Jordan David Thomas Walters

This article is about how best to understand the Murdochian idea that love is the direct apprehension of another person as a source of value outside oneself. Taking expressions of care as a case study, the article argues that the unilateral conception of loving attention that Iris Murdoch and some of her influential defenders employ cannot make sense of phenomena central to interpersonal love. According to the intersubjective alternative defended, loving attention is based in second-personal thought: thought about another subject that stands to their self-conscious thought as uses of ‘you’ stand to uses of ‘I’. Such a conception better explains why one fully counts as seeing another person, in the sense that constitutes loving attention, only if one thereby puts the beloved in a position to feel seen.

We propose an account of the subject’s cognition and its relation to the world that allows for an articulation of the phenomenon of ideology. We argue that ideology is a form of what we call ‘a priori activity’: it transcendentally conditions the intelligibility of thought and practice. But we draw from strands of post-Kantian philosophy of science and social philosophy in repudiating Kant’s view that the a priori is necessary and fixed. Instead, we relativize the a priori: we argue that it is contingent, and therefore revisable. More precisely, it is conditioned materially, in that it is enmeshed with and shaped by material social practice. We conclude with some remarks about the possibility of agency over the relativized, materially conditioned a priori—that is, about the possibility of critique.