Mary Midgley: secular thinker who found Richard Dawkins' brand of atheism weak

Her curiosity about humans drew her to study animals and poetry, always striving for the middle ground rather than resting on absolutes

Midgley frequently found herself pitched against scientific orthodoxy and defending the right of individuals to maintain religious and scientific ideas in parallel (YouTube/The RSA)

Mary Midgley, who has died aged 99, was a moral philosopher who made enormous contributions to human thinking on questions such as the self, our animal heritage and our place in the universe. Although not a believer in any god, she was a staunch advocate of religion, frequently finding herself pitched against scientific orthodoxy and defending the right of individuals to maintain religious and scientific ideas in parallel.

She saw her role as a philosopher as being able to unite and reconcile extremes of thinking, to bring shades of grey to a domain of polarised black-and-white ideas. “Moral philosophers are back in the world, which is certainly the right place for them”, she writes in the conclusion of her 1999 book, Wisdom, Information and Wonder.

Midgley was born Mary Scrutton in London a year after the First World War, the daughter of Lesley and Tom Scrutton, a curate who later became chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge. Her interest in philosophy first developed at Downe House School, Berkshire. She recalls in her biography: “I had decided to read classics rather than English – which was the first choice that occurred to me – because my English teacher, bless her, pointed out that English literature is something that you read in any case, so it is better to study something that you otherwise wouldn’t.

“Someone also told me that, if you did classics at Oxford, you could do philosophy as well. I knew very little about this but, as I had just found Plato, I couldn’t resist trying it.”

Going up to Somerville College, she read mods and greats alongside Iris Murdoch and graduated with first class honours in 1942, at the height of the war. Further study at that time being impossible – “the war put graduate work right out of the question” – she joined the civil service.

Returning to Oxford in 1947, Midgley continued her studies with Gilbert Murray, the eminent classicist, researching Plotinus’s writings on the soul. She recalled that the work was “so unfashionable and so vast that I never finished my thesis”. In a later article, Proud not to be a Doctor, she said: “I missed out on one of the regular phases of academic education. I never had the normal discipline of the PhD,” and suggested that this was a positive, if nowadays exceptional, influence on her subsequent academic career.

She married the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley in 1950 and moved with him to Newcastle for his new post at the city’s university (he died in 1997). After raising a family she too joined Newcastle’s Department of Philosophy in 1962 as a senior lecturer.

Midgley came to writing late in life, having by then brought up three children. Her first book, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, published in 1978, was informed by the experience of parenthood and what she saw as the animal-like aspects of child behaviour. Speaking about the experience of writing her first book in middle age, she said: “You have passed your mid-life crisis and know that you will be dead soon anyway, so it seems just as well to say things before you go.”

This was the first time a philosopher had provided substantial comment on sociobiology, a subject very much in vogue following the publication of Edward O Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis just three years earlier. Whereas earlier philosophers had concentrated on what differentiates us from our animal cousins, Midgley instead examines the similarities, demonstrating how much like animals we are. The result is to illuminate our human condition as an extension of our animalistic nature.

Her insights were followed up in Animals and Why They Matter (1983), which sought to explain issues such as racism and sexism in terms of our attitudes towards the beasts. In Science and Poetry (2006) she shows sympathy with James Lovelock’s concept of earth as a holistic, living organism, suggesting that “The idea of Gaia – of life on earth as a self-sustaining natural system – is not a gratuitous semi-mythical fantasy. It is a useful idea, a cure for distortions that spoil our current worldview.”

In the debate of creationism versus evolution, Midgley argued that those who oppose the theory of “intelligent design” are driving others to accept the concept. In a 2007 interview with The Independent, coinciding with the publication of her pamphlet Intelligent Design and Other Ideological Problems, she said: “When people are asked why they are persuaded by intelligent design, they often say that it’s the only alternative to scientific atheism and Darwinism which are pernicious moral doctrines.” She added: “They see it [intelligent design] as the only refuge from this anti-human bloody-mindedness”.

While Richard Dawkins, with whom she had heated public spats, contends that the only possible positions are his own or fundamentalist creationism, Midgley sought a middle ground where there is still scope to raise what she calls the “questions of inner life”. These are the enquiries that evade straightforward scientific answers, issues that as she suggests “can’t be settled in the lab”.

Throughout her work Midgley often refers to an alienation created by the artificial separation of body and mind, a legacy of Descartes. “The central trouble is the dualism of mind and body”, she says. “The notion of our selves – our minds – as detached observers or colonists, separate from the physical world and therefore from each other, watching and exploiting a lifeless mechanism, has been with us since the dawn of modern science.”

This issue comes to the fore in Are You an Illusion?, published in 2014, where she argues against a dominant materialistic ethos to instead favour the importance of our own thoughts – subjective sources of information – in explaining the world. That year she was interviewed by comedian Rob Newman at the RSA in London.

The philosopher Stephen Cave said of the book: “Midgley manages in just 150 pages to say more than most scholars manage in a lifetime ... Midgley combines both the ability to place intellectual fashions in their broader context with having lived long enough to personally witness the rise and fall of many of them.”

Mary Midgley, philosopher, born 13 September 1919, died 10 October 2018