On philosophical love (or why I fell in love with Iris Murdoch) {Guest Post by Fleur Jongepier.}

[This is an invited guest post by Fleur Jongepier.--ES]

Have you ever fallen in love philosophically with a philosopher? Do you know the reasons why (not)?  Is there even such a thing as philosophical love? I believe there is such a thing, and that having such intellectual emotions is vital to philosophy as well as one’s own academic wellbeing. I also believe it’s intricately related to inequalities of various sorts, and that we also need to think about the sociology, if you will, of philosophical love.

Let me start with a confession: recently, I fell in love with Iris Murdoch. One can fall in love with someone after years of friendship, but this was not like that. I knew of her, but was never really ‘into’ her. I don’t think I was ready fall in love with someone like Iris, someone who worked on the topic of love and someone for whom the loss of faith constituted an important personal-philosophical theme. Back then I thought such topics were too personal to constitute proper philosophy. Also, she was never on any of my syllabi as a graduate or undergraduate student and none of my lecturers talked about her in any serious or respectful way. Happily things are different these days (see e.g. women in parenthesis, the Iris Murdoch research center at the University of Chichester, the journal Iris Murdoch Review, etc.).

In preparation for a lecture on ethics and aesthetics, I recently watched an interview with her on Youtube, and I was smitten. When asked whether she believed one can do philosophy in novels, she said that, at best, a novelist would be engaged in “idea play”. Dostojevski involved in idea-play, the audacity of it! I loved the concept of “idea play”, and I loved her mischievous smile when she said it. (I didn’t really love her accent, but we would get over that.) She said things like “I feel in myself such an absolute horror of putting theories as such into my novels,” and I thought that was excellent. It resonated strongly with my own emerging views on philosophy and literature. But I also wondered whether she really believed it, that the two were so separate even in her own case. And then I wondered if I really believed it, and whether they were so separate in my own case. And so I wanted to get to know her better. I soon bought The Sovereignty of Good, a large pile of her novels, and listened to hours of excellent podcasts. So far, I’ve only read part of the third essay from Sovereignty, and none of her novels. I’m a little afraid I might fall out of love with her, and I’m not ready for that. That’s because I have reasons for loving Iris.

I don’t know if one might have reasons for romantic love, or parental love, or love for one’s friends. As yet I have no explicit views about the relation between love and rationality. All I know is that there are reasons for philosophical love in my own case. There’s a sense in which I needed to fall in love with someone who reflected explicitly on the very discipline of ethics and on how certain ways of doing and teaching ethics can be ineffective if not harmful. I had reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared about how teaching ethics matters to how persons might (fail to) become better beings. On the importance of distinguishing between theories about the good, and actually being a good person. Given that I recently took up fiction writing again, I also wanted to fall in love with a philosopher who wrote novels and who was (happily?) prepared to make philosophical sacrifices to do that.

I have reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared deeply about topics that human beings outside of academic philosophy typically also care about. I want to feel passionately about a philosopher who believes that working on humanly important questions is compatible with being a rigorous philosopher. I need to feel close to someone who could show me that writing well and clearly is compatible with embracing ambiguities and complexities in one’s writing. I want to fall in love with a philosopher with different and refreshing conceptions on what rigor and clarity in philosophy and ethics amounts to. I want to be together with someone with whom I might further explore freer ways of doing philosophy; to explore the boundaries of philosophy and fiction; to explore the role of language, rhythm, emotions and real life in my academic work. I want to love a philosopher who loved those things, and I want it to be Iris. 

I had another reason to fall in love with Iris, which has to do with my reasons for wanting to (continue to) be an academic philosopher in the first place. Philosophical love can make that one is unprepared to “let go” of certain positions when confronted with objections, like a dog unprepared to let go of a stick (even when it cannot pass through the gate). The distinct type of doggedness that accompanies philosophical love can – like any other type of love – create serious problems of having myopic views and whatnot. However, it can also constitute a form of intellectual virtue and an important factor to the vitality of certain debates and disciplines. It’s a good thing that, due to intellectual love and passion, some people are prepared to go to great – all too great – lengths, and it’s often because of love that they are so prepared.

Intellectual emotions are important to one’s academic wellbeing. For me, in any case, philosophy is something I want to remain genuinely passionate about, at least sometimes. I’m not prepared for philosophy to become a purely cognitive or instrumental affair of finding good “niches” to publish in.^[1] And even though I see the dangers of philosophical love slipping into heroism – and I’d prefer, with Liam Kofi Bright, there to be #noheroes in philosophy – I still want to be able to fall in love philosophically, with all that that entails. I want to be able to defend certain views, or indeed someone’s work, to irrational lengths. I want to be able to be sometimes epistemically vicious, as Quassim Cassam calls it. I want to be able to be dogmatic, closed-minded, prejudiced, overconfident, gullible, and I definitely want to engage in wishful thinking every now and again. Just as love can be blind (fortunately enough), so too can philosophical love. Such blindness can be a good thing, both for the discipline and the progress and vitality of debates, but also for one’s intellectual wellbeing. I started doing philosophy because I was passionate about it, and I want to keep it that way. But it’s getting more difficult, given the increasing specialization of the discipline and instrumental thinking and publishing strategies. And so I needed fire, I wanted to lose myself in intellectual passion like I used to, and so I had to fall for Iris.

