Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

Marcel considers a ‘cinematographic’ conception of time, whereby the past is thought of as a fixed series of discrete events (like the row of pictures that Elizabeth uses to illustrate the idea of the past as something there and unchanging).[50] This is the picture of time that operates in the I-It world, writes Marcel (borrowing Martin Buber’s way of speaking). But when it comes to living individuals, the I-Thou world, the cinematographic conception of time is inadequate. In the world of human beings, the past remains alive in the present and the future. ‘Past is all “open to be recreated” – my own & others’, Iris summarises.[51] The interweaving of past, present and future in the I-Thou world is seen most vividly in the case of promises: ‘Reln of lang. to past & future. Promises.’ [52] A promise is an act of faith, or ‘creative loyalty’;[53] ‘faith’ because although a promise orientates us, together, towards a shared future, neither of us can know what kind of people we will be when that future comes.[54]

Philippa’s point is a simple and elegant extension of Wittgenstein’s: our evaluative language does not peel off the world, leaving behind a stripped-out, valueless scene that we might call ‘reality’ or ‘nature’. Rather, an evaluative description makes sense only when it is located in a pattern of human life.[74]

‘The meaning of “offensive” is not found solely in the dictionary but in human life: to give its meaning would be to describe not just the rules of etiquette and offence, but the social life of human animals, how hierarchy is achieved and sustained, how relationships are built and sundered.’ Mary too is weaving in lessons from Wittgenstein: ‘Language has to be rooted in the complexities of real life, not imposed on it from outside as a calculus derived from axioms.’

While Philippa went to work on moral language, Elizabeth was digging deeper into human action. Her first book, Intention, was several years off, but it was already foreshadowed in the paper she addressed to Oxford’s Socratic Club in February 1948. ‘The metaphysics of all this is very difficult’,[79] as Mary Glover had said.

‘With this argument you propose to destroy “naturalism”.’[86] In that chapter, Lewis had argued that ‘naturalists’ cannot account for thought’s rational character. Thought, he had argued, is governed by rational relations. Conclusions follow logically from premises. Yet the naturalist insists that all relations are ultimately causal. Human behaviour and thought follow causally, not rationally, from other physical events. Lewis claimed that this position is self-defeating. The naturalist thinks he has rational grounds for his belief in naturalism. But if naturalism is true, then his belief has no rational grounds at all. It is just a physical event, with a causal explanation like any other. A belief without rational grounds is irrational, so the naturalist’s position, Lewis concludes, is self-undermining.

When we are interested in reasons, validity and grounds for human thought and action, Elizabeth would show, we do not look for causal chains, but for large-scale patterns. These are not patterns of cause and effect, nor of constant conjunction, but patterns which locate what H.W.B. Joseph had called ‘bits of living’ within a rational order.

Elizabeth’s patient explanation in which she compared Wittgenstein’s interest in human life to Aristotle’s: ‘The special importance of language does not, then, flow from its being a particularly grand isolated phenomenon. It arises because speech is a central human activity, reflecting our whole nature – because language is rooted, in a way that mathematics is not, in the wider structure of our lives.’ This is why studying language is ‘an investigation of our whole nature’.[100]

As Mary was learning from Plotinus: the macrocosm without is mirrored in the microcosm within.[104]

In her journals Iris continued to brood on ‘E’s’ paper on the past. In late spring 1948, she wrote in her journal: ‘There is no memory past unsupplemented (any more than there are sense data unsupplemented). There is only the woven texture…the interweaving of pasts of testimony & deduction with one’s own past of memory.’ Poised over the page, she worried about the implications of E’s picture. ‘Problem: to find a theory of historic past wh. doesn’t make it “ghostly”. ’ Then she adds: ‘isn’t it ghostly save to historian?…Much of past is ghostly to me…Parts of my own past may seem ghostly?

One of the things that Iris took away from Elizabeth’s paper was the idea that to have a concept is to have an ability. By speaking of linguistic or conceptual abilities, Elizabeth pointed Iris away from the surface features of language (of the kind that J. L. Austin and his Kindergarten were busy gathering and analysing) and towards ‘facts about how we learn use of words (hence concepts.)’.

