BEYOND ATTENTION VERSUS FANTASY

This article will analyse and critique the treatment of the concept of imagination in Iris Murdoch as a philosopher and novelist. I argue that Murdoch’s philosophical treatment of imagination, based on her tendency to make a binary opposition between “good” attention and “bad” self-deluding fantasy, and involving a rejection both of certain High Romantic concepts of the Imagination and what she sees as the too broad scope given to imagination in Kantian philosophy, is fundamentally flawed, but that a more subtle and theoretically convincing treatment of imagination, similar to and influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the imaginary of the real, is to be found in her fiction, in particular in the 1980 novel Nuns and Soldiers, where we may find in nuce a concept of imagination which covers both the perception of the “reality” of the visible world, the process of artistic creation, and the infinite links between the visible and the invisible.