Mary Midgley

Career

Midgley left Oxford in 1942 and went into the civil service, as "the war put graduate work right out of the question". Instead, she "spent the rest of the war doing various kinds of work that were held to be of national importance". During this time she was also a teacher at Downe School and Bedford School. She returned to Oxford in 1947 to do graduate work with Gilbert Murray. She began research on Plotinus's view of the soul, which she has described as "so unfashionable and so vast that I never finished my thesis". In retrospect Midgley has written of her belief that she is "lucky" to have missed out on having a doctorate. She argues that one of the main flaws in doctoral training is that, while it "shows you how to deal with difficult arguments", it does not "help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context – the background issues out of which the small problems arose."

In 1949 Midgley went to Reading University, teaching in the philosophy department there for four terms. In 1950 she married Geoffrey Midgley (died 1997), also a philosopher. They moved to Newcastle, where he got a job in the philosophy department of Newcastle University. Midgley stopped teaching for several years while she had three sons (Tom, David and Martin), before also getting a job in the philosophy department at Newcastle, where she and her husband were both "much loved". Midgley taught there between 1962 and 1980. During her time at Newcastle, she began studying ethology and this led to her first book, Beast and Man (1978), published when she was 59. "I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didn't know what I thought before then."

Awards

Midgley was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by Durham University in 1995 and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law by Newcastle University in 2008. She was an honorary fellow of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre at Newcastle University. In 2011 she was the first winner of the Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity.

Death

Midgley died at the age of 99 in Jesmond on 10 October 2018.

Ideas and arguments

The purpose of philosophy

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." Midgley argued that philosophy was not something that was reserved for intellectuals and academics. In her view, it is something we all do — an activity that is part of the human conditions.

Philosophy and religion

Despite her upbringing, she did not embrace Christianity herself, because, she says, "I couldn't make it work. I would try to pray and it didn't seem to get me anywhere so I stopped after a while. But I think it's a perfectly sensible world view." She also argues that the world's religions should not simply be ignored: "It turns out that the evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of."

Midgley's book Wickedness (1984) has been described as coming "closest to addressing a theological theme: the problem of evil." But, Midgley 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. She therefore criticizes existentialism and other schools of thought which promote the 'Rational Will' as a free agent. She also criticizes the tendency to demonize those deemed 'wicked', by failing to acknowledge that they also display some measure of some of the virtues.

Midgley also expressed her interest in Paul Davies' ideas on the inherent improbability of the order found in the universe. She argued that "there's some sort of tendency towards the formation of order", including towards life and "perceptive life". The best way, she argued, of talking about this is using the concept of "a life force", although she acknowledged that this is "vague". She also argued that "gratitude" is an important part of the motivation for theism. "You go out on a day like this and you're really grateful. I don't know who to."

This understanding also links with Midgley's argument that the concept of Gaia has "both a scientific and a religious aspect." She argued that people find this hard to grasp because our views on both science and religion have been narrowed so much that the connections between them are now obscured. This is not, however, about belief in a personal God, but instead about responding to the system of life, as revealed by Gaia, with "wonder, awe and gratitude"

She observes that "practically all the great European philosophers have been bachelors", and argues that this may be responsible for the solipsism, skepticism, and individualism that dominate the tradition.

Gaia and philosophy

Midgley was supportive of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. This was part of her "principal passion" of "reviving our reverence for the earth". Midgley also described Gaia as a "breakthrough", as it was "the first time a theory derived from scientific measurements has carried with it an implicit moral imperative – the need to act in the interests of this living system on which we all depend.

In 2001 Midgley founded, along with David Midgley and Tom Wakeford, the Gaia Network, and became its first Chair. Their regular meetings on the implications of Gaia led to the 2007 book Earthy realism edited by Midgley, which sought to bring together the scientific and spiritual aspects of Gaia theory.

Midgley's 2001 pamphlet for Demos, Gaia: The next big idea, argues for the importance of the idea of Gaia as a "powerful tool" in science, morality, psychology and politics, to gain a more holistic understanding of the world. Instead, Midgley argued that we "must learn how to value various aspects of our environment, how to structure social relationships and institutions so that we value social and spiritual life, as well as the natural world, alongside commercial and economic aspects.

Her book Science and Poetry, also published in 2001, also includes a discussion on the idea of Gaia, which she argued "is not a gratuitous, semi-mystical fantasy", but instead is "a useful idea, a cure for distortions that spoil our current world-view." It is useful both in finding practical solutions to environmental problems and also in giving us "a more realistic view of ourselves". Gaia has, Midgley argued, both scientific and moral importance, which also involves politics. There is also a religious angle to Gaia.

