Mary Midgley, aged 81, may be the most frightening philosopher in the country: the one before whom it is least pleasant to appear a fool. One moment she sits by her fire in Newcastle like a round-cheeked tabby cat; the next she is deploying a savage Oxonian precision of language to dissect some error as a cat dissects a living mouse.
She believes that philosophy matters, perhaps especially to the people who think it is merely a garnish on the brute facts of life - "like the bed of tulips in front of a nuclear power station", as she puts it with typical vividness. That is why she is so much fun to read and why she has become the foremost scourge of scientific pretension in this country: someone whose wit is admired even by those who feel she sometimes oversteps the mark.
Perhaps the oddest thing about her career is that she did not publish her first book until 1978, when she was 56, and had for years been working in provincial obscurity. Beast And Man was highly praised by her old Oxford friend Iris Murdoch, and pitched her almost by accident into a career as the voice of acerbic sanity about science. With two others, Science And Salvation, and Evolution As A Religion, she staked out a territory all of her own, examining how science comes to function as a substitute for religion, and how very badly it does the job.
It is entirely characteristic that her latest book, Science And Poetry takes its epigraph from Richard Dawkins, "Science is the only way we have of understanding the real world", and proceeds to dance all over this apparently reasonable statement. It's not that she considers science a bad way of knowing the real world. But it is only one among many, and one which must be kept in firmly its place.
In a characteristic image, she compares human knowledge to the dolphin tank in a zoo: "human life [is] like an enormous, ill-lit aquarium which we never see fully from above, but only through various small windows unevenly distributed around it. Scientific windows - like historical ones - are just one important set among these. Fish and other strange creatures constantly swim away from particular windows... reappearing where different lighting can make them hard to recognise. Long experience, along with constant dashing around between windows, does give us a good deal of skill in tracking them. But if we refuse to put together the data from different widows, then we can be in real trouble."
She started looking in from a window that has now almost vanished. She was born in 1919, the daughter of Canon Tom Scrutton, then the chaplain of King's College, Cambridge, and had a conventional middle class upbringing in a large vicarage in Greenford, which was at the time a village distinct from west London and is now a rather gloomy suburb. Her father, she says, was "a rather notorious pacifist: the chair of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. He had been a chaplain in the first world war, and had had to explain to people why they were dying. That had put him off war." Her mother, Lesley, née Hay, was the daughter of the Scots engineer who built the Mersey Tunnel. Her elder brother. Hugh Scrutton, became a distinguished art gallery director.
At 12, she was sent to Downe House, a boarding school which had been started in Darwin's old home, though it later moved. She found it a rather an enlightened place. "I loved it. There was quite a lot of spare time, quite a good library, and a headmistress interested in all sorts of things. I got philosophy when I was there: when I was about 16 I picked Plato off the shelf and thought it was tremendous stuff."
By this time, she had realised that she was not a Christian. "Christianity never really took. I tried to operate it, but there never seemed to be anybody there." When she eventually explained to her father, he accepted without fuss that she just didnÍt have the right temperament.
In 1938 she went up to Somerville College as senior scholar. Iris Murdoch was in the same year, and they became close friends at once; Elizabeth Anscombe, later to become Wittgenstein's foremost disciple, who died last week, was a year ahead of her, and the moral philosopher Philippa Foot a year behind her. Foot says today, "[Mary] was a very grand figure indeed." For Midgley, the war years were a uniquely wonderful time to be a woman studying philosophy at Oxford. "I think the fact that there was not an endless gaggle of young men who were distracting helped us - and there was nobody doing philosophy then who didn't really want to do it. Also, there didn't seem to be a future, so nobody was thinking of careers."
Many of the women left, too, for war work. But she stayed, with her friends, rather than rush off to volunteer for some job where they could be pretty sure their talents would be misused. "It wasn't that we underestimated the evil that was out there, or that we didnÍt want to do our bit, but it didn't seem to us a trifling matter to try and make sense of Kant meanwhile."
There were also politics to contend with. Murdoch had joined the Communist party soon after coming up, an act which seemed to her circle like a kind of ordination. "The party was very important, it was there like the church: only really serious people actually joined it. ThereÍs nothing like that out there now: there's nothing righteous by way of a cause that one is refusing to join. I and my other friends had this guilty feeling that it was our insufficiency that prevented us from following her, but there were also the [Stalinist] treason trials..."
