Midgley, Montaigne and Feuerbach: the things we make and then obey

Most coincidences of date mean nothing, and a column of this kind survives by saying so. Today's are an exception.

On 13 September 1919 Mary Midgley was born in Dulwich. On 13 September 1592 Michel de Montaigne died in his château in the Dordogne, aged fifty-nine. On 13 September 1872 Ludwig Feuerbach died at Rechenberg, outside Nuremberg, poor and ill, kept going in his last years by the workers' movement that adopted him after the universities would not. What connects them is one suspicion in three registers: that human beings habitually manufacture something — a god, a story about nature, a settled conviction — and then treat the product as though it had arrived from outside, with an authority of its own.

Feuerbach put it most flatly: God is the human species-essence turned inside out and knelt to. Midgley put it most stubbornly, over forty years and a shelf of books — much of what gets said in the name of science is myth in a lab coat, doing the work the evidence is credited with. Montaigne is the awkward member, and worth saying so. His subject is the speed with which a mind mistakes its own latest opinion for the shape of the world, and he would not have signed Feuerbach's thesis.

Midgley published her first book at fifty-nine, and the profession has still not caught up#

The case for Mary Midgley as the most underrated British philosopher of the twentieth century does not rest on obscurity. She was widely read, reviewed everywhere, and in 2011 the first recipient of the Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. The case rests on the gap between that standing and her place inside the discipline. She taught at Newcastle from the mid-1960s until 1980 and retired as a senior lecturer, never having held a chair, founded a school, or left an apparatus for graduate students to extend. Open most surveys of twentieth-century British philosophy and she is a paragraph, if that.

She was born Mary Scrutton, read Mods and Greats at Somerville, spent the war in the civil service, and published no book until Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature appeared in 1978, when she was fifty-nine. She thought the delay had done no harm: she had not known what she thought before then. Asked by the Guardian in 2001 why she kept going, she gave an answer that is the closest thing British philosophy has to a working method: "I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say, and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict."

Beast and Man faced two ways at once, satisfying neither side. Against the social science that had human beings arriving as blank slates, Midgley insisted we are animals with a nature we did not choose; against the sociobiology then gathering force, that having a nature is not being determined by one.

The quarrel with Richard Dawkins followed. "Gene-Juggling", published in Philosophy in 1979 (vol. 54, pp. 439–458), opens with one of the best first sentences in modern philosophical polemic:

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological.

Dawkins replied in the same journal in 1981 with "In Defence of Selfish Genes", and the honest verdict is that he had the better of it: Midgley had read The Selfish Gene as making a claim about motives when it was making one about the units on which selection acts, and her tone let him turn the dispute into a question of manners. What has worn better is her underlying point. A metaphor introduced to make a technical result vivid does not stay technical; it escapes into the culture, where it stops modelling gene frequencies and becomes a picture of what people are.

The mature statement came in Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (1985) and Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (1992), the latter drawn from the Gifford Lectures she gave at Aberdeen in 1989–90. The thesis is more careful than its reputation. She was not attacking science, a charge she spent thirty years denying; her target was the smuggling of a total world-picture, eschatology included, inside the authority of experimental findings. Physicists on the end of the universe, computer scientists on the ascent of mind out of matter: these perform the office of prophets while claiming the immunity of technicians. The Myths We Live By (2003) generalised it: myths are not lies but the patterns that make a body of fact intelligible, and a culture sure it has none cannot see its own.

A second reason she matters has nothing to do with Dawkins. Animals and Why They Matter (1983) arrived while Anglophone ethics was choosing between Peter Singer's calculus of suffering and Tom Regan's rights framework. Midgley took a third route, arguing from the relations we actually have with the animals we live among: we are already in a mixed community with dogs, horses and cattle, and the obligations are found in a bond that predates any theory. Marginal for twenty years, that route is now mainstream, and rarely credited to her.

Her memoir, The Owl of Minerva (2005), takes its title from Hegel's remark that the owl flies only at dusk — from a woman who began publishing at fifty-nine, a joke as much as a motto. It gives her account of the wartime Oxford where she, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch all studied — a subject she returned to in the Guardian in November 2013, declining the tactful answer:

I can only say: sorry, but the reason was indeed that there were fewer men about then. 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 on winning arguments.

The men who stayed in those small wartime classes were conscientious objectors and invalids, she added, and "they weren't so keen on winning arguments". It is a claim about institutional form rather than about sex. Her last book, What Is Philosophy For?, appeared from Bloomsbury on 20 September 2018. She died three weeks later, aged ninety-nine.

Montaigne invented a form that could hold a mind changing its mind#

Montaigne died at the Château de Montaigne on 13 September 1592, of an abscess of the throat that paralysed his tongue. The man who had spent twenty years writing about his own body in the most conversational prose in French died unable to speak, which is the sort of detail he would have used and then apologised for.

