April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

Toril Moi
LANGUAGE AND ATTENTION
An edited and rewritten translation of
Sprk og oppmerksomhet (2013)

Introduction

On 22 July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb in Oslo which killed
eight people and injured over two hundred others. Then he drove to Utya, a small island in
the lake of Tyrifjorden where the Norwegian Labor Party was having its annual youth camp.
At Utya, he killed 69 persons one by one, at extremely close range: inches, not yards.
Almost all the victims at Utya were under twenty. Some were as young as fourteen.
If ordinary language philosophy teaches us anything, it is that when our sense of the
meaning of words disappears, so does our sense of reality. The terrorist of Utya turned out
to have written a manifesto, mostly made up of excerpts from conservative and racist
websites. For years he had been cutting and pasting, citing and recirculating other people's
words. His relationship to language was profoundly alienated. So was his relationship to
reality. To him, the callous killing of children was simply the "marketing operation" for his
manifesto.1 He had lost -- or maybe he never really had -- any sense of the weight of words.

Moi, Toril. "Markedslogikk Og Kulturkritikk: Om Breivik Og Ubehaget I Den

Postmoderne Kulturen." Samtiden.3 (2012): 20-30. Print.
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In Norway, Anders Johansen, a professor of non-fiction at the University of Bergen,
wrote that the terror at Utya changed our relationship to language: Serious attempts to
make words conform to reality are no longer immediately dismissed as nave. To many of us
it has been crucial to find ways to say something true about what happened, in a language
that is accurate both to facts and emotions.2
After reading this, I realized that it was not by coincidence that I began to write about
language and attention in May and June 2012, at the same time as I attended parts of the 22
July trial at Oslo District Court.3 The trial made me realize that questions of language and
attention are not esoteric topics. On the contrary: if we want a good society, one devoted to
justice for all, we should encourage every citizen to develop the capacity to look at reality,
other people, themselves, with the kind of attention the British philosopher Iris Murdoch calls
a just and loving gaze.4
Wittgenstein tells us to despise the craving for generality and instead cultivate the
keenest attention for particulars. He also reminds us that we often fail to see the most obvious
and ordinary things, precisely because they are obvious and ordinary. We need to learn to see
the ordinary and the everyday afresh, learn to pay attention to the obvious. We also need to
develop our capacity to face the difficulty of reality, focus on the things we prefer to avoid,

Alvorlige forsk p bringe ord i samsvar med virkelighet blir ikke uten videre
avfeid som naive lenger. For mange har det vrt maktpliggende kunne si noe sant om det
som skjedde, i et sprk som kan vre dekkende bde saklig og emosjonelt. Anders
Johansen, Virkelighetssjokk, Prosa nr. 5, 2012: 18.
3
I would like to thank Trygve slund, who invited me to give a talk at Aschehougs
Summer Seminar in June 2012. Without his invitation the original essay this chapter is based
on would never have been written. But without Nora Campbells enthusiasm for the project, I
would never have considered turning the talk into a proper manuscript. Nora is an excellent
editor: her comments were always both challenging and inspiring. Nazneen Khan strem
helped to convince me that this ought to become a text in the Voices-series. Ane Farseths
deserves special gratitude, for she heroically agreed to read and comment on the original
lecture draft on one hours notice.
4
Ref. to David L. Paletz and Toril Moi op-ed in the New York Times. 2012.
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the things we really dont feel we have the energy truly to take in. (The "difficulty of reality"
is Cora Diamond's expression. I shall return to it.)
This is not a "theory." One doesn't need to study Wittgenstein to do these things. For
me, however, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Austin remain necessary. Because I am an intellectual
and an academic, and because I care about the life of the mind in the university, the
wonderful, liberating, freeing thing about Wittgenstein and Austin and Cavell too, is that
they offer an intellctually convincing way back to the ordinary. I have no wish to break with
academic inquiry, or turn into an anti-intellectual. On the contrary, I want intellectual life to
engage with ordinary life, with human experience, in a language that can tell the difference
between confused abstraction and genuine insight. Ordinary language philosophy sets us free
to look at whatever we are interested in: Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever
ordinary language is about, Cavell writes.5 That freedom is fantastic, but with freedom, as
Sartre and Beauvoir always said, comes responsibility. To write about what we are interested
in is to reveal what we take ourselves to be responsible for.
This chapter is about the importance of attention, and of language. In this chapter I
examine a moral attitude that we can call attention, or, more precisely, a just and loving
gaze. This attitude is personal, existential, ethical, and potentially (but by no means always)
political. It can be an intellectual or artistic practice, too. I draw on Iris Murdoch (who draws
on Simone Weil), and Cora Diamond, but unlike them, I emphasize the need to find a
language to express what the just and loving gaze sees.
For attention alone is not enough. It is also crucial to learn to express what we see,
learn to find the words (or the artistic forms) with which to show what the world looks like
from the position we find ourselves in. This is why literature matters. Writers spend their
lives trying to find the right words. They can teach us differences. If we learn to pay

Cavell, Aesthetic Problems, p. 95.

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attention, and to express ourselves as well and fully as we can, then we will also increase our
faith in language, and help overcome the widespread skepticism against languages capacity
to express something real. By training our attention, and our capacity to use language
attentively, well gain a deeper understanding of our real need (108).
If we imagine a utopian world in which we all looked at reality with a just and loving
gaze, we wouldnt all see the same things in the same way. Social and political debates would
be at least as pointed as they are now. But per definition, the just and loving gaze cant just be
interested in its own vision. We must assume a willingness to direct that gaze, that attention
to what other people say they see. If we spent more time trying to understand why they can't
see exactly what we see, maybe we would become less quick to dismiss those who disagree
with us, and thus a little better at acknowledging the point of view of others. If nothing else,
such habits would surely improve the quality of political and ethical discussions.
By language I certainly dont mean what is usually called literary language. (I
seriously doubt that such a thing exists.) When Henry James had to explain what it takes to
become a good writer, he didnt say that writers should work hard to develop a specifically
literary language, but that they should try to notice everything: Try to be one of the people
on whom nothing is lost.6 Literature teaches us how to unite attention and language. The
best literary writing forces us to open our eyes, to see both language and reality as crucially
important, as something we need to engage with, take in and think through. The best literary
writing expresses an unusual capacity for attention, and as a result it inspires others to
become more attentive. And while it is true that writers specialize in linguistic labor, one
doesnt have to be a writer to use language with maximal attention. Some people manage to
do it in everyday life, or in court.

