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The article says: > In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC ra
by Amezarak 2y ago
The article says:
> In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men. To most, Midgley’s attempt to discuss the relationship status of our most cherished philosophers would have been discarded as irrelevant, even scandalous.
I don't have to rack my brains very hard to recall similar observations that are much older:
> Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might per-
suade him to it, – marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the
optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus,
Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not;
indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married
philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception,
Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply
in order to demonstrate this proposition. (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality)
I have found this to be a very common motif: a news article presents someone saying something so REVOLUTIONARY it had to be suppressed, that nothing before was ever like this said or done...which is almost never the case; it is very popular for some reason to manufacture these examples of suppression above what really did occur. (I recall a similar HN article about the secret suppressed queen Semiramis, who was proverbially famous until we abandoned classics education.) Although the peculiar anglo attitude towards philosophy probably didn't help, maybe she was just not that interesting: the idea that a philosopher's ideas were really just a distillation of his personality, way of life, and physical health weren't novel.
- kasey_junk 2y agoThe article points this out? It describes how this person was outside of the mainstream of a particular time & place, which was noted for being overly restrictive.
- Amezarak 2y agoYes, and it makes the implication that it was because of this she wasn’t more famous. It seems more likely that her ideas just weren’t that great. Another great example is later in the article, where pregnancy is held to refute Cartesian skepticism. Somehow, we are expected to accept that a strong feeling something is true is the same thing as something being true. I am not a Cartesian by any means, but obviously Descartes anticipated this line of argument: this sort of thing is taken care of by his “evil demon” interfering with our feelings and sense perceptions. Even more broadly, we don’t accept this style of argument in general: the testimony of those who have experienced God on acid trips is not taken as confirmation of his existence. The subject of the article just doesn’t seem to have said much novel or interesting, but the author seems insistent that she deserved more attention anyway, and the only explanation is some sort of deliberate oppression as with the BBC example for malicious reasons. (Which itself is overstated: they would have disdained Nietzsche saying the same thing.)
- justonceokay 2y agoA bunch of those philosophers and others were probably gay (or at least some kind of not straight) IMO. I get that sense from Wittgensteins letters especially. I’m not saying that they were wearing eye shadow while writing or anything like that, in fact I think that the burden of being different weighed on them very heavily, hence the philosophy.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoAs a married man, there's no way I could ever do philosophy. "Honey, are you going to the store like you said? Or are you too busy thinking about the human condition again? The kids need to eat!" "Yes dear, just about to leave the house. Will finish this 800 page draft of very mediocre thoughts later." Yeah, come to think of it, the problem is probably the quality of my thoughts rather than family..
- MrMcCall 2y agoIf you are in a marriage with any degree of success, you are a philosopher, and a politician, too ;-) Thanks for the chuckle, friend.