Customer Reviews

Science and Poetry (Routledge Classics)

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Mary Midgley's book is mainly a critique of the relevance of atomism, that great legacy of the enlightenment that made us individuals and claimed that every aspect of the world could be reduced to collections of minute, interacting but passive particles. For her, like every viewpoint, this one perspective is built from its own very particular imagery, but while it produced great breakthroughs in some areas, it can't possibly describe all of the phenomena we perceive today. It has left us dangerously ill prepared to deal with the environmental and moral challenges we face three centuries after it first gained acceptance. A universal framework designed in the midst of religious oppression was bound to favor individual, self-contained, competing entities but how can it address the complexity we face in today's environmentally challenged, interrelated world?

Midgley believes that different domains require distinct analytical frameworks and that atomism with its need for clearly quantifiable elemental particles is just one approach. It is not, for example, despite the valiant attempts of some, applicable to the consideration of culture or the study of history.

Furthermore, by ignoring subjectivity all together, this singular viewpoint leaves no satisfactory place for consciousness or life in general, ideas that we all live by no matter how objective our beliefs. We are not passive automatons, self-contained slaves in an all-determining environment. Despite the now little believed notions of behaviorists, we're alive, distinct from any constituent atoms within us, part of a living earth and active participants in our own lives.

My main disappointment with this work was not its effective exposition of the need to go beyond atomism and siblings but its shying away again and again from what that could mean, except for the brief description of the concept of Gaia and universal human rights that ended the book. I would have liked to hear more than allusions to the effective and thorough alternative to simplistic reduction, that grand approach that takes account of relationships and cooperation. Other methods get a mention too, those used in the study of history or literature but these too get short shrift.

Given what dominates its pages, I think a better title may have been "the need for imagination" with a subtitle that stressed how obsolete the enlightenment's legacy now is. This book points to a need - it just doesn't go far enough in suggesting a solution.

Finally, one reflection that no reader can avoid - she writes beautifully.

From her lair in Newcastle upon Tyne, Mary Midgley has proven to be a redoubtably clear and lucid thinker, and a scourge of philosophical pretension (especially of the scientific determinism kind). She is a self styled philosophical plumber, ripping up the floorboards and investigating the bad smells that emerge from suspect philosophy that just doesn't cut it when applied to the complex world of actual existence.

In this book she takes aim at modern intellectual theories that try and split the material world into merely so many atomic particles. This leads, she contends, to strains of thought such as existentialism and selfish gene theories which underestimate the role that the consciousness plays, human striving, and a holistic interpretation of the place of humanity in nature's great cycle.

Midgely believes the main cause of this is an overemphasis on the sciences invading the spheres of thought which are the natural preserve of the humanities - such as poetry. She defends Keats against Richard Dawkins lament that he was trapped in a primitive romanticism and did not embrace the scientific understanding of the composition of the rainbow. Not so, she says. Imagination, awe, sensation are as real as the physical processes that create the rainbow. As she has said in another context, toothache is as real as a tooth.

I kept thinking of Michel Houellebecq's novel, Atomised, while reading this book. Houellebecq has become the only French author in a generation to find a foreign audience with his bitter alienated stories of deracinated characters who cannot find any pleasure in traditional family ways of living. Midgley tries to restore some of our holistic approach to life, an appreciation of our part in the grand scheme of existence, not just our mere billiard ball particle selves, our fleeting consciousness (described by Will Self in his novel My Idea of Fun as so many polystyrene chips) and tries to get back to a Bellovian sense of human existence as a great and marvellous thing.

The only weakness of this critique is what she makes of her conclusions when she arrives at them. She concludes the book with some pretty trite washy anti Thatcher bashing about the value of society and global warming. But even though she doesn't pursue her argument as much as I would have liked in constructing a viable mode of living in the modern world, I recommend this book as an excellent andidote to some of the more specious trendy philosophies pedalled by certain lauded modern thinkers that are read by lonely edgy young people eating pizza alone on dark evenings in their studio flats.

Chief purpose of science is to explain things, make the world less of a black box. But should science be the only way to do this explanation? Should it also be the way we explain such non-physical entities as culture? Is art just an escapism from "cosmic hostility" and from Dawkins' selfish robots, are Shelly's unacknowledged legislators "entertaining self-deception" (John Cornwell: The Limitless Power of Science in _Nature's Imagination_)? What qualifies for science? Is Robert Graves' _Greek Myths_ not scientific, shall it be replaced by Memetics?

How relevant in modern era it is to apply the extreme views (Lucretian atomism, Cartesian dualiaty) that were required to free us from the shackles of religion aeons ago? And are these views applicable to our daily life, life which is not made of atoms, quarks but of love, hate, home, office, pollution...?

These questions are not ones that demand more "research" but ones that are indicative of what Mary calls conceptual emergencies. So when out of these emergencies scientists start claiming omnicompetence and give disturbing picture of human life and of this world, it is time to look at the thinking that governs scientists' (and philospohers') this view, and time to check if it is on the correct path.

This, in short, what Mary's attempt is.