I. The Kestrel

Murdoch asks us to imagine a moment at a window.

Someone is brooding. Perhaps there has been a slight, perhaps an injury to pride. The scene keeps replaying, the grievance growing. There has been a world outside the window all along, but scarcely any of it registers.

Then a kestrel appears.

It hovers in the air, finding its balance in the wind. It has not come to console anyone. It knows nothing about the trouble indoors.

Attention moves outward. The trouble has not been solved, but when it returns it seems less large. The pain has not become unreal. It has briefly stopped occupying the whole world.

For Murdoch, this gives us an entrance into moral life.

We often imagine morality as the final moment: which path to choose, which rule to obey. She looks further back. Before deciding, how have you been seeing the other person? Which details have registered, and which has your story kept out?

II. The Mother-in-Law

Her other famous example is closer to the dinner table.

A mother, M, dislikes her daughter-in-law, D. D seems unpolished, too familiar, insufficiently dignified. Even her accent and clothes offend. M feels that her son has married beneath him.

Nevertheless, M behaves impeccably. She is courteous and restrained, never displaying her hostility. Look only at conduct and there seems little to criticize.

To isolate the question, Murdoch even invites us to suppose that D is far away or dead. M’s later change cannot then be reduced to a new interaction. These are variations in a thought experiment, not obligatory episodes in a story.

M begins to distrust her own gaze. Perhaps she is snobbish, perhaps too possessive of her son. Could what she called vulgarity be spontaneity, what she called undignified behavior be liveliness? The work is not to exchange hostile labels for flattering ones. It is to look again, seriously.

Her outward behavior has not changed. But D is no longer confined to the D she had already imagined.

Has anything morally significant happened?

A picture that locates morality solely in observable acts and choices struggles to say what M has done. Murdoch challenges that narrow picture, not every analytic philosopher or existentialist as if they all gave the same answer.

Trying to see someone more justly and lovingly is itself moral work. Conduct still matters. But before an action arrives, a way of seeing has already been preparing its path.

III. Unselfing

Murdoch calls certain experiences of this kind unselfing.

She distrusts the ego that keeps expanding and demanding consideration. It need not issue loud commands. More often it quietly supplies the explanation for everything.

Someone seems dull because he does not flatter you; someone seems ill-mannered because she does not live by your manners. Prejudice, fear and self-protection become a filter. You think you are meeting the person, while repeatedly meeting your own needs.

Unselfing loosens that filter. It does not abolish the person looking.

The kestrel interrupts the monologue about injured pride. The observer remains, but no longer requires the bird to certify the observer’s importance. Once the world need not revolve around me, there is finally something else to notice.

We might recall Woolf’s moments when the cotton wool of ordinary life tears and unnoticed textures appear. The scenes illuminate one another without describing an identical mental event. Nor does every vivid moment automatically make someone good.

Weil’s influence is one Murdoch herself acknowledged. She took up Weil’s account of attention; she did not give moral significance to a concept that had previously lacked it. Weil, too, cared about hearing the person who suffers.

Religion, love and other people run through Weil’s attention. Murdoch repositions these concerns within her own Platonism.

We can move from prayer to an everyday gaze without assigning God to one woman and the neighbor to the other, as if neither crossed that border.

Between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, the question becomes small and difficult: will I allow that the person here may not be the story I have already finished telling?

IV. The Sovereignty of Good

Her book is called The Sovereignty of Good.

Sovereignty here does not authorize a voice to order people about. It first unsettles a complacency: choosing something cannot by itself make it good. My desire is not the final measure of everything.

Murdoch challenges a moral picture centered on an isolated will. Choice remains, but it does not happen out of nowhere. What we habitually notice or ignore helps determine whether, at the decisive moment, we can even perceive an alternative.

Plato’s cave offers an image: turn, move toward the light, learn to distinguish what could not be seen. The sun is not a trophy held in the hand. Read through Murdoch, a turn may also happen in M’s renewed attention to D.