Henry James, The Art of Fiction, Longmans Magazine 4 (oktober 1884): 510.
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The opposite of attentive language is language used to conceal reality. Unfortunately
bureaucrats and academics are among the worst culprits. They often express themselves in
ways that land us in a quagmire of words that dont mean anything, words that only serve one
purpose: to make us acquiesce in ideas, actions and projects we dont actually understand.
This is dangerous for intellectual life, and even more dangerous for democracy.7

An Attentive Gaze is a Just and Loving Gaze

By attention I don't mean the vigilance of evil. I just said that I thought an attentive
gaze has to be a just and loving gaze. I hesitated for a long time before I decided to adopt
Iris Murdochs formulation. It is, after all, only too easy to take just and loving to mean
sentimental and moralizing. And the last thing I want is to imply that I am in favor of a
judgmental and saccharine gaze.
Attention comes from the Latin ad + tendere: to reach or stretch towards
something. Both in English and French the word gathers a whole cluster of meanings around
itself: to direct the mind or observant faculties, to listen, apply oneself; to watch over,
minister to, wait upon, follow, frequent; to wait for, await, expect. The idea of caring for, or
serving others here converges on the idea of listening, waiting, and watching.
Two women, one French and one British, have turned attention into a fascinating
philosophical concept. The first was the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (190943),
who studied philosophy at the Sorbonne at the same time as Simone de Beauvoir. The second
was Iris Murdoch (1919-99). For Weil, to be attentif is to be waiting, watchful, open to what
may arise: Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready

I think of The unknown known, Errol Morriss film on Donald Rumsfeld, 2014, as a
great example of this.
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to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it, Weil writes.8 To be attentive is
to be disponible pour la vrit: to be open, ready, available for the truth.9
For Weil the ultimate truth is God: prayer consists of attention.10 But one doesnt
have to be a mystic to follow Weil; an interest in earthly truth will suffice. Weil herself, in
fact, analyzes the value of attention through a discussion of schoolwork. Any training of
attention is an unqualified good, she claims, because it trains the mind to open itself to the
truth. Even the most banal school studies, such as math problems or translation to or from a
foreign language provide valuable training in attention. The right sort of attention, however,
only arises if we manage to find joy and pleasure in the work: The joy of learning is as
indispensable in study as breathing is in running, she writes.11
Attention, then, is not the same thing as willed concentration. The student isnt
supposed to focus on her schoolwork because she wants to achieve the best possible grades,
but simply because it is valuable to learn to carry out any task with clear attention. We must
also train ourselves into looking at our own mistakes the bad essay, the math exam we
failed with unbiased attention. The result of the training will show itself when we least
expect it, Weil assures us: Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention
wasted.12

Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,
in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Crawfurd (New York: Harper Colophon, 1973), p. 112. Et
surtout la pense doit tre vide, en attente, ne rien chercher, mais tre prte recevoir dans sa
vrit nue lobjet qui va y pntrer. Simone Weil, Rflexion sur le bon usage des tudes
scolaires en vue de lamour de Dieu, i crits de Marseille (194042): Philosophie, science,
religion, questions politiques et sociales, redigert av Florence de Lussy, uvres compltes
(Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 260.
9
School Studies, 112; tudes scolaires, 260.
10
School Studies, 105; La prire est faite dattention, tudes scolaires, 255.
11
School Studies, 110; La joie dapprendre est aussi indispensable aux tudes que
la respiration aux coureurs. tudes scolaires, 259.
12
School Studies, 106; Jamais, en aucun cas, aucun effort dattention vritable
nest perdu. tudes scolaires, 256.
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When Weil discusses attention and school studies, she probably imagines a studious
youth bent over translations to and from Latin and Greek in France around 1940. For us, who
live in an era of distraction, it is harder than ever to develop the capacity for attention. We are
pulled in every direction by multitasking and incessant electronic interruptions. Simone Weil
would probably have been quite horrified at students or professors for that matter who
listen to music, surfs the web and replies to text messages while they are trying to finish a
philosophical essay, a translation or a math problem.
For Weil attention is neutral, waiting and open. It rests on joy, a pleasurable wish to
see the truth. Attention is neither striving nor self-promoting. It tries to understand, not
destroy. Iris Murdoch stresses these aspects of Weils concept by saying that attention
express[es] the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.13
Murdoch takes the idea that focused attention has to be both loving and just from Weil, who
writes: Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our
neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.14 Warmth
and compassion are not at all synonymous with attention: too much sympathy can blind us to
reality. To manage to see another human being with the openness of genuine attention, is
truly difficult: it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle, Weil writes.15
Weil writes about attention because she wants to pray. Murdoch, on the other hand,
wants to turn us into active moral agent[s], persons capable of having a genuinely moral
relationship to reality and to act accordingly.16 Murdochs understanding of attention is far
more action-oriented than Weils.

13

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 33.

Weil, School Studies, 114. Ce nest pas seulement lamour de Dieu qui a pour
substance lattention. Lamour du prochain, dont nous savons que cest le mme amour, est
fait de la mme substance. Weil, tudes scolaires, 261262.
15
School studies, 114; cest presque un miracle; cest un miracle. tudes
scolaires, 262.
16
Murdoch, Sovereignty, 33.
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But is just and loving the right expression? Murdoch stresses repeatedly that she
wants nothing to do with sentimentality and misplaced compassion. So does Weil. A just and
loving gaze enables us to see the world as it is. It is the best strategy we have when we want
to discover the truth about a person or a situation. We will never understand whatever it is we
are looking at if we dont do our utmost to see the situation from the other persons point of
view, yet without relinquishing our own perspective. A just and loving gaze tries to explain
everything in the kindest way, but in the end, it does not shy away from criticism. A just gaze
doesnt accept just any excuse. It is willing to judge, yet never becomes judgmental. If we
really want to become active moral agents, there is no better alternative than Murdochs
(and Weils) recommendation that we look at the world with a combination of justice and
love.
Murdoch does not write about politics. But a just and loving gaze is needed in politics
too, perhaps more than anywhere else. The boundary between morality and politics is not
absolute. It is both politically and morally urgent, for example, to find the right relationship
to the Other, to groups or individuals who have been defined as different or deviant. In
the 1920s and 30s, Simone Weil directed her attention towards the French working class. In
spite of her bad health, she worked in a factory before leaving for Barcelona to fight in the
Spanish Civil War: Her attention was as political as it was religious.
In the 1970s, the womens movement set out to train womens attention, to develop
womens capacity to see the ordinary and the everyday afresh. This is not to say that the
feminist gaze of the 1970s was always just and loving. Sometimes it was angry, defiant, and
deeply unjust. But the right response to a defiant or rebellious gaze is not to dismiss it, or to
react with hatred and anger, but to pay attention to the reality it tries to convey. The task is to
try to understand both why the anger arises, what it responds to, and what it is trying to

