Unselfing

When the self comes into play, we can only focus on what matters most to us: what is most grounded within the self...is the self. How it is entangled in the world of matter, how it interacts with pain and emotions, where we want to feel most pleasant. That is the self that speaks. 

For existentialist writers like Sartre, the loss of God means that each individual must create their own values, with only their conscience to guide them. Murdoch thinks this is a false picture, both psychologically and metaphysically. Her view is that we can retain much of the conceptual structure that makes the concept of God intelligible by replacing the Judaeo-Christian idea of a person, God, with the concept of the Good.

According to most monotheistic religions, namely christianity, we are mitigating the self, or view the self as inherenly flawed, a broken version of perfection, which is God, a being abound with love. It neutralises or reframes the position of the self in a larger frame of perceived perfection. It is the fitting of an element into the awareness that it is but just a dispensable cog in a machine running perfectly. The incentive for the now newly christened cog to  perform it's function is the flippant threat that it is easily disposed if it does not follow the design of a greater purpose.

It seems to work, on the basis that the cog believed itself to be working in the machine. But that itself could bring about complications when we note that not everyone can see nor agree with the existence of the perfect machine it claims to be a part of. Or at the least, if there are enough cogs professing its existence, there would be a clear boundary formed by the in-group of 'machine believers' and the out-group of 'kafirs'. In this case, there would be a high possibility for  conflict that jeopardizes the purposes and all levels of health  in the interests of both parties. In order to exist in its best form, both parties would have to exist on a near perfect structure of segretation in terms of all kinds of Interaction, all the while being aware of each other. Nonetheless, many religions don't perform this way as one of their no.1 methods for survival is to cross boundaries for the conquering of foreign ideologies while integrating their version of religious discourse. Given the circumstances, it can be said that monotheistic religions with singular truth narratives incongruent with the pluralism of the world work to mitigate the self, as long as they dominate all narratives, or when they do not interact with any narrative whatsoever which will counteract the foundation of belief for the process of self-mitigation. 

On the other hand, the method of unselfing can be followed through without relying on an authoritative figure or grand narrative. Instead, it can be interpreted that the most important enactor of unselfing is the self. The responsibility lies within the pure incentive of being better at clearing internal and external desires instead of an external pressure of doctrine that requires devotion to authority. 

Iris Murdoch believes that unselfing is required for virtue, as it takes us out of our egoistic preoccupations, and connects us to the Good in the world. Love is a form of unselfing, illustrating how close attention to another, and the way they really are, again, takes us out of a narrow focus on the self. Though this view of love runs counter to a view that those in love often overlook flaws in their loved ones, or at least down-play them, I argue that it is compatible with Murdoch's view that love can overlook some flaws, ones that do not speak to the loved one's true self. Unselfing requires that we don't engage in selfish delusion, but a softer view of our loved ones is permitted.

To unself I simply turn my attention outward, away from myself and on to the world. If I do this successfully I will see things as they really are, and not through the lens of my own selfish concerns. 

Star this: experience of nature has a special role to play in making manifest to us the quality of consciousness that unselfing involves.

her novel The Bell states: ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.’

Like Plato, she assumes that goodness is a matter of truth-seeking, which is a way of bringing oneself into contact with reality. This requires patient attention to what is there, which again demands unselfing. You can see how she might think that the artist displays such attention - she thinks realism in art is a moral achievement.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/why-the-world-needs-iris-murdoch-s-philosophy-of-unselfing-1.3890900