Mary Midgley > Quotes

“The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.”
― Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter

“The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don’t love others enough.

"The End of Anthropocentrism?”
― Mary Midgley

“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“None of us can study anything properly unless we do it with our whole being.”
― Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge For?

“. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness.

. . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen.

The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive.

All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.

The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature.

. . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.”
― Mary Midgley, Beast and Man

“What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.”
― Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning

“The world in which the kestrel moves, the world that it sees, is, and always will be, entirely beyond us. That there are such worlds all around us is an essential feature of our world.”
― Mary Midgley, Beast and Man

“By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“The idea that being scientific simply means being irreligious is a particularly naive one. It has caused a lot of confusion and will get us nowhere.”
― Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning

“As Darwin pointed out in The Origin of Species (opening pages of chapter three), the 'struggle for existence' can often be described just as well as a mutual dependence. And harmless coexistence as parts of the same eco-sphere is also a very common relation. . . . Among social creatures, positive gregariousness, a liking for each other's company, is the steady, unnoticed background for the conflicts.”
― Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion

“The notable thing about his story here is not its atheism but its fatalism. The drama that it presents of helpless humans enslaved by a callous fate-figure is, of course, not new and, like all such myths, it conveys not just meaninglessness but a positive, sinister meaning – the presence of an active oppressor.”
― Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene

“Darwin proposed that creatures like us who, by their nature, are riven by strong emotional conflicts, and who have also the intelligence to be aware of those conflicts, absolutely need to develop a morality because they need a priority system by which to resolve them. The need for morality is a corollary of conflicts plus intellect:

'Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection. . . . Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or anything like as well-developed as in man.' - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

That (he said) is why we have within us the rudiments of such a priority system and why we have also an intense need to develop those rudiments. We try to shape our moralities in accordance with our deepest wishes so that we can in some degree harmonize our muddled and conflict-ridden emotional constitution, thus finding ourselves a way of life that suits it so far as is possible.

These systems are, therefore, something far deeper than mere social contracts made for convenience. They are not optional. They are a profound attempt -- though of course usually an unsuccessful one -- to shape our conflict-ridden life in a way that gives priority to the things that we care about most.

If this is right, then we are creatures whose evolved nature absolutely requires that we develop a morality. We need it in order to find our way in the world. The idea that we could live without any distinction between right and wrong is as strange as the idea that we -- being creatures subject to gravitation -- could live without any idea of up and down. That at least is Darwin’s idea and it seems to me to be one that deserves attention.

“Wickedness: An Open Debate,” The Philosopher’s Magazine, No. 14, Spring 2001”
― Mary Midgley

“our dominant technology shapes our symbolism and thereby our metaphysics, our view about what is real.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“Being angry is not just being slightly feverish; it is confronting a world in which other people look more hostile and threatening than they normally would. Actions of others which would normally appear harmless now seem like attacks upon one. The angry person is shorter than usual on confidence and serenity, and more inclined for aggression. He easily believes himself to be wronged. And so on”
― Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter

“Evolution, then, is the creation myth of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory. To call it a myth does not of course mean that it is a false story. It means that it has great symbolic power, which is independent of its truth.
Evolution as Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, p. 33”
― Mary Midgley

“We are accustomed to think of myths as the opposite of science. But in fact they are a central part of it: the part that decides its significance in our lives. So we very much need to understand them.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“This book is about the problem of evil, but not quite in the traditional sense, since I see it as our problem, not God's. It”
― Mary Midgley, Wickedness

“At present, when people become aware of this [common metaphorical] imagery, they tend to think of it as merely a surface dressing of isolated metaphors - as a kind of optional decorative paint that is sometimes added to ideas after they are formed, so as to make them clear to outsiders. But really such symbolism is an integral part of our thought-structure. It does crucial work on all topics, not just in a few supposedly marginal areas such as religion and emotion, where symbols are known to be at home, but throughout our thinking.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“Fatalism is now offered, not as just one possible philosophical attitude among others with reasons given for and against it, but as a fact backed by the tremendous authority of science.”
― Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene

“the supposedly Darwinian belief in natural selection as a pervasive, irresistible cosmic force. Neo-Darwinian theorists offer this force as the final explanation, not just of evolution, but of all sorts of deep social, physical and metaphysical mysteries as well.”
― Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene

“Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps by Tzvetan Todorov.5 This is a careful study of the moral situation of both prisoners and guards in the German and Russian camps. It shows how much more complex and many-sided that situation was than might have been expected,”
― Mary Midgley, Wickedness

“Demonic Males: Apes and the origins of human violence,7 Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson discuss the rather alarming facts which have lately become known about the savage behaviour sometimes observed among these primates.”
― Mary Midgley, Wickedness

“information on its own has no value. It only begins to have a value when it supplies a need, when it is brought into contact with some existing system of aims and purposes and fills a gap in that system, when it becomes relevant to people’s beliefs and attitudes.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“because individualism is giving us real difficulties today. Although it is a guiding ideal for our age, accepted as a main achievement of the Enlightenment, it takes many different forms.”
― Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene