Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

Philosophy is needed in times of chaos, she said, and here was a theory about human life worked out by her and her friends, smoking cigarettes to dull the hunger, while air-raid sirens wailed and the blackout curtains shut out the light.

The ‘hero’ of modern philosophy is, Iris wrote, the ‘offspring of the age of science’. He is ‘free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy’.

We are metaphysical animals. We make and share pictures, stories, theories, words, signs and artworks that help us to navigate our lives together. These creations are immensely powerful, because they at once show us what is and was the case, and at the same time suggest new ways of going on.

But because the past is a living thing, discoveries we make now can affect our history. We can see our past differently – and we can rewrite what we understand to have happened. Different pasts await us.

The lives of these women in turn illuminate a counter-narrative to the prevailing history of twentieth-century philosophy. Its heroes are not A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin and R. M. Hare, but characters you may not know: H. H. Price, H.W.B. Joseph, Susan Stebbing, R. G. Collingwood, Dorothy Emmet, Mary Glover, Donald MacKinnon and Lotte Labowsky. This counter-narrative connects contemporary philosophy with the great speculative metaphysicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Idealists and Realists, who struggled to understand the nature of truth, reality and goodness before the turn to linguistic analysis saw philosophy lower its sights to the meaning of the words ‘true’, ‘real’ and ‘good’.

When human actions happen on a grand scale and people make choices in disrupted and difficult circumstances, we cannot take it for granted that we will see clearly what is done, or understand easily what it means. When the background to our lives changes, our words may no longer work as they used to, and possibilities for seeing and understanding each other and the world may be lost. Sometimes, when it matters most, what another person is doing (what we are doing) can be obscure and dark. This is when philosophy comes into its own.

38] In that year’s matriculation photo, Mary, wearing a dark woollen suit, sits awkwardly on the front row (fourth from left); Iris, in a light cotton blouse, stands behind (second row, fourth from right).

Under Moore’s unsettling and persistent challenge, and Stebbing’s careful advocacy, by the late 1920s Cambridge philosophers were no longer asking ‘What is Good?’ but ‘What does “good” mean?’

But bits of living, Joseph says – the innocent, fraternal or spiteful eating of oysters – will elude the scientist’s scrutiny. They belong to a different pattern of explanation, one that speaks of intention and purpose, motive and character. Bits of living are not independent links in a causal chain (as the movements of bodies are) but have their identity as parts within a whole. The unity, harmony and beauty of that whole constitutes goodness in human life. What animates the ethical rather than physical life is consciousness of a whole ‘all-embracing form of life’, and it is this idea, rather than blind obedience to an aggregate of rules or principles, that lies at the heart of our judgements of particular acts.

Now on two feet, he sketches for Philippa his vision of philosophy. The philosopher must learn to think historically, Donald MacKinnon tells her – his own undergraduate brush with R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history fresh in his mind.[221] Our enquiries are not isolated from history nor from ourselves. Historical causes point human intellectual attention in a particular direction;[222] each philosopher must ask herself how far her historical situation and condition determine her undertaking and the principles that inform her procedure.[223] Philosophy, he continues, is an expression and an index of human dignity. A human being is an animal, and its nature – its essence – is expressed in its curiosity and imagination. Human animals speak and ask questions about goodness and beauty, meaning and truth.

Humans are metaphysical animals, he ventures, still unsure himself what this means.[224] Metaphysical animals need to speak about the transcendent, about the human spirit and the infinite.

How to break free? Perhaps, by using concepts analogically, he suggests, drawing on the work of Catholic theologians. Thomas Aquinas claimed it is possible for humans to speak of, and comprehend, God’s attributes through analogy. We know what it is for a human to be good, or to create, or to be wise. We speak of God’s goodness, of His creation, of His wisdom by analogy, by transposing concepts that have their use in the finite human realm to the infinite.[225] ‘Can we take up this structure?’ he asks, flinging himself into the other armchair.

The analogical use of a word is a creative act, an appeal to another to see a submerged connection, to take up a hint, to accept a new use of language. Freddie Ayer had mercifully spared the poets from his bonfire on the grounds that they make no claim to truth.

On 6 and 9 August, the Allies dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘When we talk about the hydrogen bomb’, Donald MacKinnon reflected on the radio, ‘we are talking about something we have chosen to develop and to use. We are talking about choices we have actually made; we are not talking about events in which we have become involved…[W]e are referring to human actions.’[210] In two flashes of blinding light, so bright they turned human beings into shadows, the bill of 1.5 million soldiers was paid by 200,000 civilians. The exchange was not like for like but it ended the war. Japan surrendered six days later.

