A just and loving gaze
Iris Murdoch on art, selfish fantasy, and the morality of attention.
It was no coincidence that 20th-century Irish-British intellectual Iris Murdoch built her career as both a moral philosopher and a novelist. For her, the promises and pitfalls of the creative act illustrate our struggle to become virtuous individuals all too well. She summarized that struggle in two key steps for the artist and moral agent alike:
The suppression of ego, which eclipses reality with selfish fantasy.
The redirection of one’s attention to some worthier, external object.
Following Simone Weil, Murdoch used the word “attention” to mean “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality” (Murdoch 33). More than the allocation of mental resources, attention is a moral orientation to specific objects in the world.
So conceived, attention undergirds all other virtues, for “our ability to act well ‘when the moment comes’ depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of the habitual objects of our attention” (55). Interrogating the objects of one’s attention is, therefore, essential to moral formation.
Again though, the great impediment to virtue, according to Murdoch, is the overweening ego, whose imagination so easily draws attention away from reality toward selfish affairs. She explains:
The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one[self] (57).
Distinguishing fantasy from reality can be difficult in our personal lives; however, Murdoch believed the difference is more easily discernible in works of art, including mediocre or saccharine works that allow us to see more clearly how the “intrusion of fantasy” and “the assertion of self” obscure reality.
(Oddly enough, some of the later songs by the pop-punk band Yellowcard illustrate this point. Their recent single “Childhood Eyes” is a painful example.)
But Murdoch would not have us look to mediocre art for our moral formation—quite the opposite. She argued instead that we may begin orienting ourselves to reality by attending to beauty, including beauty in art. For, just as mediocre art exhibits the human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy, so too, great art exhibits “the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real,” which just is the good life for Murdoch (63). Crucially, this formative quality of art influences both the artist and the art consumer:
To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline. A great artist is, in respect of his work, a good man, and, in the true sense, a free man. The consumer of art has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it (63).
Here Murdoch expresses something like T.S. Eliot’s famous argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” namely, that the artist must continually extinguish personality from his or her work to become a more effective conduit of reality, whether past or present. The true poet, in this view, is objective, detached, disinterested. His work affords readers an encounter, not with personality, nor with reality as such, but with a faithful representation of reality.
Paying one’s attention to such art—whether in the form of a poem, painting, or piano concerto—likewise demands a level of self-forgetfulness. The mysterious thing about beauty, in Murdoch’s thought, is that it attracts just this sort of attention, allowing us to momentarily silence selfish concerns for the sake of the real. It’s not that experiencing quality art makes us moral in any direct sense; but it can train us to see reality, and that’s a start.
As Mary Oliver once put it, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” As Mary Oliver elsewhere put it, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
Only a special sort of narcissist could stand before a painting by, say, Cézanne while simultaneously scheming about how to clinch yet another raise at work, right? But then, part of Murdoch’s point is that most of us really are that narcissistic most of the time, which says less about Cézanne or beauty than the habitual objects of our attention and the extent to which we have traded this world for the simulacrum of personal fantasy.
As a writer of poems, I find Murdoch’s case both compelling and convicting. If she is correct that “all just vision is a moral matter,” then artists ought to consider very seriously the vision of their work. This needn’t imply creating for the moral formation of others in some old didactic sense; it does mean checking one's ego before the blank page, the piano, the easel…
“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8).
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001.