Mary Midgley

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My costaway this week is a philosopher. Philosophy, she believes, is like plumbing. You take it for granted until it goes wrong.

Presenter0:38

Born at the end of the First World War into a free thinking intellectual household, she went, just before the Second World War, up to Oxford, where she became a friend of Iris Murdoch, and she resisted joining the Communist Party.

Presenter0:50

Marriage and motherhood in the north of England followed, and it wasn't until she was fifty seven that she published her first book. Over the last thirty years she staked out a philosophical position all her own, arguing that life is complex, there are no simple answers to its problems. Morality depends on unresolved contradictions. No single discipline, not even science, can provide a perfect solution.

Presenter1:15

These are the arguments not of a narrow academic, but of a fierce and witty woman who gleefully declares that she keeps thinking she has nothing more to say, and then finds, as she calls it, some idiotic doctrine which I can contradict. She is Mary Midgley. Um you contradict Mary with great style. It has to be said you've been called the the foremost scourge of the scientific pretension and the most frightening philosopher of the century. Are these titles that you enjoy take some pleasure in?

Mary Midgley1:44

Uh no, I get a little worried when people talk of me as an instrument of destruction. It's really not entirely fair. Um I think the trouble is that the destructive things I say are rather simple, and when it comes to construction that's always more difficult and more complicated.

Presenter2:02

But what are the sort of idiocies, the idiotic doctrines that that you attack? I mean, give me a give me a flavour. What characterizes them?

Presenter2:09

Yeah.

Mary Midgley2:09

Well, I think that they are extreme and overconfident. They usually have some sense in them but are being exaggerated and people are over advertising them as the cure for everything. I mean the notorious example is that I got very upset about the uh Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene.

Mary Midgley2:33

Because although I think he meant that to be, as it were, a biology textbook, it actually radiated very strong and simple views about human nature, a suggestion that we are basically selfish and nothing else. This isn't supposed to be what the book says. The book is supposed to be about the way genes behave. But if you use such a word as selfish, inevitably you set going tremendous natural simplification.

Presenter3:03

And people did like it. We are beguiled.

Mary Midgley3:05

Beguiled.

Presenter3:06

By big idea.

Mary Midgley3:06

But particularly if they're melodramatic, you see, if they sound exciting like that. And it it lays a responsibility, I think, on all of us who are writing not to oversimplify. Well, it's very hard not to oversimplify, and I think when I'm being treated, as I say, as some pure instrument of destruction, I'm being oversimplified, but I can see why it happens.

Presenter3:06

Yeah, but

Presenter3:09

Yeah.

Presenter3:29

Well well, I mean, let's take your your it's not a complicated analogy, actually it's a simple analogy for a complicated concept, which is that you are trying to understand life as looking into a a large aquarium, don't you? A rather murky aquarium.

Mary Midgley3:39

Very old note.

Mary Midgley3:42

A murky aquarium with very many windows, great big aquarium, you can go round to all the different sides of it. You peer in one side and you see a fish swim away. You go round the other side and you're not sure if it's the same fish. I mean obviously what I'm talking about here is uh understanding other people's points of view and uh getting the the the the range of a problem. We'll come back to it all, but tell me about your fish.

Presenter4:06

Tell me about your first record now.

Mary Midgley4:07

Well, now this is Fan Desen Swan, and this one is of course relevant to my career because it's about moral philosophy. It is the reluctant cannibal, and it's about what happens in a cannibal tribe when a child starts not obeying its elders and questioning the existing values.

Speaker 44:25

Come and get it.

Speaker 44:28

Roast leg of insurance salesman.

Speaker 44:32

A chorus of yums ran round the table. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Yum, yum, yum. Except for Junior, who pushed away his shell, got up from his log, and said...

Speaker 44:42

I don't eat people.

Speaker 44:45

I won't eat people. What's the matter with the land? Don't eat people. He keeps on repeating. Eating people is wrong.

Presenter4:53

Flanders and Swan and the Reluctant Cannibal recorded at the final performance of the Fortune Theatre in London in nineteen fifty nine. Cast your mind back, Mary. Can you pinpoint the moment when philosophy first came into your life in the sense that you you recognised it as such?

