Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind
If there was a person whose biography was bound to attract my attention, then Mary Midgley has all the essential elements. Her father was a chaplain at King’s College, Cambridge for a while, and she was brought up in Cambridge, Greenford and Ealing. Almost perfect (except I was brought up in Northolt, Ealing and Cambridge – but at least my dad was a teacher in Greenford!). She was a ‘late bloomer’ and starting serious writing as a philosopher when she was in her fifties, her first book published when she was 59 years old. More to the point she became famous in her sixties for criticising Richard Dawkins, rightly so in my opinion, but we will return to that later.
How do you become interested in a writer. Serendipity plays a large part, because there are so many people publishing interesting studies and commentaries. I don’t recall now why I bought a copy of Heart and Mind, a collection of her essays which appeared in 1981. Perhaps it had been recommended. It is likely that I was browsing in a bookstore and was intrigued by the cover on the 1983 paperback edition, which emphasised the book’s subtitle, The Varieties of Moral Experience. Whatever the reason, it was to feed my growing interest in philosophical questions. How could it not with the reissue of papers on such topics as On Trying Out One’s New Sword, The Objection to Systematic Humbug, and Is ‘Moral’ a Dirty Word.
I was to discover, to my delight, that she argued against science becoming a substitute for the humanities (after all, it had taken me a long time to get there, and reassurance was welcome), and I was to learn she was regarded as scourge of scientific pretensionism. She is a master of calling a spade a spade. In commenting on constant improvements in military technology, she argues there can be little doubt that Israel is busily trying out new swords when its attacks on Hamas include new Iron Sting precision mortars and drones to assist its work in targeting terrorists. If it is a little unfortunate that these new swords mean some non-combatants are killed, these are incidental deaths that are unintentional of course, all part of learning about the consequences of using whatever the new sword is right now – isn’t it?
Some writers find a way to cut through pretence and unnecessary sophistication. Liz Else reports that Midgley argued that philosophy is like plumbing, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong. “Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers … noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with.” (in New Scientist, 3 November 2001). Equally significantly, Midgley argued that philosophy was not something that was reserved for intellectuals and academics, but that it is something we all do — an activity that is part of the human condition.
Part of Mary Midgley’s strength lies in her emphasis on what she describes as ‘realism’. A good example is her commentary on the problem of evil.” In her 2003 book, The Myths We Live By, she argues that we need to understand the human capacity for wickedness, rather than blaming God for it. Midgley argues that evil arises from aspects of human nature, not from an external force. She further argues that evil is the absence of good, with good being described as the positive virtues such as generosity, courage and kindness. Therefore, evil is the absence of these characteristics, leading to selfishness, cowardice and similar.
The first of her many books, Beast and Man was an examination of human nature and a reaction against some of the then fashionable approaches in the social sciences, especially sociobiology and behaviourism. It was to establish two key elements of her thinking, that human beings are more similar to animals than many then acknowledged, while at the same time animals are in many ways more sophisticated than was often accepted. This was linked to her other concern, and again she criticised both those ‘existentialists’ of the time who argued that there was no such thing as human nature, but also writers like Desmond Morris (of The Naked Ape fame) who seem to be proposing a Hobbesian view, that human nature was ‘brutal and nasty’. She felt there was much to be learned from disciplines like ethology and comparative psychology. Their approach showed that “we do have a nature and it’s much more in the middle,” (see Anthony on Midgley in The Observer 23 March 2013).
Her sensitivity to fashionable thinking and a willingness by some researchers to go to extreme was to become well-known in 1979, in her comments on Dawkin’s book The Selfish Gene, published three years earlier. Midgley argued in Gene-Juggling (Philosophy, 54: 439–458), that The Selfish Gene was about “psychological egoism” rather than evolution. It was to prove the opening salvo in a long-running saga. In a note to page 55 in the 2nd edition of The Selfish Gene(1989), Dawkins refers to her “highly intemperate and vicious paper”. Midgley continued to oppose Dawkins’ ideas, and in both Evolution as a Religion (2002) and The Myths We Live By (2003), she wrote about what she saw as his confused use of language — using terms such as ‘selfish’ in different ways without alerting the reader to the change in meaning, and some expressions (“genes exert ultimate power over behaviour”), which she argued were more akin to religion than science.