He had withdrawn from public life in 1571, aged thirty-eight, to a tower library of about 1,500 volumes whose beams he had inscribed with Greek and Latin maxims. The Essais appeared in two books in 1580, in a three-book edition in 1588, and posthumously in 1595 from the copy he had gone on annotating until his death. It runs to 107 chapters and has no argument, which is the point. Around 1576 he had a medal struck bearing his age, the Greek epecho — I suspend judgement — and the French question Que sais-je? The scepticism it announces is set out at length in the "Apology for Raymond Sebond", the essay most indebted to Sextus Empiricus.

But Montaigne is a bad Pyrrhonist, knowingly so. He does not reach suspension of judgement and stop; he keeps writing, which is to say he trusts the record of a mind in motion more than any conclusion it reaches on the way. "I do not portray being," he writes in "Of Repentance". "I portray passing." The form exists because he needed something that could hold a thought and its revision in one object, without the revision counting as an error.

Here he touches the day's theme at a slight angle: what he distrusts is the certainty a mind manufactures out of custom and then takes as self-evident. "Of Cannibals" is the demonstration. Reporting what he had learned of the Tupinambá of Brazil, he turns the accusation on his own countrymen, then in the middle of the wars of religion: "I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead." The essay reached England in John Florio's translation of 1603, and Shakespeare took it up almost verbatim in Gonzalo's commonwealth speech in The Tempest, a passage that puts Montaigne's ideal society in the mouth of a well-meaning fool.

Feuerbach said theology was anthropology, and the nineteenth century believed him#

Feuerbach was born at Landshut on 28 July 1804, studied theology, switched to Hegel in Berlin, and wrecked his academic prospects at twenty-six by publishing Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830) anonymously, with satirical verses that were traced to him. He lived as a private scholar at Bruckberg on his wife's porcelain money until the crash of 1859 took it.

Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) changed the terms of an argument rather than adding to it. The thesis fits in a sentence: the predicates we assign to God are predicates of the human species-essence, detached from the species, made infinite and worshipped. Divine wisdom is human understanding without its limits; divine justice is what we already demand of one another, set beyond appeal. Theology is anthropology conducted in code. His sharpest move is the argument from compassion: a God who suffers with us must be the kind of being that can suffer, and so is already human in the relevant respect — man was in God, he writes, before God became man. The cost is what Marx took over: everything ascribed to God is subtracted from the person ascribing it, so that worship impoverishes the worshipper in proportion to its devoutness.

The limits deserve stating, because the argument is credited with more than it delivers. Feuerbach shows a mechanism by which religious belief could be generated out of human self-understanding; he does not thereby show that nothing answers to it. An account of how a conviction arises is not a refutation of it — a point that applies equally to the naturalistic explanations of religion now offered by cognitive science, and one his admirers have ignored for nearly two centuries.

Among the Young Hegelians the effect was immediate. "Enthusiasm was general," Engels recalled in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, serialised in Die Neue Zeit in 1886; "we all became at once Feuerbachians." George Eliot translated it into English in 1854, under her own name, Marian Evans. Marx's reckoning had come earlier, in eleven notes jotted in the spring of 1845, which Engels printed as an appendix when the essay appeared as a book in 1888. They are working notes, and the eleventh is routinely read as a dismissal of philosophy in favour of activism.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Set against the first thesis, the target is narrower. Marx complains there that all existing materialism, "that of Feuerbach included", grasps reality as an object of contemplation rather than as human sensuous activity. Feuerbach had shown that religious alienation is something people do, then treated it as an error of consciousness curable by correct understanding. The eleventh thesis objects to that cure, not to interpretation as such: if the projection is generated by conditions, explaining it to the projector changes nothing, because the conditions go on producing it. Feuerbach, unaware of all this, read Capital in 1868 and joined the Social Democratic Party in 1870; the party helped support him, and at his funeral in Nuremberg the crowds carried red banners. The line from the projection thesis to the analysis of commodity fetishism runs through that grave, as does the habit of reading the sacred as a human product that our piece on Bataille took up earlier this week.

Where the pattern holds, and where it breaks#

Feuerbach's believer has made a god out of his own best qualities and forgotten the making; Midgley's prophet has done the same with a research programme. The diagnosis takes the same form in both cases and carries the same limitation: showing that something was manufactured tells you where it came from, not whether it is any good. Midgley knew this and said so — myths are necessary, and the question is which ones. Feuerbach was less careful, and his followers less careful still.

Montaigne does not fit, and forcing him would be a disservice. He has no theory of projection and no interest in unmasking anyone; his scepticism is aimed at himself first, and produces a style rather than a critique of institutions. What he shares with the other two is the bare recognition that a mind treats its own settled furniture as part of the world, and that the only remedy is to keep noticing. Mistaking a vocabulary for a discovery is no vice confined to theology or popular science, as the afterlife of Deleuze's terminology suggests. Philosophy manages it on its own.