Mary Midgley5:07

Well, I have the notion that I first heard the name. One uh thing that struck me very much when I was quite small, five or six. We moved to a house where there was an extraordinary sort of hump in the garden outside the study window, and um my father explained that uh the parson who had been there before had been sitting at his study window and he'd seen an elm tree begin to sway to and fro.

Mary Midgley5:31

And that elm tree had finally fallen the other way, and this was the root that remained. So, as my father commented, being a philosopher, he just sat still and waited. Well, I thought that's rather splendid, you see.

Mary Midgley5:46

to learn to do that. But there was a lot of chatter going on around me on serious subjects and I did vaguely gather that this some of this might be called philosophy and I thought it was quite interesting.

Presenter5:58

This was in Greenford. It was more a rural place than the sort of part of the West London sprawl that it now is.

Mary Midgley6:00

Yeah, yeah.

Mary Midgley6:05

Oh, it was indeed. Greenford one has to say nostalgically was then country, and my brother and I potted around um l looking for newts in the ponds. Oh, an enormous rough garden and

Presenter6:19

This was around a sort of dilapidated vicarage.

Mary Midgley6:21

The dilapidated vicarage had been patched up, but it was dilapidated when we got there.

Presenter6:26

Hmm.

Mary Midgley6:27

And you follow

Presenter6:27

And your father was a

Mary Midgley6:28

Bit eccentric, but I gather he ended up at Speaker's Corner shouting the oil. He was eccentric in the sense that he had liberal views.

Presenter6:31

Shouting the evil

Mary Midgley6:36

He was a pacifist because in the First World War he'd been a chaplain and had been required to explain to soldiers why they were dying, and that put him pretty much against war.

Presenter6:45

But I wasn't suggesting he was eccentric because he was a liberal thinker, but he did stand in the town square. That is right.

Mary Midgley6:51

That's right. And he would put a chair in the market place after evening service, and he has some boards painted, please question your parson, and people would drift up and say, Is every word in the Bible true? No, he would say, The Bible is a lot of different books, you know, written for different purposes, and so forth.

Presenter7:05

Please note.

Mary Midgley7:09

And though the other thing they always asked was why has the Archbishop of Canterbury got fifteen thousand a year? And the answer is he's running an office, you know. This is not, he doesn't spend it all on drink. I mean, a lot of these things were jolly obvious, but they were real questions. People were simply wondering and wanting to know.

Presenter7:28

And he wanted to help and he wanted to communicate, he wanted to give practical help, he wanted to help them think, which is probably.

Mary Midgley7:28

And he won't

Mary Midgley7:31

He wanted to help

Mary Midgley7:34

Yeah.

Presenter7:35

Where you got the idea?

Mary Midgley7:36

So, indeed.

Mary Midgley7:38

Record number two.

Mary Midgley7:40

Ah, yes. My father, who had quite a good baritone voice, used to sing some baritone songs, and this one I think is ever so good because it's both very

Mary Midgley7:50

Very jolly and very sad, you know, Subert manages to be both these things at once. Let's have

Speaker 47:57

Fost bringed kine and grief for thee

Speaker 48:01

The strength to dental form thy leash, Mine Helps, Mine Helps.

Speaker 48:12

Frost print kind and prefernish Mine hairs, mine hairs Astering so then so fundish Mine hairs, mine hairs

Speaker 48:35

Unja di post kund aushtat.

Speaker 48:39

Fully shiny asleep should not my parents

Speaker 48:47

I'm deeper sweeps and but mine hearts mine

Presenter8:55

Schubert's Depost, sung by Peter Schreier, accompanied by Andras Schiff. Um you said, Mary Midgley, that you were a a clever but rather chaotic child. You were sent off to boarding school to Down House, near Newbury, weren't you? Where you you seem to have been encouraged to tackle abstract thought at the drop of a hat. I'm pretty fearless stuff.