I also had reason to fall in love with a woman, specifically. Widespread sexual harassment and all other types of behaviours in its vicinity in academia has acutely obvious consequences, but also has negative effects that are much harder to identify. I believe being able to (allow oneself to be) passionate about philosophers and their work, especially if they are male, in a position of power, and alive, is one such hard to identity consequence. Due to all sort of incidents near and far, and the disappointment and disgust I feel in response, I’ve come to realize that experiencing philosophical love and passion for male philosophers is not really an option for the time being. Not even dead ones. I’m genuinely sad I (appear) to feel this way, and I feel uncomfortable about how these unreflective disinclinations generalize against all philosophers (m) despite knowing full well there are many lovable philosophers (m) around. But that’s the way it is, and I fear I’m not the only women who has become rather reserved with respect to experiencing intellectual passions. Even if, for some, the disappointment is less acute, it seems we all have reason to be aware of the dangers and inequalities surrounding philosophical love. If only because some philosophers themselves are apparently unable to recognize the not-so-difficult distinction between romantic love and philosophical love, and are incapable of behaving appropriately when intellectual passion comes their way. It wouldn’t surprise me if the safest and most uncomplicated type of philosophical love is, if you would allow me, homoerotic (in acute contrast to romantic homoerotic love, needless to say).

It’s not just women that philosophical love affects differently, it’s also people of colour and persons with mental or physical disabilities. Philosophical love and academic passion can be a privileged thing to feel, to allow oneself to feel, to be open to, to (dare to) act on. Given the importance of being able to experience philosophical love and passion at no cost to oneself, it’s tragic that it’s likely to be less open to some.

Philosophical love is thus likely to be implicitly (or perhaps on occasion explicitly) sexist, racist, and ableist.  This should be evident when one regards the typical receiving end of philosophical love: male, white, abled. That’s simply the result of a lack of diversity in most syllabi, curricula, and department staff. That’s part of the reason why I didn’t have the chance to fall in love with Iris before: I never encountered her during my undergraduate or graduate years, and was taught to love the “cooler” type. I taught myself to be passionate about depressingly analytic styles of writing, where the joy of playing around with language and real life had no place. I eventually fell in love with Dennett, whom I thought was analytically respectable and an engaging writer, thus a fine compromise for my intellectual heart and mind. But not being able to love Iris may well have meant not being able to flourish philosophically more fully, or earlier on.

One might think that the fact that I have so many reasons to love Iris – many of which have rather little to do with her and all the more with me, with feminism, and with various disappointments – is love-debunking. Love-debunking, as one might think of it, is when there are explanations for why you love someone or something that aren’t actually good reasons to love. If you come to see and accept those reasons for love, they would undercut your love. But there’s no reason to think my love for Iris can be debunked (I know, that’s precisely what smitten people would say). It’s true that I have reasons to love her, and know that I do, but that fact in itself isn’t love-undermining. Explaining something doesn’t always have to involve explaining it away (pace, Dennett). For one thing, reasons to love and feelings of love might be different things running parallel: I (sometimes) love philosophy for instance and I recognize, looking at myself from a distance, that being the sort of person I am, philosophy is the sort of thing I must love, tied as it is to my self-conception, and so on.

The point here is this: we do not need to be so worried about the fact that we fall in love with certain philosophers for all kinds of personal and social reasons, good or bad. The fact that philosophical love is often explainable doesn’t make one’s love any less real, deep, or indeed any less of a valuable academic-philosophical drive. Maybe you fell in love with a philosopher because your PhD supervisor not so coincidentally shared the same love. Maybe you fell in love with a certain topic because someone whom you greatly admire was passionate about it. Maybe you fell in love with a book because you thought you needed to love that book to be a “serious” philosopher. I think we all have philosophical love stories like these, and I don’t think they are “fishy” love stories. It’s only to be expected that philosophical love will often, or always, have robust social and personal-level explanations. And it’s not “unscientific” to recognize the reasons why one falls in love with certain debates, books, articles, or philosophers and their work.  It’s better to recognize and acknowledge these socio-personal love-explanations than to pretend, on the basis of some naive idea of academic neutrality and objectivity, that there’s such a thing as pure philosophical love, that is, a purely content-induced love.