The previous term (Trinity 1948), Farrer had given a course of lectures on the ‘Essay on Metaphysics’ that Collingwood had written on board the Alcinous en route to Java. Katharine Farrer was deep into an English translation of Marcel’s Être et avoir that would be published in 1949, with a Preface written by Donald MacKinnon.

As R. G. Collingwood noted on board the Alcinous: metaphysics is not an adolescent demand for reassurance, but an attempt to understand the transcendent background to human life, against which individual propositions may be verified by observation and scientific investigation. We have different methods for this study of the form of reality, its complexity, its patterns and their interrelation. Poetry, art, religion, history, literature and comedy are all the metaphysician’s tools. They are how metaphysical animals explore, discover and describe what is real (and beautiful and good).

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Philippa told Mary that Herbert Hodges, at Reading, was looking for an assistant. Hodges had studied Classics at Balliol in the early 1920s; his tutor had been Sandie Lindsay. He had spent his philosophical life resisting logical positivism and the vision of philosophy that it promoted.[116] Leaving Oxford for Reading, Hodges created in miniature his vision of a collaborative, synthetic philosophy, in which lecturers and undergraduates from English, Classics and Philosophy gathered together around a cosy fire in a Victorian terrace to talk freely, and without fear of ridicule.[117] He derived this conception of philosophy, as ‘an experiential science of spiritual phenomena’,[118] from the German sociologist and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, on whom, in 1949, Hodges was writing his second book. In his review of Hodges’s first book, Sandie Lindsay remarked on ‘the considerable similarity between Dilthey’s thought and that of the late Prof. Collingwood’. Both ‘recognised that mind and body, man and Nature’ are ‘closely knit.’

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Moral freedom, she will argue, is not the ability to choose your own moral principles in an otherwise valueless world. True moral freedom is the ability to look steadily at reality and to see things justly. To see what matters, what things are important and good. To look again and to rethink the past. This work of looking does not involve sudden movements of the will at isolated moments of choice but is a continuous task. And as Donald MacKinnon had seen, it requires humility and purity of heart.

Iris had spoken on the radio of the unrealistic picture of the human life that she found in both Sartre’s and Hare’s philosophy. Both men pictured themselves as lone subjects, facing a ‘brute and nameless nature’. Philippa was ready to connect this picture with the moral subjectivist’s idea of a deep contrast between statements of fact and evaluation. She would use her insights about the word ‘rude’, first expressed over the clatter of the Lyons’ tea room on Cornmarket, to start to reinstate the connections between descriptive and evaluative language.

Hare’s purely formal criterion ruled out any restrictions on the content of morality and so ruled out any logical connection with human life. Like the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, who placed value outside ‘the whole sphere of what happens’ (words she had heard Iris speak on the radio), Hare thought that there is nothing in reality to ground the objectivity of moral judgement. His philosophy, like Sartre’s, thus retained the formal structure of Kant’s categorical imperative, but with moral principles cut free of any transcendental background.

It is not true that moral judgement floats free of our ideas about a good human life. Reality is not brute and nameless. Meaning is not withdrawn. Rather, we will only be prepared to call something a moral principle, she said, if we can ‘fill in a certain background’. That background, she had learnt from reading Aquinas with Elizabeth, will be one that allows us to see ‘a connexion, in a man’s mind, with that (admittedly large) collection of virtues and vices’.

Virtue terms ‘connect new, and possibly surprising, applications of “good” or “bad” ’ and carry with them ‘a special way of looking at something’, Philippa would explain to her audience. They illuminate the background pattern.

‘It is surely clear’, she would write, ‘that moral virtues must be connected with human good and harm, and that it is quite impossible to call anything you like good or harm.’ [153] With this insight, she found a way to put value back in the world, and to reconnect moral language to human life. The connection to virtue or vice is not a disguised appeal to a higher-order principle: ‘Do not be ostentatious’ or ‘Always display humility’. Philippa did not think (as many contemporary ‘virtue ethicists’ do) that bringing an action under a virtue description implies that it ought to be done. Rather, the virtue term gives a ‘way of looking at something’, a way of seeing the facts in the light of ideas about the human good.

