← The Minefield
Purification and the Moral Life: Disciplining the Eyes artwork

Purification and the Moral Life: Disciplining the Eyes

The Minefield
01:00:00
Play episode

Show notes

There are habits of seeing which can corrupt our moral lives, or clutter our vision, or defile our imaginations. Just as there is a “contemptuous gaze”, as Iris Murdoch puts it, there are also “eyes tempered by grace”. So what might it mean to undergo a “fast for the eyes” in order to see the world more clearly?

More from this show

More
  1. Why do we keep remaking films and TV shows?

    Over the last decade, the proliferation of streaming services made more movies and television series available to more people than ever before. It revolutionised what we watch (inc…

    54:40
  2. These days everything is political — is that bad for politics?

    Writing in the 1850s, at the advent of what we would come to understand as the popular press — which is to say, periodicals for mass distribution, rather than aimed at paid-up memb…

    54:36
  3. If AI can’t be brought under human control, why are we still pressing ahead?

    When the history of artificial intelligence is written, the middle months of 2026 may well emerge as a kind of turning point. For this was the period when hundreds of programs or “…

    54:36
  4. Last Words: Is ‘Abbey Road’ a fitting end to the Beatles?

    In our previous explorations of famous “last words” — performances or compositions delivered with a certain end in view, with a sense of either culmination or parting, or with an e…

    54:36
  5. Does a ‘digital duty of care’ put free speech at risk?

    Evidence has been mounting for more than a decade that social media tears away at the fabric of democratic life by eroding the conditions of deliberation, shared understanding and…

    54:36
  6. Is loyalty a virtue?

    It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an in…

    54:45
Now Playing
Purification and the Moral Life: Disciplining the Eyes — The Minefield | Podcast | Josplay Music