April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

achieve. At the same time we must acknowledge where the defiant or angry gaze grates
against the reality it is trying to grasp.
A just and loving gaze is open and waiting in relation to reality, but it is not passive.
To be attentive is to let reality reverberate in us. Attention answers, responds and takes
responsibility.17

The Value of Attention: Cora Diamond

Cora Diamond has long been interested in attention: attention to particulars, attention
to and in literature; and attention in the sense of Murdoch's just and loving gaze. For her, as
for Weil and Murdoch, moral reflection is a specific kind of attention, a particular response to
the world, a way of seeing things (the world, other people, oneself).
For Diamond, moral philosophy -- moral thought -- has to focus on the particular
case, on the individual, the specific and the unique. She disagrees with the widespread idea
that moral reflection is always expressed through deliberation on clear-cut choices, or in
explicit evaluations: right, wrong, evil, good. Like Iris Murdoch, she thinks there are "moral
attitudes which emphasise the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of
understanding."18 Deep insights can arise unexpected places, not least in literature. To show
what she means by attention, Diamond quotes the last stanza of "Ducks," a children's poem
by Walter de la Mare. Having described many different kinds of ducks, the poet concludes:

All these are kinds. But every Duck

Himself is, and himself alone:
Fleet wing, arched neck, webbed foot, round eye,

17

I couldnt have written this without reading Cavell on acknowledgment as response.

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And marvellous cage of bone.
Clad in this beauty a creature dwells,
Of sovran instinct, sense and skill;
Yet secret as the hidden wells
Whence Life itself doth rill.19

In this text, a perfectly ordinary duck is transformed into a creature of beauty and
dignity, deserving of respect and admiration. Diamond wants us to see that there is something
morally important about the quality of his attention. Lets call this an example of a just and
loving gaze.
Traditional moral philosophy, Diamond writes, takes a far too narrow view of what
counts as relevant insights and thoughts about morality. It takes for granted that moral
philosophy is only a matter of deciding what the right action is in situations where we have to
make a difficult choice. The famous trolley problem is the quintessential example of this
attitude. Here is one example from among the multitudes of different versions: A runaway
railway trolley comes down the railway line. If nothing is done, it will kill five workers
further down the track. I am standing on a bridge over the track, next to a very fat man.
Should I push this stranger down on the line in order to save the five workers? Versions of
the trolley problem has been used to get clear on everything from the influence of insomnia
on our capacity for moral deliberation, through gender differences in the moral domain, to
where to draw the limits between different moral doctrines.20

18

Iris Murdoch, Symposium: Vision and Choice in Morality, Proceedings of the

Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 30 (1956): 46.
19
Walter de la Mare, Ducks, i The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (London:
Faber, 1969), 817.
20
Iversen, Jokaim ien, Betydningen av n natts svn for moralske valg.
<http://frisksomenfisk.com/nyheter/29/10/11/betydningen-av-en-natts-soevn-formoralske-valg>.
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Diamond thinks the trolley problem is truly useless (my interpretation, not her words)
when it comes to explaining the kind of moral reasoning we actually engage in in everyday
life. First, it is overly focused on dramatic choices. Second, it divorces the question of moral
action from the question of how we see the world. Thus it turns morality into something that
is placed on top of already existing knowledge.
More generally, Diamond objects to the idea that epistemology and metaphysics
provide the framework for what we can say about reality, and then, once that framework is in
place, moral philosophy can tell us what is to count as good or evil, right or wrong. In this
way morality is reduced to the question of how to label people and their actions, and divorced
from questions concerning truth and insight (for those questions are taken to be settled before
the moral reflection can begin.)
Such a view is perfectly compatible with naturalistic and scientistic world views, but
not with ordinary language philosophy. In a naturalistic world view, moral reflection may be
an interesting pastime, unconnected to actual knowledge. Such attitudes also think of
language as an overlay, as something external to truth, something additional, without intrinsic
moral relevance. Ordinary language philosophy is sharply opposed to this view. Words and
world are intertwined, and it is impossible to use language without simultaneously expressing
a human subjectivity: as soon as we speak, we also make judgments, show others what we
see.
Diamond reminds us that in reality moral action only rarely take the form of a clear
choice, in which we can make lists of arguments for and against. In real life, we often feel
that we have no choice. Or we discover that we already have done something with huge
moral implications, without really thinking about it. Sometimes we make long lists of
arguments, consider them carefully, and decide what to do. Then we go out and do the
opposite. Or we dont actually do anything. In such situations, the trolley problem is no help.

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At the beginning of Iris Murdochs novel The Bell (1958), Dora Greenfield takes the
train on a hot summers day. The train, of the kind with a long corridor running along the side
of the compartments, is hot and overcrowded. As Dora squeezes into her middle seat in her
compartment, she feels sweaty and fat, for her skirt is tight and she is only too aware that she
has put on weight. An old lady struggles through the crowded corridor and reaches Doras
compartment, delighted finally to have found Doras neighbor, a rather large old lady. Dora
stopped listening because a dreadful thought has struck her. She ought to give up her seat.
She rejected the thought, but it came back.21
Dora spends over a page thinking about her new moral dilemma. Should she give up
her seat? Couldnt the elderly lady just as well stand in the corridor herself? But she looks
rather frail, and the corridor is really crowded. Nobody else in the compartment look as if
they are even thinking of getting up. But Dora took the trouble to get to the train early. She
deserves her seat. Doesnt the elderly lady deserve to stand in the corridor? In any case, Dora
was tired. She certainly deserved to rest:

She regarded her state of distress as completely neurotic. She decided not to
give up her seat.
She got up and said to the standing lady Do sit down here, please. Im
not going very far, and Id much rather stand anyway.22

It turns out that the elderly lady already has a corner seat by the window in a different
carriage, and that she is only too pleased to change seats with Dora. Everyone in this
carriage was thinner, Dora thinks as she settles into her comfortable corner.23

21

Iris Murdoch, The Bell (New York: Penguin, 1987), 910.

Mudoch, The Bell, p. 10.
23
Mudoch, The Bell, p. 11.
22

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The scene is comic: we smile at the contrast between Doras smug deliberations and
her spontaneous leap out of her seat. But there is an edge to the comedy. The scene tells us
that the relationship between moral reflection and action is more complicated than we think.
Dora is by no means a saint. Her reflections arent particularly subtle. She has a tendency to
be selfish, and she loves feeling physically comfortable. She is also a little too pleased to be
rewarded with a better seat. (Murdoch herself considered thoughts of rewards to be alien to
moral deliberations.24) Dora clearly has a fairly shaky understanding of why she does
whatever she does. This turns out to be the case for her train journey too. Without really
understanding why, she is on her way to be reunited with her husband, a man she fears.
However, Dora still has the right attitude. While the other passengers bury themselves in their
newspapers or determinedly stare out of the window, Dora is attentive. She takes in the
situation. She gets up. Murdochs attitude towards Dora is humorous, but loving and just, too.

