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Lessons of Murdochian Attention

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Abstract

The idea of attention was brought back into mainstream philosophical thinking about ethics by Iris Murdoch, drawing on Simone Weil. While Murdoch’s use of the idea has been reflected on by a number of recent commentators, I think its deepest lessons have largely been missed. Beginning from a recurrent and revealing misreading of Murdoch on attention, a misreading often articulated through reflection on Murdoch’s example of M and D, I want to bring out some of those lessons. It is well-known that Murdoch links attention with just and loving vision. I describe a common, mistaken account of what she means by just and loving vision, and I then turn to other connotations of attention invoked by Murdoch. These other connotations are mentioned in dispatches by some commentators, but not dwelt upon. While Murdoch herself does not explore them extensively either, I argue that they are important for teasing out what matters most in Murdoch’s invocation of attention. As that way of putting suggests, my interest in Murdochian exegesis is eventually superseded by my attempts to elicit what I think to be some of the most fruitful implications of her reflections on attention.

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Notes

  1. Murdoch often mentions and even quotes Weil without referencing a source. When she does cite a source, mainly in Murdoch 1992, it is almost always the Notebooks.

  2. I think one among various reasons for this is a conception of truth as essentially a property of representations, often assumed as part of the background against which Murdoch’s idea of attention is understood. But, I cannot justify that suggestion here, nor directly explore the limitations of that conception of truth.

  3. This essay expands on footnote 4 of Cordner (2014, 130).

  4. Murdoch focuses mainly on then-contemporary exemplars of this deflection—existentialism and Hare-type prescriptivism. But, she is also alive to historical antecedents, one of them Kant, who thinks of moral difficulty as essentially executive and not epistemic—a difficulty not of seeing morally clearly but of acting on what we can (easily enough) see. It is true that some inroads into this outlook have been made via reflection on ‘thick’ ethical concepts, but they have in fact not penetrated very far, and attempts to link them with Murdoch’s concerns have been sketchy and not very influential. See Broackes 2012: 15–18. ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (1956) is an early Murdochian sketch of the moral importance of vision and the limitations of the ‘choice’ model of morality. ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1964), containing the example of M and D (see below), is a key essay in her development of this theme.

  5. Here I elide two sentences from Murdoch’s text, in which she asserts that the change in M is not in any of her overt behavior, but ‘happens entirely in her mind.’ While Murdoch emphasizes this ‘anti-behaviourist’ point as important when she introduces the example, it plays no role in my discussion. In fact it recedes into the background even in Murdoch’s later references back to the example, and my own view, on which I do not rely here, is that it plays little or no role in the example’s main lessons. Broackes (2012, 47) says something similar.

  6. Lawrence Blum has pointed to an occasional tension in Murdoch’s use of ‘attention.’ Murdoch says that attention is ‘seeing lovingly and justly,’ which in turn is ‘seeing D as she really is.’ But, she also speaks of attention as the effort to counteract illusion and so to see truly, and efforts can fail. So, on this second way of speaking, but not the first, one can genuinely attend and yet still not ‘see (another) as she really is’ (Blum: 2012, 311). Blum thinks Murdoch’s Platonic inclination to think of the good as exerting ‘a magnetic pull’—so genuine efforts to attend will tend to be rewarded—leads her to speak mostly in the first way and so to overlook this occasional tension in her use of the term. I am mostly going to pass by this tension, as it does not bear on my discussion.

  7. The relation of these remarks to the rest of Driver’s essay is not easy to determine. Murdoch never uses the term ‘particularist,’ but Driver mostly seems to read her as treating just the issues discussed by contemporary particularists and their opponents, but as doing so rather imprecisely because she does not explicitly frame them that way.

  8. The reference of Driver’s word ‘detail’ is not confined to small or trivial matters. It ranges over any features or properties of what is attended to.

