What Is Philosophy For? by Mary Midgley

Author:Mary Midgley [Midgley, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350051102
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

16

Missing persons

All this powerful rhetoric illustrates the way in which familiar visions – well-known and potent images – can shift our morality and take the place of the plain facts before us. That is what I meant when I said earlier that the human imagination has far more power than we realize. Of course that imagination also has great power for good. It gives us our new panoramas, new insights which are the source of all our fresh ideas and inventions. But if we don’t want these new developments – if we are anxious to resist change – imagination also provides us with an escape-hatch by making a noise somewhere else. In strengthening our resistance, it plainly often has power to set aside all regular processes of argument.

That is why people who are in the grip of a favoured vision often become quite immune to regular argument, and it is why their favoured vision is often rather a primitive, childish one. Thus, battle-imagery has an obvious primitive appeal, and the childish emotive image of ‘the nanny state’ is enough to stop many people attending to the alarming facts of climate change altogether. Similarly, seeing the living world as simply a mass of machinery and ourselves either as engineers or as cogs within it obscures the centrality of our own independence and spontaneity. Mill, arguing for free discussion, stresses that centrality:

really is of importance, not only what men do, but what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery – by automatons in human form – it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce … Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model and set to do the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the inward forces which make it a living thing.1 (Emphasis mine)

Is it not extraordinary that, a mere couple of centuries after Mill wrote this, sane and well-educated people should reject his inspiring vision of the tree altogether and should insist instead that they themselves will soon become mechanized? Is it not odd that they should be taking positive pride in claiming that they are already becoming ever more machine-like, and should predict that those who will rule the earth after them will be essentially machines? We shall have to ask more questions about the meaning of this doctrine shortly. But first, according to my usual method, I want to look back and ask where it came from.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.