{"id":8351,"date":"2024-08-05T17:22:11","date_gmt":"2024-08-05T21:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/iris-murdoch-on-the-angst-of-not-knowing-ourselves-and-each-other-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-08-05T17:22:11","modified_gmt":"2024-08-05T21:22:11","slug":"iris-murdoch-on-the-angst-of-not-knowing-ourselves-and-each-other-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/iris-murdoch-on-the-angst-of-not-knowing-ourselves-and-each-other-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people \u2014 and \u201cunderstanding is love\u2019s other name.\u201d<\/a> Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you \u2014 not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than not, when a person breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not. If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, for in the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell. But in any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight \u2014 of seeing through the shining pane of the other\u2019s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Audubon Society.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Iris Murdoch<\/strong> (July 15, 1919\u2013February 8, 1999) explores this central perplexity of human life with her characteristic intellectual agility and emotional virtuosity in one of the essays found in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 one of my all-time favorite books, which also gave us Murdoch on what love really means<\/a>, the myth of closure<\/a>, and the key to great storytelling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

\n

People are so very secretive. Sometimes it is said, \u201cThose characters and that novel are purely fantastic \u2014 nobody in real life is like that.\u201d But people in real life are very, very odd, as soon as one gets to know them at all well, and they conceal this fact because they are frightened of appearing eccentric or shocking\u2026 What are other people really like? What goes on inside their minds? What goes on inside their houses?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else \u2014 this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, while our illusions about ourselves and others are the work of fantasy, seeing clearly is the work of the imagination \u2014 of the willingness to investigate imaginatively what lives behind the masks people wear, what hides in our own blind spots. Murdoch writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Imagination, as opposed to fantasy, is the ability to see the other thing, what one might call, to use those old-fashioned words, nature, reality, the world\u2026 Imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In another essay from the book, Murdoch considers the existential jolt of discovering how poorly we know ourselves, for we are always divided between our will and our personality, the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome with an uneasy feeling the existentialists called Angst. Defining it as the \u201cfright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control,\u201d Murdoch locates Angst in any experience where we feel the discrepancy between our ideals and our personality. She writes:<\/p>\n

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Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that personality resides solely in the conscious omnipotent will.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a sense, Angst \u2014 which often manifests as anxiety, to use a presently fashionable term \u2014 is the loss of faith in the omnipotence of the rational will, the discovery that much of our conduct is governed by unconscious tendrils of our personality impervious to our conscious ideals. This makes the project of change far more complex and durational than we would like it to be. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting the Audubon Society.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Murdoch writes:<\/p>\n

\n

The place of choice is certainly a different one if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business. Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the \u201cdecision\u201d lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be \u201ccultivated.\u201d If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at\u2026 Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is so because pure attention reveals the fundamental necessity of our lives, and where there is necessity there is no need for choice \u2014 there is only what Murdoch calls \u201cobedience to reality,\u201d which is always \u201can exercise of love.\u201d Such attention \u2014 \u201cpatient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation\u201d \u2014 shapes what we believe to be possible and, when coupled with the conscious will, shapes our lives. It is only through obedience to reality that we can ever see clearly enough \u2014 ourselves or another \u2014 to be in loving relationship, by discovering, in Murdoch\u2019s lovely words, \u201cthe real which is the proper object of love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Couple this fragment of the altogether superb Existentialists and Mystics<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Adam Phillips on the paradoxes of changing<\/a>, then revisit Iris Murdoch on how attention unmasks the universe<\/a> and how to see more clearly<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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