Mary Midgley9:13

Well, um

Mary Midgley9:15

We were given practice in the questions in general papers, and they were things like and I remember two particularly one was, Nature is badly lighted and too green, discuss.

Mary Midgley9:27

And one was attempt by definition and example to explain the word work.

Mary Midgley9:34

But these remain with you afterwards, you see. Um these I mean uh the meaning of the word work still seems to me

Mary Midgley9:40

Be interesting. Is it work?

Presenter9:43

So we got the brain working. That was the point of it. Wasn't it? So it made you think.

Mary Midgley9:45

Absolutely. Because at first some

Presenter9:47

Because at first sight their pretty daughter in nature is

Mary Midgley9:50

You think whatever could I say, but then you start yes, yes, well.

Presenter9:50

Too great of you.

Presenter9:53

Uh

Mary Midgley9:54

Um you know you get

Presenter9:54

But there was a certain teacher, wasn't there, who who in cur

Mary Midgley9:58

encouraged you to sort of think out of the box. Oh yes. When we got to the sixth form stage, particularly the history teachers, Jean Roundtree and Bed Sanderson, really were interested in the background of their subjects. But however much she knew Miss Roundtree, she I mean, she made a large error with you, didn't she? Well she certainly did. Jean Rowntree was extremely keen on me knowing German and that wasn't a bad idea.

Mary Midgley10:24

And so in February 1938, she said she thought it would not be too dangerous or foolish to go to Vienna. Well, she was unfortunately mistaken. But you went. I went and sort of settled in with a family called Jerusalem, delightful people. A Jewish family, that's right. That's right.

Presenter10:44

That's right.

Mary Midgley10:45

And uh I went arrived on the first of March and on March the fourteenth Hitler came in and so there one was in Vienna with the stormtroopers going

Presenter10:55

And you understood because of Miss Roundtree's current affairs.

Mary Midgley10:56

Because

Mary Midgley10:58

Uh

Presenter10:58

Bare sections.

Mary Midgley10:58

It wasn't sort of totally unexpected.

Presenter11:00

What's going on?

Mary Midgley11:04

Um but it was very bad. And um How nasty did it get? Oh well, I mean I didn't see anybody being killed. Uh I saw the crowds in the Ringstrasse all yelling Seek Heil, Seek Heil and doing their Hitler salutes. And uh Jewish shops were being smashed, no written notices up and shops

Presenter11:23

Hmm.

Presenter11:24

You would have been

Mary Midgley11:25

In what?

Presenter11:25

seventeen well about seventeen, eighteen.

Mary Midgley11:28

Seventeen, eighteen. It was not exactly surprising, but it was As bad as one would expect it to be.

Presenter11:43

What about the Jewish family you were with?

Mary Midgley11:44

Well, they got out in the end after that. But the father was arrested, wasn't he? The father was arrested, and I went.

Presenter11:46

But the father was

Mary Midgley11:51

Fraujerslin sent me asked me to go to the Quakers to see if they could help, and there was nothing I could do. I think um I thought that possibly by staying I was some sort of protection to them.

Presenter12:02

But you were very distressed, were you not?

Mary Midgley12:04

Twenty hours, yes, yes, it was horrible, yeah.

Mary Midgley12:08

I could not Three.

Mary Midgley12:11

Oh, yes. Now we're at Downhouse. Every summer there's a great Binot, as there is at most schools, and the Binot included a sort of ballet taking place. And the ballet which was being rehearsed all my last summer at school was Pierre Gynt. My form actually were just trolls, you know, nothing terribly ambitious in the dancing line. But this theme of Solbig's song has remained with me ever since.

Speaker 412:37

Bless the soul within my hand.

Speaker 412:58

We got a real

Speaker 413:14

For the eyes I know

Presenter13:36

Sulweg song from Grieg's Pier Gynt, sung by Elizabeth Serdestrom, with the new Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davies. So you you got a scholarship up to Somerville, Mary. Um one of your contemporaries um at Oxford, uh Philippa Foote, also a philosopher, has uh since said that you

Mary Midgley13:52

So

Presenter13:55

Cut a very grand

Mary Midgley13:57

See Indeed. Philippa tells me this, and it's a bit comic, because I thought Philippa was terribly grand. You know how inferior one feels.

