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Love and Attention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Janet Martin Soskice
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Extract

The matched pair ‘love’ and ‘attention’ is familiar to most of us from the essays in Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good.Although she tells us in that book that there is, in her view, no God in the traditional sense of that term, she provides accounts of art, prayer and morality that are religious. ‘Morality’, she tells us, ‘has always been connected with religion and religion with mysticism’ (Murdoch, 1970, p. 74). The connection here is love and attention: ‘Virtue is au fondthe same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature’ (ibid, p. 41). Art and morals are two aspects of the same struggle; both involve attending, a task of attention which goes on all the time, efforts of imagination which are important cumulatively (p. 43). ‘Prayer’, she says, ‘is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love’ (ibid. p. 55).

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 32 , March 1992 , pp. 59 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1992

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References

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