Iris Murdoch on Love and Friendship

 

Decades into his long life, the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.” A generation later, the poetic playwright Tom Stoppard defined it as “knowledge of each other… knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.” This unmasked fact is the antidote to the most dangerous fiction the Romantics bequeathed us — their model of love as union between lover and beloved, a kind of fusion of selves, with its connotation of mutual completion rather than mutual recognition of and rejoicing in two parallel completenesses.
 
Such gladsome recognition of the other’s otherness is the foundation of love and the foundation of morality — both requiring not a bridging of selves but an unselfing, both vulnerable to same fundamental misconception that fissures the very foundation upon which they rest. Almost every religious, spiritual, and contemplative tradition in the history of our species, when stripped of its mystical and counterscientific aspects, holds at its center an ethic of love. But also central to almost every tradition, especially of the West, is a dangerous warping of love in the hands of the self.
Most commonly known as the Golden Rule, it mistakes the reality of the self for the only reality, taking one’s own wishes, desires, and longings as universal and presuming that the other shares those precisely — negating the sovereign reality of the other, negating the possibility that a very different person might want something very different done unto them.
 
The remedy for this malady of selfing is to remember that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, each with its singular longings for and visions of beauty, goodness, and gladness. Nothing reminds us of this more readily than art, with its invitation to step into the intimate realities of other lives — the word “empathy,” after all, originated in the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art — and no one has irradiated that reminder more luminously than the uncommon philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999).
 
Long before her 1970 classic The Sovereignty of the Good, with its lovely conception of art as “an occasion for unselfing,” Murdoch began developing these ideas in an essay titled “The Sublime and the Good,” originally published in the Chicago Review in 1959 and later included in the altogether superb posthumous collection Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
She writes:

“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 realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”
 
In the same era when, across the Atlantic, Alan Watts was cautioning that “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others” as he was introducing Eastern teachings in the West, Murdoch builds on the parallels between art and morality through the multiple dimensions of love — the personal and the political, the individual and the communal:
 
“ The enemies of art and of morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual… because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination… The exercise of overcoming one’s self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention… is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly which we hardly ever do, painful.”
 
In a sentiment that calls to mind James Baldwin’s reflection on love and his haunting observation that “nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” Murdoch adds:
“The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves… Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.”
 
What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities. By Maria Popova. The Marginalian, January 8, 2022.

Making friends might come easier to some people than others, but in general, we all use the same criteria for forming relationships. We are drawn to people who share our interests, or who we simply like and admire.
 
Once we make friends, we tend to hold them in high esteem. We speak positively about our friends, sometimes ignoring or downplaying their negative qualities. For many people, this positive outlook is the core of friendship – being a “good” friend is a matter of thinking and feeling positively about them, as well as acting in caring ways towards them.
 
This type of friendship is what I’ll call “knowledge-free” – it involves no requirement to really know or understand the other person. On the flip side, this view of friendship suggests that having negative beliefs about your friends (even if those beliefs are warranted) makes you a worse friend.
 
As an ethicist who has researched friendship and virtue, this view of friendship just doesn’t seem right to me. It doesn’t capture all of what we want from friendship. I have studied the work of British-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch – and I suggest that her writings provide us with a fuller view of friendship.
 
Murdoch occupied a rare niche in 20th century philosophy, as a woman working in a fairly male-dominated field. She was also a Platonist interested in the reality of “the Good” in an era when such metaphysical theorising was deeply unpopular. A highly successful novelist, Murdoch’s many books explore the trials and tribulations of intimate relationships.
 
Love is knowledge

Much of Murdoch’s philosophical work examines the moral significance of love (which I take to be part of friendship). She regarded love as a central part of our moral life that had been unjustly ignored in the moral philosophy of her era, in favour of an endless focus on the function of moral language.
 
Unlike the view of friendship I described earlier, Murdoch’s conception of love is not “knowledge-free”. Instead, she suggests that understanding the other person is an integral part of love (and therefore of friendship, which plausibly involves love).
 
