Middle Path Philosophy

Isn't it fun when we find a kindred spirit? Someone who speaks our thoughts with more clarity or eloquence than we can ourselves? Sometimes I feel quite alone walking what feels like the middle path in life, peeking into the more polarized landscapes on either side with curiosity as well as puzzlement, and often more than a little frustration. I felt less isolated this week while reading The Owl of Minerva, the memoir (though really more of a delightful, albeit brief autobiography) by philosopher Mary Midgley.

I've never read much philosophy, often finding it to be over my head and difficult to comprehend, but from the little I've seen so far, Midgley's books are purposely written for non-academics and I might just be able to glean some wisdom from them. This will be helped along by having read her memoir, I think, which provides a marvelous scaffold from which to view her work.

Midgley was born in 1919, with her first book published in 1978, and her latest book published in 2014. Her memoir came out in 2005 and gives a savvy, often witty, account of her life and how she wandered naturally into philosophy, what she points out is defined via its Greek origin as "love of wisdom." Where she differs from other philosophers is her aversion to reductionism or the abstract, instead she prefers a far more practical Big Picture approach -- and one imbued with embodied compassion.

In her memoir, Midgley comments on some of her favorite teachers. One of those was a history teacher and Midgley said about her that:

"She also reached back often into the past to show how the strange things that seemed to be happening now could have become possible -- what people had meant by acting in this way, what states of mind had shaped our world. This way of getting at the meaning of the present by looking at the past has remained central to me. It is just as useful for understanding thought as it is for understanding action."

How many of us have had such marvelous mind-broadening teachers?

I found myself regularly smiling, delighting in Midgley's British sense of humor as she interwove her personal experiences -- a father who was a vicar, going to a girls' boarding school, attending Oxford from 1938-42 -- with philosophical views, and the history of education before, during, and after World War II. From the distance of half a century, Midgley reviewed her past and kept me captivated all the way through the book. She stands firmly in the camp of context, that all of us present our own unique views and "individual value systems" in all that we do -- we can't help it ... and we shouldn't try to:

"Personality is not an irrelevance to thought, an obstacle to philosophical enquiry. It is an essential element in the solutions offered. All thinking is a human activity, radically linked to feeling and action. ... The impartiality that we have to aim at is not impersonality but simply the avoidance of irrelevant bias."

"In philosophy, rationalists are the people who keep trying to refine and complete that half-framed order, hoping to build it into a clear, universal system. Empiricists are the ones who keep saying, 'No, that won't do. Things are a bit more complicated than that.' This dialectic is unending. Both things are needed; both can be done together."

As to her subtle humor, for example (I wish I had marked more of her humorous anecdotes and comments, but I didn't), during the war she says of a friend that:

"She also took me to visit the home of her mother and aunts, a classic clamjamfrey of elderly ladies and cats with the cats mainly in charge ...."

Midgley addresses often her frustrations with the way that philosophy is addressed in university:

"Showing-off is indeed a feature of many kinds of life and of course it is often a harmless one. But that is no reason why it should be allowed to take them over. Any situation where a lot of young men are competing to form a dominance hierarchy, will produce cock-fights. But -- as Plato pointed out already -- these fights are not part of its essence; they are distractions from it. They interfere with philosophical work. 'Tough-minded' is much too polite a word to use for people who go to a meeting, not in order to understand what someone is saying but in order to catch him or her out by picking holes in it. ... In any case, the practice of bullying one's students ... is not a sport at all; it's a vice."

Mary Midgley was and is a remarkable woman. She raised three sons before writing her first book in her fifties, and points out that not only did she choose to put her children and home life first, but that she thinks it turned out far better that way because then she had lots of personal experience to apply to her philosophy. Not that she didn't keep her toes in the waters; her husband was a teacher/philosopher as well, and as Midgley's sons got older, she slowly began writing more, teaching, lecturing, and doing broadcasts. The latest interview I found was one from March 2015 HERE, where it said:

"She is, she says, still writing: currently working on an afterword for a book about her philosophy and also on a talk she will give next month at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, when she is awarded The Edinburgh Medal for her contributions to the 'wellbeing of humanity'."

I'm reading her books in order -- other than having enjoyed her memoir first -- and will no doubt write more blog posts as I follow her through those thirty years.

