The Just and Erotic Gaze: Iris Murdoch’s Moral Ontology

Abstract

The Just and Erotic Gaze: Iris Murdoch’s Moral Ontology Hank Spaulding For Eros: “When you love,May you feel the joyOf your heart coming aliveAs your lover’s gazeLands on your eyes,Holding them,Like the weight of a kissDeepening.” —O’Donohue 27 Love, as philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch writes, “shifts the center of the world from ourselves to another place” (Metaphysics 17).1 Love is a complicated term and gestures to a type of human experience (romance, friendship, or family). However, Murdoch specifically invokes a romantic, erotic love in this quote. Erotic love shifts the center of individuals from themselves to another (16). This imagery, according to Murdoch, not only signifies the phenomenology of love in a romantic relationship but also, paradoxically, the movement of moral formation. Since romance and morality occupy this singular place in Murdoch’s moral philosophy, she is distinct from other moral philosophers of her day. The typical moral philosopher asks the question: what should I do to be good? For Murdoch the question is: what is Good? The distinction between these two questions highlights the richness of Murdoch’s work and the poverty of modern moral philosophy. Murdoch suggests that modernity suffers from a poverty in its commitment to an inward fetish of self-obsession, or what she calls the “fat relentless ego” (Sovereignty 51). The individual captivated by the “fat relentless ego” is the self-same one who is incapable of moral actions. This individual is selfish, self-possessed, and too confident in the prowess of the will for moral action. Murdoch sees much of the modern project as perpetuating the ego. The error in such a moral formation, according to Murdoch, is that proper moral formation is a journey elsewhere, namely to the Good itself. The Good is the ground and source of all reality and, in Plato’s estimation, [End Page 37] “beyond being” (Republic 205). The Good beyond being is the object toward which our attention and love must be fixed. Attention to the Good, rather than the ego, has the added gift of forming the proper moral posture in any agency, namely “the just and loving gaze” (Sovereignty 33). In short, the moral wisdom of Murdoch’s philosophy is that as humans are drawn outside of themselves toward the Good, they become less selfish, less self-absorbed, and reflexively capable of moral activity. Moral formation, then, is dependent upon love because love most accurately reveals how people can act in ways worthy of emulation. Though an accomplished philosopher of love, Murdoch is an equally accomplished novelist of love. Murdoch’s novels represent a narratively imagined outworking of her moral philosophy in the life of her characters. These characters suffer through the embattled love that exists between egotism and selflessness. One cannot read love with Murdoch without engaging these texts. Murdoch’s moral philosophy of love, I argue, centers on an erotic desire for what is Good rather than primarily how one should be good. Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction, therefore, offer readers a moral ontology. Furthermore, Murdoch’s novels use sexual and erotic imagery to describe one’s relationship to love relative to the Good. Such imagery compels readers to recognize the scandal of moral life and the Good itself. The ego is abidingly selfish and is only finally overcome through developing a taste for the Good. Only in this way can individuals be moral: through erotic love traveling to the far country of the Good in order to gain proper taste. I begin this paper by defining the parameters of Plato’s understanding of philosophy as ordered Eros and friend of wisdom. Plato’s philosophy of eros is subtle and can be read as a rejection of erotic love in favor of friendship. Though I will argue Plato is misread at this point, his deployment of Eros can lead to problematic interpretations of erotic language in philosophy. Murdoch’s philosophy recovers a correct understanding of erotic language for moral philosophy. In order to recover this, I begin with Murdoch’s moral philosophy proper in order to define certain terms, namely the “just and loving gaze,” the Good, and love. The Good gives...