Iris Murdoch's Critique of Hegel and Romanticism

 In “The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited,” Iris Murdoch is not using “Romanticism” to refer to the historical literary movement of Wordsworth, Novalis, or Shelley. She means something broader and more philosophical: a conception of the self in which consciousness becomes the source of value and meaning (as in Existentialism). Romanticism, for her, is the turn inward toward the will, imagination, authenticity, sincerity, self-expression, and the creative or autonomous ego. It is connected to the decline of the older Platonic and Christian picture in which truth and goodness are realities independent of the self, realities to which the self must conform to be what it is by nature. 

      Murdoch thinks modern philosophy after the Enlightenment increasingly relocates value inside consciousness itself. Instead of the soul looking outward toward the Good, modern thought turns inward toward freedom, will, authenticity, or self-creation. The Romantic artist becomes emblematic of this shift: the imagination no longer discovers meaning in reality but projects meaning onto reality. Romanticism culminates in the “heroic consciousness” of the modern self.

     Thus she sees Hegel as Romantic. For Murdoch, Hegel transforms reality itself into the unfolding self-development of Spirit. Being becomes intelligible through a historical dialectic in which consciousness progressively comes to itself. Reality is no longer something wholly other which humbles the self. Rather, reality is increasingly understood as mediated through the self-unfolding of mind or Spirit. She claims that this dissolves the independent, resistant reality of persons and things. In Hegel, contradiction and negation are aufgehoben — preserved and overcome within a larger rational totality. But Murdoch fears that this “sublation” can morally and spiritually endanger our sense of the irreducible particular individual. The individual risks becoming meaningful only as a moment within a larger historical process. As perhaps Christians think the lives of pre-Christian pagans were only a stage in Providence. She thinks this tendency appears not only in Hegel but throughout modern thought: the concrete individual person is sacrificed to systems, movements, historical necessity, or grand narratives of liberation.

     This she connects to the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The sublime, in her reading of modernity, becomes associated with power, will, transcendence, self-assertion, and the triumph of consciousness over contingency. The beautiful, by contrast, involves loving attention to what is other than oneself. Beauty humbles and decenters the ego. One does not create it; one attends to it. This is why Murdoch is drawn toward Plato. For her, genuine moral life requires “unselfing,” a patient attention to reality independent of our fantasies and ambitions. She fears the moral metaphysics of the sovereign self. Romanticism, in her sense, replaces contemplation with self-expression and replaces transcendence of ego with enlargement of ego.

     Thus she is suspicious of all philosophies that turn history into a salvific drama. In Hegel, history itself becomes the medium through which Spirit realizes freedom. Murdoch claims that such views can justify the suffering of concrete individuals by absorbing them into an allegedly rational historical whole. She thinks something morally essential disappears when tragedy and evil are too easily integrated into a dialectical/historical process.

       I am inclined to object that Hegel does not simply glorify the ego or subjective will; he is trying to overcome isolated subjectivity by showing how freedom is realized through ethical life, institutions, recognition, and participation in objective spirit i.e. reality, which is meaningful. Hegel’s “Absolute” is not an inflated individual self but something more like a reconciliation of subject and object, mind and world. But Murdoch identifies what she sees as a spiritual tendency in modernity: the gradual enthronement of consciousness, freedom, and will over reality, goodness, and attention. Hegel becomes, for her, one of the greatest and most sophisticated expressions of that tendency. She  is focusing on the inflation of subjectivity and the temptation to make consciousness itself the source of value. She fears that certain modern philosophies replace attentive love of reality with self-dramatizing visions of consciousness, will, creativity, authenticity, or historical destiny. We are not in essence a moment in Spirit or an expression of historical necessity; not a self-positing will or a creator of values. Morality begins in just and loving attention to what is real and other than oneself.

    For Murdoch, genuine morality often involves a kind of unselfing, which is to say, a patient acknowledgment of the independent reality of another person. And this is where she goes against some Hegelian tendencies. In Hegel, the individual can sometimes appear as meaningful primarily through participation in larger historical wholes like the family, ethical life, the state, or history. Murdoch claims that such frameworks can make concrete persons too easily “explainable” or “absorbable” into abstractions. A mother grieving a child or a lonely old man; an obscure act of goodness to a disabled person —

these realities matter absolutely, not merely as moments within historical rationality.

    And so it is clear why Murdoch rejects philosophies that too readily reconcile suffering into “the whole,” which connects to her critique of Romanticism more broadly. Murdoch thinks Romantic philosophy – by which she sees Sartre as the paradigm, I think – glorifies

will, sincerity, authenticity, heroic selfhood, or the dramatic individual consciousness.

This reduces genuine attention to reality because the self becomes too central. True goodness, for Murdoch, is quieter, humbler, less theatrical. No one creates value ex nihilo.

We discover and attend to it. I am very attracted to this line of thought. But also to the historical and communal development of understanding emphasized by Hegel. I think the tension is philosophically fruitful.