Reductionism and materialism

Beast and Man was an examination of human nature and a reaction against the reductionism of sociobiology, and the relativism and behaviorism she saw as prevalent in much of social science. She argued that human beings are more similar to animals than many social scientists then acknowledged, while animals are in many ways more sophisticated than was often accepted. She criticized existentialists who argued that there was no such thing as human nature and writers such as Desmond Morris who she understood as arguing that human nature was "brutal and nasty". Instead, she argued that human beings and their relationship with animals could be better understood by using the qualitative methods of ethology and comparative psychology, and that this approach showed that "we do have a nature and it's much more in the middle."

Writing in the 2002 introduction to the reprint of Evolution as a Religion (1985), Midgley reported that she wrote both this book, and the later Science as Salvation (1992) to counter the "quasi-scientific speculation" of "certain remarkable prophetic and metaphysical passages that appeared suddenly in scientific books, often in their last chapters." Evolution as a Religion dealt with the theories of evolutionary biologists, including Dawkins, while Science as Salvation dealt with the theories of physicists and artificial intelligence researchers. Midgley writes that she still believes that these theories, "have nothing to do with any reputable theory of evolution," and will not solve the real social and moral problems the world is facing, either through genetic engineering or the use of machines. She concludes: "These schemes still seem to me to be just displacement activities proposed in order to avoid facing our real difficulties." "[I]n exposing these rhetorical attempts to turn science into a comprehensive ideology," she wrote in The myths we live by, "I am not attacking science but defending it against dangerous misconstructions."

Midgley argued against reductionism, or 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 argued 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."

Midgley wrote her 2014 book, Are you an illusion? as a response to Francis Crick's argument in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis that a person's sense of personal identity and free will is no more than the behaviour of nerve cells. She attacks the understanding inherent in this argument that everything, including a sense of self, can be understood through its physical properties. Instead, she argues that there are different levels of explanation, which need to be studied using different methods. This means that thoughts and memories are an integral part of reality for both humans and animals and need to be studied as such.

Midgley–Dawkins debate

In 1978, J. L. Mackie published an article entitled The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution, praising Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, and discussing how its ideas might be applied to moral philosophy. Midgley responded in 1979 with "Gene-Juggling", stating that Dawkins was an "uncritical philosophic egoist", followed by some far less kind opinions of his work, and arguing that the central point of The Selfish Gene was "that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested", rather than a perspective of general evolution. In a 1981 rebuttal, Dawkins retorted that the comment was "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic".

The bad feeling between Dawkins and Midgley did not diminish. 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. In her books 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 of what she regarded as his rhetoric ("genes exert ultimate power over behaviour"), which she argued is 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.

In an interview with The Independent in September 2007, she argued 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." In April 2009 Midgley reiterated her critical interpretation of The Selfish Gene as part of a series of articles on Hobbes in The Guardian. In her 2010 book The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene, she argues that "simple one-sided accounts of human motives, such as the "selfish gene" tendency in recent neo-Darwinian thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic".

Midgley in art

Midgley is referred to in The Lives of Animals (1999), a work of fiction by the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. The book has been likened to a cross between a short story and a philosophical dialogue, as Coetzee's protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, often speaks at length about philosophical ideas. Many reviewers expressed bafflement at the text, which has an enigmatic and riddling style. As one reviewer noted, "the reader is not quite sure whether he is intended to spot some confusion or contradiction or non-sequitur in [the protagonist's] arguments." Other critics however have noted many affinities between The Lives of Animals and Midgley's philosophy, and have used Midgley's ideas to make sense of Coetzee's work.

The main character, who also appears in Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, is concerned with the moral status of animals, a subject Midgley addressed in Animals and Why They Matter, and discusses at length the idea of sympathy as an ethical concept, a subject Midgley wrote about in Beast and Man. Andy Lamey wrote that the result of these and other similarities is that Coetzee's work "evoke[s] a particular conception of ethics, one very similar to that of the philosopher Mary Midgley. Such a view affords a central role to sympathy and is fundamentally opposed to a long-standing rival view, most clearly exemplified by the social contract tradition, which prioritizes an instrumental conception of rationality."

Coetzee and Midgley additionally shared a longstanding fascination with Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee retells the Crusoe story in his novel Foe, while Midgley wrote about Crusoe in her essay "Duties Concerning Islands." Midgley's essay argued for the idea that human beings can have ethical obligations to non-human entities such as animals and ecosystems, an idea also found in The Lives of Animals, Foe and many other works by Coetzee.

Midgley agreed to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Newcastle during 2006, as part of the Environment Triptych, along with heads of Richard Mabey and James Lovelock. This was exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2013.