Iris Murdoch Quotes on Knowledge
Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and the later Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) develop one of the most distinctive late-twentieth-century moral epistemologies, in explicit opposition to the voluntarist and existentialist conceptions then dominant. The framework treats moral knowledge as the patient, loving, just attention by which the agent comes progressively to see the situation, and the persons in it, as they really are — beneath the screening self-interest and the consoling fantasies that obscure them. The corresponding rehabilitation of the Platonic Good as a regulative idea of moral vision frames Murdoch's alternative to the procedural ethics of post-Kantian deontology and of the prevailing analytic metaethics.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Iris Murdoch:
“Love is the perception of individuals.”
-
“The Bell (1958) p. 91”
He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm o -
“Only lies and evil come from letting people off.”
A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 61. -
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 181. -
“We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.”
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist(1953) | Ch. 10, p. 148 (the concluding sentence of the book)