When the Idealist philosopher R. G. Collingwood had died in 1943, Gilbert Ryle was appointed Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics in his place. For many, this event, which followed quickly after the death of H.W.B. Joseph, marked the final victory of Oxford’s ‘revolution in philosophy’, the triumph of analytic empiricism and linguistic method over the metaphysical excesses of pre-war Idealism and Realism. An unspoken consensus began to develop, sustained in the journal Mind (now edited by Ryle himself) about ‘who was and who was not a “negligible back-number” ’.[13] Discussion papers on Urmson, Woozley, Austin, Ayer, Ryle, Ewing, Carnap and Strawson filled its pages; but no one ‘would have felt it worthwhile even to disagree with, say, Joseph or Collingwood.’[14] Some time around the late 1940s, J. L. Austin would feign faint recollection of the previous Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics – ‘Some kind of historian wasn’t he?’

In 1945, the extinction of metaphysics had been declared but not yet chronicled, the publications proclaiming its defeat still to be written. Over the coming two decades, the story of an Austrian movement embedded in a Cambridge tradition by refugee scholars and women logicians, whose target was propaganda and confusion, would become that of an Oxford revolution against metaphysics, masterminded by Ryle, ignited by Ayer, coordinated by Austin (supporting cast: Paul Grice, H.L.A. Hart, Stuart Hampshire, Isaiah Berlin) and carried brightly into the future by their intellectual sons and by their sons’ sons.

The ‘revolution in philosophy’ had been won bloodlessly, by a combination of mortality and studied neglect.

But despite the victory cries, the Idealist and Realist metaphysicians were not entirely extinct, and some were making plans. Swerving to avoid a group of ancient undergraduates, Mary may have glimpsed Sandie Lindsay outside Balliol, chatting with his former pupil, Mary Glover.

She had resigned her lectureship in May 1945 and was now at work on a book about the effects of mechanised factory work on the mind and spirit. Her co-author John Winnington was a fellow machine operative who had ‘worked his way up in various firms from the lowest-paid jobs to the managerial grade’.[22] ‘Fantasy is the constant compensation for the rebuffs and failures that are so common in factory life,’ they would observe. ‘But if [a man] takes refuge in fantasy’, though he may ‘evade defeat and challenge’ he will also ‘lose the sense of fact’.[23] However, if this flight to fantasy can be kept in check, machines offer ‘the possibility of a good life for the labourer’. This will come if the ‘bits of living’ that comprise his machine-work do not dominate his life, but rather form one part of it. The worker will need ‘good leisure’, time that is not mere recovery from fatigue but involves purpose and the enlargement of human life: ‘one could attend an art school, explore the Cotswolds on a bicycle, enjoy a circle of friends’, suggested Glover.[24] If fantasy could be resisted, the transcendent values she had described to Elizabeth, ‘truth, beauty, and goodness’, could, she argued, find a home.

‘The scholar’s special duty’, he had written, ‘is to turn the written signs in which old poetry or philosophy is now enshrined back into living thought and feeling. He must so understand as to relive.’

Words and symbols, Murray saw, do not carry their meaning with them like luggage, but come alive in the context of a society, at a place and time. To bring a ‘written sign’ to life one must acknowledge the reality of the past and imagine and relive the culture in which it was spoken. And now here was Mary turning the pages of letters to Gilbert Murray from Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Marie Curie, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

‘What is that?’ Elizabeth was asking in her dissertation. What is the form of life, the shape of the soul, of a human being? Here were pictures of humans: well-fed SS girls, hair nicely set; starved men and women lifted into trucks; children playing beside trenches filled with naked bodies; skeletal blank-faced survivors who looked like corpses. The ‘Belsen cruelties were inflicted by people who saw what they did’, observed Mary Glover; but there ‘is little ground for self-congratulation if we prefer the cruelties we cannot see’. Nagasaki has shown us ‘that there is no degree of cruelty from which we shall shrink if it seems to assist in the achievement of national purpose’.

Philippa formed the question that would drive her for the rest of her life: could there be a secular philosophy that could use this language of morals, and speak of objective moral truth? She was convinced that Ayer’s moral subjectivism must rest on a mistake; her task was to find it.

Now that they were neighbours, Philippa and Mary began to see a great deal of each other, Mary finding Philippa as rewarding as ever. The war had provided concrete pictures around which each woman’s moral philosophy would later take shape. We cannot throw up our hands and claim to find the actions of an Eichmann unintelligible, Mary thought; we must be ‘willing to grasp imaginatively how [wickedness] works in the human heart, and particularly in our own hearts’.[47] Wickedness is not like aggression, ‘whose intrusion into human life needs a special explanation’; rather it is ‘a general kind of failure to live as we are capable of living’.[48] Evil is something we must understand from the inside, as fellow humans, with many shared instincts, desires and goals, and with an imaginative recognition of the ways in which a human life can fail. Philippa, in turn, confronted human action at the other end of the spectrum.