The Difficulty of Reality

To devote ones full attention to a phenomenon or a person, and to find a language in

which to express what we see, is difficult. Even when we do our best, others may never
understand us. Sometimes we are overcome by our own inadequacy: we simply cant find the
words.
Cora Diamond writes about the difficulty of reality. She defines it as something we
arent capable of thinking about, maybe because it is too painful, maybe because it is
inexplicably good:

24

In the case of morality, although there are sometimes rewards, the idea of a reward
is out of place. Murdoch, Sovereignty, 65.
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The difficulty of reality []. That is a phrase [for] experiences in which we
take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be
painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and
astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so
may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty, of being hard or
impossible or agonizing to get ones mind round. 25
Diamond is clearly not just talking about traumas. And even when she does discuss
traumatic experiences, she does not share the post-Saussurean conviction that traumas
necessarily fall outside language. To her, the difficulty of reality is something that has to do
with the way we take it, or in other words: our response. When wecant find words, the
problem is not language, it is us.
Finding the words to express goodness is not necessarily easier than finding the words
to express evil. Diamonds example of the way in which goodness can be experienced as the
difficulty of reality is thought-provoking. Ruth Klger was sent to Auschwitz when she
was thirteen.26 During the initial triage, the SS-officers female assistant, herself a prisoner in
the extermination camp, walked up to Ruth and asked how old she was. Thirteen, she replied.
Tell him you are fifteen, the woman said. When the SS-officer asked about her age, Ruth said
fifteen. The officer thought she was small. The assistant pointed out that she seemed strong.
Thats how she became registered as a prisoner in the camp, and thus got a small chance to
survive. Klger writes:

I have always told this story in wonder, and people wonder at my wonder.
They say, okay, some persons are altruistic. We understand that; it doesnt
surprise us. The girl who helped you was one of those who likes to help. []

25

Cora Diamond, The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, i

Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking og Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and
Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 4445.
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But dont just look at the scene. Focus on it, zero in on it, and consider what
happened. [] Her decision broke the chain of knowable causes. [] She saw
me stand in line, a kid sentenced to death, she approached me, she defended
me, and she got me through. What more do you need for an example of perfect
goodness? [] Listen to me, dont take it apart, absorb it as I am telling it and
remember it.27

Klger experiences this moment as an incomprehensible miracle, something she

simply cant understand with ordinary logical criteria. After the war, she encounters people
who dont think there is anything special at all in her experience. Their attitude eradicates
Klgers own deep and lasting sense of wonder. Diamond makes us see that there is
something morally defective about such an attitude. If we are to meet Ruth Klger with a
just and loving gaze, we have to be able to see what she sees, to take in the permanent state
of amazement and wonder in which Ruth Klger lives.

The Realism of Attention: Little Eyolf

Ruth Klgers case shows that the right kind of attention isnt simply a cool, clinical
noting down of features of reality. It takes imagination and empathy to be able truly to get
inside the experiences of the other. I think this is what Simone de Beauvoir has in mind
when she speaks of being absorbed by a novel, to the point of feeling the taste of another
life.28 At the same time, however, we need to avoid what Murdoch calls fantasy.
According to Murdoch we engage in fantasy when we project our own proliferation of

26

I am expanding on Diamonds example, which she discusses in The Difficulty of

Reality, 6162.
27
Ruth Klger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: The
Feminist Press at CUNY, 2001), 108109.
28
See The adventure of Reading, ch. 5 here for the quote.
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blinding self-centred aims and images on to reality.29 The just and loving gaze requires
detachment, a kind of impersonality: The freedom which is a proper human goal is the
freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion.30 Misplaced sentimentality has
neither moral nor artistic value.
Both Murdoch and Diamond use the word realism about the capacity for attentive
moral response: in the elaboration and application of moral concepts, we come to an
understanding of what the world is, what life is, Diamond writes.31 For Murdoch, realism is
a moral achievement, a liberation of the self, the result of an unusual capacity for unselfish
attention. Moral philosophy therefore has to be a kind of realism. But this realism is almost
impossible to achieve: How is one to connect the realism which must involve a clear-eyed
contemplation of the misery and evil of the world with a sense of the uncorrupted good
without the latter idea becoming the merest consolatory dream? 32
I am not quite sure what Murdoch means by uncorrupted good. If she means
something like a Platonic ideal, I cant follow her. Let me translate her idea into a more
ordinary register: We must develop and preserve a sense of goodness as an ordinary,
everyday phenomenon, something that doesnt have to be either extraordinary or saintly. To
be a morally responsive human being is to look at reality with a just and loving gaze. This
gaze, if we can develop it, makes it possible to try to do the right thing in relation to others.
(That any action can fail, or have unanticipated consequence is part of the grammar of the
word: thats just what an action is.)

29

Murdoch, Sovereignty, 65.

Murdoch, Sovereignty, 65.
31
Diamond, Murdoch the Explorer, Philosophical Topics 38, no. 1 (2010): 57We
have already discussed Diamonds realistic spirit.see chapter 2.
32
Murdoch, Sovereignty, 59.
30

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To learn to love is to learn to see. Ibsens late play Little Eyolf (1894) provides an
excellent example.33 Ibsens critics have often complained that this play is difficult to
understand. They have been particularly concerned with what they take to be the plays
inferior structure. According to them, it is a problem that the plays dramatic event the
death by drowning of Rita and Alfred Allmers ten year old son, Eyolf happens already at
the end of the first act. Eyolf drowns because he follows a strange ratwife into the fjord.
Critics who think this is the high point of dramatic action of the play, can't figure out what
Ibsen wanted to do in the remaining two acts.
The play ends with a scene in which Rita and Allmers hoist the flag, after they have
decided to do something for the poor boys who live down by the fjordside, the same boys
who often poked fun at Eyolf, who was lame in one leg.34 Many critics have found this end
unbearably sentimental and melodramatic.
If we take Weil, Murdoch, and Diamond seriously, its not that difficult to understand
what Ibsen is interested in in Little Eyolf. The play is about two ordinary, well-intentioned
human beings who refuse to look attentively at themselves, other people or the world. When
their son dies, suffering enters Allmerss and Ritas lives. The last two acts show how that
suffering, the awareness of human finitude -- changes the protagonists, how it slowly makes
them realize that they cant continue to live in their egocentric cocoon. At the end of the play,
Rita wants to develop Something that could ressemble a kind of love in relation to other
people.35 But that requires her to shed her illusions and learn to look at themselves, and
others, with a realistic a just and loving gaze.

