There are days when even love feels like an act of possession. The way we carry people in our minds, repeating words they never said. Sometimes what we crave isn’t tenderness, but something fixed. Not the nearness of another, but the comfort of control. It’s quiet, but it grows. That part of the self that wants to be right. To be wanted. To be central. And the more we crave closeness, the more we try to fold the other into our narrative. We begin to mistake control for care. We hold on, even when we say we’re offering space. That confusion sits quietly in so many of our ideas about love.
Iris Murdoch saw that part clearly. She wrote about it without flinching. For her, love had nothing to do with conquest. It was the patient act of seeing. Of letting go of how you wish the world would be, and choosing instead to meet what already is.
Murdoch (1919–1999) was an Irish-British philosopher and writer who spent her life returning to the same difficult questions. She wrote twenty-six novels and developed a philosophy that centered attention on goodness. Not rules. Not religion. Just the long, slow work of looking at others without rearranging them.
She called it unselfing. The softening of ego so that someone else’s reality could be more fully known. And she believed that was what love really was. Not infatuation. Not flattery. But the choice to look closely at someone who will never be you, and to stay with what you find.
It’s not easy. But in her world, that kind of love is the beginning of a moral shift, a real presence, maybe even a quiet form of the good.
The Illusion of Eros: Temptation And Its Perils
Sometimes, what we call love is merely the desire to feel needed. We meet someone, and suddenly our days feel meaningful again. But Iris Murdoch warned that this spark, this rush of recognition, is not always love. Often, it is eros at work. Not the patient’s love of attention, but the urgent hunger of self-projection.
The Eros definition that dominates Western thought ties love to desire, pursuit, and the fantasy of being complete. But Murdoch believed this was dangerous. The temptation of eros is that it makes the beloved vanish beneath what we want them to be.
Tolstoy saw it too. In Anna Karenina, one of the best classic books of all time, Anna’s affair begins with glamor, with heat, with a sense of awakening. But her vision of Vronsky becomes so tightly held that it erases everything else. She no longer sees her son, her past, or the reality of Vronsky himself. The illusion consumes the truth.
Murdoch called this the peril of loving through fantasy. Because fantasy keeps us at the center, it flatters the self, but it cannot teach us to see. And for her, seeing was the beginning of moral love.
To love someone, Murdoch believed, was not to dream about them, but to learn how to witness them. Not as symbols, but as subjects. Not as saviors, but as strangers with their own lives, waiting to be seen.
The Fat Relentless Ego: Barrier To True Love
There is a part of the self that never stops speaking. It measures, compares, and revisits old humiliations. It wants to be admired. It wants to win. Iris Murdoch called it “the fat, relentless ego.” It is what love must move through, and eventually leave behind.
In The Sovereignty of Good, she writes,
“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment, everything is altered… the brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.”
That shift from self-absorption to attention is not just beautiful, it is moral. The kestrel does not belong to her, yet it reorients her. It reminds her that the world is not arranged around her feelings.
True love, too, requires this kind of reorientation. It asks us to step back from the fantasies we build and the fears we feed. It asks for the act of letting go, not just of pride or pain, but of the illusion that we are the main character in every story.
For Murdoch, letting go of ego is not a loss. It is the first condition of seeing. And only through seeing, sustained, undramatic, and clear, can love begin.
Unselfing: The Liberation Of Love
Some of the most honest moments in life arrive when we’re not trying to prove anything. When the mind forgets to narrate. When attention turns outward and stays there long enough to feel the quiet of not being the center.
Iris Murdoch called this unselfing. A deliberate, but gentle movement away from the ego. It happens when beauty stops us. When art refuses to flatter. When we begin to see not for use or gain, but for the sake of seeing.
She describes one such moment while watching a kestrel outside her window. She had been brooding, caught inside her thoughts, nursing a small wound to her pride. Then the kestrel appeared; hovering, precise, indifferent. And in that instant, her ego fell away. What remained was clarity.
Unselfing is not transcendence. It’s a shift in direction. It asks the self to stop gripping so tightly, to loosen its need to be admired or affirmed. In Murdoch’s view, this is where love begins. Not in sentiment, but in attention.
That’s what good art can do, too. It holds its ground, it resists absorption into our narratives. It lets us practice the difficult act of regard.
For Murdoch, love was not a feeling to chase, but a way of seeing to return to. And unselfing was the path that made it possible.
Attention As Love: Seeing Reality Clearly
Most of what we call love is projection. We imagine someone into our story, and when they speak out of turn, we flinch. Iris Murdoch knew this. She wrote that “love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Not poetic. Not romantic. Just real.