One way or another, these kept Midgley out of the party, and when the Oxford Labour club split after the Hitler-Stalin pact, she ended up on the committee of the new social democratic club, along with Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland. "I remember Roy Jenkins, as a slender youth, singing Frankie and Johnny at committee meetings." Perhaps a woman who has seen the subsequent vice-chancellor, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, in this light would never be unduly impressed with the pomp and gravity of Oxford. In any case, she has few regrets about leaving the place.
"I put in for the job that Mary Warnock got at St Hugh's. It was providential, really. I would have been destroyed by the terribly destructive and critical atmosphere. It isnÍt destructive of everyone, but look what happened to Isaiah Berlin, who also started as an Oxford philosopher. They kind of frightened him to the point where he said I shall go away and do the history of thought. I think pretty much the same thing happened to Iris Murdoch. The minute you got out of Oxford a great weight lifted, at least for a person like me."
This disdain is mutual, even when strongly coloured with affection. Her friend Philippa Foot, who thrived in Oxford after the war, says, "Her mind doesn't quite work like most straight Oxford analytic philosophers, I'd say. I don't mean that we're not keen on the poor old planet, but we don't talk about it an awful lot. It doesn't come into our work. I think she found her forte being witty and sane on television."
In 1945 she met Geoffrey Midgley, who was doing a doctorate at New College. "The dominant philosophical line at Oxford at that time was a refined kind of logical positivism. But there were also present highly metaphysical people like Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. So there was a very great deal of argument. Someone brought him round to my rooms in Park Town at about 11 o'clock one morning, and we were still arguing at six that evening. But what impressed him was that I had produced a pork pie and a tin of spaghetti to enable the argument to continue."
He found a job in Newcastle but after a year they met again, and got engaged. They were married in 1950. She had three sons in five years and stopped working, except for reviewing children's books and novels for the New Statesman. This interruption supplies one of the most distinctive qualities of her thought: to the natural Oxonian self-confidence which assumes that learning is important and foolishness a crime, she adds a belief that the learned are often importantly foolish.
Sometimes this leads her to aim at soft targets but also to some exhilarating removals of the Emperor's New Trousers. "Inside every real philosopher", she has written, "is not only a lawyer, but also that lawyer's client: someone with a substantial idea to express."
The ideas she considers really substantial are those which deal with Aristotelean questions: how should men and women live (not that Aristotle had any interest in women's lives), and she has little time, or inclination for more Platonic interests in pure logic or ultimate reality. In Science And Poetry she writes, "Any major kind of philosophising always presents some distinctive ideal for life as well as for thought because life and thought are not really separate at all, and if the contemporary academic philosophers suppose they are not doing this they are mistaken. Academic narrowness is a style of thought as much as any other. It is quite as easily conveyed by a style of writing, and even more easily by a style of teaching."
This distance from academic proprieties comes out in her friendship and admiration for James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis. "I think we all have a pretty high opinion of her", he says. "She's so right about science. It is becoming fragmented to such an extent that the average scientist is now a specialist who knows no more outside his speciality than the average layman; and somebody needed to say that." The fierceness of her character seems to him a purely professional affectation. "She's enormously good at friendship. In the academic world they are prepared to say in print things that none of us would dare say in person, but I donÍt think they feel it the same way."
He met her when she gave a talk on one of her favourite metaphors: philosophy as plumbing. The idea that it is something on which civilisation depends, but which no one notices until it goes badly wrong, when you have to bring a specialist. It's about as far removed from the ivory tower as any idea might be, and you could not get further from academic narrowness than the place where she emerged after her interlude of motherhood as a publishing philosopher, in the 70s.
She started with the problems of animal behaviour, reading Konrad Lorenz and Nico Tinbergen, who shared a Nobel prize for their researches into the ways that animal behaviour is as much a genetic product as are animal bodies. Animals inherit their ways of thought and feeling quite as much as the leopard inherits its spots. This is now the stock of hundreds of pop science books, but back then it was worth a Nobel prize. But, of course, since we are a species of animal, we too must have inherited predispositions and these will shape the ways we understand the world, and things we can hope to get out of it.
These are not ideas which would have appeared strange to any philosopher until about 1900. Since then it has been almost axiomatic that philosophy has nothing very authoritative to say about how we should live. When Midgley got interested in the question in the early 70s, it was unusual enough to get her invited for a year to Cornell University. Out of that came Beast And Man. "I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didnÍt know what I thought before then; if I had been an academic I would have had to publish, whether I knew what I thought or not. The idea that in philosophy or English you can have 16 new ideas a year is ridiculous."