Isn’t the European tradition’s obsession with solipsism and freedom all a bit…adolescent? Mary asked.

Iris too had noted the respect in which the café-dwelling Sartre ‘eschews intimate bonds’.[131] But a life without dependants, even lived in isolation, need not be unreal and disconnected, she thought; not if it is lived with love.

Iris’s lifelong philosophical and literary love affair with love began in earnest in 1951 when she agreed to give a series of radio talks on the work of the French philosopher Simone Weil, a Christian Jewish mystic and political activist who had died in 1943.

her lessons on Kant with Heinz Cassirer) would locate the great humanity of the artist, and the continuity of art and morals. ‘The essence of both of them is love.’

It was in this interplay between image and reality, art and truth, recollection and recognition that the writings of Simone Weil first spoke to Iris. Above all, they unlocked the significance of Plato for her. As a youthful Communist during the war, lectures by E. R. Dodds (Mary’s future doctoral supervisor) had left Iris cold. She had read Plato’s Republic in 1940, while busy with the Oxford reds preparing for another Bolshevik Revolution, and had been so disgusted by ‘the old reactionary’ that, as she joked to a friend, she took to selling the Communist Daily Worker.[143] She had wanted to get close to the ‘thronging multitudes’ whose lives ‘in mines & cotton mills’ were a rebuke to Plato’s vision of a just aristocracy. Now in Simone Weil she confronted a red who kept the Symposium in her pocket: when labouring as a grape picker in Vichy France, she carried it with her and taught it to her fellow farmhands.

For Weil, Platonism, Communism and Christianity all contain the same fundamental truth: the human soul comes to know reality through love.[145] Just as Mary Glover had said.[146] ‘[B]eauty is the only spiritual thing which we love by instinct’, Iris Murdoch will later write.

That year, Iris would be teaching F. H. Bradley, the Idealist whose distinction between existence and reality was so important to Mary. It was the first time Bradley had been taught since Freddie Ayer had declared the metaphysicians extinct. Franz was meanwhile lecturing on ‘Theories of Taboo’ and ‘The Study of Kinship’.[155]

Iris, in her critique of Hare and Sartre, had pointed out that with the metaphysical background stripped away, the isolated subject can do nothing but choose. Philippa now saw that the loss of the background was also the loss of concepts that we rely on to orientate ourselves in ethical relations to others.

By removing the opposition between animal and human, Beast and Man, Mary began to see that she could start to dissolve the paradox at the heart of our self-understanding (‘I know I am one of Nature’s little kings’). Our lives are animal lives that are in many ways continuous with those of fleas, gorillas, cats and jackdaws. Even our sense of our own dignity and importance does not distinguish us; each animal knows itself a ‘little king’ in its own domain, Mary thought. Later, she would write, ‘the bird’s song is not just a mechanical advance indicator of the violence with which intruders will actually be repelled.’ Rather, ‘The song must be primarily expressive. What it says is, “Hurrah, hurrah, it’s me, it’s mine, I’ve got it, I am the greatest” ’.

Though ‘The Philosopher’s Defence of Morality’ was Philippa’s first published article, her first publication was a 1951 critical review of The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, a collected volume of essays by contemporary philosophers on the great Warburgian philosopher’s work. ‘[R]eading these essays’, she complained, ‘I found that I could no longer recall the peculiar excellence of Cassirer’s work, which immediately impressed me again when I returned to the original.’[198] Her final word in ethics, Natural Goodness, reveals hidden traces of Warburgian influence, woven into the fabric of her own philosophical thought. For Ernst Cassirer, each organism is surrounded by its own environment, its Umwelt.

