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

Abstract

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 esti-