  9. Perhaps it is better—less misleading—to say it gets us further at some truth; however, trivial or uninteresting, about the object or situation, rather than at ‘the’ truth.

  10. Archbishop Pell later expressed himself in ways that may well have reflected some changes in how he saw things.

  11. It is of course possible that discovering a new detail about another could play a role in prompting the kind of reorientation Murdoch envisages M undergoing. But, loving attention is still something different from what might thus prompt it.

  12. The humility of recognizing that one never has another ‘taped’?—yes, that makes sense and is important. But, it seems Clarke thinks that somehow implies, or perhaps presupposes, the intelligibility of seeing the other ‘in her unbounded particularity and complexity’. It does not.

  13. The last phrase echoes the occasional oscillation in Murdoch’s use of ‘attention’ that Blum points out (see n. 6 above) between actually seeing something as it really is and making the effort to do so.

  14. Two commentators who avoid the misunderstanding I’ve been sketching are Bagnoli (2012, 216–217) and Laverty (2007, 99–104). Laverty also speaks about M’s transformed orientation to D in terms related to mine below.

  15. It does not actually matter for my purposes whether Nussbaum actually read Murdoch’s gaze aright. It is enough that there can be gazes with the character Nussbaum here ascribes to Murdoch’s. But, for simplicity’s sake, I am accepting Nussbaum’s ‘take’ on Murdoch’s ‘intense gaze’ on that occasion.

  16. Nussbaum implies that Murdoch looked at her with ‘the gaze of art’ as that is represented in Murdoch’s novel The Black Prince. I do not think any view about ‘the gaze of art’ (whatever that might be) should be ascribed to Murdoch as a philosophical view just because it appears in one of her novels. But anyway, the link Nussbaum makes to such a view has no bearing on my comments on what Nussbaum says in the quoted passage.

  17. I am thus leaving it open whether, as Nussbaum implies, attention does require the intense perceptiveness that enabled Murdoch to describe her better than her lovers could—and just requires something ‘more’ as well. My own view is that it does not require the former at all. But, in any case, Nussbaum’s description of Murdoch’s actual seeing of her seems to suggest that the ‘something more’ betokens a radically different orientation from that intense focus.

  18. The theme of acknowledgment in Cavell’s thinking in fact has a good deal in common with Murdochian attention.

  19. There are of course other forms of tenderness and gentleness—the tenderness of lovers for example. Different forms need speaking to in rather different ways.

  20. This example raises further questions I cannot resolve here. Social and professional role-mediated relationships carry within them limitations in the exposure of one to another. The one behind the employment counter, or a counselor or nurse or teacher, cannot while remaining within her role be fully personally exposed to the other. Yet, this limitation of exposure need not be a matter of what I earlier called seeking to ‘manage’ how one is seen by another. It can be put to that purpose, but does not have to be. Then the limitation carried in the role does not obstruct attention, but it does partly shape the form attention takes there. Of course, in some contexts, a ‘professional’—a counselor, say—might find herself moved her to breach the boundaries of the role-relationship. There are difficult questions about when this might warrant doing and what risks might then be run in any particular case.

  21. I’m not resisting any and all links between attending and knowing. Murdoch speaks of love as ‘knowledge of the individual.’ Knowing, one might say, takes many forms. It matters how one elaborates or speaks to use of the word ‘know’ in connection with attending. I have made various connections—with recognizing and being present-to, for example. Another potentially fruitful connection is with ‘acknowledgement’ (see n. 18 above).

  22. That blunt double assertion—about Plato and about this aspect of Murdoch’s relation to him—of course calls for justification. I try to provide it elsewhere, in ‘Plato, love and the body’ (unpublished manuscript).

References

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Drew Carter, Yana Canteloupe, and an anonymous reviewer for Sophia, for very helpful comments.

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Correspondence to Christopher Cordner.

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Cordner, C. Lessons of Murdochian Attention. SOPHIA 55, 197–213 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0540-2

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