“It is always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?” wrote Iris Murdoch in her slim work of moral philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good. “It is frequently difficult in philosophy to tell whether one is saying something reasonably public and objective, or whether one is merely erecting a barrier, special to one’s own temperament, against one’s own personal fears.” Philosophers, because they’re humans, build elaborate systems, intellectual or otherwise, to shield themselves from what scares them most.

I am afraid of a lot of things. As for many, intimacy is somewhere near the top of the list, alongside death and the dark. It’s not that I fear getting too close to another person or being fully seen; it’s rather that I fear that total closeness is impossible. However close I draw, the other remains opaque; however open I am, something in me stays hidden. We live as lonely monads, glimpsing, but never grasping, one another.

When I was younger, I found this view affirmed everywhere. Nabokov, in Pnin, insists that “one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness … The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish.” Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, warns that “in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone.” These books attested to the idea I’d intuited: that loneliness was not an accident of existence but its very condition.

Philosophy seemed to promise an answer, and I was taken in. Indeed, analytic philosophy is marked by a confidence that all philosophical difficulties are in principle resolvable, if we just think them through logically. The questions that haunted me—Is it possible to really know another person? Is it possible to be known?—were natural concerns of the philosophy of mind and knowledge. Thinkers like Gilbert Ryle, who rejected the “private theatre” of consciousness in favor of publicly observable dispositions, offered frameworks in which solitude seemed less final. Yet even these accounts could not dissolve the irreducible inwardness of the mind, the part that resists entry. All they could offer, ultimately, was brief, unsatisfying consolation.

Then came Iris Murdoch, whom I first encountered in a college seminar on goodness taught by a young graduate student. Murdoch’s ideas about “unselfing” struck me as no other philosopher’s work had. Not only is understanding—literally, as she puts it, “seeing” the other—possible, it is a necessary ingredient to living a moral life. Here, unlike any philosophical worldview I’d studied before, interpersonal insight was central to cultivating a good life. Murdoch does not, sadly, provide a formula for how to capture the other’s mind in its totality, but she does offer a view of existence guided by an understanding of the other, which began to allay my concerns that other people could never be reached.

After that course, though, Murdoch’s name never came up in another classroom. Even now, a decade later, as I pursue graduate studies in philosophy, I’m often surprised by how rarely Murdoch is mentioned. In the Introduction to Moral Philosophy classes I’ve helped teach, she’s nowhere to be found on the syllabus. When I mention my interest in her to my peers, there are nods of recognition but not of knowledge.

Murdoch taught philosophy at Oxford for fifteen years, published more than two dozen novels, won the Booker Prize, wrote five major philosophical works and even became a Dame. She has had lasting influence on some of the most important contemporary moral philosophers, including Martha Nussbaum and John McDowell, and has recently received recent popular attention outside academia for her role in the “wartime quartet”—the group of four female philosophers (Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley, along with Murdoch) who studied together at Oxford. She was famous in her lifetime, and as a novelist is famous to this day. How is it that, despite all this, my peers barely know about her philosophy?

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A recent book, The Moral Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, by Mark Hopwood—the graduate student, now a professor at the University of the South, who first introduced me to Murdoch—suggests that the reason Murdoch hasn’t received her rightful place in the history of philosophy is because we’ve been misreading her. Murdoch’s philosophy has been described even by her defenders as “disparate and unsystematic,” her arguments, if they exist, as “opaque” and “obscure.” In his book, Hopwood seeks to correct this longstanding misinterpretation of Murdoch as a “messy” philosopher whose work requires heavy hermeneutical excavation in order to make any sense. In fact, he argues, her views are coherent and continuous, if only we would stop reading her “within the boundaries set by mainstream analytical moral philosophy” and instead “on her own terms.”

Her own terms are, Hopwood admits, hard to pin down, but that’s on purpose. Filtering her ideas through a traditionally analytic framework will necessarily render her philosophy deficient; attempts to categorize her as a Kantian, Platonist or virtue ethicist fail to see what she is actually trying to do. Murdoch’s aphoristic, recursive style is not a stylistic quirk or a failure of rigor, but rather a deliberate rejection of the idea that morality can be codified into universal rules or principles. She is not trying to build a system so much as resist the unrealistic demand for systematicity. Yet this doesn’t mean that anything goes, nor does it lead to sheer relativism: in its place, Hopwood argues, Murdoch’s philosophy is organized by a consistent set of commitments that allow her to explore the ways in which moral life requires imagination, attention and the patient effort to see reality (and other people) more lovingly.

This philosophy takes on a highly personalized nature in its application. And so where critics see rambling and repetition, Hopwood sees a refusal of theoretical neatness—because life itself refuses it. For Murdoch, philosophy should mirror the density and subtlety of ordinary experience. “Ordinary language (and indeed ordinary life),” Hopwood notes, “is a great deal more subtle and complex than philosophers tend to want to acknowledge.” In trying to make problems more tractable, philosophers narrow and standardize experience, abandoning one of our richest tools for understanding: metaphor.