1978 Beast and Man

1981 Heart and Mind

1983 Animals and Why They Matter

1984 Wickedness

1985 Evolution as a religion

1989 Wisdom Information and Wonder

1992 Science as Salvation

1994 The Ethical Primate

1996 Utopias Dolphins and Computers

2000 Science and Poetry

2003 The Myths we Live by

2005 The Owl of Minerva 

2007 Earthy Realism

2010 The Solitary Self: Darwin

2014 Are you an illusion?

Falling Into Fascination

Marion Woodman

One of my quirks seems to be that I fall suddenly into fascination with certain authors, both fiction and non-fiction. In the past, it's been with the marvelous and wise Jungian Marion Woodman (born in 1928, published her first book when she was 52) or with the evocative naturalist Terry Tempest Williams; I end up buying every single one of their books to read sequentially, and google articles, essays, and videos on them, just to obtain a more in-depth feeling for these people. It's sort of like falling in love:

"There was I, sitting at one side of a long table, quietly listening to a Geography lesson and doing (as they say) nobody any harm, when suddenly the world was filled with a wonderful and quite unaccountable light and warmth. Trying to make out where this radiance came from, I gradually realized that it centered on Daphne, who was sitting opposite. We beamed at each other."

The above quote was written (about a time when she was a child) by my new love, Mary Midgley, a philosopher born in 1919 (published her first book when she was 59), in her memoir The Owl of Minerva. I "met" Mary while reading a series of books on nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner; he mentioned Mary quite often and with every quote he shared, I fell more in love with her until the momentum carried me into getting as many of her books as I could. I've never ended up meeting any of my author-loves, and maybe I don't need to ... I hear their voices in my heart and head, almost as if they are happy to guide and bless me from afar like distant mentors.

Mary Midgley

As it happens, however, I don't fall in love only with writers, but also with topics or subjects, and when I do, then comes immersion within those as well. When I began to show dogs in my 20s, I read hundreds of books on canid behavior as well as those specific to training and breeding; almost 10 years later, I did the same with felines, and then came the energy medicines (homeopathy and flower essences) followed by Ayurveda in my fourth decade. All of these were built upon the continual scaffold-shifting that is my spiritual Self seeking the Divine. Thus, while my study of topics or subjects (or authors) is intense and immersive, I come up for air to explore my own intuition and imagination to apply these ideas in the context of my own life. 

So, what occasionally appears to be indecisive or waffling behavior is, rather, a whole-life view--the Big Picture--of what this all means to me instead of a reductionist approach in perspective. I dive deep but try not to become mired down, thus allowing my fascination or love to guide me, hopefully, into being a more loving, embodied, and empowered woman who is more at ease with the ebb and flow that is Nature.

Unkempt

I wrote elsewhere a while back about my distress over my neighbor "mowing the woods" in front of my property because he thought it looked messy -- we live in a semi-rural neighborhood, it's why I fell in love with the place, it's supposed to appear chaotic and wildly gorgeous! Not only that, but the "messiness" is inherent in promoting a healthier environment:

"The industrialized eye, accustomed to suburban lawns and controlled gardens, generally sees such diverse, visually complex plant communities as chaotic. There appears to be no order or control, only wild, random growth. Regardless, plant communities have spent some 500 million years learning their craft; there is a reason for how they are structured. The more visually complex a plant community, the better it can respond to ecosystem demands and stressors. All ecosystems are dynamic over time in their drive to preserve this kind of 'wildness.' A suburban landscape, not continually forced into an orderly shape, will 'relax.' It will begin rearranging, reassembling, itself immediately; it will begin to look rather unkempt." ... "Disease outbreaks and heavily destructive insect infestations are extremely rare in these kinds of lumpy, visually complex, 'unkempt' ecosystems." ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner in The Lost Language of Plants

I have also been seen as messy or unkempt, especially once I passed my mid-thirties. Maybe that's part of why I protect the messiness of the woods; I feel it as kindred, as part of me.

Bo Jangles

Bo Jangles in the Amur Maple

Maybe?

We have a possible new addition to the family - a kitten. Five days ago, I found a feisty little blond kitten in our garage, hiding in the under-carriage of my car. The kitten is skittish, for sure, but beginning to trust me. Now if I can just get the elder cats (14 and 17) to accept the kitten instead of chasing it!

I think I know who the kitten's momma is; ever since moving in, we've seen a tortie-colored adult once in a while and last year I saw her briefly with a kitten. The previous owners of the house had been feeding what they said were two strays, but left them behind and our cats aggressively chase them away. I don't know why momma-cat would have abandoned this little kit, though -- maybe she was killed or a Tom-cat separated baby and momma as soon as he was weaned? Haven't seen a sign of her, though, since the kitten's been with us.

This little one was terribly skinny so I've been feeding every few hours -- which is also helping him/her to trust me. Because of how thin it is, I'm thinking it may be a little older than I first thought. Will know more when I can get it into a vet's office without traumatizing it too much.

Needless to say -- for those who know me -- I'm already in love with this charming kitten.