ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss Iris Murdoch’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s role in the demise of the relationship between self and other. In her last manuscript, The Pursuit of Being, she uses a photo negative technique to create a philosophical stage onto which she highlights the consistency of her own demand that literature and philosophy engage in truths about how people’s fragility and strengths are forged. She does this by exposing Heidegger as both a real threat to human relationships on the one hand, as well as a straw dog on the other. Forcefully, she sees that Heidegger reduces ‘self’ to a vague outreach of ‘Being’ to which it must return. Ultimately, she shows that he distracts interlocutors from realising any capacity for loving vision because he refuses to recognise the impossibility of the growth of truth, goodness, or beauty within the self, in the absence of another.