Humans make sense of their own experiences through the use of metaphor, so why shouldn’t philosophers? As Hopwood writes, “When Murdoch proposes that philosophy ought to involve ‘a developing and vindicating of our ordinary and familiar linguistic habits, we might understand her to be suggesting that philosophers ought to be seeking to vindicate the idea of the inner life by developing our ordinary way of talking about it, i.e. by making unapologetic use of metaphorical language.”

Murdoch’s unapologetic use of metaphor complicates matters for philosophers in several ways. Most importantly, it undermines the principle of universalizability, to which many philosophers are deeply attached. As Hopwood puts it, Murdoch’s philosophy shows us that “it is not always possible to think of morality in terms of universal rules, since it is not always possible for me to conceive of the situations with which I am faced as ones that could possibly be faced by any other moral agent.” On her view, it is a kind of nonsense to imagine that someone else might find themselves in the same situation, given how particular and personal our moral lives are. Rather than seeking to unify moral life under a single set of principles, Murdoch urges us to “reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of the metaphors and pictures that we live by.” The pressing question, then, is what kinds of metaphors, stories and narratives orient us. Are they protective fantasies, or narratives animated by a genuine desire for the good? The danger is that they can be either, and our moral task is to discern which ones guide us toward the good.

We orient ourselves, Murdoch suggests, through loving attention, through imaginative understanding of others and through a demanding honesty with the self. No single maxim can govern all cases, because each of us inhabits a life that is extraordinarily dense and irreducibly particular. Even within our own experience, the search for clarity remains bounded by what Hopwood calls “the paradox of form”: the idea that in attempting to grasp something, the tools we use to do so will in part inevitably obscure it.

What emerges is a conception of the self that contrasts sharply with the rational, self-sufficient agent of Kantian moral philosophy. A person’s life—even to themselves—takes the form of an idiosyncratic story, apprehended through metaphors, images and narrative, and any decisions they make as a moral agent will spring from these stories. As Murdoch knew, this view—apt for a novelist, but unorthodox for a philosopher—placed her at odds with the view of moral agency that she inherited from Kant, and which she sought to resist in The Sovereignty of Good:

Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god. … How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. … This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. … He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal; and since he is not a Hegelian (Kant, not Hegel, has provided Western ethics with its dominating image) his alienation is without cure.

The Kantian man—which remains to this day the “dominating image” of a person underlying contemporary analytic philosophy—is alienated on a metaphysical level from his world, a world he can never know in itself. When called upon to act morally, his recourse is not to the outside world, or to the facts as they present themselves in their particularity, but rather to what this abstract thing inside himself—his capacity to reason—requires of him. His alienation is an in-built feature of the structure of his mind. The irony of his predicament is that rationality is the very thing meant to unite him with others. Humans are unified in virtue of this shared capacity; indeed, it is what makes us human, and by which we all can exist eventually in the magical “Kingdom of Ends.” Beyond that, reason unites us further in that it binds us all to the same moral laws. It requires that the maxim according to which we act be universalizable. Indeed, this is what makes the famous categorical imperative categorically imperative, and it is the law to which every human is bound.

It’s a beautiful rendering of man, but is it right?

There’s certainly a virtue to a system that can render every human dignified and worthy of respect, and endow each of us with the power to solve any moral problem without doubt. But can something as abstract as the capacity to reason really be what emotionally and spiritually binds us to one another? Murdoch suspected it couldn’t, and the great gift of Hopwood’s reading is that it offers a different framework for thinking about moral lives and relationships. Hopwood gives us a Murdoch who is no longer just a defective analytic philosopher, but a thinker in a tradition of her own.

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And it is here, in her departure from mainstream philosophical methods, that Murdoch may have the most to teach us. Her rejection of the urge to universalize (and therefore flatten) moral experience can, in individualizing morality, bring us closer to understanding others. Moral philosophers who generate universal moral systems are playing out, as Murdoch puts it, “the urge to prove that where we intuit unity there really is unity.” This urge “is a deep emotional motive to philosophy, to art, to thinking itself. Intellect is naturally one-making. To evaluate, understand, to classify, place in order of merit, implies a wider unified system, the questing mind abhors vacuums.” The tendency to seek out unity, Hopwood shows, is natural to the human mind, but exists at once and in eternal tension with random detail, plurality and particularity.

I would add that the questing mind not only abhors a vacuum but is deeply terrified of the existential loneliness Pnin’s narrator suggests to us; the mind abhors the idea that maybe, as Rilke wrote, “we are all unutterably alone.” I wonder, in this sense, if the urge that generates universalizable moral systems is not only an urge to render a chaotic world intelligible but also a gesture toward epistemological intimacy. It makes some psychological sense: if reason alone allows us to delineate the principles to which we are all subject, then maybe I really can know the other at a profound metaphysical level. A universalizable moral system would connect us to the other from whom I am eternally separated and quell the deep anxiety of permanent isolation.

