Might my love of Picasso make me a better partner? Can appreciating artworks improve my capacity for loving attention in my relationships? Philosophers of art have long doubted that simply engaging with artworks can improve our character. Plenty of avid art-lovers are no kinder or fairer than the rest of us. So why think that spending time with artworks would make us better lovers?
Iris Murdoch thinks there is significant overlap in how we admire artworks and those we love. In fact, Murdoch suggests that that the kind of attention we give to artworks models the attention required for our loving relationships. Murdoch famously couches love as a kind of vision: “the patient eye of love.” To love someone well requires seeing them clearly: stripping away the fantasies, projections, and self-serving narratives we habitually project onto others. Such projections obscure, rather than illuminate, the other’s reality. The work of attention is to see the other more clearly which requires what Murdoch call unselfing. Unselfing involves silencing the ego’s noisy demands so that reality outside the self can come into view.
Aesthetic appreciation, for Murdoch, exemplifies this unselfing. When we look at a painting, like Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, with real focus, our desires and practical interests fall away. Murdoch thinks details of artworks, like a patch of color or a small house at the foot of the hill, draw us in and hold our attention. We experience a quieting of our usual internal chatter and feel ourselves drawn outward toward something independent of us. There’s no practical concern or self-oriented worries (What will I have for dinner? How should I respond to that email?) just a focus on a reality that’s different to our own. We don’t (or shouldn’t) want to possess the artwork and we don’t judge it by what it can do for us. A good aesthetic attitude recognizes the object as “for-itself” and independent.
This is where Murdoch draws on Kant. Kant claims that in judgments of beauty, we “preserve complete indifference” to the object’s existence. This doesn’t mean we’re apathetic, but that our pleasure isn’t tied to our needs. Our delight is disinterested in so far as it isn’t grounded in our own particular interests. Murdoch thinks this is the right model for loving attention too. Love should be appreciative rather than possessive; it should value the loved one for their own sake rather than for the sake of some need or practical goal.
If aesthetic attention exemplifies loving attention, then shouldn’t avid art lovers make noticeably better partners? Shouldn’t we all be chasing after film critics and art curators? If they really do involve the same practice and activity, then we might expect excellence in one domain to track excellence in the other, revealing a clear connection between refined aesthetic sensibilities and the capacity for loving attention. If no connection emerges, then perhaps art appreciation and love involve different kinds of attention.
This worry misses Murdoch’s point. To see why, we need to recognize that Murdoch is encouraging us to think about love a little differently. We tend to think of love as an ongoing activity that ticks over in the background of our everyday lives. I might not be consciously thinking about how much I love my family throughout the day, but I know it’s there. It doesn’t go away if I go without seeing them or am distracted by other things. I continue loving, even in the absence of conscious awareness.
But Murdoch encourages us to treat love as something more aspirational and present. When recognized as an ideal, Murdochian love is fragile and even intermittent. That’s not to say that we don’t love people in the gaps between proper attention, but rather that we love them best when we really see them for who they are, on their own terms. Part of why this is so fragile and intermittent is that it’s incredibly hard. It is difficult not just to silence our own prejudices and preoccupations, but to be genuinely receptive and open to something so different to us. This is not the kind of activity that can tick over in the background of our daily busyness. It requires effort, practice, and focus. Most of us, Murdoch thinks, love imperfectly most of the time.
Lesley Jamieson frames this in terms of a need to be open to the eccentricity of others. Other people are different to us and our instinct tends to judge and moralize this difference as ‘wrong.’ Love involves being curious about this difference, finding it exciting and inspiring. Again, art is the paradigmatic case where we encounter new worlds that excite and inspire us. To effectively appreciate the world the artist has built up, we need to practice the same openness and tolerance central to love. The judgmental, neurotic, and fearful parts of the self are the biggest threats to this. These are the real targets of unselfing.
Artworks help us practice this difficult work. Art appreciation cultivates tolerance and openness whilst encouraging us to seek out and enjoy different realities. But we shouldn’t be surprised by a lack of noticeable link between art appreciation and success in interpersonal relationships. After all, the work Murdoch is interested in is interior, gradual, and often invisible. A moment of real attention—to a Cezanne sky or the subtle angst in a partner’s expression—has significance even if it isn’t noticeable to an onlooker. Visible behavior and job titles are not always a good indicator of whether this kind of attention is happening. No need to look out for an eligible film critic, then. But perhaps we need to acknowledge that love is not something that runs on autopilot; it calls for focus, effort, and attention.
Colette Olive
Colette Olive is a philosopher based at the University of Leeds, where she is a Teaching Fellow, and a part-time Lecturer at NYU London. Her work spans historical and contemporary debates in aesthetics and the philosophy of love, with a special focus on Iris Murdoch and Simone de Beauvoir.