For Murdoch, love was a form of moral attention. Not the attention that flatters or flirts, but the kind that stays. The kind that learns how to see without turning away. This kind of love cannot be conjured quickly. It must be earned through the long practice of letting another person remain fully other.
In Anna Karenina, it is not Anna’s fiery love that survives, but Levin’s slow one. He struggles. He falters. But he comes back to Kitty again and again, not as fantasy, but as fact. He grows into his love by learning how to see her beyond what he hoped she would be.
In the movie, Before Sunrise, something similar happens; our favorite fictional couple doesn’t dramatize their connection, they explore it. They notice. Their conversation becomes the setting. Their attention becomes the plot.
Murdoch believed this attention was how we touch the good. Not by striving, but by softening. Not by claiming, but by seeing. Love, in her world, was not what stirs us. It was what steadied us. What sharpens our sight. And what, when practiced with care, begins to heal the distortion of the self.
Letting Go And Moral Transformation
Letting go has been mistaken for giving up. But Iris Murdoch knew it meant something else. It meant loosening our grip on the stories we write inside other people’s lives. She believed that to love well, we had to relinquish the fantasy of control.
In The Idea of Perfection, she writes,
“The love which brings the right answer is attention, and this attention can only be given by someone who has relinquished self.”
To Murdoch, the act of letting go was not a loss. It was how we make space for another person’s truth. It was how we let the ego step aside so something real could step in.
Look at Wyeth’s Christina’s World. The figure does not rush or demand. She remains still, looking outward. She does not possess the landscape. She attends to it, and in that stillness, there is clarity.
Letting go, in this sense, is not surrender. It is precision. It is what allows love to become ethical rather than consuming. Without it, even our best intentions turn into projection.
Murdoch understood that fantasy feels good because it obeys us. But love, real love, requires a slower gaze. It asks us to be willing to stay when the story we wanted begins to dissolve. That is where clarity lives. Not in what we claim, but in what we are willing to release.
Good Art, Beauty, And The Training Of Attention
Iris Murdoch believed beauty was not decoration, it was instruction. She thought beauty could train the mind to attend, not just to notice but to witness without distortion. To stand before something and let it remain fully itself was, for her, the first step toward goodness.
This is what she called good art. Not because it made us feel uplifted, but because it asked nothing from us. A kestrel. A painting. A hillside in early winter. Each one becomes a teacher of perception, gently showing us how to love without possession.
Monet’s Woman with a Parasol catches a moment just before movement. The figure stands open to the breeze, untouched by performance. She is not for us. She is for the sky. The viewer’s job is not to interpret her, but to be with her. To soften into the stillness.
Wyeth’s Christina’s World teaches the same thing, though more quietly. Christina is looking outward. Her body is halted, but her attention is alive. She does not command the landscape. She lets it be.
Murdoch believed that beauty loosens the ego’s grip. The self retreats. The gaze becomes cleaner. More honest. This is not a mystical feeling. It is moral work. And it is how we begin to see others not as reflections, but as realities.
If we learn how to look, if we truly look, we begin to love in the same way. Not by naming or needing. But by remaining.
Conclusion: Towards A Murdochian Love
To walk through Iris Murdoch’s idea of love is to walk away from the mirrors we’ve been taught to hold. Not because they are useless, but because they are too full of themselves. She believed that love, real love, could not begin until the ego softened, until our vision cleared.
For Murdoch, love was not an emotional surge or a private ecstasy. It was unselfing: the steady act of turning outward, of attending to someone without needing them to reflect us. It was not passion that made love moral. It was attention. Careful, unsentimental, undemanding attention.
Letting go was not a weakness. It was the condition for truth. The condition for seeing others as they are, not as our projections would have them be. Art, in her view, became one of our greatest teachers in this work. Not because it consoles, but because it teaches us how to stay. How to see without grabbing. How to witness without distortion.
She once wrote that “the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.” To love, then, is to try again and again, to see past that illusion. To look clearly. To remain. And in doing so, to reach something not just intimate, but good.
This kind of love may not stir loudly. It may not give us language for longing or certainty. But it offers something rarer: the slow arrival of moral vision. A presence that asks for nothing but presence in return. It lives in the pause before judgment, in the decision to observe rather than possess, in the way we begin to make space for someone else’s reality.
Can we love this way?
Can we slow down long enough to see what is real?
Can we let art shape our sight, not only for beauty, but for the moral clarity it invites?
The questions stay open. But Murdoch would say the attempt is already part of the answer.