Any account of human action, Philippa would later say, must make sense of these Sudetenland farm boys and their choice. An account that cannot recognise their goodness, truth and reason must be mistaken.

mais tu passes Iris ma chère comme vu éclair.’

Mary, no longer an overgrown schoolgirl, but at twenty-nine an impressive scholar, was about to begin work on her thesis on Plotinus.

Iris, now the ‘experienced woman’ she had dreamt of being, knew more about the new French and European existentialist philosophy than almost anyone in England.

Now, with the war behind them there was urgency to the task of finding a way back to moral truth, objective value, and an ethics that connected to what really matters. Iris’s plan that year was ambitious: ‘Revise moral philo. Demolish Ross. Take Crit. of Prac. Reason seriously. The limits of the linguistic method. i.e. discover real extent of the present crisis in philosophy.’

Philippa wanted to show that ‘it can’t just be a matter of booing and hooraying: when we say there was something absolutely wicked about the Holocaust, this is not just a personal decision, decision not to do such things, or an expression of disapproval. There is something objective here.’

Mary’s aim in philosophy was to ‘make sense of the relation between older and newer ways of dealing with the subject’.[9]

In her version of the story (Mary never lost her flair for drama) she cast Richard Hare as the anti-hero. ‘As with many philosophical schools,’ she told us, ‘the starting-point was a joint “No!’’.’

The commander’s attitude and actions were for Hare further evidence that Ross and Prichard must be wrong.

If moral intuition was attuned to an objective moral reality, then such a stark and insurmountable clash of intuition ought not to be possible, Hare thought. Intuitions and emotions cannot, then, be ways of perceiving an independent moral reality; they are merely the upshot of one’s particular upbringing.

When, as a young philosopher at Lady Margaret Hall, Dorothy Emmet found the ‘world of moral certainties’ described by her Realist lecturers unrealistic, her response was to seek a connection between morality and what is important in human life. But for Hare, thousands of miles from home and confronted with conditions and a set of values he could barely recognise, the existence of different moral certainties seemed fatal to the idea of universal, objective moral standards. ‘What must be understood about a prisoner-of-war community is that it is a society which has to be formed, and constantly re formed, out of nothing’, Hare recalled. There was no background, no shared understanding of what mattered, on which he could depend. In ‘this very strange, constantly disintegrating situation…one can never know from day to day whether personal survival – which seems in any case rather unlikely – is rendered more likely by cooperation with one’s fellow-prisoners or by looking out for oneself’.

As Mary had learnt from Plotinus, an individual forced to act outside a ‘good society’ cannot rely on like effect to follow like cause, and so must choose without expectation or hope that acting from a good motive – friendship, duty, benevolence, honour – will result in him doing good. Hare, like Plotinus, retreated inward. He fixed in his mind his own set of moral principles, and attempted to bind his future self to them come what may.

Richard began meditating on those two scenes. He had not been convinced by Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic before the war, but his loss of faith in objective moral reality now led him to accept its basic picture of a value-free world.[25] What he could not accept, however, was Ayer’s claim that moral language is nothing more than the expression of emotion, and that his disagreement with the Japanese commander was a simple clash of feelings. He wanted to show that even though there was no value in the world, moral disagreement could be approached rationally and, where both parties were intellectually honest and open, reason could prevail. Back in Balliol, Richard Hare had formed the ambition ‘to find a way of answering moral questions rationally’.

In order to bring the language of morals back into the realm of reasons, Hare began by reclassifying it. This was to be the third time in the twentieth century that philosophers made use of G. E. Moore’s suggestion that moral philosophers should study the word ‘good’ and not goodness or the Good, in order to find a place for ethical concepts in an increasingly alien world.

For Realists Ross and Prichard, moral statements were subject to objective standards of correctness – standards which they understood as residing in an independent moral reality. For Ayer they were expressions of emotion, communicating subjective feelings. For Hare, they would be prescriptions or imperatives, employed to recommend or oppose courses of action. A moral judgement, Hare argued, is akin to an order: ‘Do it!’ or ‘Don’t do it!’

Hare had attempted to show that there could be a rational basis for moral disagreement, even after Ayer’s ethical weedkiller had stripped reality bare of value. It was this that elicited the joint ‘No!’ from Philippa, Mary, Iris and Elizabeth. Philippa Foot certainly couldn’t stomach this repackaged version of Ayer’s subjectivism. She wanted to be able to say to the Nazis: ‘But we are right, and you are wrong.’ She wanted the idea of an objective moral reality against which actions could be judged wrong or bad and not just inconsistent or irrational.