Mary Midgley14:07

Party else.

Presenter14:08

But would you have been talking about sort of intellectual superiority? Were you very intellectually self-confident?

Mary Midgley14:13

No, I wasn't. Um but I mean I suppose there was this that at Down we were very much in the habit of arguing about these vast themes and I do seem to remember somebody at Somerville saying in a rather irritated manner, Oh, here's somebody else from Down who knows all about everything. Uh it was not not that we thought we knew, but that we were used to chatting about each other.

Presenter14:34

But of course there were fewer men around when you were there because it was 1938 39

Mary Midgley14:37

Well, by the time the war got going, there were very few men around, but when I went up in 1938, you see, things were kind of normal. But was it.

Presenter14:45

But was it ultimately a a disappointment or an advantage that there weren't men around? So many men around?

Mary Midgley14:49

So many men around. Well, um, it caused it to be much easier, I think, for us to get our mou our mouths open and speak um in in classes. And you see, I think that this is why a number of us who were up at

Presenter14:56

Something

Mary Midgley15:02

Oxford at that time have made ourselves known in philosophy. There was Philippe Foote, there was Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Bournock.

Presenter15:09

Hmm.

Mary Midgley15:10

And a few others. There have not been so many in philosophy since. I mean, proportionately, I think. I just murdered.

Presenter15:17

Iris Murdoch was there, of course. Iris and became a great friend. She was your bridesmaid, wasn't she?

Mary Midgley15:18

And we can agree

Mary Midgley15:22

Yes, she she was, my bridemaid. Iris and I uh held up uh very quickly. I found Iris very um soothing and easy because uh rather rarely among us when we first went up she wasn't self-conscious, she wasn't thinking, Oh dear, I'm not good enough, what will anybody think of me? She just uh went ahead and said what was in her mind and I took to her very much. And we remained extremely close and the main sort of uh obvious difference between us was that Iris joined the Communist Party almost at once, whereas I was always dubious about it, having been reading my news datesman, I knew about the treason trials and the nineteen thirties and so forth.

Presenter16:01

But you'd also seen uh in Vienna ideological

Mary Midgley16:04

Absolutely, but you see, it's hard.

Presenter16:04

Absolutely.

Mary Midgley16:07

hard to sort it all out, and I think it was hard to believe that there wasn't somewhere somebody who was right and was going to do justice on the others.

Presenter16:15

But it's that same theme, isn't there? That that there aren't any big, simple answers you know. There there you are, then being conflicted by all of these different views and and and trying yourself.

Mary Midgley16:18

There you are.

Mary Midgley16:22

Bye.

Presenter16:25

To find

Mary Midgley16:26

The middle line. That's right, that's right. I mean, Aris came out quick after the war, much quicker than most of the intellectuals who uh went for Stalin, which I think, you know, does a person credit.

Mary Midgley16:38

Record number four.

Mary Midgley16:40

Yeah, now this is a bit of uh Benjamin Britton's Serenade for Tender Horn and Strings, which I think is an absolutely splendid collection of songs. The bit in question is Is the Lightwake Dirge? And it's the bit where you're told what'll happen to you after death if you don't do charitable good things in this life, you will get a pretty bad time. Here it comes.

Speaker 417:04

Christ to save my soul.

Speaker 417:18

Send me night and home.

Speaker 417:22

To break the tread of arms that pass that Christ is.

Speaker 417:47

Level comes at last, and Christ is in I see.

Presenter18:01

Part of the dirge from Benjamin Britton's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, with Peter Peirce accompanied by members of the London Symphony Orchestra and the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britton.

Presenter18:11

So you left Oxford, Mary. You went to Reading and then to Newcastle eventually, having married uh your husband Geoffrey. Um but leaving Oxford was a was a positive act on your part. You said you would have been destroyed, quote, if you'd stayed. And you you seem to be saying that it it was a very negative atmosphere, it was a very critical, destructive atmosphere.

