Mary Midgley, Moral Philosopher
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Mary Midgley.
The biologist Stephen Rose called her “a philosopher with what many have come to admire, and some to fear, as one of the sharpest critical pens in the West.”
CreditLeon Harris/eyevine, via Redux
Mary Midgley is a leading moral philosopher who became an accessible, persistent and sometimes witty critic of the view that modern science should be the sole arbiter of reality.
Midgley, who taught at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne for years, wrote more than a dozen essays for a general audience.
Her last essay, “What Is Philosophy For?,” was published by Bloomsbury Academic.
The publisher said in a statement: “Its quality and remarkable insights do not fall short of the brilliant mind that penned it.”
The biologist Stephen Rose, writing in The Times Literary Supplement called Midgley “a philosopher with what many have come to admire, and some to fear, as one of the sharpest critical pens in the West.”
Andrew Brown, writing in The Guardian, called her “the foremost scourge of scientific pretension in this country.”
Midgley unhesitatingly challenged scientists like the entomologist Edward O. Wilson and the biologist, and noted atheist, Richard Dawkins.
By her lights they practiced a rigid “academic imperialism” when they tried to extend scientific findings to the social sciences and the humanities.
In place of what she saw as their constricted, “reductionistic” worldview, she proposed a holistic approach in which “many maps” — that is, varied ways of looking at life — are used to get to the nub of what is real.
One challenge came in her first essay, “Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature,” based on a conference she had organized on that slippery, perennial subject at Cornell.
She was later asked to revise her original manuscript to reflect her critical reaction to Wilson’s best-selling book, “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (“a volume the size of a paving stone,” she wrote later in a well-received autobiography, “The Owl of Minerva”).
She described the field of sociobiology as a kind of reactionary “biological Thatcherism.”
Sociobiology — the application of gene-centered theories of natural selection to the social life of organisms — was not itself overly controversial, especially, as Wilson originally used it, in the study of ants and insects.
Midgley, given her own interest in emphasizing humans’ animal nature — that “we are not, and do not need to be, disembodied intellects” — praised parts of Wilson’s essay.
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Midgley’s first essay, “Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature,” was well-received.
What provoked her and others was his hypothesis that the tenets of sociobiology could be applied to humans.
That idea, according to scholars, threatened to radically revise generally accepted notions of human nature.
“The term ‘human nature’ is suspect because it does suggest cure-all explanations, sweeping theories that man is basically sexual, basically selfish or acquisitive, basically evil or basically good,” Midgley wrote in “Beast and Man.”
In “The Owl of Minerva,” she wrote that the need to address Wilson’s concepts had distracted readers from her crucial topic:
“the meaning of rationality itself — the fact that reason cannot mean just deductive logic but must cover what makes sense for beings who have a certain sort of emotional nature.”
She adds that “Beast and Man” remains “the trunk out of which all my various ideas branched.”
Midgley took pains to distinguish between the important contributions of science and the philosophy of “scientism,” in which “prophets,” she writes, decree that science is “not just omnicompetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking.”
“We do not need to esteem science less,” she continued.
“We need to stop isolating it artificially from the rest of our mental life.”
Midgley did not align herself with any specific school of thought.
She wrote that moral philosophy and plain “common sense” often covered the same ground.
She targeted what she saw as some of the basic errors of modern scientific orthodoxy, including misplaced objectivity, the exclusion of purpose and motive, and the propensity to depersonalize nature.
The very titles of her essays — among them “Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning” and “Evolution as a Religion” — and even irreverent chapter headings, like “Knowledge Considered as a Weed Killer,” conveyed her stance against what she called the “parsimonious” worldview of science.
In The Journal of Philosophy, she issues a scathing critique of Dawkins’s widely popular essay “The Selfish Gene,” taking issue with what she called his “crude, cheap, blurred genetics.”
In that essay, Dawkins suggests that evolution is a product of an innate drive in genes to perpetuate themselves, “selfishly,” through the vehicle of a given species, and that the behavior of living things is in service to their genes.
Midgley explains her disagreement years later in The Guardian, writing:
“‘Selfish’ is an odd word because its meaning is almost entirely negative.”
“It does not mean ‘prudent, promoting one’s own interest.’”
“It means ‘not promoting other people’s’ or, as the dictionary puts it, ‘devoted to or concerned with one’s own advantage to the exclusion of regard for others.’”
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She refutes the notion that selfishness underpinned all life.
