Iris Murdoch on the Angst of not knowing Us and Each Other – The Marginalian

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock that is too fast to break. We fall in love, and we find again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people – and to “understand it in another word for love.” Even without deliberate deception, people will surprise you, shock you, hurt you – not out of malice, but because of the imperfection of their own self-awareness, which always leads them to surprise you. Often, when someone breaks a promise, it's because they believed they were the type of person to keep it and found themselves unable to. If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, because in the lifelong project of self-understanding, we are all reluctant visitors to the dark and desolate places of our nature, where the shadows we don't want to meet live. But in any human organization that has achieved the right use of the word love, we must have a relationship with both light and dignity in ourselves and each other. So all authentic relationships are a matter of clear vision – seeing through the transparent window of the other's self and removing the mirror of what we see.

Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) explores this central confusion of human life and its characteristic intellectual capacity and emotional beauty in one of the stories found in Existentialists and Mystics: Philosophical Writings and Literature (public library) – one of my favorite books, which also gave us Murdoch on what love really means, a tale of closure, and the key to telling good stories. You write:

People are very secretive. Sometimes it's said, “Those characters and that novel are so cute – there's no one like that in real life.” But people in real life are very strange, as soon as one gets to know them well, and they hide this fact because they are afraid to appear hidden or shocking… What are some people really like? What is going on in their minds? What happened in their homes?

Of course, it is impossible to fully know what it is like to be someone else – this is the cost of awareness, unity and secrets as they are; it is impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be yourself. The dream of good vision is just a dream. But we can always see clearly to love little by little.

The irony is that, while our illusions about ourselves and others are a work of fiction, seeing clearly is a work of imagination – of being willing to investigate with our imagination what lives behind the masks people wear, what is hidden in our blind spots. Murdoch writes:

Imagination, as opposed to dream, is the ability to see something else, what one might call, to use those old words, nature, truth, world… Imagination is a form of freedom, a renewed ability to see and express reality.

In another essay from the book, Murdoch looks at the jolt of discovering how badly we know ourselves, because we are always divided between our will and our being, consciousness and unconsciousness. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome by an uncomfortable feeling called Angst. Defining it as “the fear that an experienced person will feel when he grasps the power and direction of a personality that is not under his immediate control,” Murdoch places Angst in any experience where we feel a conflict between our ideas and our personality. You write:

Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is the disease or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that humanity resides only in the will of the almighty.

In a sense, Angst – often seen as anxiety, to use the current fashionable term – is a loss of faith in the omnipotence of the rational will, the discovery that much of our behavior is governed by unconscious habits of our personality that are not accessible to our conscious thoughts. This makes the transition project more difficult and longer than we would like it to be.

Murdoch writes:

The realm of choice is certainly different if we think in terms of a world where there is compulsion in the will, and understanding and exploration which is a slow business. Behavioral change and behavioral success are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able to change ourselves suddenly as we cannot suddenly change what we can see and do what we desire and are compelled by. In some ways, the clear choice now seems less important: less decisive (since most of the “decision” is elsewhere) and obviously something to be “cultivated.” If I am going well I will have no choice and this is the last state I should be guided to… It will always influence belief, for better or for worse, and I can influence it by looking at the ongoing reality.

This is because pure attention reveals the basic need of our lives, and where there is need there is no need to choose – there is only what Murdoch calls “listening to the truth,” which is always “an expression of love.” Such attention—”patient, loving concern, directed toward a person, a thing, a situation”—shapes what we believe is possible, and, when accompanied by rational will, shapes our lives. It is only by listening to the truth that we can ever see clearly enough—ourselves or another—to be in a relationship of love, finding, in Murdoch's beloved words, “what is truly the proper object of love.”

Put this superb piece together perfectly Existentialists and Mystics with Adam Phillips on the paradoxes of change, and revisit Iris Murdoch on how attention reveals the universe and how to see clearly.