Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is

Abstract

Iris Murdoch argued that much contemporary philosophy is guided by a faulty picture of the human being. Her claim was that philosophers had forgotten what a human being is. This paper traces Murdoch's view of that kind of forgetting, and tries to show that we have good reason to re-open the question “What is a human being?” This question is important for philosophy in at least two respects. First, negatively, as a reminder that we do not normally treat our fellow humans as merely a biological creature having certain properties. Secondly, treating the question of the nature of the human as an open question also serves the purpose of destabilizing dominating pictures that still guide and form much contemporary moral philosophy. Thus, Murdoch's criticism of mid-20th century philosophy is still highly relevant. On a more general level, this paper argues that Murdoch's thoughts on how we are guided by pictures in philosophy also shows how a philosophical “illusion of sense” can be the result of what Murdoch calls “a general loss of concepts”. Methodologically, this means that the use of simplified and well-defined concepts as philosophical starting-points runs the risk of distorting the subject matter to such a point that it no longer is clear what the philosophy is about.