Swimming as moral competence

Iris Murdoch’s Crest of a Wave

Abstract

This article builds on Peter Conradi’s observation that “to swim” for Murdoch is nearly synonymous with “to possess a moral competence”. It examines Murdoch’s 1978 Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, the Sea to show how swimming embodies her philosophy of morality as attention, “unselfing” and movement toward “the good”. Everyday practice (prayer, art, being in nature) train this capacity. The arguments propose that swimming is best understood as immersion in the world's “thinginess” (borrowing from Heidegger) rather than mere “otherness”, since it involves both submission to nature and active engagement with it.

Swimming in the novel is a ritual practice, an “ascesis”, through which protagonist Charles Arrowby is gradually stripped of vanity and brought toward moral clarity, though never to full resolution, since for Murdoch moral life remains “chancy and incomplete”. Swimming thus dramatizes Murdoch’s broader philosophical claim that goodness is found not in abstract rules but in embodied, attentive participation in the world.