She wrote in a letter to The Guardian in 2005: “[There is] widespread discontent with the Neo-Darwinist—or Dawkinsist—orthodoxy that claims something which Darwin himself denied, namely that natural selection is the sole and exclusive cause of evolution, making the world therefore, in some important sense, entirely random. This is itself a strange faith which ought not to be taken for granted as part of science.” She wasn’t finished. In an interview with The Independent in September 2007, she suggested that Dawkins’ views on evolution are ideologically driven: “The ideology Dawkins is selling is the worship of competition. It is projecting a Thatcherite take on economics on to evolution. It’s not an impartial scientific view; it’s a political drama.”
She says she doesn’t want to ‘keep on attacking’ Dawkins, but he continuing criticism of his approach is revealing, especially as it relates to her overwhelming desire to counter simplistic reductionism. Dawkins is referred to once again in Are You an Illusion? as a leading representative of what Midgley sees as a kind of self-deceiving fatalism, namely the conviction that the universe has no purpose, that it contains at bottom, as Dawkins has written, “nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”. Midgley insists that no one can know this, and that there is in fact much evidence to suggest there is purpose. Our own planet, she argues, is “riddled with purpose… full of organisms, beings that all steadily pursue their own characteristic ways of life, beings that can be understood only by grasping the distinctive thing that each of them is trying to be and do”.
Midgley has identified a concerning trend towards reductionism in other scientists. This was the concern that led her to write Are You an Illusion? In this book, her principal concern was with Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, and she quotes from his book The Astonishing Hypothesis: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact [her italics] no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their attendant molecules.” As she sees it, Crick is suggesting our sense of self is an illusion, an elaborate trick played by our nerve cells. That’s tricky, at least in the sense we cease to exist as conscious beings the moment those nerve cells stop functioning. When asked what she takes consciousness to mean, she suggests, “I think it’s a faculty that animals including us have. And it’s developed gradually out of other faculties … The trouble is we’re getting at the problem of consciousness from the wrong end because this dogmatic materialism which I was attacking in the book is so much part of our culture that consciousness comes in as something unaccountable.”
As far as I am concerned, she is another Charles Handy. What I mean by that is she makes us confront paradoxes, and realise the power that lies in paradox, in embracing what doesn’t fit together, rather than trying to eliminate paradox by obliteration of one facet (exactly what Dawkins does in The Selfish Dream). In The Empty Raincoat, Handy wrote on The Paradoxes of Our Times (Chapter 2). Among these, he considered what he saw as The Paradox of the Individual:
Society speaks with two voices. One voice urges us to discover our `authentic self’, to be ourselves, to plan our own path through life and, whilst respecting the rights of others, to hold fast to the right to be true to ourselves. …
The other voice is that of the receptionist or the conference-organiser. `Who do you represent?” “To whom are you affiliated?’ “What organisation are you from?’ Recounting his problem with receptionists and switchboards, the British writer, Anthony Samson, who works on his own from home, says, `I’m tempted to reply that I represent the human race…the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but it won’t get me through the switchboard. I have to reply that I represent no one or that “I’m just a friend”. …
It is a paradox, once best captured by Jung, who said, years ago, that we need others to be truly ourselves. `I’ needs `We’ to be fully `I’. Looking up, however, at the office-blocks in every city, those little boxes piled on top of each other up into the sky, one has to wonder how much room there is for `I’ amid the filing cabinets and the terminals. It was A. E. Housman, Sampson reminds us, who wrote in one of his poems, `I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.’ Who, we must wonder, will be the ‘We’ to whom we would want to belong? Is it the minimalist, virtual organisation?: Or our current `edge city’ in suburbia? Or the disappearing family? Can a personal network substitute for these?