But we humans are metaphysical animals. We dwell in the past as well as the present. ‘You should be ashamed’, ‘We are very proud of you’, ‘What you did was brave’, ‘You must say sorry’. Specialised descriptions – ‘humiliating’, ‘courageous’, ‘disrespectful’ – orientate us towards the world and to each other. We make promises and imagine our futures. It is part of our nature to question. By asking ‘Why?’ the child begins to draw connections – to trace the larger patterns that transcend the region of space and time in which he is situated; to relate cause and effect, purpose and goal. He can come to see the same event here and now as falling under different descriptions. He can view it against a wider background. A square of paper goes into a box in London: I am sending a letter; a fur coat is folded: I am contributing to an aid programme; a handle goes up and down: I am poisoning the inhabitants.

Iris had a new thought to add. ‘Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture’ (these words appearing in print the following year). ‘This is the process which moral philosophy must attempt to describe and analyse.’

But Elizabeth, Iris, Philippa and Mary had looked at past debates about duty and principle, and begun to piece together the background metaphysics that was needed to see things clearly. They had set to work on an account of human life, action and perception, that could reconnect morality with what really matters.

It was essential to the achievement of that end that the people die on such a scale: without it the unconditional surrender would certainly not come. That end, a worldly event, was one that Harry S. Truman, as President of the United States, was uniquely able to bring about by moving his hand across the page, signing his name, giving the order.

Truman knew that the targets could not be purely military. ‘It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities,’ he remarked later.

‘When I say that to choose to kill the innocent as a means to one’s ends is murder, I am saying what would generally be accepted as correct,’ wrote Elizabeth. We may wonder what ‘innocent’ means, but a definition here is not necessary; ‘with Hiroshima and Nagasaki we are not confronted with a borderline case. In the bombing of these cities, it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end.’

as Mary Midgley would write, wickedness is not a character trait, like courage or aggression; it means ‘intentionally doing acts that are wrong’.

Elizabeth, Iris, Mary and Philippa began their philosophical lives together soon after Freddie Ayer had declared metaphysics extinct. His brand of ‘weedkiller’ seemed to have reduced living human animals to efficient calculating machines. ‘I don’t understand!’ had ceased to be a request for help, an appeal to another metaphysical animal for assistance to see things more clearly.

For all four friends, what mattered most was to bring philosophy back to life. Back to the context of the messy, everyday reality of human life lived with others. Back to the deep connection that ancient philosophers saw between Human Life, Goodness and Form. Back to the fact that we are living creatures, animals, whose nature shapes our ways of going on.

Each of the four women found different ways to balance our animality with the fact that we are language-using, question-asking, picture-making creatures. As metaphysical animals, our inventions, symbols and artworks change our Umwelt and, to some degree, our very nature.

Elizabeth’s puzzlement was, she said, the beginning of her forty-year struggle to understand the connection between good reasoning and goodness.

Her masterpiece Natural Goodness, written towards the end of her life, sets out in elegant detail a moral vision the seeds of which were first planted in the 1940s: an account of natural goodness and virtue that begins from thinking about plants.

Foot is considered today to be one of the most significant analytic moral philosophers of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Anscombe, who published always as ‘G.E.M. Anscombe’, is credited, alongside Philippa Foot, with the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the twentieth century. Her ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in which she argues that moral philosophy ‘should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology’, is one of the most widely read and cited papers in ethics today.

It is thanks to her translation that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is recognised as a literary, as well as a philosophical, masterpiece.

Her monograph Intention invented philosophy of action in its current form: many agree that Intention is ‘the most important treatment of action since Aristotle’.

Alongside her twenty-six novels, she published three more philosophy books: The Sovereignty of Good, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists[19] and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. The last is dedicated to Elizabeth Anscombe.

[W]hat actually happens to us will surely still be determined by human choices. Not even the most admirable machines can make better choices than the people who are supposed to be programming them. So we had surely better rely here on using our own Minds rather than wait for Matter to do the job. And, if this is right, I suspect that…philosophical reasoning – will now become rather important. We shall need to think about how best to think about these new and difficult topics – how to imagine them, how to visualize them, how to fit them into a convincing world-picture. And if we don’t do that for ourselves, it’s hard to see who will be able to do it for us.