Ruth Murphy is a PhD candidate in Italian at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Literature, University of Cambridge. Her most recent article, ‘“Let me look again”: The Moral Philosophy and Literature Debate at 40’, was recently published in New Literary History (Vol. 55 No. 1).

Here, Murphy explains the article’s central idea: that testimonial writing can perform “a kind of moral work” when it pays witness to troubling events and simultaneously grapples with their wider moral significance. She also reflects on gender and language in philosophy and on why, 41 years after Martha Nussbaum’s groundbreaking 1983 article in the same journal, literature still performs as much moral work as ever.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

How did you get to this subject area?

I’ve never been formally trained as a philosopher. But I found myself in my MPhil and at the beginning of my PhD really attracted to philosophical writing, and wanting to approach these questions in Levi and Arendt from a philosophical lens. Also, Arendt is basically a philosopher, although she didn’t really like that term.

And then I started thinking about what’s been written on the relationship between literature and philosophy. Where do we draw these boundaries? Towards the beginning of my PhD—I think I was just three months in—the pandemic hit. I had some time to read things that I may not have come across otherwise, and somehow I started reading a lot of Iris Murdoch. She’s been really influential in opening up analytic philosophy to Continental philosophy and to literature, and now there’s also been a real resurgence of interest in her philosophy. Obviously she’s always been well-known as an author, as a novelist. So somehow Murdoch came along, and from there Martha Nussbaum and more contemporary people.

Can you briefly summarise what the article says?

I think this is interesting to anyone who brings philosophy or even theory into their approach to a literary text, and that’s where I was coming from at the very beginning.

This article looks at the way academics, mainly, have approached the relationship, or lack of relationship, between literary studies as a discipline and philosophy. There are certain people in the history of thinking about this relationship that have really tried to bring them together, like Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum. And there was one issue in particular of New Literary History, the journal that my article’s been published in, that really made its mark in taking stock of where things were and where things could possibly go, and why [literature and philosophy] had distanced themselves so much from each other.

My argument is that there are ways of reconciling the two: it can be found in the writing of Primo Levi, the writing of Hannah Arendt. I also argue in my PhD thesis that a lot of the essays of James Baldwin do this. And I try to lay out the characteristics of this writing in the piece.

So, what I lay out is a form of writing I call ‘bifocal’, because it’s based on either lived experience or a historical event, or an examination of a historical event—but often the person is quite implicated in the history itself—and then it’s combined with reflection, sometimes over a very long period of time, about the significance of the event, and a philosophical assessment of its general meaning for humanity. It draws general significance from a particularity.

I do think it’s a more twentieth or twenty-first century kind of writing, but I don’t think it can be confined to that. At the end of the article I hint that maybe confessional writing, like Augustine’s Confessions, could be—so, you know, I’m hoping that someone else will test those kinds of books.

One of the things I hadn’t realised was so important, but that you’ve just come back to, is that bifocal testimonial writing is written a long time after—within living memory, but the writers have had a lot of time to reflect. Is that an important aspect of the testimony genre, or do you think that’s an important prerequisite for people to be able to do bifocal writing?

I don’t think it always has to be a long time after the event, but I think there has to be some kind of negotiation of distance. So I’m thinking, for example, of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where Arendt watched some of the trial but actually not that much, and then also brought a lot of her own experience as a Holocaust survivor to a more distant—and some people felt quite cold—report.

I started reading your article and thinking about journalism, and especially war reporting. But that does seem distinct from what you’re talking about, because firstly journalists often very deliberately don’t moralise, and secondly the point is to have an immediacy, to be completely in touch with the event.

Yes. [Bifocal writing] is where that immediacy is somehow negotiated or stepped back from in order to give general significance. If you’re completely immersed in an event and there’s a massive emotional and contemporary ‘living out’ of it—can you already understand that experience? I don’t think that the significance really hits us as human beings until we’ve had a moment to take stock of it. For me it’s a way of distinguishing works that are testimonial, but are not necessarily bifocal—in that they’re just a description of a particular experience in all its intensity, and in all its specificity and subjectivity, but they don’t necessarily make the attempt to draw out its broader significance. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but the philosophical element, I think, has to incorporate some of this distance.

You also said it’s got to be new in some way, that it “formulates a new ethical concept or vision.”