Earlier in this series we worried that Plato’s Forms might close the world. Murdoch offers another route back. She does not abandon the Good’s transcendence, yet places the work of approaching it at a window, in art, between people. Goodness does not consist in fitting others into my perfect drawing.

V. The Novelist

Murdoch also wrote twenty-six novels.

Philosopher and novelist are not mutually exclusive identities. In her, however, their conjunction reveals a particular patience: after proposing an idea about people, let actual particularity disturb it.

A good novel can be a place to practice attention.

A character does something that irritates you. Reading on, you encounter shame, misunderstanding, an unspoken wish. Understanding does not remove responsibility. It prevents a verdict from too easily living a whole life in the person’s place.

Fiction can also feed our fantasies. Reading many books guarantees no justness of vision. The exercise happens only if we allow a character to exceed the part assigned in advance.

Comte and Popper invite questions about the scope of knowledge, but their frameworks do not simply establish that fiction has no cognitive value. Demarcating science is not judging all meaning; a character is not an experimental hypothesis awaiting refutation.

Murdoch gives the reader a difficult practice: another person is not an illustration of my theory. After the book closes, the practice must continue in life.

VI. Beside Arendt

Arendt, in the previous essay, asked whether orders and clichés were doing our judging. Murdoch brings the question into ordinary encounters: even when I am thinking constantly, am I attending to anyone else?

Eichmann’s responsibility cannot be described as an empty interior. His actions, convictions and self-defense require examination. Arendt’s question is not a chart dividing humanity into thinkers and vacant shells.

M’s case is plainly not an equivalent crime. She has an elaborate account of D and thinks herself remarkably restrained. The difficulty is precisely that her account is so complete that D herself has little room to enter it.

Imagine two rooms: one sends the work of judgment outside; the other is crowded with projections. This can help us ask questions. It is neither a complete definition of two philosophies nor an equation of the cases’ gravity.

Do not surrender judgment; do not mistake your judgment for the person judged. Together, these demands give the room within us a window facing outward.

VII. Forgetting

In 1997, Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Memory and language became harder to rely on. Familiar life required increasing assistance. Someone who had spent so long finding words for people was encountering difficulties that words could not easily convey.

John Bayley recorded their last years in Iris and other memoirs. His was the testimony of someone close to her, not a camera capable of exhausting her experience from outside.

We cannot conclude that she could no longer see anyone, or that her self had evaporated. Another person’s experience is never entirely available to us. An inability to explain it does not mean the person is absent.

Nor should Woolf’s ending be arranged beside hers as a symmetrical diagram of cognitive collapse. Illness and suffering belong to particular lives, not to an essay’s need for an elegant conclusion.

The question now turns toward carers and readers. When someone can no longer respond in familiar ways, do you still see her? She need not keep producing books to deserve patient company.

The twenty-six novels remain, as do The Sovereignty of Good, M and D, and the kestrel. But even without those works, a person’s worth would not require a literary legacy to renew it.

VIII. At the Bridge

On this imagined bridge, Murdoch arrives carrying a novel. Not her own: someone else’s. She is still reading.

She looks up and sees the bridge and its people.

Before finding a place, she looks at them.

Comte is there. She does not immediately file him under positivist. Earnestness can resemble obstinacy. She wants to look a little longer, without deciding what anxiety must be hidden underneath.

She looks at Weil. Perhaps she first asks whether she is cold, whether she needs to sit down, rather than turning her body into an allegory of unselfing. Listening to someone does not require celebrating everything that hurt her.

Arendt is still writing. Murdoch pauses beside her. One asks how judgment gives way, the other how vision narrows; neither belongs exclusively to light or shadow. The bridge can let their conversation continue.

Something passes overhead. A bird. It need not be a kestrel.

Murdoch stops for a moment to watch.

The philosophers, arguments and her own preoccupations recede. Not because they do not matter, but because a bird is also here, flying for none of their reasons.

It flies away. She tucks the novel under her arm and takes her place.

She does not know whether that bird will return. Nor can she guarantee that next time she will look up from her concerns.

But she can keep looking. And keep allowing people and the world to interrupt her.^[1][2][3]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives