The Fat Relentless Ego

What Iris Murdoch Understood About Love That Most of Us Don’t Want to Hear

There’s a particular kind of flattery we do to the philosophers we love. We soften them, sand down their edges, take the parts that sting and quietly set them aside. Iris Murdoch is not easy to flatter because she won’t let you. She was a novelist and a philosopher who spent her career asking the same uncomfortable question from two directions at once: What if most of what we call love is something else entirely? The novels revealed the answer in human detail, the philosophy explained why you may find yourself resisting accepting it.

This is the last essay in this series, and I’ve saved Murdoch for last deliberately. Not because she’s the most romantic, she’s nearly the opposite, but because I think she’s the most honest.

The Ego’s Preferred Activity

In The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), Murdoch describes what she calls the “fat relentless ego.” The phrasing alone is noteworthy. Not strong or persistent…fat. Bloated on its own desires and interpretations. Relentless in the way that hunger is relentless: not dramatic, just constant, always looking for the next thing to consume.

Her argument is that the default orientation of consciousness is inward. We don’t see the world as it is. We see it refracted through a continuous, mostly unconscious process of interpretation, and that interpretation is almost always organized around what we need, what we fear, what we want to be true. This is not, she insists, some correctable cognitive error. It’s the baseline condition of being a self. “We are not isolated free choosers,” she writes, “but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.”

Fantasy is her real target. Not delusion exactly, not clinical unreality, but the softer, more pervasive habit of dressing reality in what we’d prefer it to be. Nowhere, she thought, does fantasy run wilder than in love.

Why Love Is Especially Vulnerable to This

She’s describing something you’ll probably recognize. When we say we love someone, we often mean something like: I have strong feelings about the person I’ve constructed from what I’ve observed, filtered through what I need, organized around how they make me feel about myself. That’s not nothing. But it’s not quite them.

The novelist in Murdoch understood this with particular clarity. Her fiction is full of characters who are absolutely convinced they’re in love, and who are, without question, experiencing something intense, but who are essentially in love with their own projections. In The Black Prince (1973), the narrator Bradley Pearson falls into an obsession he experiences as transcendent, sublime, world-altering. It’s written from the inside with total conviction. Murdoch then places multiple contradictory appendices after the main narrative, each character offering a different account of what actually happened, and none of them line up.

In The Sea, The Sea (1978) (the Booker Prize winner), Charles Arrowby retires to the coast and becomes fixated on a woman from his past, convinced their connection was unique and eternal, that reclaiming her is somehow his destiny. He’s completely wrong about all of it. His wrongness, however, is rendered with such interiority, such conviction, that you feel it from inside before you can see it from outside. That’s the trap she’s building for her reader – the ego feels real from the inside. It always does. The conviction with which you experience your love for someone is not evidence of the quality of your attention.

Unselfing, and How Rarely It Happens

Murdoch had a concept for what love could be, when it worked, which she called “unselfing.” The idea is borrowed partly from Simone Weil, whose influence Murdoch acknowledged directly. For Weil, genuine attention to another person, real, undistorted attention, required something like a suspension of the self, a willingness to receive rather than to project. Murdoch took this seriously as both a moral and a metaphysical claim.

Unselfing, in Murdoch’s sense, is the moment when you genuinely perceive something outside yourself; not through the scrim of your needs, your fantasies, your ego’s preferred story, but as it actually is. In The Sovereignty of the Good, she describes experiencing this looking at a kestrel: “I was looking up and suddenly I saw the hovering bird. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but the kestrel.” That’s the experience she’s after. That quality of perception, extended toward a person rather than a bird. She is ruthlessly honest about how rare it is, and how hard. Most of what passes for love, she thought, was still ego in a more flattering costume. We think we’re giving ourselves over to another person when we’re actually, quietly, arranging them into the shape of what we need. The husband who loves his wife’s neediness because it confirms his sense of strength. The woman who loves her partner’s ambition because it reflects well on her choices. The intensity that feels like devotion but is actually anxiety about being left. The jealousy dressed up as caring deeply.

None of this is cynicism. She writes, in one of her most quoted lines: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Difficult. She means it. She’s not being poetic. The realization that another person is genuinely real, has an inner life as dense and consequential as yours, exists outside your story about them, is not automatic. It requires sustained effort and considerable self-overcoming. Most of the time, most of us don’t manage it for long.

She Wasn’t Writing From a Distance

One thing worth saying about Murdoch: she wasn’t delivering these conclusions from some elevated philosophical remove. She had a long, complicated, by-all-accounts turbulent emotional life. She had many significant relationships before and during her marriage to the literary critic John Bayley, which lasted from 1956 until her death in 1999. She was, by most accounts, someone to whom people were intensely drawn, and who was intensely drawn to others, in ways that weren’t always tidy or resolved.

I mention this not to be salacious but because it matters to how you read her philosophy. She wasn’t diagnosing humanity from a position of detachment. She was, almost certainly, working through something she knew from the inside. The fat relentless ego she describes, she had one. The fantasy-weaving she identifies as the enemy of real love was presumably something she did her share of it. The difficulty of unselfing, not a theory but an experience she was trying to articulate, and maybe to achieve. That makes her harder to dismiss. It’s easy to set aside a philosopher who describes human weakness from a position of apparent immunity. Murdoch isn’t offering herself as a corrective example. She’s offering the diagnosis because she’s lived inside the disease.

What This Actually Asks of You

Here’s where I want to be careful, because I think Murdoch gets misread in a particular way. She’s sometimes taken as saying: love is mostly delusion, unselfing is nearly impossible, therefore manage your expectations. A kind of romantic deflationism. I think what she’s actually arguing is something more demanding: the work of love is attentional. It requires you to practice seeing the person in front of you rather than the person you’ve constructed from them. That’s not a counsel of despair. It’s a description of what love actually is when it’s real, and a fairly precise map of what makes it hard.

The “just and loving attention” she writes about in The Sovereignty of the Good is a discipline, not an automatic feeling. You don’t fall into it. You cultivate it, imperfectly, repeatedly, and you fail at it regularly and try again. The moments when it happens, when you genuinely perceive another person rather than your projection of them, are, she thought, among the most real experiences available to us. You have to want to look, which means you have to be willing to see something that might not confirm what you’d hoped. The ego’s great trick is to make that feel like a threat. It isn’t. It’s the only way through.

Closing the Series

If I’ve done what I set out to do across these essays, you’ve spent time with thinkers who took love seriously without sentimentalizing it, who were willing to say that it’s harder, stranger, and more interesting than the version we usually get.

Murdoch is the right person to end with because she asks the bluntest question of all: Are you actually paying attention to the person you love, or are you paying attention to your idea of them? Most of us, most of the time, are doing the latter. That’s not a condemnation. It’s just the starting point of the real work.

The fat relentless ego will never stop being fat, or relentless. But you can notice it. You can catch it mid-construction and ask what it’s building and why, and whether what’s actually there might be more interesting than what you’re trying to make it into. That, I think, is what she meant by love as a moral achievement. Not a feeling you have. A way of seeing that you practice until, occasionally, you get it right.