Mary Midgley fights against simplification and reductionism, the attempt to impose any one approach to understanding the world. She suggests that there are “many maps, many windows,” arguing that “we need scientific pluralism—the recognition that there are many independent forms and sources of knowledge—rather than reductivism, the conviction that one fundamental form underlies them all and settles everything.” She writes that it is helpful to think of the world as “a huge aquarium. We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows … We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. But if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far.” She argues that, “acknowledging matter as somehow akin to and penetrated by mind is not adding a new … assumption … it is becoming aware of something we are doing already.” She suggested that “this topic is essentially the one which caused Einstein often to remark that the really surprising thing about science is that it works at all … the simple observation that the laws of thought turn out to be the laws of things.” (These quotes come from The Myths We Live By, 2003). “
To return to the collection of essays in Heart and Mind, it is uncompromisingly a book about ‘facts’, and an argument that the facts of modern psychology must be accommodated within any theoretical framework concerning morals. It is more than that, however. Writing in The Guardian (29 Nov 2013) she was addressing the issue of the relatively limited number of women philosophers after the Second World war: “The trouble is not, of course, men as such – men have done good enough philosophy in the past. What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about. All this can go on until somebody from outside the circle finally explodes it by moving the conversation on to a quite different topic, after which the games are forgotten. Hobbes did this in the 1640s. Moore and Russell did it in the 1890s. And actually I think the time is about ripe for somebody to do it today.” Equally important she does so in such a way that the maximum number of people can see what she’s talking about. The philosopher and historian Jonathan Rée says: “She has always written in a language that’s not aimed at the cleverest graduate student. She’s never been interested in the glamour and greasy pole” associated with Oxbridge and London.”
In Heart and Mind, essay seven asks Is ‘Moral’ a Dirty Word? It is a brilliant examination of how various writers have either dismissed or focussed on the topic of morality. She explains “I want to try the hypothesis that the central job theword does, the one for which it is worth preserving, is to mark, as Philippa Foot suggested, a certain sort of seriousness and importance (as in the remark, ‘we can’t just do what we fancy here; there is a moral question involved’) and its other implications , whether of form or content, flow from this.” Clear and simple. Morality isn’t trivial. Nor is morality just another perspective, like humour. Midgley argues that moral means ’belonging to a man’s character, to his central system of purposes’, so that being moral relates to seriousness. Being moral, she argues, is a serious matter. “A serious matter is one that affects us deeply … the moral point of view is one where we consider priorities, where we ask, ‘what are the most serious, the central things in life.’”
In a brief commentary, what can be said about a person who writes with clarity and focus on some key issues without skimping over her analyses. You have to read her work. I was struck by that somewhat maverick philosopher Roger Scruton having made the comment about Mary Midgley that she has “ploughed her own furrow”. He wrote of her: “Believing that philosophy has been wrongly described as the handmaiden of the sciences, she seeks instead to approximate it to art, poetry and religion, as part of a systematic attempt to make sense of the human condition and to show the place in the natural world of beings like us.”
Midgley herself has several metaphors to describe that process. In one she speaks of science being but one portal through which to observe an aquarium of life. In another she refers to science as “one of the enterprising plants” – along with history, poetry, music and mathematics – “that have taken root… and spread to transform great parts of the human landscape”. In one discussion about her approach the point was made that there are some things, it was suggested, such as gravity or electromagnetic forces that they exist – unlike poetry or music – regardless of the human landscape. Yes, but that leaves us with the challenge of ‘meaning’. We put ourselves in the centre of the universe when we search for patterns and clues that are resonant with us. But leaves us with the puzzle that our attempts to make sense of a universe that appears to be indifferent to us and our struggles. Midgely notes, “You want some sort of proof that is you and isn’t you,” she replied to Anthony Andrew (in Mary Midgley: a late stand for a philosopher with soul, The Guardian, 23 March 2014). “You’re going on as if there was some kind of proof that wouldn’t go through oneself. There can’t be, can there?”