33

This section draws on my essay on Little Eyolf, published in Chris Gray and Susan
Wolfs collection ADD REF.
34
I follow Ibsens habit of referring to male principal characters with their last names.
35
Noget, som kunde ligne en slags krlighed .Henrik Ibsen, Hundrersutgave:
Henrik Ibsens samlede verker, ed. Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, 21
vols. (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1928-57), bind 12: 266.
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April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

If we read the play in this way, the structure isn't mysterious at all. In the first act
Ibsens genius shows us Ritas and Allmerss egoism and blindness. Then the worst happens.
In the second act we witness the emergence of the protagonists increasing self-insight, which
culminates in the wish to care for others, in the third act.
In the end, Rita and Allmers decide to do something for the poor children down by the
fjordside, the children whose screams we hear, but whom we never get to see on stage. It is
quite possible that they wont be able actually to carry out their project. But as they stand
there hoisting the flag in the last scene, they want to try. To them, the thought of working for
the children of others is an attempt to free themselves from illusions and try to see reality as it
is. Ibsens own gaze at these characters is neither sentimental nor judgmental. At the end of
the play, they are neither heroes nor villains, but two ordinary people who have to live in a
world they now know to be as fallen and imperfect as they are.
Even the structure of Ibsens play brings out the connection between realism and love.
For Little Eyolf is structured as a double movement away from selfishness and towards love,
away from fantasy and towards reality. The controversial end emphasizes Ritas and
Allmerss attempt to go on living without closing their eyes to suffering. Metatheatrically,
the play struggles to develop a just and loving gaze on its own imperfect characters. But
the play is not just a narrative of their attempts. The very form of the play, the form that
annoyed so many critics, represents an enormous effort to escape from traditional forms of
theater (tragedy, comedy, melodram) and reach a new form of realism, a realism capable of
showing the right kind of compassion.

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I Am Learning to See: Rilke and the Attention of Modernism

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) are as different from Little Eyolf as it
is possible to be. Yet Rilke too is interested in the way egoism blocks the possibility of an
attentive gaze. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a fiery defense of the modernist
understanding of writing. In order to grasp what is real, important, and necessary in an
alienated and alienating world, one must write. Through his writing, Malte questions
absolutely everything he has been told by others, everything he has learned and heard.
Writing is a counter-strategy to deception and inauthenticity. To write is to convey something
genuine, something true. A true writer needs to be able to see, to experience the world for
himself:

I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into
me; nor do impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is
a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do
not know what happens there.36

This is fascinating passage sets up the Notebooks investigations of the relationship

between the inner and the outer. By inner I mean the inner life, what Wittgenstein
sometimes calls the soul. By outer, I mean whatever surrounds the writer. Rilke brings
out the paradoxical nature of writing. Writing is expression, in the most literal sense of the
word, for it turns the inner into something outer. At the same time, however, the writer
doesnt have a soul, an inner life, until he learns to see.
36

Rilke, Notebooks, Penguin Classics, p. 4. Ich lerne sehen. Ich wei nicht, woran es
liegt, es geht alles tiefer in mich ein und bleibt nicht an der Stelle stehen, wo es sonst immer
zu Ende war. Ich habe ein Inneres, von dem ich nicht wute. Alles geht jetzt dorthin. Ich
wei nicht, was dort geschieht. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzechnungen des Malte Laurids
Brigge, vol. 5, Gesammelte Werke (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1927), 9.
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April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

The implication is that if we dont see anything, if we dont pay attention to the
outside, we have no inner life. Or rather: paying attention to the outer produces an inner
space we ourselves dont understand. If we dont turn our attention to the world around us,
we will either remain empty, or become utterly predictable, because utterly without an
unknown inner space. When Malte learns to see, he becomes a mystery to himself, but this is
an enrichment, the very condition of writing.
For Malte, the more he learns to see, the more he ends up feeling unknown,
unknowable by others. After all, he himself doesnt understand what goes on in his new,
secret interior space. There is an incipient skepticism at work here, a skepticism which
necessarily leads to thoughts of loneliness, madness and death. But the alternative, which is
not to open ones eyes, is worse, for that leads to inner emptiness, to the death of the soul.
In a brief passage, Malte describes his parents strained relationship to the local
parson, Dr. Jespersen:

When he visited us, Dr. Jespersen had to content himself with being some sort
of private person; but that was precisely what he had never been. As long as
he could remember, he had been in the souls department. The soul was a
public institution, which he represented, and he contrived never to be off duty,
not in even in his relations with his wife, his modest, faithful Rebekka,
beatified by the bearing of children, as Lavater put it when writing of another
case.37
The passage reveals that Jespersens problem is that something that should be inner
the soul somehow has become something outer. This externalized innerness is clearly

37

Penguin edition p. 71.Dr. Jespersen mute sich bei uns darauf beschrnken, eine
Art von Privatmann zu sein; das gerade aber war er nie gewesen. Er war, soweit er denken
konnte, im Seelenfach angestellt. Die Seele war eine ffentliche Institution fr ihn, die er
vertrat, und er brachte es zuwege, niemals auer Dienst zu sein, selbst nicht im Umgang mit
20

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neither a mask nor a costume, nor is it a deliberate performance. Rilke describes it as a
department, an institution, a clunky and impractical administrative unit which Jespersen
either doesnt want to or doesnt know how to break loose from. As a result, Jespersen has
become impossible to relate to for anyone who doesnt piously submit to his ecclesiastical
authority. He simply no longer knows how to behave like an ordinary human being (a
private person). No wonder, then, that young Maltes parents find Jespersen the most boring
guest imaginable: To be candid, there was nothing whatsoever to talk about; remnants were
dragged out and disposed of at unbeliveable prices everything had to go.38 Without an
inner life, language and expression becomes impossible. But to get an inner life, we need to
learn to see.
For Rilke, Jespersens state is a serious matter. If authenticity requires the outer to
correspond to the inner, then Jespersen can neither be authentic or inauthentic. Since
Jespersen is the outer shell he shows the world, the distinction becomes meaningless. For this
reason, we cant call him a hypocrite, either. In a way, Jespersen is a postmodern subject a
hundred years ahead of time: he is his priestly performance. No concept of falsity or
inauthenticity can apply to him, yet paradoxically, this is precisely what makes him seem so
hopelessly inauthentic.
The difference between the young Malte and Jespersen is that Malte tries to see, to
take in the world, whereas Jespersen has become a bureaucrat of the soul: his role as the
representative for an organization has made it impossible for him to be an individual, a
private person, a self. The irony is that this bureaucrat works precisely in the soul-business.
I dont think Rilke thought of himself as a writer particularly concerned with moral
issues. To convey what a shallow and self-obsessed person is like, Rilke simply shows us

seiner Frau, seiner bescheidenen, treuen, durch Kindergebren seligwerdenden Rebekka,

wie Lavater sich in einem anderen Fall ausdrckte. Rilke, Aufzeichnungen, 5, 132.
38
Rilke, pp. 70-71.
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how he talks, without sticking moral labels on any specific point, but also without shrinking
from judgment. Yet his insistence that we must learn to see has obvious moral (or political)
implications. Rilkes style, his way of presenting his material, his utterly original engagement
with the relationship or non-relationship between the inner and the outer challenges his
readers: can we see what he sees?

