On the Failure of Philosophy to “think love”: Iris Murdoch as Phenomenologist

Abstract

This brief notice from Iris Murdoch’s first philosophical treatise, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, contains in nuce her approach to a number of issues which were to prove of great significance to her personally and in the subsequent appraisal of her work as philosopher and novelist. First, a distinction is drawn between the writer of philosophy and the writer of fiction which suggests that the former is attempting to elucidate specific, often technical, issues, whereas the latter is more concerned with portraying the fullness of life’s phenomena, in so far as these are accessible to the novelist’s experience and imagination. Second, there is the apparently provocative contention that, in adopting a phenomenological approach, the novelist can arrive more directly at the truth, thus preempting the outcomes of philosophical analysis. Murdoch herself was fully aware of the limitations, as well as the possibilities, of phenomenology and its associated method of “reduction,” but I shall be suggesting in this essay that a rereading of her philosophical works is possible when these are viewed through the hermeneutical lens of the phenomenology of love that is presented within her novels. As has been observed by many commentators, eros, which she described as the “ambiguous mediator and moving spirit of mankind”1 and its multifarious manifestations, is the theme which consistently appears across her entire oeuvre, and she drew inspiration in that respect from a wide range of sources, including Platonism, NeoPlatonism, Christianity and Buddhism, in addition to the Simone Weilian concept of “unselfing” (Murdoch, Fire 34). In the best of her novels, however, such traditions, while clearly discernible, are always subservient to the realities and finitude of the human condition, which are presented