What I've Been Up To: Metaphysical Animals and the Modern Jazz Quartet

What I’ve Been Reading

I’ve always been a fan of philosophical biographies. Often deas that are often hard to digest on their own go down well when wrapped in the lives of those who originated them. Some good examples are The Courtier and the Heretic, which tells the stories of Leibniz and Spinoza, The Metaphysical Club, which provides a gentle introduction to the likes of Charles Sanders Peirce, and the magnificent Magnificent Rebels, a ripping yarn about the German Romantics which I reviewed in an earlier post.

My latest discovery in this genre is Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. Just as another of my favourite philobios, Wittgenstein's Poker is based on an incident where Ludwig Wittgenstein supposedly threatened Karl Popper with a poker, Metaphysical Animals is bookended by another incident which shocked the assembled dons: Elizabeth Anscombe's opposition to Oxford University’s bestowal of an honorary degree on Harry Truman. This brought back fond memories of my student days, when I protested against another ethically dubious award (Lord Carrington in that case) breaking my glasses and losing some hair in the process. (That was OK because I had a lot more hair in those days.)

The Fantastic Four as students at Somerville College: L-R Iris, Mary, Elizabeth, Philippa

Anscombe’s protest, though, is not the focus of the book; rather, it is a symbol of how she, along with Mary Midgely, Phillipa Foot and Iris Murdoch put ethics back in the spotlight after a slew of logical positivists and “ordinary language” philosophers had tried to boot it offstage. Anscombe et al. are like the Fantastic Four set against supervillain A.J. Ayer and his sidekick J.L. Austin, with both sides flirting with the enigmatic Wittgenstein. To my surprise, I found that Wittgenstein had an uncharacteristic mutually nurturing relationship with the young Anscombe, “now a formidable intellectual presence who, since getting her First, had taken two toddlers, a difficult husband, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in hand.”

I found myself cheering on the four women as they waged war not just on analytical philosophy but also on the entrenched sexism of Oxford, which had only recently got round to awarding degrees to women (if you think that’s bad, consider that Cambridge didn’t take this step until 1948). Even those dons who regarded women as their intellectual equals were working within a philosophical tradition that, as Mary Midgley put it, saw women as “men who have accidentally come out the wrong shape.” Nevertheless, the female academics were expected to look feminine. “Elizabeth’s first lecture drew the attention of the university authorities. They were concerned that young women undergraduates might be corrupted by her example. The issue was not her attack on phenomenalism, but her trousers.” A compromise was adopted: Anscombe was provided with a small room (containing a decanter of sherry) in which she could change into a skirt for her lecture. Often, though, she would simply put the skirt on over her trousers.

It’s details like this that make the book so fascinating. If you just knew Anscombe was a Catholic convert and “raving Platonist” (as one of her colleagues put it), you wouldn’t expect her also to be a scruffy socialist. The personalities of the four women shine through: the glamorous Philippa Foot, the sensible Mary Midgley and above all the meteoric Iris Murdoch, who everyone seemed to fall in love with (she even had a brief affair with Philippa, though long after the events of this book). The personal side makes the philosophy come to life — for example, I’d previously only known Philippa Foot as the creator of the trolley problem — and this is all the more so for philosophers who insisted that philosophy had to be embedded in the personal. While Austin et al. were creating a philosophy of ordinary language, these visionaries had made a philosophy of ordinary life — which in turn can make ordinary life extraordinary.

Early in her schooldays Mary Scrutton [later Midgely] had an experience of seeing pure sense data. It happened like this. ‘I was bending over a bath, stirring the water before getting into it, when I felt a light tap on the back of my head and the world before me suddenly turned into an expanse of white triangles.’ As she looked in wonder, the triangles began to move and turn blue at the edges. Finally, things began to reassemble. The white patches were not tiny sensory objects, fragments of private experience, but small pieces of the plaster ceiling, gently shattering as they tapped her on the head on their downward flight into the bath. Later, when she started studying philosophy, she remembered this scene, in which she had experienced pure colour and shape. Is it possible that the stable world of baths and ceilings can be assembled out of such ephemeral fragments? she wondered. Are baths and ceilings no more than constellations of appearances?1 Mary was thinking thoughts that had troubled the mind of the ancient philosopher Protagoras, on an island in the Aegean Sea, 450 years before the birth of Christ.

What I’ve Been Listening To

As a large part of Metaphyscial Animals takes place before and during WWII, I spent some time listening to jazz of that era, but then turned to a Spotify playlist I had created some time back called “Jazz Fugues”. During the fifties and sixties, a number of jazz musicians got interested in baroque music, including Dave Brubeck, Jacques Loussier and my favourite jazz group of all time, the Modern Jazz Quartet. With its intricate counterpoint, the fugue is the most formal baroque form, and at first glance it would seem a million miles from jazz, but that is partly because of a (fortunately obsolete) style of playing my keyboard teacher used to call “Nazi Bach” where every note was hammered out like a machine. In fact, baroque music was rhythmically quite free, though scholars disagree how much it “got that swing”, and improvisation was the norm — in fact, the first fugue in Bach’s Musical Offering was improvised to a tune given to him by Frederick the Great. Of all the musicians on this playlist, the Modern Jazz Quartet capture that combination of freedom and formalism the best, whether in their renderings of Bach or their own compositions.

Incidentally, I had an aesthetic/philosophical/mystical experience similar to Mary Midgely’s back when I was fifteen. While listening to the Modern Jazz Quartet’s album No Sun In Venice, I was staring into the corner of the ceiling, and suddenly it appeared convex rather than concave, then my whole vision lost perspective and became a two-dimensional pattern, accompanied by a strange feeling of emptiness in my head. Those few seconds changed me completely, which just goes to show how quirky such experiences are. Some people get heavenly choirs and beatific visions, some get jazz and a 2D living room, and some get flakes of plaster falling into a bathtub.