Virginia Woolf and Reality

Rereading A Room of Ones Own, I realize that Virginia Woolfs project actually is to
unite language and attention. (If that is true, then this chapter is also a homage to Woolfs
wonderful essay on women and literature.) The message is that women must write, not just
for their own sake, but for the sake of the world: When I ask you to write more books I am
urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How to
justify this instinct or belief I do not know, for philosophic words, if one has not been
educated at a university are apt to play one false.39 But of course she goes on to justify her
instinct anyway.
In ordinary life, we only catch fleeting glimpses of reality. Usually we are far too
filled with superficial and selfish thoughts to realize what actually is there, around us. A
writer is privileged to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his
business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us (Room, 108). (I find
Woolf a touch too Romantic here, just a shade too convinced that writers always have godgiven powers of insight, but I cant let that deter me. At least I agree that writers are
specialists in language and attention.) In modernity, a human being risks living her whole life
in a kind of unreality, unless she learns to see. To read texts like King Lear, Emma, or In

39

Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 108.
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April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

Search of Lost Time opens our senses: one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems
bared of its covering and given an intenser life (Room, 109).
Reading matters as much as writing. (Few writers have read as much as Virginia
Woolf, I think.) Reading texts that genuinely grasp reality, we learn to pay attention. Even if
we cant find the words to express our experiences, we can focus our attention on them.
According to Woolf, the reward for our attention, and for our struggle to express its insight, is
a stronger and more vital experience of life itself.
For Woolf, attention is disinterested and impersonal. Self-consciousness is destructive
for any writer, but particularly for women: It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their
sex, she declares (Room, 102103). Dont dream of influencing other people. [] Think of
things in themselves (Room, 109). If it is crucial for women to enter literature, to become
part of our literary tradition, it isnt because they womens only literary task is supposed to be
that of shedding light on an otherwise neglected subspecies of the human (so that the woman
writers only raison dtre would be to write about her gender), but because each individual
woman writer shows us the world as she experiences it, without hidden agendas of any
kind.40
A writer is always searching for truth, Woolf writes. But truth has a deplorable
tendency to slip out of our hands, just like Woolfs thought fish swims out of her head
when she is told that because she is a woman, she is not allowed to walk on the grass. A
writer, she insists, must communicat[e] his experience with perfect fullness. There must be
freedom and there must be peace ( Room, 103). When women enter literature, well get
greater insight both in women and in the world. Each woman has to find her own voice, focus
her attention on the world, and find a language in which to express her vision. Although
Woolf doesnt say that this is a political task, it can easily become one. In the 1970s, we

23

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learned from the womens movement that under the right circumstances, such a seemingly
simple project can be political dynamite.
Like Beauvoir, Woolf appears to think that only creative writing truly gives us
another world. Moreover, she does seem to believe that only some few, hugely talented
individuals have the capacity to create a genuine language with which to communicate their
vision. If she means the capacity to create a language, and a vision, that will remain in history
for centuries, she is surely right. But writing is not only valuable for a Dante or a
Shakespeare. Non-fiction, and philosophy too, can change lives.
Luckily it is easy to read A Room of Ones Own from a more democratic perspective.
Woolf's fundamental insight is true for everyone: it is valuable to try to see reality as it is, and
to find a language for what one sees. The result doesnt have to be War and Peace. An
attempt to pay attention at the breakfast table, or in the next office meeting will also help
change the world, however imperceptibly.

Must We Read Literature?

I have deliberately placed great emphasis on the importance of reading literary texts.
For me, the best literature gives us the most brilliant examples of attentive language. So I
have been quoting poetry, plays, novels, autobiographical testimony and non-fiction (if we
can call A Room of Ones Own non-fiction). But of course it is not necessary to have read a
single book in order to be able to look at others with a just and loving gaze. The value of
attention is certainly not something that must be learned from philosophy and literature.

40

I discuss some of the implications of this view on I am not a woman writer

(2008).
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April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

This is why I disagree with Martha Nussbaums claim that we necessarily will
develop the capacity for compassion through reading literature.41 As if people who dont
have the education, the leisure, or the money to sit down to read a book somehow are doomed
to remain less sensitive and compassionate than those who do. History, of course, offers
plenty of examples to the contrary. We have all heard stories about the concentration camp
commanders who enjoyed Goethe and Schiller in their spare time.
I suspect that the relationship between attention and the love of literature is the other
way around: people who are interested in attention, will often find joy and insight in
literature, if they have the opportunity to become readers. The reason why literature is
valuble isnt that it makes us good. It is that it helps us to see the world more clearly. It
does this, not because writers are the only attentive people in the world, but because they
work so hard on their language.
If it is expressed, the vision of the attentive gaze sees can have significant social and
political implications.42 To work with language is to train oneself to see more clearly. Writing
is thinking. There is no such thing as "literary language." There is only language that makes
us see, and language which doesn't. And all the shades of transitional uses of language that
end up somewhere on the sliding scale between them: language that makes us glimpse
something; language that has caught hold of a "thought fish," but fails to reel it in, and so on.
The call to look at reality with a just and loving gaze is the opposite of formalism:
whatever form that enables the writer to express her own vision is the right one. Non-fiction,
or even academic writing, can have as much impact as poetry. As literary scholars we dont
need to don the formalist straight-jacket. Instead we can simply train ourselves to look at

41

Se Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
(Princeton og Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).
42
Cf. Sartre and Beauvoirs unveiling through writing.
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April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

literature with the right attention, and strive to find the right language, style and form in
which to share our vision with others.

