passion, intellectuals working through moral dilemmas and even straightforward, realistic depictions of gay relationships. And she had many affairs, often at the same time, though keeping them separate. As a young woman, she had an affair with one fellow and then an affair with that fellow’s friend named foot, who later married Philippa foot, who invented the trolley problem, and Iris had an affair with her and remained close to her the rest of her life, just before she married John Bailey, who found sex ridiculous, so he says she’s having liaisons with the Elias Kennedy, a very domineering Bulgarian genius who Bailey regarded as, quote, Pluto, got out of the underworld with a crocodile smile, wanting to whisk Iris off to Hades, unquote. But she married Bailey, and perhaps did not have as much sex with him as she did with others, but he came to see that her liaisons were the Alembic from which her novels were distilled. They represented Iris, search for wisdom, authority and belief and beneficence in her lovers. Bailey said these affairs offered Iris the Hurly burly of the chaise long and contrasted the deep, deep peace of the double bed, which was him, I guess, she compared herself to Proteus, who changed shape but reverted to the true when hugged tightly, this appeared to have been, in fact, true. She entered her days with John Bailey, days made famous with his memoirs of her and her Alzheimer’s. Now Jackson’s dilemma was the final novel written by our Murdoch, published in 1995 she died four years later. Researchers at University College London found in 2004 that the language used in that novel is a lot simpler than in her earlier works. They suggested the novel offers, quote, a unique opportunity to study the effects of Alzheimer’s on spontaneous writing, and hope that their research could help to develop better diagnostic tests capable of picking up on the subtle changes in cognitive ability. Unquote, which sounds like it could have been a subplot in a novel by Iris Murdoch, which, in a way, I suppose it is. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is James Kass.

Ray Briggs
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates. Support for this episode, and all the episodes in our Wise Women series, comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. That conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Iris (movie)
We all worry about going mad, don’t we? How would we know, those of us who live in our minds anyway?