I think often the experience of a lived event drives people to write about it, and to make these general statements, precisely because it deviates from our expectations. Or it addresses a breach in our understanding. Jerome Bruner says that’s why stories that we want to hear are successful: because they address this breach. I also, in the last chapter of my thesis, talk a lot about the work of Miranda Fricker, and she has this idea that’s quite simple: that there’s a collective understanding of things, a hermeneutical resource, and in this resource there can be gaps because it hasn’t served dominant groups in the society to fill them. Things like there not being language for sexual harassment up until the twentieth century. And so bifocal writing is often where the answers to this come from. She also uses the example of Edmund White, who articulated the experience of being gay before it was widely publicised and accepted. These writers respond to the exception of their experience.

Given all that, what’s the point of moral philosophy? What does induction from lived experience to moral questions not cover? What’s left for moral philosophy to do?

I guess one thing that scares me, if all writing was bifocal writing, and the same in academia, is that the importance of personal experience would reach a level that becomes authoritarian. Having someone completely on the outside to assess different conceptions of lived experience and different moral concepts is a good thing, I think. I just wish that philosophy—moral philosophy and the analytic tradition particularly—gave more attention to how people actually live and the problems that people face on a daily basis. But I am wary of philosophy that’s purely based on felt experience. I think there’s a place for distance—even for a lot of distance. But it has to be balanced.

Lots of the modernist writers that you talk about, and that Nussbaum talks about in her original article—Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, but also David Sidorsky’s article talks about Proust and Joyce, and you talk about Primo Levi in this article—are male modernist fiction writers. And then the Somerville quartet, and that group of predominantly women philosophers, are the people driving this refresh between literature and philosophy. What do you think the reason is for that gender gap? Why would the examples not be writers like Virginia Woolf?

It’s interesting that you mention her, because I would really love to write [about her]—that would be my next project, why or how Virginia Woolf is bifocal. I think A Room of One’s Own is a great example. Joan Didion is someone else whose work could be a really interesting example of bifocality. I haven’t yet had the time to do this, and I hope to continue, especially if my thesis becomes a book. There are even more examples of similar women writers in the last sixty years.

As for women in philosophy, it’s changing for the good, but women tended, and still to some extent tend, to be more tangled in experience. And so for women philosophers not to address the messiness of trying to be a professor and a mother is much harder—I think [G.E.M.] Anscombe had seven kids—and you cannot do the same kind of philosophy, I think, when you have the reality of having children and having to make a home.

One of the arguments I make in the article is that testimony as a genre was already, at the time when they were having this big debate in New Literary History, doing a lot of this combination of writing that they were advocating. And at that time, I think you probably still had a lot of bias around what survivors were heard. When we think of Holocaust survivors, we think mainly of men. Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Antelme in France. And there’s been some more work done on women in the Holocaust in general, but within that genre of testimony as it emerged, it’s still male-dominated.

What’s it like for you now as a woman in philosophy, if that fits? Does that fit? Do you feel outside of philosophy?

I think I’ll always feel outside because I wasn’t moulded in that milieu. But my sense is still that academic philosophy can be a kind of boys’ club. Recently, after a philosophy conference, I was speaking to a Finnish philosopher, a woman, and she was saying that throughout her career she has made the decision not to measure herself by the kind of on-the-spot performativity that was so valued by her male colleagues.

And the idea of thinking on the spot when you’re challenged after your paper is really interesting to me, because it’s not very philosophical! If you really want to give a good answer about something, you’re going to have to think about it. During my MPhil the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero came [to Cambridge] and gave a paper and someone asked her a question that had a more philosophical angle. She thought about it for a second and said, “I’m a philosopher, so I’m going to respond to that whenever the answer has come to me,” or something like that. It was respectful, but that need to reflect surely is what philosophy is, right?

Are you planning to turn the PhD into a book?

I would really hope to. I think the most exciting thing for me would be to have bifocality at the centre, and then to look at a range of different works. I’m hoping, like you said, that Woolf is maybe in there. And one of my other interests is in children and philosophy. Maybe it’s not that surprising, but children are barely mentioned in the history of philosophy, and when they are, they tend to be by women philosophers because they’ve had to look after children. I have an article coming out about that and I hope to return to the topic at some point in the future.

Friday 9 August 2024