Language and Attention after 22 July

Ane Farsethss recent book about contemporary Norwegian literature shows that in
the decade leading up to the 22 July 2011, much of the best Norwegian literature was haunted
by a sense of unreality. In this decade, Norwegian society, with its combination of oil-fueled
affluence and social-democratic traditions, appeared to breed a desire for reality in many of
its most talented artists.43 The postmodern fascination with performance and performativity
had lost much of its hold, and writers as well as characters often worried about authenticity,
veering between a fear of being seen and the wish to remain hidden.
In an essay in the Norwegian journal Samtiden, I wrote about the mass murderer of 22
July that He is the worst possible incarnation of a culture in search of reality.44 For at least
a generation, it has been chic to claim that language fails to grasp reality. This made us lose
any faith we may have had in the power of language to change reality.45 But if we lose faith
in language, the alternative is action. In Ibsen's Rosmersholm, Rebecca West throws herself
into the waterfall because she realizes that nothing she can say to Rosmer will overcome his
doubt in her, and in himself.46 To find reality is to find our faith in the power of language to
do something in the world. But there is no need to get melodramatic about it, to think
exclusively in large-scale terms. Even de la Mares insignificant little duck pushes our

43

Ane Farseths, Herfra til virkeligheten: Lesninger i 00-tallets litteratur (Oslo:

Cappelen Damm, 2012).
44
Toril Moi, Markedslogikk og kulturkritikk: Om Breivik og ubehaget i den
postmoderne kulturen, Samtiden, nr. 3, 2012: 24.
45
Cf. Sartre and Beauvoir, committed literature, etc.
46
See my chapter on Rosmersholm in Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism.
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understanding of the life of animals just a little further, just because the writer looks at it with
such tremendous attention.
This is why I read Vigdis Hjorths 2012 novel Leve posthornet! with such pleasure.
(The title, which refers to Kierkegaards Repetition, means Long live the Posthorn!").
Written in the aftermath of 22 July, this novel truly tries to break down the belief that
language cant say or do anything real. The story about Ellinor, a communications advisor
who has completely lost the sense of the meaning of her words; who literally cant see clearly
when she looks out of the window; who no longer is able to feel anything for the people that
surround her, whether it is her lover, her family, or her colleagues, is simultaneously a
profound and witty allegory of postmodern societys alienated relationship to language.
Leve posthornet! asks about the meaning of life without becoming tragic. Hjorth finds
the right comic tone -- her novel is a Norwegian counterpoint to the British tradition of comic
novels from Jane Austen to Zadie Smith. Hjorth joins this tradition without giving up her
modern and postmodern taste for game-playing. Her novel is full of genuinely funny
references to other Norwegian novels (not least Dag Solstads parable of the faithful postman
in Maos China, in Arild Asnes 1970), and offers us a piece of magic realism in the story
about a teacher who is chased off an island off the coast of northern Norway because she
makes her young students realize that they are unhappy. It is also a fine satire of political and
commercial bureaucratic complacency.
The title may well be derived from Kierkegaards ode to the posthorn in Repetition
(he praises it because it is said never to sound the same tone twice), but it may also be a sly
reference to that pioneering postmodern novel, Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49, in
which a posthorn is the symbol of a conspiracy which may or may not exist. Furthermore,
Derridas well-known claim that the letter never arrives, is also under attack here, for in
Hjorths novel, the mail actually does arrive.

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April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

As the novel develops, Ellinor manages to find both language and action. She learns
to mean what she says, and to work with something she has faith in, namely the heroic
struggle to stop Norway from adopting the European Unions Third Postal Directive. (One of
the best parts of the novel is the way it uses pits ordinary language to satirize bureaucratic
language.) When Elinor develops a more genuine relationship to language, she even manages
to shed her disdain for clichs, realizing instead that sometimes a clich expresses exactly
what she feels. Over time, her emotional numbness leaves her, and she begins to admire and
learn from the experiences of others.
It is no coincidence that the action of Leve posthornet, a novel written after the
massacre at Utya, ends in April 2011. It would be difficult to set a story about Ellinors
new-found attention and optimism to a period that included 22 July. Yet the novel expresses
the longing for reality, for a more genuine faith in language that intensified in the aftermath
of those atrocious events.
For Norwegians the terror of 22 July was, and remains, a deeply traumatic example of
the difficulty of reality. We could not find the words. If a genuine understanding of 22 July
demands that we be capable of looking at everything that happened that day with a just and
loving gaze, only saints will succeed.
Yet Oslo District Court nevertheless made huge efforts to look at the events of that
day precisely with such a gaze. After the presentation of the post-mortem report for each
victim, the court looked at a photograph of the victim while a one-minute long biography,
usually written by his or her family, was read out. Many survivors from Utya spoke in court
about their suffering. The accused was also given hours to express himself, both at the
beginning and at the very end of the trial.
Towards the end of the 22 July trial, Morgenbladet's commentator, Kristopher Schau,
wrote that after the experience of sitting in court every day for ten weeks, he only had one

28

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conclusion: let us be good to one another. (The word he used was snill, which hovers
somewhere between good and kind, and is often used about children.) I understand what
he means. There is something so awful about contemplating the pain and horror of terrorism,
day after day, that we naturally want to remember that goodness too belongs to the range of
human capacities. The same impulse makes us join rose marches to seek comfort in
community. (On 25 July 2011, 200,000 people marched in the center of Oslo, carrying roses
as a symbol of their revulsion for the horrors in Oslo and at Utya. Similar marches took
place all over Norway.)
But here I need to stress that being "good" is not at all the same thing as to look at
others, or the world, with a just and loving gaze. To be good is not always a virtue. When
we tell a child to be good, we usually dont mean that he is to show compassion, but that he is
to obey us, and follow the rules. Children brought up to be good often grow into expert
pleasers, at the cost of their own voice and identity. Moreover, what may look as good
behavior, may in fact be motivated by all kinds of more or less obscure feelings: a sense of
guilt; a misunderstood sense of duty; masochistic self-sacrifice. A person looking at the
world through the lens of such feelings certainly doesnt see it clearly.
For Simone Weil, to look at ones neighbour with the right attention is to see him so
clearly that we give him the help he actually needs, not the help we intellectually believe he
needs.47 To give that sort of help may not make us look good, in either sense of the word. If
we are obsessed with our own efforts to appear good, we also risk underestimating evil, or
not seeing it for what it is. An attentive gaze isnt moralizing, but it doesnt shrink from
judgment when required. In fact, to describe a phenomenon as clearly as we can is to express
a judgment. In Norway, we often believe that to be good is to make sure we never say
anything critical about someone else. But avoidance is not a moral virtue. To withhold the

47

Se Weil, tudes scolaires, 262.