Given the dangers of philosophical love and academic passion more generally, one might want to try and root out these emotions and try to avoid them in ourselves and our students and strive towards “impassionate philosophy”. I think that would be a mistake. Such intellectual emotions are crucial to deciding to (try and) become an academic philosopher in the first place, and – for me – to (want to) remain one. Such passions are integral to philosophy and science (see also the recent piece by Helen de Cruz on the importance of awe). One’s relation to philosophy and science requires both the head and the heart. And so instead we need to design our institutions and behave in such ways that we, including our students, can safely fall in love with concepts and debates and, yes, to also fall in love, non-romantically, with philosophers and their work. We need to make sure, by taking diversity seriously on all levels, that there are concepts and debates and philosophers for us to safely fall in love with.

Do I really love Iris though? One might think philosophical love is, at best, love in scare quotes. If one thinks that, then I fear one must be prepared to narrow down the love domain to rather impoverished ends. If one can’t love philosophers but only ‘love’ them, then it seems one can’t love Bob Dylan either, or Bessie Smith, or Francis Bacon, or Sofonisba Anguissola. I’m not prepared to only ‘love’ Bob Dylan, and by modus tollens/ponens, I don’t just ‘love’ Iris either. But if philosophical love is anything at all, what might it be? Philosophical love meets many characteristics of romantic love, though not all (and importantly so!) One importantly shared characteristic is “depth” which makes love different from mere liking. Philosophical love will involve being prepared to dedicate oneself to certain (shared) values and courses of action, even at cost to other projects that one values. Also, loving someone typically involves knowing their faults and loving them regardless (see this Digression).

For me, loving Iris involves being non-instrumentally curious in her work and a willingness to find out who she is, to have a “softer view”, as Julia Driver puts it, on her flaws, and not to try and mold her into my ideal image of her. Most importantly, love, as Murdoch tells us, is a way of getting “away from the self” (or “unselfing”) and to focus wholly and lovingly on the other. One is directed “towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability to so direct attention is love”. If suddenly seeing a kestrel is, for Murdoch, a way of unselfing, then Iris is my kestrel. Loving Iris is a way of focusing wholly on philosophy, seeing strands of philosophy I didn’t even notice before, of forgetting about misbehaviours in academia and to be mindfully passionate in philosophical thought, to forget about my laundry, the bills I need to pay, my own existential worries and self-interested concerns.

And so, for all these reasons, and many others besides, I’ve fallen in love with Iris. I’m well aware that I want to love her, for my own academic wellbeing, philosophical vitality, and fiction-writing enthusiasm. Being Iris, she might be rather displeased that I love her for reasons, she might even think this means I don’t love her, but I love her all the same. (I hope we’ll get through the holidays; I’m not looking forward to the baked beans with olive oil.)

[1] Being tenured, I realize this is a highly privileged thing to say. However, this also brings out what’s so tragic about competing on the job market and tenure tracks: that one is often forced to suspend one’s original or new passions, thus often substantially reducing academic-philosophical wellbeing.

Comments

[Frances White]

This is wonderful to read. I fell in love with Iris Murdoch over 40 years ago and I value someone saying it. When I eventually did my PhD on her I was fearful of waking up one day and finding that her writing had gone to dust and ashes on me. But it never did. I got fed up with my own writing and with criticism but whenever I turned back to a text by Iris either fictional or philosophical it was the same magic and passion again. It has never gone away.
Dr Frances White: Deputy Director, Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester

[Fleur]

Thank you! I have a feeling, pun intended, it will be the same for me.

[Susan J Brison]

❤️What a beautiful essay. I fell in love with Simone de Beauvoir when I was 16, in part because I found her ideas of "essential love" (what she and Sartre had) and "contingent love" (what she had with those lovers who weren't Sartre) so appealing (perhaps because it was so different from the seeminly boring traditional marriage my parents had). I fell out of love with her when I learned how much damage she and Sartre did to those whom they "loved contingently." Nelson Algren was right to be furious with her after what she wrote about their affair in Force of Circumstance. But it was her and Sartre's affairs with their young students (and how she spoke of them in her letters to Sartre) that made me see how how shallow and hypocritical her way of loving actually was. I still admire her philosophically and teach The Second Sex with no small amount of awe. But *love*? I just don't have it in me. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/26/stand-by-your-man

[Fleur]

Thanks so much for this Susan! I hadn't read that piece - thanks so much for sharing - I had no idea. Those are some gruesome details. How tragic to fall out of love due to misbehaviour of philosophers one admires.
To end on a positive note: I vividly remember a talk you gave at the Moral Sciences Club a few years back. Definitely a renewed passion for philosophy moment for me.