Just Attention
“. . .the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil
Note: I come to this reflection after thinking about war and public argument. Much of our moment rewards speed, certainty, and noise. Iris Murdoch suggests morality begins somewhere simpler: with attention. We are quite good at jumping to our own assumptions.
The first scolding I remember was, “Just pay attention!” I heard it often. Back then, it meant I should stop looking out the window. My name, William, came first. That made it serious.
Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was a prominent moral philosopher and leading English novelist of the late twentieth century. Though she did not believe in a personal God, her thought was shaped by the Anglican world she lived in. As an atheist, she still engaged with religious questions. In her moral philosophy, Goodness takes the role God once held.
Murdoch did not distinguish between her philosophical work and her novels. For her, ethics was not about rules or decisions. It centered on how we live, what we observe or ignore, and how we struggle and fail in everyday life.
She thought we had narrowed morality down to choices, principles, reasons. Its real ground is perception, and above all, perception of others. From this perspective, moral failure often precedes action. We do not first make the wrong choice; we first see things the wrong way.
For Murdoch, evil is not only dramatic or grand. The cruel person, the uncaring bureaucrat, and the tyrant are not monsters. They are people caught up in their own fantasies, resentments, and self-justifying stories. Others become little more than ideas or images in their minds. We are shaped less by what others actually think of us than by what we imagine they think. In the end, the distance between them and us is shorter than we prefer to think.
Death brings clarity. Awareness of mortality can disrupt the self’s fantasy-driven monologue, reminding us we are contingent beings rather than the center of the universe we imagine. This sobriety matters. Honest attention to mortality becomes, in Murdoch’s terms, “unselfing” — a loosening of the ego’s hold that lets us see others as they are. To understand someone, it helps to know who they are. When attention is right, good action follows.
For Murdoch, Good is real and independent, not determined by human desire or social convention. Its triumph is not an event in history but a fact about reality itself. No war, no catastrophe, no accumulation of injustice or evil can diminish it. For Murdoch, this is not a hope but a certainty. The Good does not need room in life. We do, in our small part of it.
Turning toward Good is its own justification. It defines what it means to be human. There are no assurances of reward. A virtuous person may suffer, while an immoral person may prosper. Nevertheless, Good remains.
This idea appears in many traditions. It is central to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s God Was in This Place and I, i Did Not Know, which focuses on a scene from Genesis. Jacob, after betraying his brother, stops in the desert at night. He dreams of a ladder connecting heaven and earth.
When he wakes, he is shaken, not because something new has appeared, but because what was present had gone unseen. “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” It is hard to see without looking. Kushner renders that second I in lowercase, i, not to diminish it, but to confess it. It is the small, humbled self that finally sees.
Murdoch did not use the term God, instead referring to “the sovereignty of Good.” Still, her view aligns with Kushner’s: most of the time, we are too absorbed in ourselves to notice what matters. A crisis or a dream, such as Jacob’s, can break that spell.
For all our guilt and fear, we are not alone and, like Jacob, are loved beyond measure. Murdoch lived true to that sovereignty against the spirit of the times.
We do wrong because we see wrongly.
Most truths are not hidden; they are unseen.
Love is the discipline of seeing what is there.
Notes and reading
Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) taught philosophy at Oxford and wrote more than two dozen novels, winning the Booker Prize in 1978. Her philosophical work draws on Plato and is influenced by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil’s reflections on attention.
Murdoch is best known for The Sovereignty of Good (1970). For her, evil arises from the ego's distortions of reality; goodness requires learning to see justly. Her central concept is "unselfing"—the ego's grip on perception loosening until the self sees clearly by getting out of its own way. Just attention (her key term) is how that happens. The French aphorist Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) anticipated something close: "Truths are not created, they exist; one can only see them, disentangle them, discover them, and expose them." The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, ed. Paul Auster (2005), 28.
Murdoch believed fiction can show moral life more clearly than abstract argument, and her novels often reveal a yearning for the spiritual in a post-theistic age. The Bell (1958) is a striking example, showing how idealism, jealousy, and spiritual longing mingle in ordinary life.
Gravity and Grace — Simone Weil (2002). Reflections on suffering, attention, and divine reality. Its austere spiritual vision strongly influenced Murdoch’s understanding of attention as a moral, and almost religious, discipline.
Where Weil sees grace creating and filling the “void,” Murdoch emphasizes attention directed toward what is already present.
Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love — Rowan Williams (2006). A former Archbishop of Canterbury and major Anglican theologian, Williams treats art and love alike as disciplines of truthful attention to reality rather than projections of the self, a vision that closely parallels Murdoch's "unselfing."
God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know, 25th Anniversary Edition, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner (2016). A meditation on the biblical story of Jacob’s dream, exploring how the sacred often goes unnoticed in ordinary life. Kushner, a widely read teacher of Jewish spirituality, reflects on presence, perception, and the spiritual dimensions of paying attention, a theme that resonates with Murdoch’s “just attention.”
For the spiritually adventurous: With thanks to Addison Hodges Hart (The Pragmatic Mystic). “Hesychasm”: the forgotten discipline of interior silence, not quietism, not mere technique, but trained attention toward God, whom rationalism has long insisted we can only approach through the mind. Palamas (Triads, 14th c.) held otherwise: reason illuminates; it does not unite. Murdoch would recognize the move: the self stepping aside so that reality can be seen. See Nikolai Gerasimov, Orthodox Christianity (3/12/2026).
The last three sentences here--marvelous aphorisms--sum up and add to this strong reflection. The three build well, too. I wouldn't have received as much from the third one if I hadn't thought out the second one a good deal.
I should read more about Murdoch's concept of "the sovereignty of Good." It sounds helpful as a way of understanding how Good works as life's framework, despite everything. Good's sovereignty may have something to do with your point from Palamas: ". . . the self stepping aside so that reality can be seen."