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Love and Knowledge in Murdoch

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Murdoch on Truth and Love

Part of the book series: Philosophers in Depth ((PID))

Abstract

Iris Murdoch makes frequent remarks that seem to identify love and knowledge. I attempt to make sense of these remarks, noting some obvious and important objections to such an identification. Pace those objections, I suggest, she is not merely committing a category confusion between an emotion and an epistemic status, or the content of a certain kind of state of mind. What Murdoch is talking about is more a matter of knowing than of knowledge: she is interested not so much in an epistemic status or an epistemic content, as in a complex of particular activities of cognitive exploring that are distinctive of a just and loving sensibility of attention. I explore some of these activities, mentioning five in particular. I note how they imply that there are special epistemic viewpoints, and wonder in closing how that admission (epistemic elitism) can be reconciled with our inclination to say that if anything is knowledge, then in principle it is available to anyone to know it (epistemic egalitarianism).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am thinking of George Steiner’s implicit comparison of Murdoch’s identification of love and knowledge with Keats’s of truth and beauty, and his apparent suggestion there that such ringing pronouncements, while false, are edifyingly false: they point us to an “unfinished coexistence”, an unresolved tension (EM: xviii). To the contrary, my interest in Murdoch’s identification is about how it might not be false. (And my interest in Keats’s likewise, though that is not at issue here.)

  2. 2.

    To our eyes the similarities between the later Wittgenstein’s concerns, and those of Ryle and Austin, are obvious. But the differences matter too—as all three philosophers themselves insisted. Both Ryle and Austin insisted that they were more philosophically endebted to Cook Wilson and Prichard, and even to G.E. Moore, than they were to Wittgenstein.

  3. 3.

    Ein Mensch kann daher in unendlicher Not sein und also unendliche Hilfe brauchen. Die christliche Religion ist nur fuer den, der unendliche Hilfe braucht, also nur fuer der, der unendliche Not fuehlt. Der ganze Erdball kann nicht in groesserer Not sein als eine Seele… Nur ein sehr ungluecklicher Mensch hat das Recht, ein Andern zu bedauern. (CV 45–6; Winch oddly translates “Not” as “torment”.)

References

All references to Iris Murdoch here are to

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Sophie-Grace Chappell

Authors
  1. Sophie-Grace Chappell
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Correspondence to Sophie-Grace Chappell .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Gary Browning

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Chappell, SG. (2018). Love and Knowledge in Murdoch. In: Browning, G. (eds) Murdoch on Truth and Love. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76216-6_5

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