Iris Murdoch
British-Irish · 1919–1999
British-Irish philosopher and novelist who argued that moral life centers on the quality of attention we pay to the world, that love is the perception of individuals in all their particularity, and that the Good is sovereign, demanding a disciplined unselfing of the ego.
Wikipedia ↗“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”
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“Art and morals are one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
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“Attention is the natural prayer of the soul. I have used the word attention, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”
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“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality. And the chief instrument for this is unselfing — a disciplined suppression of the greedy ego.”
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“The Good has nothing to do with purpose, indeed it excludes the idea of purpose. All is vanity is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way to be good is to be good for nothing.”
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“In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego. Moral philosophy is properly, and target of its analysis is properly, not the good man — since we can scarcely imagine him — but the confused man, the man in the cave.”
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“Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue. Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature.”
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“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. This is the process which moral philosophy must attempt to describe and analyse.”
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