Mary Midgley, a moral philosopher and author, has been described as “the UK’s foremost scourge of scientific pretension”. At the venerable age of 94, she has published a new book, Are You an Illusion?, which examines contemporary approaches to the question of consciousness. As in previous books, such as Science as Salvation and The Solitary Self, Midgley seeks to challenge what she sees as the materialist dogmatism that dominates much of modern scientific thinking.
Here, Midgley explains the popularity of Richard Dawkins, why genes aren't selfish after all, and how today's scientists could do with a little more philosophical training.
What does it mean to say that science is a form of metaphysics?
I take it that `science’ here means `physical science’, not just systematic thinking in general? If so, then saying that it is a "a form of metaphysics" seems to be just a mistake. The speaker’s idea is probably that `science’ on its own can supply its own conceptual background – the set of assumptions needed for its work – so that no philosophical thinking is needed here.
This can’t be true, since concepts – structural ideas such as mind and body, force, time, life and causal necessity – are not physical items.
What is involved here is not just a tribal dispute between two sets of academics. Reflection about these background assumptions is philosophical work whoever does it. The many great scientists, from Newton to Einstein, who have always dealt with philosophical questions have known this well. It is only lately that scientific training has become so one-sided that the crucial function of philosophy within it has been forgotten.
This close link between science and philosophy is not exceptional. Every discipline – history, mathematics, language, whatever – raises philosophical problems whenever the discussions within it become very general..
Is science ill-equipped to approach the question of the self and human consciousness?
Again, if `science’ means `physical science’, it can’t deal with questions about the self and human consciousness, since these are not physical items. The central questions here are not about empirical facts. They are questions about how best to think about our lives. It is no deprivation to science not to deal with them, science has plenty of subject-matter of its own.
How have we come to place so much faith in science when it comes to understanding the self?
The physical sciences have been so extraordinarily successful in their own sphere of late that people tend now to expect them to be applicable everywhere. Enlightenment thinking has built up a general optimism about human capacities which centres at present on what is called `the scientific method’ – a grossly simplified notion about how scientists work, one which almost treats them as omnipotent.
Brain science, in particular, has been greeted with a credulous rapture which is quite out of proportion to any light that it has actually thrown on the rest of life. In fact, at present the sort of wild credulity which used to be associated chiefly with religious movements seems to flow most naturally towards scientific developments.
All this distracts people from older ways of thinking – not just from religious thinking, but from all sorts of instinctive and traditional social approaches by which human life has habitually been guided, and which are probably necessary to it. In this area, isolated experimental results are really not a substitute for the accumulated experience of history.
Why do you think Richard Dawkins has become such a respected figure even outside the domain of science?
Issue 24, 11th August 2014
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