Mary Midgley18:31

I think what was going on in moral philosophy in Oxford at that time was terribly narrow. And at that time, if you raised questions in Oxford or Harvard or any of those places, which were actually moral questions about what it was fair to do in the world, you know, about should next be done about race or something of that kind, you would have been told that this was not philosophy. This phrase it is not philosophy, or has nothing to do with philosophy, was constantly used and was used to sideline these immediate practical topics. Do you think that's still

Presenter19:05

Yeah.

Presenter19:08

Uh

Mary Midgley19:08

Dog.

Presenter19:09

Yeah.

Mary Midgley19:09

Yeah.

Presenter19:09

Uh

Mary Midgley19:09

Um I too narrow. I fear that it has to be and there's something at present which makes it almost have to happen, which is the insistence that all academics should produce a constant stream of

Presenter19:10

Too narrow.

Mary Midgley19:22

Papers of one kind or another.

Presenter19:23

Papers of one kind of thing.

Mary Midgley19:25

The survival of their department can depend on the sheer number of articles and the number of words in the articles that they bring out. It is a strange obsession with product, I think, that this notion of accountability that you've got to hold everybody who has office to account, and instead of producing educated students, the thought is you produce a lot of pages covered in words, you see.

Presenter19:52

Record number five to her father.

Mary Midgley19:54

Yeah. Ah, now, yes, we come to

Mary Midgley19:59

Anna Russell explaining Wagner. Now this is a product of a real enthusiasm for opera, which my husband Geoffrey had and which I shared, in which indeed we got very interested in Wagner. And we think he's bloody good on the musical side, and indeed his ideas are very interesting. But if you look at the myths in any literal sort of way, you can scarcely keep from laughing. And I think Anna Russell has explained extremely well how this works.

Speaker 420:28

The scene opens in the River Rye.

Speaker 420:33

And swimming around there are the three Rhine maidens, a sort of aquatic Andrew sister.

Speaker 420:41

Their signature tune is as follows.

Speaker 420:54

I won't translate it because it doesn't mean anything.

Presenter20:58

That was Anna Russell attempting to explain Wagner in part of The Ring of the Nieblung, and it was recorded live in the Town Hall, New York, in 1953.

Presenter21:06

So married life and motherhood, Mary Midgley, took took you over. You had three sons. You juggled with the philosophy as well and wrote some papers and articles and lectures. But true to the views you were just expressing, you didn't write your first book until you were in your late fifties, I think. You Beast and Man. You simply don't feel you'd have been capable of writing.

Mary Midgley21:26

Well yes, my uh views weren't clear enough. Um what really made it all come together was that I got passionately interested in um animal behaviour, um in the accounts given by uh people like Jane Goodall and Conrad Lorenz and others of how animals actually behave. This was news to me and seemed terribly exciting because the way the animals behaved was actually not the rather ludicrous sort of way in which we tend to assume that they behave, that the wolf is wicked and the rat is vicious and so forth, but much more um complicated and much more like ourselves. So this seemed to put us much more in the world, you see. I had not been aware of it, but I'd had a thought that we were sort of

Mary Midgley22:11

Away above the natural world and not screwed onto it. And I began to think that we were screwed onto it. That's how it all kind of came together.

Presenter22:20

But it it it was ultimately to put you on a collision course, if you like, with the evolutionists and notably the one we've mentioned, Richard Dawkins, who argued that science

Presenter22:32

Has most of the answers, really, to our behaviour and determines what we do and when we do it and how we behave.

Mary Midgley22:40

Yes, um I think that science simply is much more complicated than that really, but there's something very good uh in what Dawkins says, in that he is keen to point out that we humans are part of the whole life system, that we are animals along with the other animals. This is a very good and important point.

Mary Midgley23:02

Which he has always made, but the

Mary Midgley23:05

Trouble then, I think, is that he's putting both us and the other animals in a vast bracket of being selfish. And I think that is most misleading and not at all scientific.

Presenter23:17

There are those, of course, who say that you misunderstood his use of the word selfish. Well. Um

Mary Midgley23:24

He chose to use that word.