For a lot of the 20th century it was a precondition of respectable psychology to pretend that consciousness was an illusion; and in philosophy, questions of purpose had come to seem illegitimate or outside the scope of the business, just as they were in science. But recognising that human beings are a sort of animal lets these questions of purpose back in. At the same time, Darwinism was enabling scientists to ask the question "what are things for" and get answers that looked scientific as well as philosophical.
The convergence of so many different lines of enquiry on these questions was unfortunate. When the humanists met the scientists, the middle ground was churned into a muddy no-man's-land of controversy, where only the bravest dared change their position by scuttling between shell holes and opponents' positions were illuminated only to make it easier to fire on them.
John Cornwell, the writer and director of the science and religion project at Jesus College Cambridge, says, "Mary is an excellent thing, of course. Whenever you look for a debate, she is the natural against the ultra-Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennett. But although she often professes to be talking about science, she does draw an equivalence between scientism [applying scientific method inappropriately] and science. I think a lot of the stuff she does is very good knockabout, which pleases people who don't like science, and she tends to lump together an enormous amount in her criticisms.
"I tackled her once exactly on this point about confusing scientism with science, at a conference I organised. It was in the evening down in the college bar: she had collected a gang of groupies, and when I had finished, she declared to the audience, 'is Cornwell drunk?'. She's very feisty. I was entirely sober: but just for making this point against her, I got the treatment. She's a daunting opponent, and she does go as close to playing dirty as you can get." With all that said, Midgley remains surrounded by affection, described by many as "an excellent ting". As Philippa Foot says, "She's raised three splendid foals, and so on. She's very much someone who is very successful in family life." Steven Rose, the professor of biology at the Open University, attended her 80th birthday party: "We only learnt that there was an enormous circle of people who would meet round at her house when we went up there. She was simply surrounded with affection and respect. Yet she is formidable. She's incapable of being stopped once she's started.
"She was on a radio programme once with John Gribbin [the physicist and writer], and eventually her patience burst. So she put her hand over her eyes, closed her eyes, and turned away; then she launched into a tremendous denunciation. Melvyn Bragg, who was presenting the show was enchanted and frustrated by it because of course he couldnÍt catch her eye or signal to her."
The vehement clashes on such occasions are not scientific or factual at all. It's true that Midgley misunderstood the early work of Richard Dawkins and took violent offence at its use as justification for bad philosophical positions; he in turn took undying umbrage at what she had written, but those disputes are in part the kind of misunderstanding that might have been sorted out if the participants could sit down and talk. The bitter question has become an insoluble one of academic competence, part of the war between science and the humanities.
Midgley feels that modern scientists, though they have realised what the urgent problems of the human race are, still talk as if science, or simply increasing knowledge, could solve them. But "If there is one thing that we know from the long and hard experience of the human race, it is that what is wrong is not simple."
She started off much more horrified, she says, by the stupidity of her own tribe, the humanists and sociologists, who believed that human nature was either uninteresting or non-existent; and that if it did exist, it could be moulded into any shape we wanted. One place where this was a real problem was feminism: the question do women differ from men only in the position of their dangly bits, or in their hearts and minds too, is not purely academic. Science, philosophy and ethics all can help to solve it, but that is not what makes it urgent. It's interesting because it is a question that everyone must solve in their own lives, and which various academic disciplines can help them to solve. Those have always been the kind of questions that interest Midgley.
But now that everyone is more or less a sociobiologist, or Darwinian in polite society, what really distinguishes her controversial position is the idea that pre-Darwinian ideas of human nature are likely to be just as accurate and a great deal more revealing than whatever the latest pop-science best-seller tells us. There are times when she seems to be reacting to the imperialisms of science with her own just as determined imperialism: in Science And Poetry she returns to her roots as a Latin scholar, and traces a lot of the philosophical mistakes committed by modern scientists all the way back to the pagan Roman poet Lucretius: "It was Lucretius,"she writes, "who launched the notion of science as primarily a benign kind of weedkiller designed to get rid of religion, and did it in great rolling passionate hexameters which gave it a force it would never have had if it had been expressed in unemotive prose.
"I am not saying that the atomic theory would never have emerged in science if it had not had those particular philosophical and poetic roots in ancient Rome. I am saying that, if the theory had had different roots, it would not have brought with it this particular word-picture, this myth, this drama, this way of accommodating science in the range of human activities, this notion of what it is to have a scientific attitude (it would no doubt have brought a different one)."
