Iris Murdoch and Existentialism

Iris Murdoch was one of the first philosophers in English to respond to Sartre’s early works. Initially a sympathetic interpreter, by the time of The Sovereignty of Good, she had turned against Existentialism in favor of a vision finding inspiration in Plato and Simone Weil. For many philosophers in the anglophone world the picture of Existentialism (particularly its Sartrean version) in Sovereignty became accepted as a reasonably accurate, albeit devastating, account of that loose trend in philosophy. But Murdoch’s portrayal is in fact a willful distortion, in part because Murdoch creates an amalgam-figure to attack, which includes the behaviorism in Oxford philosophy at the time and the utilitarianism of philosophers like R. M. Hare, neither of which have any serious connection with French Existentialism. In so framing her attack, Murdoch obscures how much her own vision in Sovereignty and elsewhere owes to the Existentialism tradition.