While this idea may not appeal directly to argument, it seems to appeal to our deepest impulses. Solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments we can inflict on one another; it is well known that socially isolated prisoners are more likely to develop psychosis or become suicidal. In an ethically disturbing experiment from the 1960s, rhesus macaques were raised in total social isolation. When they weren’t staring off into space or rocking silently in place, the monkeys developed self-mutilating behaviors, compulsively pinching or tearing at themselves until they drew blood. Whatever hell Sartre meant when he wrote that it is other people, it seems a better hell than the hell of being totally alone.

So perhaps the desire for unification is driven by a fear of total alienation. In her resistance to unifying pictures, Murdoch may ironically provide a way of accessing the other that universalizing moral theories cannot. Her reorientation of the inward moral gaze outward moves us closer to true acquaintance and connection with the other. Hopwood draws this out by recalling Murdoch’s early engagement with Gabriel Marcel, who famously distinguished between the concept of a “problem” (“something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce”) and the concept of a “mystery” (“something in which I am myself involved … where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity”). If the problem of knowing the other is a problem to be solved, then I will struggle forever with insurmountable alienation. But if the other is reframed as a mystery to be explored, then my inability to fully grasp the other is not a personal epistemological failing, but a constitutive part of the aesthetic experience of getting to know another person—one that ends if not in total knowledge, then in something like understanding. The concern that nagged me as a young student was not solved, in the traditional sense, through this reframing, but soothed. And once I was relieved of the burden of having to figure out the answer to the other, I could more clearly see and appreciate the complex mystery of whoever stood before me.

This requires encountering others with curiosity, openness and some psychological acuity. Here Hopwood identifies an important distinction in Murdoch’s work between “egoistic fantasy and creative imagination.” The ego, for Murdoch, is relentlessly self-protective, constantly in the business of creating “false unities.” It attempts to create a world that serves its purposes, and in so doing, distorts it. Creative imagination, meanwhile, when engaged with honestly and separated from the self-serving ego, offers us a way to authentically join with the world as it is. What moral life is then, on Murdoch’s view, is seeing the other in all their glorious particularity: How can I view this person lovingly? How can I appreciate their qualities? What about my own desires and motivations is blocking me from justly seeing the other? (The self, in this sense, can be just as opaque as the other.) This reorientation of the moral gaze is what she calls “loving attention.”

In a key example of loving attention taken from Murdoch’s essay “The Idea of Perfection,” Hopwood explores the scenario of a mother, M, and the daughter-in-law she dislikes, D. M finds D “insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile.” In a moment of self-scrutiny, it occurs to M that she might be “imprisoned … by the ‘cliché’: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl.” She wonders if she is playing out her jealousy toward D in her judgment, and begins to see D differently: “not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on.” M begins to reimagine, which is to say, re-see D and, no doubt, their relationship improves.

This is not some version of toxic positivity in which M naively glosses real negative qualities as positive ones. Nor is it merely an attempt to see D “accurately,” as an ideally rational agent would, as the standard—and, according to Hopwood, incorrect—reading of this example goes. Instead, M must be sensitively attuned to what qualities in her own mind might produce a skewed, self-serving portrait of the daughter-in-law. She must ask herself if she is seeing D differently now because of her “unwillingness to see her perfect son as having made any kind of mistake, in which case loving attention to detail might reveal the various ways in which D can actually be rather tiresome.” Loving attention is constituted by whichever perspective is able, as Hopwood puts it, “to go beyond the easy patterns of fantasy to engage with D as a real individual.”

There is a significant consequence to this reading: “Morality is less about the attempt to master rational norms, and more about the attempt to do justice to the reality of other individuals.” The reality of other individuals—and of ourselves—renders each moral moment different, and subject to the particularities of our individual psyches. M must scrutinize her own psyche, an honest interpretation of which makes way for attending to the other as only she can.

The fantasies we project are personal. Our stories are necessarily idiosyncratic. I think this is precisely the difference that scares us. But if we have a moral philosophy that moves us away from some abstract capacity to make logical sense of the world and toward imagining the other through personal narrative, are we not saved—at least a little bit—from our loneliness? Perhaps my intuition of loneliness was itself a projection of my ego, which sought to protect me from that fear of getting closer to others. Murdoch recognizes that we may not come to a full understanding of the other, but through loving attention, we can at least glimpse them. “The tragic freedom implied by love is this,” she writes in “The Sublime and the Good”:

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. Nor is there any social totality within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled. We only have a segment of the circle. 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.

Maybe glimpsing the segment of the circle is just enough to keep us sane.

Image credit: Ida Kar, Iris Murdoch, 1957. © National Portrait Gallery, London.