Philosophers of the Intimate in a Time of Confinement: Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum

Abstract

Philosophers of the Intimate in a Time of Confinement: Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum Ruth Murphy But if we do leap ahead of what we know we still have to try to catch up. Will cannot run very far ahead of knowledge, and attention is our daily bread.1 Covid-19 has not been ‘the great leveller’ that some had imagined.2 Over a year on, all data clearly show that social injustice has been amplified by the consequences of the pandemic. Precarious labour conditions, degraded job prospects, rising unemployment and increased health risks have been the experience of many. Key workers, who have carried the burden of the crisis and remain the lower-paid members of society, often did not have the luxury to self-isolate when required. When it comes to lockdowns, there are even greater disparities in what ‘home’ is between the rich and the poor, giving it the potential to be a comfort or a cage. There are, too, those who have already faced confinement, such as the sick and prisoners. There are those who have had to grieve or die alone, missing the last embrace of their parents and friends. There are new ways of being and not being with each other. What can philosophy offer us in such a time, without glossing over these social differences? I would like to make the case for renewed attention to the work of Irish-British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) and of the contemporary American philosopher Martha Nussbaum (b.1947), whom Murdoch influenced. First, because both are unrelenting in their belief that the messy reality in which we live must inform our philosophy – in opposition to philosophy dictating truths that risk ringing hollow when confronted with the complexity of life. Over the past year, that messiness has been truly – metaphorically and physically – brought home, and we could not be more enmeshed in a spatial and temporal continuum of work, domestic chores, leisure, parenting, home-schooling, masked interactions Studies • volume 110 • number 438 241 – all determined by ever-changing social regulations and expressed in a completely new medical lingo. Second, because the style of philosophical writing developed by both Nussbaum and Murdoch, unlike the flatness and dryness of conventional philosophical prose, allows the philosopher and the reader to restore a form of moral complexity and subtle undecidedness that tend to evaporate through categorical language. Nussbaum specifically calls for a style that can ‘emphasize the world’s surprising variety’, a form which ‘itself implies that life contains significant surprises’.3 Covid-19 was, to put it lightly, such a significant surprise. And so, precisely because they do not deny life’s messiness but continually acknowledge it, and defend a more literary approach to key ethical problems, the work of Murdoch and Nussbaum helps us to think about the compression of our lives in the experience of confinement. Inversely, this time of confinement gives a new resonance to their philosophy. We may think of lockdown as life stripped of its outer layer: the place of social gatherings, public life, ceremonies, communities and exchange. This leaves us in the fragility of our intimate lives. While the outer layer may be vulnerable in its own right (one thinks of financial crashes, political upheaval, and of course pandemics), it is rarely seen as an acceptable locale for the expression of individual fragility. It is instead linked to the public, to manifestation, to accolade, to audience, and to distance. Murdoch and Nussbaum are instead philosophers of the inner layer, of vulnerability and internal struggle.4 When the pandemic temporarily, as it were, removed public life (at least as we used to think of it), the sovereignty and the inevitability of our intimate lives became manifest. In this condensed existence, a philosophy of the intimate, the domestic, and the private is the more compelling. Finally, in bringing Murdoch’s philosophy to bear on such a time, fifty years after the publication of The Sovereignty of Good,5 we cannot but reflect on the consequences of Covid-19 for women. The work of Murdoch and Nussbaum cannot be separated from the conditions in which it was produced: they were both part of a wider...