Take the following passages:
 
Love is the perception of individuals. … Love … is the discovery of reality. (The Sublime and The Good, 1959)
 
Love is knowledge of the individual. (The Sovereignty of Good, 1970)
 
You can see in these quotes Murdoch’s view of love is knowledge of the other person, or seeing them as they really are –- it involves understanding them as a person, both their positive and negative qualities.
 
Notably, Murdoch thinks that really knowing or understanding another person is a difficult task: “It is a task to come to see the world as it is”. According to the Freudian psychology Murdoch subscribes to in The Sovereignty of Good, humans are prone to “fantasy” – refusing to face the truth because it can damage our fragile egos.
 
So while we may have a natural, selfish tendency to believe reassuring fantasies about the goodness of other people (especially our friends), true friendship requires us to be patient, kind and accepting of their negative qualities too.
 
 Loving attention
 
 Being a good friend to others thus involves what Murdoch calls “loving attention”: regarding them in a patient, caring way, and always trying to do justice to who they really are.
 
In a Murdochian view of friendship, being a good friend involves knowing or understanding our friends more fully. Think about the way a friendship develops: One might initially know a few facts about a friend’s interests, such as that they enjoy classical music. Over time, a good friend would not simply know that their friend enjoys classical music, but exactly what kind of music they like, what it is that they like about it, and the importance that it has in their life. This deepening understanding of the other person naturally leads to a more fulfilling friendship.
 
Murdochian friendship therefore rules out the idea that being a good friend requires having positive – but false – beliefs about one’s friends. If friendship involves true knowledge of another person, it can’t require us to have untrue beliefs about them.
 
How might this relate to the other things we usually expect of friends, such as that they treat us well, and help us when we need it? Once we truly, lovingly see and understand another person, the right way to behave towards them will follow naturally. We won’t have to ask ourselves things like “should I bother helping my friend who is in need?”, because seeing their need will itself compel us to act rightly.
 
Think about Iris Murdoch the next time a friend of yours does or says something you disagree with. Instead of ignoring their flaw or mistake, try to accept it as part of their whole – it may even strengthen your friendship.
 
Iris Murdoch: what the writer and philosopher can teach us about friendship. By Cathy Mason.
The Conversation , November 9, 2021.

The 20th-century novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch had a profound love for her closest friend, the philosopher, Philippa Foot. The two women first met when they were students taking classes in philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. They remained friends for over six decades. From the 1940s to the 1990s, Murdoch wrote over 250 letters to Foot, some of which were recently published.
 
The relationship between Murdoch and Foot gave shape and meaning to both of their lives. Murdoch referred to Foot as “essential you” and said that Foot was “a constant figure” in her “mental world”. During a period of estrangement, Murdoch wrote: “Losing you, and losing you in that way, was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. I hope very much that we can now recapture something.”
 
After a reconciliation she wrote, “Pippa, you know without my telling you that my love for you remains as deep and tender as ever – and always will remain, it is so deep in me and so much part of me. I cannot imagine that anyone will ever take your place. I think of you very often. My dear heart, I love you.” After Murdoch’s death, Foot reported that Murdoch was “the light” of her life.
 
Some interpreters have suggested that this was not a mere friendship but a lesbian love affair. In fact, their relationship did become sexual at one point. But, as Foot explained to Murdoch’s friend and biographer, Peter Conradi, they realised that their feelings for each other were not best expressed in this way. The sexual aspect of their relationship stopped soon after it began.
 
What, then, were Murdoch and Foot to each other? Close friends? Lovers? Murdoch herself grappled with this question. She wrote to Foot, “Sometimes I feel I have to invent a language to talk to you in, though my heart is very full of definite things to say. You stir some very deep part of my soul. Be patient with me and don’t be angry with my peculiarities. I love you very much.” It seems Murdoch herself didn’t quite know how to characterise her affections for Foot.
 
