ABSTRACT
Iris Murdoch’s personal journals reveal a long-standing and deep interest in the natural world. Elements of her literary and philosophical writings, when re-examined through an ecological lens, confirm Murdoch’s profound sense of human situatedness on a living planet, as well as a disquiet regarding human impact. Murdoch’s approach to ecology is considered in the context of the contemporary environmental turn, examining how as novelist she accounts not only for our human dependence on the environment, but also for nonhuman independent existence functioning outside the human sphere. The perception of a vibrant natural world experienced through the body and its restorative effect on the mind is key to her thinking. Her ethics of attention is extended beyond an anthropocentric vision and applied to the natural world, and firm connections are established between her theological preoccupations and her environmentalism. This critical assessment of Murdoch’s ecological vision, a new direction for Murdoch studies, comes at a time when environmental practitioners and philosophers are ruminating over an overt contradiction between nature’s connotative power in culture and its literal manifestation in the real world, and having to rethink widely understood conceptions of nature and human exceptionalism.