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truth from someone is to deprive him of an opportunity to face reality. The attentive gaze
the just and loving gaze must be capable of contemplating evil, otherwise its aspirations
will be hollow.
Maybe it is because I believe in the power of ordinary language to say something true
about reality that I was so shocked by the first two expert psychiatrists testimony in court. In
their report, and during the trial, Synne Srheim and Torgeir Husby revealed what a
scientistic understanding of psychiatry, based entirely on the checklists of the diagnostic
manual ICD-10.48 They were deeply skeptical about ordinary languages capacity to convey
truth. They appeared not to have a moral vocabulary, and they were quite incapable of
reflecting on their own categories.
However, in spite of their allegiance to pure science, they inevitably based key
findings on their own understanding of what is to count or not count as ordinary language,
apparently without realizing it. One example would be their claim that the mass murderers
language, in interviews and in his manifesto was full of neologisms of the kind typical for
psychosis. Under cross-examination, however, it turned out their criterium for a neologism
was simply their own sense of what counts as ordinary language: a neologism, they said, is a
word that we take to be used in an incomprehensible way.49
But if this is the only language we have to speak of what happened on 22 July, well
never understand what happened that day. In court, this became very apparent. On Thursday
14th June, during the cross-examination of Srheim and Husby, the presiding judge, Wenche
Arntzen, had to take on the role as a moral philosopher:

48

ICD-10 is WHOs diagnostic manual. It is organized according to similar principles

as the American Psychiatry Associations handbooke DSM-V.
49
ord som brukes p en uforstelig mte for oss VG-Nett, 22/7-rettssaken: Ordfor-ord dag 38 (torsdag 14. juni), VG-Nett, 15. juni (endret 17. juni) 2012.
<http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/rettssaken/artikkel.php?artid=10058131>.
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Judge Arntzen: As to this question about who shall live and who shall die. Is it
a delusion because it so immoral?
Psychiatrist Srheim: Now you confuse me.
Arntzen: You are saying that nobody can decide who shall die, that morally
speaking nobody can have this responsibility?
Srheim: The way we see it, no single individual has the responsibility for
who gets to live and die.
Arntzen: Well, many people have that responsibility in the sense of the death
penalty, and in war. These are phenomena that exist.
Srheim: Yes, you are of course right.
Arntzen: But to call it a delusion. Is it because it is so immoral?
Srheim: No, I am thinking of the examples you mentioned about war, and to
sentence someone to death, its impossible that he, sitting there in his
childhood bedroom would belong in one of those categories, and really
believe that he was in a position to discover who should live and who should
die.
Arntzen: Yes, there is a transition from legitimate through a wide spectrum to
illegitimate homicide. Terrorist actions may have an ideological basis.
Couldnt this be experienced as a vocation, however absurd it might be?
Srheim: I think we begin from a simpler starting point than you, in your
position as judge, has the opportunity to do. Our starting point is that he was
sitting there alone, and quite seriously spent years figuring out who would
have to die. []50
50

Dommer Arntzen: Ogs dette med hvem som skal leve og hvem som skal d, er det
en beskrivelse av en vrangforestilling fordi det er s umoralsk?
Rettspsykiater Srheim: N ble jeg forvirret.
Arntzen: Dere sier at ingen kan bestemme hvem som skal d, men ingen kan vel i
moralsk forstand ha dette ansvaret.
Srheim: Snn som vi vet det, er det ingen enkeltindivider som har et ansvar for hvem
som skal leve og hvem som skal d.
Arntzen: Det er jo mange som har ansvaret for det i betydningen ddsstraff og krig.
Det er et fenomen som eksisterer.
Srheim: Ja, det har du selvflgelig rett i.
Arntzen: Men det fre det som en vrangforestilling. Er det fordi det er s umoralsk?
Srheim: Nei, jeg tenker de eksemplene du sa om krig og ved ilegge noen
ddsstraff, det er umulig at hvordan han p gutterommet skulle komme inn i en av de
kategoriene og mente han var i posisjon til finne ut hvem som skulle leve og d.
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The very fact that Srheims reaction was to be confused by Arntzens clear
questions about morality and ideology, reveal that it is possible to practice psychiatry at the
highest level without ever engaging in moral reflection. Judge Arntzens questions, on the
other hand, show that the persons who actually were carrying the burden of deliberating
about the sanity or insanity of the mass murderer, to assess the degree of responsbility he had
for his actions, discovered that they simply couldnt do this from a purely positivistic
perspective.
The 22 July trial certainly demonstrated that a scientistic understanding of the soul is
neither infallible nor particularly interesting. But it wasnt just the trial that showed that we
need different concepts, a different gaze, a gaze that doesnt immediately reduce the
difficulty of reality to the simplistic and flattening categories on a questionnaire. The debate
raging around every aspect of what happened on 22 July has shown that we have to develop
our capacity to discuss moral questions about action and responsibility. This is why we need
a new focus on language and attention.
The mass murderer of 22 July is the product of a society in which nobody has
troubled themselves with the need for a just and loving gaze. He is a distorted caricature of
the worst in postmodern society. He is Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman rolled into one.51
Maybe this is even more striking in the case of the Norwegian terrorist, since his horrendous
actions, and his unspeakably chilling manifesto with its deadly marketing metaphors were put
together after the financial crisis, which mercilessly revealed how the same logic, and the
Arntzen: Ja, du har en overgang fra rettmessig drap og et spekter over [til] fullstendig
urettmessig. Terrorhandlinger kan vre ideologisk begrunnet, er ikke det et
selvopplevd kall s absurd det enn kan vre?
Srheim: Jeg tror vi tar et enklere utgangspunkt enn dommeren har anledning til ta.
Vrt utgangspunkt er at der satt han alene og i dypeste alvor brukte han r finne ut
hvem som mtte d. [...22/7-rettssaken: Ord-for-ord dag 38
51
Maybe I should add Jordan Belfort, so memorably portrayed by Leonardo di Caprio
in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
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April 14, 2015 / Toril Moi

same language, led to economic catastrophe for millions of ordinary workers all over the
world.
A society that refuses to take the demand for genuine attention seriously, and rejects
the very idea of a just and loving gaze as so much unscientific sentimentalism, will be cold
and bureaucratic. In such a society, leaders will consider themselves managers, content to
have carried out correct protocol. They wont ask themselves if they have looked at the
situations for which they are responsible with genuine attention. Nor will they ask themselves
whether they really understand what actions are required to solve the problems they are
dealing with. Instead, they will continue to make and follow bureaucratic rules. When
disaster strikes, they will hide behind their rules and regulations, and their vague, lifeless and
peculiarly impersonal language. When we have to sort through the rubble, and find out what
such people take responsibility for, we will certainly feel that reality keeps slipping through
our fingers.

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