What’s “Unselfing” All About?
By: Lizzie Bestow
Tags: Literature, Writing, Writer, Philosophy, Life

Murdoch and Literature

Murdoch wrote a number of novels in which relationships and their consequences are explored. In one of her novels, The Bell, which centers around a country house called Imber Court, where a small Anglican religious community live in (apparent) harmony. Imber Court lies next to Imber Abbey, a convent of Benedictine nuns who are cloistered from the external world. Michael Meade leads the congregation of lay people.

Meade, it is later revealed, is a gay man who has never managed to reconcile his faith and his sexuality. He chose the former over the latter. In the end, he realizes that the two aspects of his identity can live in harmony. The community dissolves, and he lives in the Court with Dora, a young woman who is married to the troublesome and selfish Paul. At the beginning of the novel, she has left Paul (a historian, who has joined Imber Court in order to study the abbey), but Paul entices her back to the Court to work on their marriage. At the end of the novel, Michael and Dora live together in peaceful co-existence; here, Murdoch appeals to love.

‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.’

Michael loves Dora, and Dora loves Michael; it’s a platonic love. It’s not, and never will be, a romantic love. But they understand each other, and value each other. Dora’s husband Paul loves what he wants Dora to be. Michael accepts Dora as she is, but pushes her to better herself — he teaches her to swim, for example.

The experience between Micheal and Dora is mirrored when we connect with literature at large. It’s important to note that this isn’t an experience we have when we read all literature. Reading a trashy romance won’t take you outside of yourself. But reading something that beautifully depicts the lived realities of other people takes you outside of yourself. Sartre also draws on this in his discussion of a ‘double, simultaneous postulation’. This is the notion that a passage in a work of literature can speak to two different groups of people at the same time.

A white person reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reads a story about someone with completely different life experiences to him. He has never faced prejudice due to the colour of his skin; whereas a black person who is a contemporary of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s reads the story and recognizes their own struggle in Tom’s. A white person has no experience of this struggle, but they learn a little of what it is to have faced such prejudice. They start to realize that there is a reality outside of their own. The same passage connects with two different groups of people in an entirely different way.

Knowledge

For Murdoch, the knowledge that unselfing brings us is a different kind to the kind of knowledge we garner when we learn how to solve a maths problem, for example.

Philosophers have identified different types of knowledge, and what constitutes knowledge. For some, knowledge is a ‘justified true belief’. Others talk about self-knowledge; the kind of information we have about our own mental states. There’s also scientific knowledge, and situated knowledge.

One thought experiment that’s been particularly influential in the philosophy of mind is ‘Mary the Scientist’. This is a thought experiment first proposed by Frank Jackson in his article “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982) and extended in “What Mary Didn’t Know” (1986).

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.… What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.”

The Knowledge Argument was used by Jackson to try to show that Physicalism (the view that everything in the world is physical) is false. But it appears to introduce a different kind of knowledge — a kind based on feelings and experience. This is the kind of thing Murdoch is talking about. She’s referring to a kind of knowledge that we struggle to put into words.

It’s the knowledge Murdoch refers to in The Bell, the kind of knowledge of something outside of our immediate periphery. It’s the knowledge of someone else’s reality. Murdoch thinks that love can do this — but that literature, too, can transport us outside of ourselves. A good novel should make me understand a little of what it’s like to be someone else. This is central to the “unselfing” process. Understanding other people’s lived realities enrich our own lives, and it also enhances our relationships with others. For when we look outside ourselves, we understand others.