What they had may best be described as a “romantic friendship”. The term has recently gained traction in popular discourse and is used to refer to relationships that are intensely intimate, but that in some way fall short of full-blown romantic relationships. Although the term is recent, the concept is not new. The Ancient Greek word “philia” or “friendly love”, did not distinguish between romantic and non-romantic friendships. And the term “Boston marriage”, coined by Henry James, was used in the 19th century to describe intimate partnerships between women that were not always sexual.
 
 
The idea of romantic friendships has gained popularity partly due to an increasing frustration about conventional notions of romantic love. As the philosopher Carrie Jenkins argues, our conception of romantic love is largely socially constructed; that is, there is nothing essential or inevitable about the ways we conceive of romantic relationships. Instead, the expectations we have around romantic relationships are determined in large part by our socio-historical context and can often encode oppressive norms. And according to Jenkins, the mainstream conception of romantic love – soulmates who fall in love, settle into a monogamous lifelong partnership, and have children – is too narrow to capture the sorts of romantic relationships that many of us find most fulfilling.
 
The proliferation of new relationship models, including romantic friendships, reflects a growing desire to be imaginative about what intimate relationships can look like. Romantic friendships take some of the elements of a traditional romantic relationship – the desire for intimacy, the commitment to build one’s life around another person, and even sex – without having to take all of them at once.
 
Of course, once we dispense with the notion that there is one appropriate model for a romantic relationship, it’s harder to see what distinguishes a romantic relationship from a close friendship. What does it really mean to ask whether the love between Murdoch and Foot was romantic or platonic?
 
Questions about the status of Murdoch and Foot’s relationship arise partly because of the intensity of their connection. At times, Murdoch wrote Foot multiple letters over the course of a few days. She told Foot about her friends, her travels, and her writing. She shared her ideas for her novels and asked Foot about her life, the work she was doing, and her family. What is reflected in Murdoch’s letters is a deep desire to know Foot and to be known by her. We don’t have access to Foot’s responses, but given her lifelong devotion to Murdoch, we can assume she felt similarly.
 
We can think of the intense connection between them as in line with Murdoch’s own account of love. In The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), she theorised that love is vision perfected. It is seeing the other person with clarity, as she really is, in all her particularity and detail. In Murdoch’s view, love is a willingness or a choice to see another person this way. But it is also more than this. Love is a desire – a desire to really see the other person and to be seen by them in return.
 
Even though Murdoch and Foot were not in a committed romantic partnership, and even though their relationship was not primarily sexual, they were in love in the sense of having a deep desire to know and be known. The intense desire to know and be known is what gives their friendship a romantic feel. If the traditional romantic relationship model is limiting, the kind of romantic friendship that Murdoch and Foot had is inspiring.
 
Part of what is appealing about romantic friendships is being able to have the love and closeness associated with romantic relationships without the corresponding practical arrangements of sharing one’s day-to-day life with another person – something typically associated with traditional romantic partnerships. Part of what is appealing may also be the idea of being able to have a kind of erotic love – a desire to possess or be proximate to another’s beauty – that doesn’t require sexual or physical attraction. Even though Murdoch and Foot ultimately decided not to pursue a sexual relationship, they were able to have a relationship that was deeply intimate and, in some sense, erotic.
 
Yet romantic friendship isn’t without risk. Murdoch was afraid of Foot, claiming that her fear and love of Foot were “consubstantial”. Why? At times Murdoch found herself “unable to communicate” with Foot. Their communications were “problematic and filled with a sense of danger which is sometimes thrilling and sometimes sad”. Murdoch felt she couldn’t “link expression and emotion, and that no expression seems quite easy, adequate, right”, noting how odd it was that they were “awkward… with each other after all these years”.
 
Here we see the intense desire to be known and loved in a romantic friendship brings with it much of the same vulnerability that is found in traditional romantic relationships. In fact, romantic friendships might involve heightened vulnerability. Part of what Murdoch describes in relation to Foot is an inability to really understand what she feels, or what she needs from Foot.
 