Iris would describe ‘this piece of our philosophical history’ – from Ayer to Hare – as ‘the elimination of metaphysics from ethics’. While Idealists and Realists had aimed at discovering objective moral truth, whether by self-transcendence or intuition, in Ayer’s and Hare’s worlds, we confront ‘a stripped and empty scene’ in which morality is ‘not pictured…as being attached to any real natural or metaphysical structure. It is pictured without any transcendent background.’

Thus, for the older Mary reflecting on the past, the way to tell the story of herself and her friends was to begin with them knitting together the great cleavage in reality that Ayer celebrated and Hare accepted – bringing fact and value back together. From this, she said, ‘a lot of metaphysics would follow’. On to the knitting needles would go Philippa’s notes on Aquinas (one of ‘the best sources that we have for moral philosophy’); fragments of Wittgenstein’s latest writings turned out of Elizabeth’s pockets (forms of human life); Mary’s inky notes on Plotinus (reality not existence); Iris’s heavily annotated copies of Gabriel Marcel’s Être et avoir (problems and mysteries). Memories of wartime lessons: Ross and Prichard’s moral intuition; Collingwood’s clothes-line and Lindsay’s entia rationis; Price’s un-observed cats; Cassirer’s lessons on Kant’s Achtung; Joseph’s ‘bits of living’ and Miss Glover’s talk of love’s capacity to reveal the Good; Plato, Aristotle and Donald MacKinnon’s analogical concepts and this insight: we are metaphysical animals.

Elizabeth presented her paper, ‘The Reality of the Past’, to the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, the department’s long-standing discussion group (of which she had been Secretary 1945–6).

She began with a puzzle that is first stated by the pre-Socratic mystic Parmenides: ‘ “It is the same thing that can be thought and can be,” ’ so “what is not and cannot be” cannot be thought. But the past is not and cannot be; therefore it cannot be thought, and it is a delusion that we have such a concept.’[40] This fragment of Parmenides does not express a form of ‘Cartesian doubt’, Elizabeth told her Cambridge audience – Parmenides is not worried that it might not be possible to know about the past. No, he is raising a more fundamental puzzle: how is it even possible to talk or think about the past? His question is about meaning and intelligibility: ‘Is not our apparent concept of the past impossible?’ he asks.

The problem about the past emerges, she continues, when we try to understand our talk about it by applying this model of language. We find that we cannot do it. ‘The name or thought of something past seems to point to its object in just the same way as the name or thought of any other actual thing; yet how can it, since its object does not exist?’[41] So we find ourselves forced, with Parmenides, to the absurd conclusion that it is an illusion to suppose that we can think about the past.

The portrayal of past and future events as a set of pictures on a prepared timeline, Elizabeth goes on, is also connected to a particular way of understanding the idea that the future, but not the past, can change. The idea that the past cannot change but the future can change, ‘could be represented by the fact that once a picture has passed me it cannot be removed from the row, whereas a picture on the right-hand side can be removed’. And ‘by the fact that the pictures become set as they pass me so that they cannot be altered whereas the pictures to the right are in a fluid state or are as yet mere blanks’.

But this leads to more philosophical problems. Why can’t the past be altered? Is it merely an empirical impossibility, as when a set of photographs is placed in a sealed box, stored in an archive or printed on a special material that fixes the images? Or is the unchangeability of the past somehow written into the nature of reality? Can’t we imagine a change in the past, as if one of the cards that has passed us by suddenly alters?

‘The past is real’, ‘the past cannot change’, Elizabeth told her audience, are remarks that belong to daily human language-using life. They are parts of a practice that we can set out to describe. She was asking her audience to join her in taking an extraspective glance.

To believe that Aeschylus wrote Agamemnon is to trust in continuous human endeavour that has preserved for us the testimony of those who bore witness. This is something that Mary had cottoned on to early in Fraenkel’s class, then in Gilbert Murray’s study atop Boars Hill, and now as a D.Phil. student. She was giving it metaphysical roots in Plotinus’ distinction between existence and reality. The scholar chases down the past through continuous layers of human effort, of copying and reproducing, of retelling and reimagining.

In her talk on the reality of the past, Elizabeth swapped a picture of a solitary and stationary observer for a community of humans, each of whom is a witness to a tiny part of human life. She transformed the lonely individual into someone who is alive at a particular historical moment, with one perspective among many, living in a human society that weaves together the common past by answering various forms of this question: ‘What happened?’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘What did you see?’ Each contributes a thread to that tapestry, one thread in a pattern that transcends each individual and that is beyond what any one of us can know. We, together, keep the historic past alive by recording and preserving testimony through the generations. What becomes our shared past is contingent on that activity.