The history of philosophy is a history of men talking to men, about other men.
The ambitious minds of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Hume (to name just a few!) have dominated and dictated our definition of ‘philosophy’ throughout history. While impressive and fixating, this exclusively male story has systematically overlooked the lives and experiences of women. Enter The Philosopher Queens (2020) a timely book, exploring the lives and legacies of twenty prominent female philosophers whose (her)stories remain largely untold. I will be drawing attention to one woman in particular – Mary Midgley – whose insights into the practice and purpose of philosophy examine the impact of this largely male story.
Traditionally, male philosophers have practised what is known as ‘armchair philosophy’. They rely on rationality, reflection, and abstract concepts, without drawing on the real world that might exist beyond said armchair. Philosophers have pondered with their feet off the floor, so to speak. Traditionally, the place of women has not been in the philosophical armchair: their feet have been firmly set on the ground in a historically domestic setting. As such, female voices have been excluded from academic philosophy. I wonder, would the practise of philosophy be any different had the stories of women made the cut?
One woman who never saw her place as in the armchair was Mary Midgley. Midgley began her somewhat unusual philosophical career in 1938 reading Mods and Greats at Sommerville College, Oxford. Among the minority of female philosophy students, she describes entering Oxford at a time when philosophy was dominated by clever young men. Philosophy, to these men, was a competition to win arguments in fractious displays of intelligence – the aim was not to advance understanding, but to avoid appearing weak. Arguably the most influential of these Oxford men was A.J Ayer, whose book Language, Truth and Logic (1936) had taken Oxford by storm. Ayer aimed to remove the philosopher from real life, reducing his role to determining whether sentences are true or false. In keeping with the history of philosophy, the role of the philosopher was not in contributing to a collective process of understanding the world, but rather a solitary exercise of sitting in a comfy armchair – perhaps with a whiskey – considering the logic of abstract arguments.
This trend goes back as far as Plato, who argued that the virtues of the scholar – reason, deduction, and abstract thought – were to be commended above all else. In a radio script that never went to broadcast entitled Rings and Books, Midgley likens Plato to the ‘philosophic adolescent’. She writes:
‘[T]he philosophic adolescent (even more than other adolescents) withdraws himself from the influences around him to develop ideas in harmony with his own personality’.
Some years later, Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) went as far as suggesting that an isolated mind is the only thing that we can know exists, for sure. The Knower (the mind) must be separated from the Known (the world). Midgley suggests that this Cartesian move:
‘appeals to the adolescent philosopher in all of us […] [because historically] philosophers did not want the human soul to be mixed up in the world of objects, as it must be to make knowledge possible’.
So, what encouraged the armchair approach? This is an immensely complicated question. For now, I want to draw on one interesting statistic, which may shed some light on the historical trend. As Midgley observes, ‘practically all the great European philosophers have been bachelors’. With minor exceptions (Aristotle and Mill, for instance), few of the male cannon experienced life with a significant other – a woman, man, or child. This, Midgley points out is ‘after all, quite an important aspect of human life’. Perhaps the marital status of these male philosophers, (or lack thereof), might contribute towards ‘a certain over-abstractness, a certain remoteness from life, in the European philosophical tradition…’.
One area in which this abstractness is most visible is in the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers have doubted the certainty of other minds, claiming that one mind can only really know one body with certainty. For Descartes it is only possible to infer the existence of other minds. It seems inevitable that a scholar, or indeed any person, who lacks meaningful relationships of any sort with another human being may regard the conscious minds of others as uncertain and relinquish this as a source of knowledge. But, as Midgley suggests, if you played a ‘normal active part among other human beings’ you would not think this. ‘[F]or anybody living intimately with [others] as a genuine member of a family, cogito would be Cogitamus; their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own’. Though Berkeley, Hegel and G.E. Moore did marry, this was only after they completed their serious philosophical work and therefore their partnerships had little bearing on their philosophy. By contrast, it was only after marrying and raising her three sons that Midgley began to write. She reminds us in her ever-sensible tone that ‘she didn’t know what she thought before then’.
For Midgley, a person leading a normal domestic life is less likely to question the very minds of others. Largely, women do not see life as a ‘narrow shaky gangway between the two towers of the knower and the known’ as Midgley describes it. Because for women, this gangway flies in the face of lived experiences. A woman who has carried a child in pregnancy would claim it entirely possible for one mind to know two, or even three bodies, intimately. As Midgley points out, when a woman moves from 2 month of pregnancy, to 5 months, she passes ‘from the belief “I am not well” to the belief “I am now two people”’. But you won’t find examples such as pregnancy in traditional philosophy textbooks. The lived experiences of women, and other such ‘domestic’ topics, are rendered ‘unphilosophical’. But even Midgley, making this explicit philosophical critique in Rings and Books, was shouting into the dark – the editor of the radio broadcast Aniouta Kallin, to which Ring and Books was submitted, rejected it as “trivial, irrelevant intrusion of domestic matters into intellectual life”.
But for Midgley, domestic matters and intellectual life must be combined. There is no significant distance between philosophy and life – to pass from one to the other is much like passing through the rooms of a house: effortless and familiar. ‘Philosophy is a not a luxury but a necessity’ – an inevitable part of the human condition, much like growing up, or falling in love. When we do philosophy, we should not operate as ‘isolated intellectuals’ taking part in a sterile enterprise – rather we are part of a collaborative, living process of shared human development.
In Midgleyan fashion, I want to conclude that we need a balance. Of course, it is important for the philosopher to have space to think and concentrate; we must sometimes be philosophic adolescents, for as Midgley admits, ‘this is necessary if the personality is going to be formed at all’. But this should not prescribe what philosophers ought to concentrate on. When we complete a session of undisturbed thought in the armchair, we must put our feet back on the ground and walk around the other rooms in the house. We must bring our findings to the real world, to see if they fit. The crux of Midgley’s criticism of the male tradition is not, of course, the simple fact that they were men – rather that ‘[t]he great philosophers did not return. Their thoughts, unlike yours and mine, had power enough to keep them gazing into the pool of solitude.’
Ellie Robson is a A CHASE DTP funded PhD researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis explores and revives the philosophy of Mary Midgley. Ellie discovered the philosophy of Midgley through the In Parenthesis Project at Durham University, where she completed both her BA(hons) and Masters degrees.