Joana Corrêa Monteiro
Controversies around the work, nature and purposes of universities have been around for some centuries, and even if settings, challengers and pretexts often change, the main ideas and opinions put forward are usually variations of the same set of basic claims, arguments and questions. The last decades are no exception and, from time to time, either because some scandal makes the headlines, or because more, or less, funding is allocated to, or cut from, some specific knowledge field or institution, or for countless other circumstantial reasons, universities and those working in them have had to explain their views on what they are, what they do, and why that which they do is worth doing. Even if, as has been noted, the clear majority of those engaging in these discussions has attended universities, usually good ones, and it would make sense to expect they are in the best possible position to know what the essence and purpose of a university is, the truth is this does not seem to be a settled matter.
Interesting examples of such not so recent discussions include the debate around the alleged moral, political and social roles of universities and the somewhat troubled relationship between research and teaching in universities. Are universities responsible for leading moral, social and political progress? Or is that something that might or might not happen as a result of the other things universities do, but not their real purpose? And is that purpose to communicate and expand knowledge or to create and advance it? Or both? How do knowledge and moral, social and political order interact?
I do not think that the role or purpose of universities is to promote moral, social or political development. To put it very briefly, I think that a university is a place for the cultivation of the mind, a community or set of communities devoted to the pursuit of intellectual goods. This does not mean that universities exist in separate realms, with no interferences from or in the day-to-day messiness of reality––because if understanding and truth are among those intellectual goods, then what happens in “the real world”, the universe (in the broadest possible sense, and not exclusively in the physical sense), is precisely at the origin and centre of the university’s endeavour.
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The two recent intellectual biographies of the Sommerville Quartet, Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (Oxford University Press) and Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Penguin), both underline several unusual aspects of the lives and works of these philosophers, the most obvious one being the fact that they were all women who thrived in a field where men were predominant. This is obviously true, but it should not obscure the fact that it may not be quite enough to group them together meaningfully. Their womanhood does not account for the more important things that they might have in common as philosophers, though it certainly played an important role in their lives, in some of their intellectual enterprises, and in their friendships, both for trivial and not so trivial reasons, such as the fact that they were all in Oxford during the Second World War, at a time when many of the male students and professors were fighting abroad. It is curious, however that it is Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s work that explores this aspect at a greater length, giving a more in-depth account of the personal adventures of each member of the Quartet and underlining the role other women had in their lives and works, despite the fact Lipscomb’s title might suggest otherwise.
It is also noteworthy that it is not common to think that Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch formed what is usually understood in philosophy as ‘a school’. Their interests were diverse and not easily understood as a continuous unified commitment. However, it seems clear that their friendships were relevant to, perhaps even entangled with, their intellectual pursuits. Murdoch once said in an interview that philosophy “attempts to solve very difficult highly technical problems”, that it takes a “patient relentless ability to stay with a problem” since it is “a very counter-natural (…) odd unnatural activity” which “disturbs the mass of semi-aesthetic conceptual habits on which we normally rely”.[1] Intellectual goods are hard to pursue and almost impossible to obtain—in perfection, at least. This we know since Plato and Aristotle. Philosophy is a very hard activity. As is reading Homer, or Joyce, or developing equations that make sense of the little we know about the Higgs boson. It is natural, then, that the company of others also interested in broadly the same fields, sub-fields or topics, is important in that pursuit. The romanticized idea of the secluded intellectual is a statistical oddity. There are, of course, self-taught geniuses that function better if let alone to contemplate. But most of us need these types of friendships and communities to thrive in the quest and enjoyment of intellectual goods, and to clearly show that feature of the life of the intellect is perhaps Lipscombe’s and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s more significant contribution through their biographies. This is illustrated by Lipscomb’s introductory claim that these four women had a common project, despite their different and singular paths and worries, motivated by a common deep dissatisfaction with what was being done and taught in the field of Ethics, in their time. Against that, they came to share the idea that “there are moral truths, grounded in the distinctive nature of our species – in facts about what human beings need if they’re going to thrive”. Their friendships, their conversations about their works and readings, “their shared history and their shared affection but also profound differences” all shaped “the quartet” and its distinctiveness.
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A biography is a narrative, a story of how someone came to be what she came to be. Philosophy is not necessarily best done through stories. But from its beginning it has included, to some extent, an examination of the lives of philosophers. Socrates remains a vivid reminder of that. It’s not only that “an unexamined life is not worth living” it is that some lives are simply not compatible with the pursuit and contemplation of the good, the beautiful and the true. Or, to put it differently, to fully appreciate the problems and questions a particular philosopher struggles with, and to understand her attempts at dealing with and even answering it, one needs to know relevant aspects of her life, her culture, her background, the philosophical but also the social and political reality she inhabits, and so on. This, of course, entails the recognition that ideas, even universal ideas, are not innocuous possibilities floating around with no relation to reality of any kind—ideas and reality mutually shape each other.
The existential dimension of philosophy is not regional nor characteristic of particular schools, authors or sensibilities. By its very nature, the activity of the philosopher is all-demanding. It is obviously true that no-one could possibly spend their entire human life devoted to the mere blissful contemplation of ideas. And it also seems true that, even if she did, that would not necessarily make her better at philosophy. However, David Hume’s famous thought that philosophy is so hard that it has to be left at the office with the door shut once one finishes a day’s work is unable to grasp the surprising and trifling ways in which life and philosophy mix with each other. To design a logically perfect system of comprehension that fails to capture reality in its richness, messiness and complexity is a philosophical failure.
All of this is plainly illustrated by both books when, for example, they show how Philippa Foot’s dissatisfaction with mid-twentieth century anglophone ethics and its insufficiency before the horrors of the Second World War determined her later accomplishments, or when they underline the close relations between Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention and the famous episode of her vote against President Truman’s honorary degree.
These help us understand the meaning of their philosophical enterprises and ideas more clearly and more deeply, especially the ones that are connected with their shared criticism of a conceptual scheme that depends on a fundamental separation between the realms of facts and values, in light of which “nothing is objectively good or bad, right or wrong, important or not important”. Lipscomb’s work, offering a less complex network of relations and characters, turns out to be more effective at this, building from an initial contrast he establishes between an Aristotelian world view and a Humean one, and showing how each of these thinkers reacted to tensions present in their own days with conceptual tools that seemed to have been exhausted in previous times but where, surprisingly, they came to find an innovative way of rethinking the great questions of human life and existence.
Naturally, not every personal detail of a philosopher’s life should be subject to a kind of public scrutiny before her ideas could be appreciated, and the line between plain gossip and meaningful insight is, in some cases, too easy to blur, especially in a time, as ours, when confusion about the nature and aims of universities—and about the nature, scope and value of philosophy and other humanities—persists. The effort, however, of offering a complete portrait of these four philosophers, of the intellectual community their friendship exemplifies and of the development of what came to be their relevant contributions to philosophy is commendable, not only because it reveals the richness of the relations between philosophy and life in their case or because it offers a meaningful example of the type of community that can flourish in a university, even in highly specific and hard circumstances (such as a world war). But also because it underlines the relevance and provocations that Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley’s lives and works still have for twenty-first century philosophers and students.
[1] Iris Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee.” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
REFERÊNCIA:
Lipscomb, Benjamin J. B.. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022. Mac Cumhaill, Clare and Rachael Wiseman. Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. Dublin: Chatto & Windus - Penguin-Random House, 2022.