Mary Midgley23:27

about genes rather than saying something like they are self perpetuating or prolific or something of that kind. And it is so highly coloured a word that he cannot possibly complain if people take it literally, but also he himself takes it literally quite a lot of the time in the book.

Speaker 423:34

Kind of

Mary Midgley23:46

Um when Hobbes talked like that, uh saying that uh

Mary Midgley23:51

We we were all uh solely self-interest. He was doing it for political reasons. He wanted to um stop people being ordered about by the by the church, really. Um and and if you put the thing out explicitly as a political doctrine, then people know where they are. But if you say I am a scientist and I'm telling you this, you see, it really gives you an authority which you didn't ought to have.

Presenter24:11

Yeah.

Presenter24:12

Mm.

Mary Midgley24:12

That's what got got me upset.

Presenter24:14

Upset is the word. I mean, you had a huge sense of outrage. I mean, you expressed it.

Mary Midgley24:18

Yeah.

Presenter24:21

Very strongly and very in a very articulate way. But I have to say, if ever there was a slap down, that was it, wasn't it?

Mary Midgley24:22

Very strong.

Mary Midgley24:25

And yep.

Mary Midgley24:26

Yes.

Mary Midgley24:29

Well like it was intended as such, yes.

Mary Midgley24:33

Number six.

Mary Midgley24:34

Uh yeah. Um well now, this is Vaughan Williams' Phantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. I have no special excuse at all for bringing it in. I just think it's an absolutely splendid

Mary Midgley24:46

And very soothing piece of music. I think it does us all good. Let's have it now.

Presenter25:48

Plot of Vaughan Williams' Phantasia on a theme by Thomas Talis, played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the Field, conducted by Neville Mariner.

Presenter25:55

M

Presenter25:56

Mary, you've lived in this society for

Presenter25:59

May I say more than eight decades now? And let me ask you then, from that experience and as a moral philosopher.

Presenter26:06

What's your judgment about us today as you see us struggling to um legislate, if you like, for decent behaviour with ASBOs, for example, antisocial behaviour orders. Do you think you can do that?

Mary Midgley26:18

Well, it's difficult, isn't it? I think really that the increase in social mobility, the way in which everybody is surging around and not living with people that they know very well, makes it all much harder. And I don't know how much can be done about this. I mean, when people used to be stuck in the same village all the time, of course things went wrong and people treated each other badly. But still, you did know all the people who you were concerned with. And people do tend to treat those they know better than those that they don't, I think. It's not to be expected.

Presenter26:54

Things don't

Presenter26:55

So are these the kinds of

Presenter26:57

price we pay really for being more affluent and more liberal and more equal and

Mary Midgley27:01

More liberal and

Mary Midgley27:04

More free

Presenter27:04

Yeah.

Mary Midgley27:04

Then more independent. Yes, I think so. Some sort of balance has to be arrived at.

Presenter27:06

What

Mary Midgley27:10

If you haven't yourself been brought up with any kind of uh

Mary Midgley27:14

as it were, habitual discipline, it's very hard to learn it when you're grown up. So I think that there are great difficulties. The point of view of people who are trying to organize society, you do have to impose some sort of order, but it gets very hard.

Presenter27:29

On the other hand, if you think about it, we we taught people how to how not to behave in a racist manner by introducing the Race Relations Act, didn't we? That worked.

Mary Midgley27:38

Relations Act, didn't we? That worked, that's quite true. So punishment sometimes or the law sometimes does does work, does have a job to do. It's n I'm not I'm not against some sort of legal arrangement, but the absolute

Presenter27:48

Um it's not

Presenter27:51

That you want to l legislate against the individual thing rather than the person.

Mary Midgley27:55

That's what I'm thinking.

Mary Midgley27:57

Yeah.

Mary Midgley27:58

But I have no I'm afraid no bright suggestion of what to do other than that the balance really does need to be attended to and that simply trying to scare people is not necessarily going to work.

Presenter28:13

Yeah.

Mary Midgley28:13

Yeah.