Such assertions are anathema to the kind of scientist who believes that his theories arise strictly from the facts. Certainly, it doesn't account for the developments of science which postulate things we literally cannot picture, such as modern particle physics. But it certainly explains the way in which phrases that can have a strict scientific meaning, such as "genes for something" can spread in the wider culture with meanings that would horrify the scientists involved if they thought them important. But of course few do. For most, the metaphors in which their theories are described really are no more significant than the tulips in front of a nuclear power station, whereas she sees metaphorical thought as the ground on which even nuclear power stations are built.
This is in part a consequence of her attitude to religion. Though she is not any sort of Christian, believing that too many of the essential doctrines of Christianity are impossible for a decent and educated person to subscribe to, she remains convinced that the religions of the world can't simply be superseded because we don't like them. "It is absurd to talk as if religion consisted entirely of mindless anxiety, bad cosmology, and human sacrifice."
There is a sense of rather Victorian moral astringency about her that preserves the high-minded and disciplined attitudes that led privileged Oxford youth to see the Communist party as a kind of church. "It is an extraordinary thing to say of someone that they cannot control a character flaw", she once said about the certainties of one her opponents; and she meant it, whereas nowadays it is more common to find it remarkable when anyone does manage to overcome a failing.
The great thing to be said for organised religion, she believes is precisely that it is not disorganised. "People are naturally ceremonial, ritualistic, and naturally inclined to find purposes in things. If these impulses are not brought together and disciplined, you get something even worse than organised religion. I feel this about the Guardian's anti-royal campaign. If you don't have your ceremonial life centred on royalty, you've got it centred on pop stars, and that's worse. It's all a matter of the lesser evil."
This fierce sense that organised religion has learned from its own mistakes fired her two shortest and perhaps most enjoyable books, Science As Salvation and Evolution As A Religion. These systematically dissect the ways in which much modern science simply assumes that scientists have the same kind of function in a scientific universe as priests had in a religiously motivated one, and the idiocies that follow from this assumption.
For instance, there are plenty of theologians who believe that God made creatures so they could know him and love him. That is a ridiculous claim on its own, but what are we to make of the remark by two prominent physicists that "a physicist is an atomÍs way of knowing about an atom?" She uses that as a classic example of folie de grandeur and adds: "It should surely be obvious that, if the universe is the kind of thing capable of knowing or wanting to know anything, it can do this on its own, and does not need help from physicists."
For all the obvious difficulties about believing in God, or in anything else that might answer our prayers, Midgley points out that prayer has been immensely important in history: "People have achieved the most amazing things by putting their trust in providence, or indeed by praying. They were not thinking about the virgin birth or the atonement when they did that. But they were thinking in a way that does seem central to human effort. I think it is reasonable to say that one can think that way with respect to the creation as a whole. All the formulations that one makes about this have something wrong with them, and it is very easy to say that there is something wrong with them; but thatÍs not to say that we can live without the religious attitude."
At first sight it is strange to see such a very hard-headed and deflationary thinker growing so apparently high-flown. She is, for example, a considerable fan of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, as much because of its religious potential as because of its scientific truth. But of course the idea that the universe could be deflated down to the facts is one she has constantly fought against. We could not begin to understand a world that was made of facts and nothing else; such a world is itself an imaginative vision and not a scientific one.
It seems odd, though, that she can nowhere articulate her positive ideas with nearly as much stirring precision as she can do the demolition job. In person it is obvious that she loves company, family, and the fun of talking with live ammunition. Her house in a leafy suburb of Newcastle, where she has lived for nearly 50 years, has a comfortable litter of books around a shiny white computer - nothing else is brighter than the gas fire. Sitting in an upright chair in front of the fire, with one leg stretched out on the footstool, she seems to radiate contentment and a capacity for affection in an almost cat-like fashion, yet, like a cat, when she stretches comfortable, the claws appear as well.
"I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say - and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict - a negative approach, as they say, but one that doesnÍt seem to run out."
Life at a glance
Born: September 13 1919, London.
Education: Downe House School, Berkshire; Somerville College Oxford.
Married: 1950 Geoffrey Midgley, (three sons - Tom, David, Martin; three grandchildren - two boys, one girl).
Employment: Senior lecturer in philosophy, Newcastle University, 1962-1980.
Publications: Beast And Man 1978, Science And Salvation 1992, Wickedness 1984, Evolution As A Religion 1985, Animals And Why They Matter 1983, Heart And Mind 1981, The Ethical Primate 1994, Science And Poetry 2001.
• Science And Poetry by Mary Midgley is published by Routledge in March, price £19.99.
