Musings: Love, Philosophy, Empathy, Religion

 I have not read Irish Murdoch - not her philosophy or her fiction - and, frankly, have only noticed her in the past 15 years. Perhaps, it is that more people are writing about her, but it could as easily be I was not paying attention. And the more I read, the more I want to read more. An example is For Iris Murdoch, morality is about love, not duties and rules (Aeon Essays).

In lovingly attending to others, we attend to them as sources of interest and value in their own right, not as things we care about merely in relation to our own concerns. We come to care about such things, as it’s often put, ‘for their own sake’. This, she suggests, frees us from the grip of our fantasies. Love draws us out of ourselves and our concerns towards the world, and especially towards other people. Such loving attention therefore enables us to get to the truth in a way that our ordinary looking – distorted as it often is by the ego’s fantasies – does not. Loving attention is a kind of discerning attention that allows us to see things as they really are.

Murdoch thus embraces the forceful aspect of love, its ability to overcome us. Love needs to be a powerful force, she suggests, in order to overcome the strong pull that fantasising has for us. We are strongly motivated to fantasise because doing so speaks to our deep egocentric needs and wishes. But love is a powerful-enough force that is able to overcome this, able to draw us out of ourselves and towards reality. In thus reorienting us, it can allow us to see and respond to others as they really are – and this, she thinks, is at the core of morality.

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 Finally, Murdoch makes the intriguing suggestion that even our everyday engagement with art, skill and craft can be a starting point for learning to attend to others. In learning skills and crafts or engaging with art, we learn to focus on something outside of ourselves, something we seek to gradually deepen our grasp of. The beginner, in this context, needs to exercise humility, to recognise that their initial impressions may need to be rethought and that their grasp is partial and inadequate. Thus, Murdoch suggests, though the person who took things no further would clearly be morally lacking, arts, skills and crafts are an excellent introduction to moral life and the kind of attentive love required of us there.

WTF is my reaction to Conservative Christians argue empathy can be a sin (AP News).

Stuckey admits Jesus is an empathetic figure. In her book, the Southern Baptist from Texas writes, “In a way, Jesus embodied empathy when he took on flesh, suffered the human experience, and bore the burden of our sins by enduring a gruesome death.”

She’s clear that empathy can be good. But she writes it has been co-opted “to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality.”

“If you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose,” she writes of this progressive line of thinking. “If you really respect people, you’ll use preferred pronouns. … If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant.”

Rigney doesn’t think empathy is inherently wrong, either. He finds fault with excessive or “untethered empathy” that’s not tied to conservative biblical interpretations.

And here is a good reason for Orthodox Christianity's relegating dogma to councils, not individuals. 

This is the Christianity I recognize:

In New York, the Rev. Micah Bucey first noticed Christian anti-empathy messages after Budde’s sermon. In response, he proposed changing the outdoor sign at Judson Memorial Church, the historic congregation he serves in Manhattan.

“If empathy is a sin, sin boldly,” he proposed it say, a catchphrase that borrows its last clause from the Protestant reformer Martin Luther.

A photo of the resulting church sign was shared thousands of times on social media.

“Our entire spirituality and theology at Judson are built around curiosity and empathy,” Bucey said. “We’ve always considered that our superpower.”

I will also point out that the reason for a Southern Baptist denomination is that they supported slavery in 1860.

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