Life & Wisdom Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch treats desire less like a preference and more like a metaphysical glitch: the body, supposedly pragmatic and opportunistic, locks onto one specific other body and refuses the market logic of replacement. The phrase "absolute yearning" is doing double duty. It romanticizes the pull while also making it faintly alarming, as if the self has been hijacked by a force that doesn’t consult our values or long-term plans. "Indifference to substitutes" is a cold, almost economic formulation, smuggling in the language of consumer choice only to show how badly it fails to describe what actually happens in erotic life.

The subtext is characteristically Murdochian: our cherished self-image as rational agents collapses under the pressure of attention. Her novels and philosophy circle the idea that morality begins not with willpower but with seeing - and being seized by what we see. Here, the mystery isn’t just why we want; it’s why wanting can be so particular that it feels like knowledge, like recognition, like fate. Yet Murdoch’s wording refuses to sanctify it. "Mysteries" can be beautiful, but they can also be opaque, stubborn, and ethically inconvenient.

Context matters: Murdoch wrote in a postwar Britain suspicious of grand metaphysical claims and increasingly fluent in psychology. She threads the needle by granting desire its brute, bodily authority without pretending it’s fully explainable or fully trustworthy. The line captures a modern unease: the most intimate certainty we feel is often the least defensible in argument.