“Just as there would be no word for white if everything was white, there could surely be no word for selfish if everyone was always selfish,” she writes, adding, “Selfishness cannot, then, be a universal condition.”
In a career as a philosopher, Midgley addressed a great number of subjects.
Evolution, the importance of animals, the role of science in society, cognitive science, feminism and human nature all came under her scrutiny.
She ranged more widely in “Science and Poetry,” in which she considered the place of the imagination in human life.
She found excesses of materialism and fatalism in human life, discussed the unusual compatibility of physics and religion, and approved of philosophical and metaphorical aspects of the Gaia hypothesis, which looks at the earth as a living system.
“With this essay,” Brian Appleyard writes in The Sunday Times of London, “Midgley establishes herself as the most cool, coherent and sane critic of contemporary superstition that we have.”
She was born Mary Scrutton in Dulwich, England, to Lesley Hay and Tom Scrutton.
Her father, a church curate, became a chaplain of King’s, Cambridge, before the family moved to Greenford, where he became vicar and where Mary and her brother, Hugh (later a prominent art gallery director), grew up.
When she was 12 Mary attended Downe, a boarding school that had begun in Charles Darwin’s home, though it later moved to Ash Green, near Newbury.
She began classes at Oxford and quickly found herself in a heady academic environment.
Her fellow philosophy students included Iris Murdoch, who became a good friend and eventually a Booker Prize-winning novelist; Philippa Foot, who became a leading moral philosopher; and Elizabeth Anscombe, who later went by G. E. M. Anscombe as a published philosopher and was a prominent disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s.
Scrutton married the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley, whom she had met at Oxford.
The couple had three sons, during which time she reviewed novels for The New Statesman.
In addition to her son Tom Midgley, she is survived by two other sons, David and Martin, and three grandchildren.
David Midgley edited the book “The Essential Mary Midgley.”
Midgley returned to teaching philosophy as a lecturer at Newcastle.
She later became senior lecturer.
It was while teaching there that she began publishing the work for which she would be acclaimed.
Not that she envisioned a long career of expounding on her philosophical views in a succession of books.
She wrote more as a critic, she suggested, responding to what she heard or read.
“I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say,” she told The Guardian, “and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.”
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Mary Midgley.
She campaigned for animal welfare and environmental awareness, and against the arms trade.
Mary Midgley
Philosopher who brought a sharp critical intelligence and a gift for vivid metaphor to her writing on human behaviour
Mary Midgley is an important writer on ethics, the relations of humans and animals, our tendency to misconstrue science, and the role of myth and poetry.
She published many essays in which she identified the limitations of only trying to understand things by breaking them down into smaller parts and losing sight of the many ways in which parts are dependent on the wholes in which they exist.
These atomist and reductive approaches are particularly unhelpful when it comes to human self-understanding and, in trenchant and witty style, Midgley points the way to a saner and more helpful overview of ourselves and our world.
Her first notable essay was “The Concept of Beastliness,” published in the journal “Philosophy.”
It impressed Max Black, of Cornell, who invited her to lecture there and encouraged her to expand her ideas.
The result was “Beast and Man,” which was warmly received.
In this two essays, she opens discussion of a question to which she returned many times, namely the implications of advances in science and evolutionary theory for understanding human behaviour.
It is clear that human achievements have their roots in abilities and patterns of response which we share with other animals.
So we are not (as some existentialist thinkers have imagined) totally free to create ourselves.
But, Midgley insists, we should not extrapolate from this insight to some depressing biological determinism.
More careful reflection shows that our biological endowment includes a capacity to develop a shared culture, and our culture in turn sustains individual creativity.
Other ramifications of these ideas are discussed in her later essays, including Heart and Mind, Animals and Why They Matter, Wickedness, Biological and Cultural Evolution, The Ethical Primate, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene, and Are You an Illusion?
Often the original impulse to her writing was polemical.
In a Guardian interview she said, “I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say - and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.”
Her friends note with amusement that one of the targets she attacks with particular vigour was the regrettable liability of humans to fall into overly combative debate.
And she could herself be guilty of unsympathetic interpretation of her opponents.
But her major targets were the tempting muddles to which we are all prone, in particular when we do not keep in check our tendencies to simplify and exaggerate.
Her essay, “Gene Juggling,” which appeared in “Philosophy,” was the start of a famously acrimonious debate with Richard Dawkins in which Midgley was accused of wilfully misrepresenting his claims about the “selfish gene”.
It is true (as she herself acknowledged) that her tone was intemperate and that she did not give weight to Dawkins’s explicit claim that the phrase was intended only as a ‘metaphorical’ way of presenting ideas in evolutionary theory.