In effect, Murdoch and Foot didn’t have the language to talk about what they were to each other, or to describe their relationship to others. They didn’t have a framework to make sense of the insecurity and vulnerability they felt in relation to each other, nor explicit norms to help them navigate it. Having a term like “romantic friendship” may have helped.
 
Ultimately, deep, lasting love comes in many forms. And as we continue to generate alternatives to the traditional relationship model, it is equally important to expand our language. As the feminist theorist bell hooks argues, “a good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love – starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.”
 
Sukaina Hirji is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and Meena Krishnamurthy is assistant professor of philosophy at Queen’s University.
 
This article is part of the Agora series, a collaboration between the New Statesman and Aaron James Wendland. Wendland is Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College, London and a Senior Research Fellow at Massey College, Toronto.
 
What is romantic friendship?  Deep and lasting connection comes in many forms: we need a new vocabulary to talk about love. By Sukaina Hirji and Meena Krishnamurthy.  The New Statesman, November 2, 2021. 
 

In April 1945, a newsreel film entitled German Atrocities appeared in British cinemas. Having been spared graphic images during most of the war, this was, for most British civilians, their first encounter with the horrors of the concentration camps. After watching footage of emaciated bodies and piled-up corpses, the 24-year-old Philippa Foot told her mentor, the philosopher Donald MacKinnon: “Nothing is ever going to be the same again.” These were acts, Foot felt, that were undeniably evil, and if philosophy was unable to identify them as such, then there was a major problem with philosophy.
 
And there was indeed a problem. The moral philosophy taught at Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s pictured the world as value free. According to the influential AJ Ayer, all ethical statements, since they can never be empirically tested, are meaningless.
Foot had studied at Oxford with three other remarkable women: Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley, each of whom was to devote themselves to arguing with the Oxford tradition, be it through novels, academic papers, books or radio broadcasts.
 
Benjamin Lipscomb’s new group biography, The Women Are Up to Something, is a fascinating exploration of their life and thought. They each tackled moral philosophy in ways as distinct as their backgrounds and beliefs. Bringing together Murdoch, “a bohemian novelist and spiritual seeker,” Anscombe, “a zealous Catholic convert and mother of seven,” Foot, “an atheistic daughter of privilege,” and Midgley, “a stay-at-home mother who finally wrote the first of her 16 books in her 50s” (59 to be precise), Lipscomb paints a vivid portrait not only of them as people, but also a moment in British philosophy too often told through the male line.
 
While never a “school” as such—though all went to Somerville College, Oxford—the four would interact in various ways for over 50 years, engaging in debates in person, through correspondence, or via some of the most important essays on ethics of the 20th century. They also occasionally swapped lovers, developed crushes on each other and, possibly, attempted seduction. (In fairness, all such occasions tended to involve Murdoch.)
Lipscomb delights in bringing the women’s personal stories to life. For Anscombe (at one point “tracksuited and smoking a cigar”), the orthodoxies of motherhood were of little interest—legend has it that she would place a label on her children that read “If found wandering, please return to 27 St John Street”—while her domestic philosophy, as she told the Manchester Guardian in 1959, was that “dirt doesn’t matter.”
 
What did matter was philosophy. For Anscombe that invariably meant Wittgenstein, whose greatest translator she remains. Initially her relationship, by her own admission, was “besotted reverence,” where “almost anything Wittgenstein said sounded important and true to me.” Later she pushed back against the Austrian thinker, describing his views on religion as “sheer poison.” Still, it was by her own request that her grave now sits next to his in the Ascension Parish in Cambridge.
Foot was the granddaughter of US president Grover Cleveland, the child of an aristocratic upbringing that she could never shake off. She was aware of the subtleties of the class system in ways that dismayed her: “If you are called ‘Lady Mary’ you had to be terribly grand, much grander than being called ‘Lady Murray.’ It’s the kind of thing I knew. I hated it.”
 
Midgley, meanwhile, was the daughter of a priest, and brought up in the faith that she later lost, referring to Christianity as an engine she couldn’t start.

