We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.
Mary Midgley · Moral philosophy
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Summary
Philosopher
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Mary Midgley
1919–2018 · Moral philosophy · Modern
Mary Midgley argued, against both a blank-slate social science and a crude biological fatalism, that human beings are animals with a nature, and that this nature includes culture, dependence, and moral feeling. Beast and Man, 1978, is the clearest start. The short sentence people quote, that we are not just rather like animals but are animals, matches the book's thesis.
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It may be a mild compression, and the card in this library marks it Summary rather than as a sentence in quotation marks. She wrote plainly, in public, against the idea that a serious philosophy has to sound like a neighbouring science or like nothing at all. Later books take on science and myth, the stories we do not notice we are telling when we say 'just genes' or 'just culture'.
She was of Anscombe's generation at Oxford and did not confuse agreement with membership of a school. The animal claim is not an insult and not an excuse. It is a refusal of one-storey pictures of the person. Those pictures are still the ones a headline prefers. Her sentences are often already the right length, which is why a second, flashier sentence is usually someone else's improvement.
Beast and Man stays a paraphrase of the central claim. 'Philosophical Plumbing' and the opening of The Myths We Live By are included. A fifth slogan was not cut out of books that argue by accumulation.
Start here
The opening chapters of Beast and Man.
You meet the thesis at the length it needs, which is not the length of a mug.
Quotations
“Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong.”
Mary Midgley · Moral philosophy
knowledgesociety
Well attested
“Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns…”
Mary Midgley · Moral philosophy
knowledgemeaningsociety
Paraphrase or translation
Key ideas
Animals
We are animals. Culture is something this animal does, not a layer on top of a beast.
Against one storey
Neither blank slate nor genetic fate. Both are myths of simplicity.
Myth in science
Explanatory pictures do moral work they do not declare.
Major works
Beast and Man (1978)
The book of the animal thesis.
Evolution as a Religion (1985)
Against a certain scientific myth-making.
Science and Poetry (2001)
Later essays on how we picture ourselves.
Influences
Influenced
- a later public philosophy of animals and science
Common misreadings
- Being an animal is not, in this book, a permission to behave badly.
- She is not anti-biology. She is anti-reduction, including cultural reduction.
- The six-word sentence may be slightly compressed. The thesis is not in doubt. The carving is.
Famous lines Mary Midgley never said
None of the lines this library files for Mary Midgley is marked Questionable or Misattributed. That is only a fact about these cards. It is not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.
FAQ
What is the best book to start with?
The opening chapters of Beast and Man. You meet the thesis at the length it needs, which is not the length of a mug.
What is the most famous quote?
This library does not measure fame, and it does not rank lines by how often they are shared. The first line it files for Mary Midgley that is not marked Questionable or Misattributed is “We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.” (Beast and Man (1978), the claim as she presses it, Summary).
What is the most misquoted line?
None of the lines this library files for Mary Midgley is marked Misattributed or Questionable. That is a fact about these cards, not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.
What is one key idea, in a sentence?
Animals: We are animals. Culture is something this animal does, not a layer on top of a beast.