Nevertheless, it may be that she was right to think that the overall message conveyed by Dawkins’ memorable coinage was the misleading idea that our genes doom us to individual selfishness.
Another topic, which came to the fore in her later essays, is the prediction by some scientific writers of future utopias, when science and technology will answer all our questions and solve all our problems.
Here she had important points to make about the limitations of science, the significance of poetic and religious vision and the need to integrate our many sources of insight into the human condition.
These and related ideas are explored in Evolution as a Religion, Wisdom, Information and Wonder, Science as Salvation, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers, Science and Poetry and The Myths We Live By.
Mary Midgley at home in Newcastle
Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer
Mary was born in London, the younger of two children of Lesley (nee Hay) and Tom Scrutton.
Her father had served as a chaplain in the first world war and shortly after Mary’s birth became chaplain of King’s, Cambridge.
When she was five he moved to become vicar of Greenford, west London, where Mary and her brother, Hugh (later a distinguished art gallery director), were brought up.
Mary was sent to Downe.
This progressive boarding school started in Charles Darwin’s old home, although by the time Mary was a pupil it had moved to Ash Green, near Newbury.
She won a scholarship to Oxford to read Classical Greats and, arriving at Somerville, became one of a strikingly able and forceful group of women philosophers.
Elizabeth Anscombe had arrived at Oxford the year before, Iris Murdoch, who became a close friend, was an exact contemporary, and Philippa Foot arrived a year later.
The work of this interesting quartet of thinkers has recently become the object of revived interest in the contribution of women to philosophy during the last century.
Mary graduated with a first and for the remainder of the war worked mainly as a civil servant.
She was secretary to the classical scholar Gilbert Murray, after which she returned to philosophy, starting a thesis on the psychology of Plotinus.
She tutored at Somerville and lectured at Reading.
At this point it looked as if an academic career of a familiar shape might be opening up.
But instead, she married a fellow philosopher, Geoffrey Midgley, whom she had first met in Oxford.
He was lecturing at King’s, Durham.
He and Mary set up house together in Newcastle and had three sons.
Mary turned to journalism, reviewing novels for the New Statesman and the BBC Third Programme.
She also read extensively in (among other things) psychology, anthropology, evolutionary theory and animal behaviour, becoming particularly interested in the views of such pioneers of ethology as Lorenz and Tinbergen.
Her excellent autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, gives a vivid account of this first half of her life.
The Guardian Profile: Mary Midgley
It is unlikely that she would ever have become a professional philosopher in quite the mould of many of her contemporaries, since she had little taste for the logical and linguistic issues that were the focus of mainstream work, and which remain the focus of much contemporary work.
She said later that she was glad to have escaped when she did from the ambience of Oxford, finding it overly narrow and competitive.
The break in her career kept her very much aware of the need for philosophy in wider debate and, as she said herself, she was concerned “to bring academic philosophy back into its proper connection with life, rather than letting it dwindle into a form of highbrow chess for graduate students”.
She returned to teaching philosophy, as a lecturer and later senior lecturer at Newcastle.
It was not until this point that she began to publish the work for which she later became famous.
She took early retirement to have more time to write and travel, and she was writing up to the end.
Her final book was What is Philosophy For?
Her work had already begun to be widely known at the time she retired, and she was invited to address numerous conferences and festivals.
She became involved in campaigning for animal welfare (and for several years she chaired the RSPCA’s committee on animal experimentation), for environmental awareness and against the arms trade.
She also appeared frequently on television and radio, presenting the case for animals and the environment and against scientific hubris.
Her speaking and writing were always direct and vigorous and were informed by wide reading, a sharp critical intelligence and a gift for vivid metaphor.
The drive of her thought is throughout sane and humane.
Mary Midgley: a late stand for a philosopher with soul
She was awarded an honorary DLitt at Durham, an honorary DCL from Newcastle and she was the recipient of the Edinburgh Medal.
For nearly half a century, she and her husband Geoffrey (himself a remarkable and admirable man) kept open house in Newcastle for friends, colleagues and pupils.
At parties and frequent informal gatherings, tea, homemade beer and good whisky were freely dispensed while robust discussion flowed.
She will be remembered and missed by many as an unfailing source of challenging ideas and generous friendship.
Mary is survived by their sons, Martin, Tom and David, and grandchildren, Tenzin, Sheridan and Jessica.
Mary Beatrice Midgley, philosopher
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