By JOSÉ COSTA JUNIOR*
Observing the sky in recent times, some of the visions of the British philosopher Mary Midgley come to mind.
We are living in strange skies. Different shades of color, thick smoke that won't go away, heavy clouds of dust, orange suns and a burning sensation when we breathe are common features of our lives these days. The lack of seasonal rain in much of the country contributes to the situation, which is probably not natural. News of arson appears in the media, as well as reports that humidity levels are very low.
There are signs that industrious human action has had a decisive impact on the planet's climate balance in recent centuries, but everything seems to have escalated at this time. The coexistence of extreme weather events and extreme forms of exploitation of nature is striking and seems to be part of the same phenomenon. In this context, a walk in the open air demands a lot and we don't really know what to do, especially with children.
In this inhospitable environment, respiratory diseases spread and we try to deal with the situation according to our condition. Shortly after living under the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, life here is once again facing challenges, obviously not on such a large scale as the global crisis caused by the coronavirus, but which leaves us in a very difficult situation and which also, curiously, involves the natural and spontaneous task of breathing.
Observing the sky in recent times, we are reminded of some of the views of the British philosopher Mary Midgley (1919-2018), who produced relevant analyses about who we are and our place in the world. In dialogue with other areas and recognizing the limits of our own condition, Midgley promoted reflections on the risk of fragmented views of human nature, society and our place in the living world. Firstly, in the case of human nature, Mary Midgley argues in the book Beast and Man: The roots of human nature (1978) that the fragmentations between reason and emotion, self and other, mind and body, culture and nature, human and animal, among others, produced a strange portrait of humanity, a way of life split between internal and external wars.
We end up distancing ourselves, others and the natural world, based on a questionable conception of who we are and our experiences. Much of his work involved trying to overcome such framings and fragmentations of humanity, promoting a broader and more coherent portrait of who we are and how we live.
A simple example involves our relationship with other animals and the environment in general: for centuries, we considered the natural world to be at our disposal, in a limited view that mainly involved the belief in human superiority and dominion over the world. In this context, we developed ways of life based on extractivism and the unregulated consumption of natural resources.
However, at some point, this system of thought and the set of beliefs that came from it became unsustainable, both because of its consequences and its foundations. A review of this framework becomes urgent, reconsidering the system of thought as a whole and promoting basic conceptual repairs, which decisively impact the content of our beliefs.
As Mary Midgley points out in What is philosophy for? (2018), his last book before he passed away, this is the main task of philosophy: to constantly review and restructure our systems of thought so that we can better understand reality and ourselves.
A second point criticized by Mary Midgley is what she identifies as “atomistic individualism.” Much of our societies are guided by a way of thinking that unrealistically isolates individuals, considering people as discrete and self-contained units in the world, guided only by their own interests. This conception is one of the foundations of the current economic system and also of the so-called democratic political organization. An “aggregate of individual units” that live based on “contractual structures” and seek the best for themselves.
Mary Midgley considers in The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene (2010) that this emphasis (i) on the form of an atomistic egoism to consider human nature, (ii) on the individualist contractual formulation and (iii) on the emphasis on individual freedom. Although politically useful, such conceptions do not fully portray human circumstances and may even distort our conceptions of ourselves and our relationships with others and with the natural world.
Mary Midgley does not question or dismiss the significant contributions to individual autonomy and politics of such conceptions. However, she emphasizes that we are not “billiard balls,” as the extreme isolationist conceptions of this worldview might conclude, a type of distant life forms that clash from time to time, but rather social animals, in constant relations with others and with the world.
The third aspect of Mary Midgley’s critique involves the risks of our fragmentation from the natural world. The alleged selfishness, isolation and superiority that are commonly conceived as human nature also separate us from the rest of the living world and, worse still, make us live in worse conditions. Midgley argues that such atomistic and selfish views of the world tend to paint a bleak and isolationist picture that causes us to misinterpret our social and natural landscape, fostering the illusion that we are much less connected and interdependent than we are as social animals.
Thus, we are portrayed as disconnected life forms fighting for resources. In this competitive climate, we need a strong, self-centered reason to “win in life.” And so, instead of recognizing our intrinsic natures and connections, we isolate ourselves into atomized forms of life, which distorts our moral outlook toward others and nature.
An alternative landscape to this fragmented, atomistic, and self-centered set of images involves recognizing our natural relationality, that is, recognizing the vast interdependence that exists between us and the world. For Mary Midgley, following the Darwinian conception—and not that of social Darwinism, a “misuse of Darwin’s ideas”—we are part of networks of relationships and dependencies that shape and expand us throughout our lives. We have freedom and agency in the world, given the kind of life form we are, but this does not isolate or fragment us from the living world.
We can think here, for example, about how dependent a child is to live, or how dependent we are on good quality air to breathe and live well. However, due to the fragile conceptions that structure our way of life, such interdependencies are little recognized, often overshadowed by limited conceptions of freedom, reason, progress and priorities, among others. This does not mean that our freedoms are limited to forms of collectivity, but rather that we can better qualify our views and choices, considering how connected we are to the world.
Such “threads of relationality” extend beyond humans and animals and continue throughout nature, or what Mary Midgley often refers to as “the biosphere,” in which we are embedded, and which we impact and are impacted by. In this way, our environments are not alien entities or mere aggregates of competitors in a “struggle for life,” but rather elements to which we are directly related and in which we simply live.
Here we have a more integrated view, which can make us rethink our moral conceptions and, consequently, our priorities. An ominous note is that when we consider such more global and interdependent views of the world, together with our place in it, we notice that this complex system does not need us humans to follow, which is in itself a counterpoint to the conception of human superiority and its self-centered correlates.
In this context, when we observe the strange and frightening skies of these days, with their heavy and uncomfortable air and see our children struggling with the most basic breathing, we can realize how impacted we are by the inhospitable world that limited and questionable views about nature and ourselves have contributed to creating.
*Jose Costa Junior Professor of Philosophy and Social Sciences at IFMG –Campus Ponte Nova.
References
MIDGLEY, Mary, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
MIDGLEY, Mary. “Philosophical Plumbing”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, Vol. 33, p. 139-151, 1992.
MIDGLEY, Mary, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene. Durham: Acumen, 2010.
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