Presenter28:13

Yeah.

Mary Midgley28:13

Number seven.

Mary Midgley28:15

This is the the Swan of Tuonella. It's a Sibelius piece. My husband played the choronglais as well as the oboe, so we used to hear this rather splendid thing pretty frequently. If you have an oboe in the house, as those having one will know, there's a great deal of upset going on because the reeds are never right. It is an endless business to get the oboe and the choronglais actually on form. But we will now hear what it sounds like when it is.

Presenter29:44

Part of Sibelius the Swan of Tuonela, played by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. Um and what about God, Mary? Um in the main the evolutionists don't allow of a place for him, do you?

Mary Midgley29:57

Well, I think all that is too narrow a way of talking. If we can go back to my aquarium, we look through all sorts of different windows and through some of them this large fish sometimes called God is visible and through others he is not. Have you seen it? We would be mistaken. I think the flick of a tail, my feeling is that the personal God I do not personally meet, but I know a lot of people do.

Presenter30:11

Have you seen it?

Mary Midgley30:24

And I think this is a puzzling and mystifying fact, but as most of those who are much concerned with him say, he is a mystery, and you shouldn't be surprised that you don't exactly get the hang of it. I mean, I do think that this is important to say, because the suggestion of some Darwinists, neo-Darwinists today, is that we know that life is meaningless, as it were, that we know that it kind of random and doesn't fit together. And that seems to me to be an absurdly pretentious kind of suggestion.

Speaker 430:55

Uh

Presenter30:55

Yeah.

Presenter31:00

Because you have a faith in a sense of order in the world. You have a faith in humanity.

Mary Midgley31:04

You have a faith in humanity. Yes, beyond humanity, in life, do you see? I mean, uh th th we should be on the side of life, shouldn't we, not just humanity. The notion of Gaia is one that I fancy, you know, um that the earth and the living things on it are form part of a system. But that's called faith, isn't it? Uh well I don't mind if you call it faith.

Mary Midgley31:26

Yes, I think so.

Presenter31:27

Last record, something's quite relevant at this point, isn't it?

Mary Midgley31:29

Ah, yes. Yes, now this is um Mendelssohn's Hebrides over to Fingel's Cave. Now, by good luck, my son Martin and I went to Fingel's Cave, and it is absolutely wonderful. You come towards this island, and you see what looks like a cathedral, two great arches on the side of it, and you see that this whole island is made of hexagonal pillars, and it is absolutely gorgeous. We were dumbfounded. Now it's

Mary Midgley32:00

A thing that I only just heard about, and I think it's good fun, that when Mendelssohn went there uh long ago, he came back absolutely bubbling with this stuff music that he wanted to write. But it was the Sabbath. He was staying with the strict Presbyterians who would on no account let him touch the piano until the following morning. So it was only then that he was able to put down the music which we shall now be hearing.

Presenter33:18

The end of Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, Fingle's Cave, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bernard Heitink. Now, Mary, I have to ask you three questions. If you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take?

Mary Midgley33:29

Oh, my I think it has to be Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a theme of talis. I think that's a kind of all purpose one, you know, that would always make one.

Presenter33:37

Go away.

Mary Midgley33:39

Whatever might be going on. And a book you can take with you as a family.

Presenter33:42

Oh, another use.

Mary Midgley33:46

William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. This is five hundred pages long. It's bound full of excellent stories about people's different religious attitudes and what got them into them and out of them, and the thoughts that he has about them are jolly interesting. I know that this'll work because last summer I was actually quite ill and I was convalescing and I thought, oh dear, what am I going to read? I know I've got War and Peace, but it won't last me, you see, the whole of August. And I took this Varieties of Religious Experience off the shelf, thinking it was pretty good, and indeed it is absolutely marvellous. You can read it many times without the slightest trouble. And a luxury. Oh well, my sons have pointed out to me that I'd better have a solar w hot water system. I think that

Presenter34:35

Endless hot water.

Mary Midgley34:36

Yes, I think so.

Presenter34:38

Mary Midgley, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 334:50

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio forward.