Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher at Oxford and a novelist whose fiction performed the philosophy: the same moral convictions that animated her essays—about the ego’s relentless distortion of perception, about the rarity and power of genuine attention, about the sovereignty of Good as an objective standard that resists the ego’s appropriation—were dramatized in twenty-six novels whose characters struggle, mostly unsuccessfully, to see each other clearly. Her foundational claim was that most of what we call seeing is actually projection: the world as it appears to the undisciplined mind is not the world as it is but the world as the ego has constructed it, a theater of self-concern in which other people appear not as independent centers of consciousness but as supporting characters in the ego’s private drama. The primary moral act, for Murdoch, is not the visible choice at the moment of decision but the invisible, continuous work of correcting