In philosophical terms, Murdoch was the outlier who often bemoaned her inferiority to Foot and Anscombe in particular, envying the latter’s “ruthless authenticity.” For Anscombe, dirt didn’t matter and what didn’t matter one could ignore. For a great novelist like Murdoch, everything had to matter, the great mess of humanity most of all.
 
The four profited from the opening of Oxbridge to female students during the war. Winning a place was a torturous process in the late 1930s: Oxford’s entry rules expressly stipulated a ratio of four men to each woman, meaning only 250 places were available. Applicants were also required to have two or three languages, including Latin and Greek, subjects often unavailable to girls. “In normal times,” noted Midgley, “a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn’t get heard.”
But these were not normal times. From 1939 to 1942, the war meant the student body was predominantly female. The effect, notes Midgley, was not only to “make it a great deal easier for women to be heard in discussion,” but also—and this is understood with greater clarity now—for a diminution of “the amount of work that one thinks is needed to make one’s opinion worth hearing.” It allowed space for the women to tackle the philosophy dominating Oxford at the time.
 
 
This philosophy flowed from Ayer’s 1936 work Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer had argued that only statements that could be verified were meaningful. Ethical statements have no objective truth, and are thus simply subjective. This can lead to what has been termed the “Boo-Hurrah” theory of ethics, known more technically as emotivism. According to this view, my ethical positions are nothing to do with any objective criteria; rather they are expressions of my own emotional attitude, merely my “tastes.” Ultimately, if I say something is “good” or “right” morally, it is because I like it, and if something is “wrong” or “evil” it is because I don’t.
 
To call the death camps evil is, therefore, merely to express an opinion. However cogently I present a moral argument against mass killing, I am only saying “boo” in another way. For Lipscomb, this is the endpoint of a particular strand of thinking in which “purpose, value, love and meaning… are not primary qualities. They are unreal.”
 
The idea that “value” did not reside in the world became Oxford orthodoxy. And although thinkers such as RG Hare, JL Austin and Gilbert Ryle set out a version of this philosophy that was subtly different, it shared a worldview that Murdoch captured in her later criticism of Ryle. His world is one, she wrote, in which “people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood or go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers, or join the Communist party.”
 
Oxford philosophy of this type led to the endless parsing of language satirised by Beyond the Fringe: “Are you in fact using ‘yes’ in its affirmative sense?” Or, as Anscombe once complained of Austin: “That man would find a difference between ‘enough’ and ‘sufficient.’” It might make for a clever discussion, but it stands mute in the face of the Holocaust.
 
But, as Murdoch later argued, even Ayer’s position was tacitly prescriptive—as Lipscomb puts it, his subjective system of ethics tends to call for a sort of “self-congratulatory toughness in facing the world.” Some of Midgley’s later battles with Richard Dawkins would be on this terrain. For Dawkins, the ascription of values to a godless and heartless world is a sort of idiocy, or at least a foolish sentimentality, in the face of which one should exhibit a heroic—even “manly”—stoicism.
Anscombe’s critique of Oxford philosophy was perhaps the most powerful. In her 1958 paper “Modern Moral Philosophy,” she identified the contrasts between contemporary ethics and those of Aristotle. Where utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number) and deontology (the idea of moral duty) are an ethics of doing, for Aristotle ethics are a matter of being. A virtue, argues Aristotle, is something that makes a person good, and a good person is someone who lives virtuously. We gain and increase these virtues by practising them. By living out our lives in honest, brave or just ways, our character becomes honourable and moral. By honing noble habits, we make the right choices when set ethical questions and challenges. This system of “virtue ethics” would become hugely influential—the four women all adopted some version of it.
 
Thus for Foot virtues and vices (the title of a 1978 collection of her essays), rather than rights and duties, are the central concepts in moral philosophy. In her case, the emphasis was on practical ethics—she worked tirelessly for charities such as Oxfam, while writing extensively on euthanasia and abortion. Her support of the right to abortion almost ended her friendship with the Catholic Anscombe, who was arrested several times protesting outside abortion clinics.
 
For Midgley, the breakthrough came with her encounters with ethology—the study of animals, which sheds light on human behaviour. This would lead to that long-postponed first book Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978). She cheerfully brushed aside the question of why it took her so long (“I’m jolly glad because I didn’t know what I thought before then”) but was thereafter prolific, especially as a populariser of ethics on the BBC. While her work differs from that of Foot and Anscombe, she too, in Lipscomb’s arresting turn of phrase, felt it “better to be damned with Aristotle than saved with Austin.”

 
Murdoch was more mercurial. For a time, she was called on to explain French existentialism to the British public, either in her novels or books of “popular” philosophy. The politically engaged works of Sartre and de Beauvoir were thrilling for a woman who had once written that “my religion, if I have one, at the moment is a passionate belief in the beautiful, and a faith in the ultimate triumph of the people, the workers of the world.” (Her politics evolved over time: she ended up supporting her fellow Somerville College student, Margaret Thatcher.) But eventually she found in existentialism similar faults to those identified in Oxford philosophy—the same glamorous toughness.
Lipscomb’s book succeeds wonderfully in presenting a particular era in philosophy, and the huge influence of, in particular, Anscombe and Foot in the field of ethics. One area not explored much is that of sex and gender. In a way, this mirrors the women’s writing. Lipscomb notes that only Midgley wrote anything about the (philosophical) question of “women,” and then mostly in the context of being allowed to think and to work.
 
This blindness to feminist ethics is revealing. In part it is a function of the era in which they worked, but not completely; they all lived through various waves of feminism. And yet the ethical battles they were involved in—even when about abortion—were, it seems, purely intellectual ones. One can imagine contemporary feminists seeing some maddening abstraction in their work, as they themselves did in the Oxford ethicists. Questions about female embodiment and intersectionality, so crucial to current feminist thinking, are absent from their “gender-neutral” work—and from this book.
 
In fact, Lipscomb does not mention feminism at all until the penultimate chapter; and, despite the title, there is no attempt to situate these philosophers’ ethical positions as women in a wider context. Given they were chosen for a group biography as women, this does seem odd. One cannot necessarily expect 21st-century thinking about identity to be explored by 20th-century philosophers of any stripe, but one might hope their biographers would try—particularly as “virtue ethics” has entered feminist discourse. After all, many of the “virtues” espoused throughout history have contributed to the subjugation of women.
 
But perhaps the feminism here is in the telling. Lipscomb is not only a powerful advocate for these thinkers, but he also tells their story with a combination of thoroughness and humour. His evocation of their cultural milieu, and the way each of them grappled with their ideas as well as with their world, is both adept and entertaining. Their friendships were marked by ferocious fallings-out, but as Murdoch wrote in her journal: “I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip & Elizabeth, how much I loved them.” It is a statement one would be unlikely to find in the private journals of the thinkers they opposed.
 
Review :  The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics. by Benjamin JB Lipscomb
 
Boo to the Boo-Hurrahs: how four Oxford women transformed philosophy. By Peter Salmon. Prospect Magazine, November 2, 2021
 

Is a good philosopher also necessarily a good writer? Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre were both, each receiving a Nobel Prize in Literature. Other great thinkers, however, haven’t impressed as much when it comes to the written word. Aristotle and Kant, two of the greatest philosophers, were among the field’s worst writers. At least, this is how things appear to Bryan Magee (1930-2019), the celebrated British broadcaster and populiser of philosophy.
 
In this video from his BBC Two series Men of Ideas (1978), Magee interviews the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, and the two set out to chart the distinctions between literary and philosophical writing and, by extension, literature and philosophy as independent disciplines. While the wide-ranging interview covers much ground, including the knotty instances in which writers of literary fiction claim to have been influenced by foundational philosophical ideas, Murdoch distills her views eloquently at the outset, declaring that, while philosophy aims to clarify, literature is for fun and mystification.
 
When does philosophy overlap with literature? Iris Murdoch talks to Bryan Magee.
Aeon,  September 24, 2019