I have found myself coming back to this book many times over the years, but always by way of portions or summaries or external dialgoues about her ideas and her thesis. That it felt due time to finally sit down and read it front to back was an afterthought to the stars finally aligning. This wasn’t on my radar to read this month (December, 2025), but it nevertheless found its way into the line up.
Here Midgley has an aim or a target. We might call it science, but its more so a particular formulation of science into a worldview. But I think her target reaches even further, bringing in the whole enlightenment enterprise as part of a necessary critique. She even gives it an embodied form- the new atheists. Whom she cites repeatedly within the context of the larger problem. Of course its always dangerous to reduce any work to a singular idea or concept, but given her interests I do think its fair. These thinkers (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett) all have their own voices but are birthed in the same soil and breathe the same air. If someone percieves there to be a problem (an observation I am in agreement with), it is those core Enlightenment ideals that provides the way into naming it. That these particular examples of “representative voices” are evoked is simply because, as she intuits, we are still living in their shadows. I don’t think its unfair to call out their well established presuppositions as having certain implications when it comes to our understanding of knowledge and science and truth and myth, and in her most upfront and biting critique, the phrase that still stands out for me is that if what they presuppose is true, “it would not (be) a very convenient arrangment for the rest of life.” This feels apt I think to where many of us find ourselves on what is arguably the other side of our needed efforts to deconstruct the world the new atheists handed us.
As Midgley points out, such a view of the world is based on a conception of science that cannot accord with the way reality, or our interpretation of reality actually works as an experiential act. This notion, that we are all necessary interpreters of the world science hands us, roots knowledge, or logos, within a conceptual framework that includes science but is not reducible to it. A world reduced to a subject of function or utility can say nothing about itself, and in fact acts as a defeater of subsequent attempts to speak in terms that reach beyond the parameters of function and utility.
We know this inutitively, as to see the world in terms that reach beyond the subject of function and utility is in fact a quality of that function and utility. To observe human function is to recognize that we actively resist reductionist pictures of the world we occupy. And for good reason. And part of what Midgley is arguing is that even someone like Dawkin’s knows this to be true. It’s why his efforts to root knowledge in science inevitably keep being betrayed by the invading force of his value systems. And yet his, and much of the reasoning tthat we find birthed from this same soil and breathing this same air, is built on a foundaiton that has certain implications that must hold it to account if it indeed wants to be rational.
The problem is, the great allure of redefining knowledge in terms of science as, in Midgley’s own summarization, “a storage cupboard” of objective facts, is that it hands us the illusion of control. And that control is found when we reduce the world to facts. That it also hands us the subsequent need to uphold illusions of value and meaning in the process is the part we ignore.
More importantly, a proper defintion of knowledge hands us a narrative of human and natural history that undermines the exceptionalism of our modern enterprise, namely through the fact that it reveals a historical reality where myth coexists with science. This betrays the motivations of this enlightenment foundation. Indeed, science, a qualitative part of what it means to be human, has been a necessary part of every human society in history. Thus when the enlightnment reconstitutes the idea of knowledge as scientific facts, it can then wieve a narrative that sees the modern world as more evolved, more aware, more intelligent than the world it sets itself over and against (the world of superstitions). And therefore better and more necessary.
Defining knoweldge through the language and lens of participation critiques the modern world precisely by exposing the lie that knowledge=facts. As though human evolution is all about trading the meaning making parts of our humanity (the old brain) for the vastly superior functionalism of the new brain (see Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence). And yet, treating science as a worldview would lead us exactly to where someone like Hawkin’s is going with the data.
Midgley pushes further to speak of enlightenment morality as a social contract that upholds the rights of the individual in ways that demand us versus them pardigms. This of course exposes the foundation of a scientific worldview that needs this notion of primitive to enlightened to uphold our notions of progress. This has only become muddled in light of globalism, something that has thrown our conceptions of responsiblity to one another into chaos. When values and ideals are held captive to the notion of social constructs, how can it be possible to say that oppression is inherently bad in all places and all ways in all of life. And yet the enlightenment ideal of the unity of all defined as the liberty of the individual must say this, even as the natural world that we occupy pushes back. That this is a tension that always by its nature exists within a culture not between different cultures is one of Midgley’s more astute points.
On eft neglected aspect of this whole discussion is the simple observation that reasoning is powered by feeling and all feeling is rooted in reason, and yet we occupy space in a culture that elevates thought, or a kind of thought that has to do with data and information, as the primary source of objective truth. Which of course sidelines and deligitimizes the role of subjective truth. As though data is what frees us and all else must bend to it in order to be true and rational. Thus the contractual language is the scientific language and the unity language is the language of feeling (hence: irrational), and yet the enlightenment uses the latter to justify the former.
If Midgely sees a way out of this it is through understanding how so much of this traverses the dominant scientific language of our time. Where atomism dominated so did certain conceptions of a mechanical world full of meat machines. Where physics as replaced it comes opportunities to reimagine the world using a different metaphor. And in some ways to reenchant it by reaching back into one of its most formative tools- myth. Here we move from reductionism to complexity, or a sort of science that is not demanding a unified theory of everything but rather recognizes that different ways of knowing are all participating in the same conversation, which is what is knowledge (or true knowledge) and how is it that we know anything at all. Here science is but one part of a larger conversation, and even within science are the different sciences that inform the discipline within its different areas of concern. She uses the illustration later in the book of a map, which I think is helpful. We can have 20 different maps all speaking of the same observed and experienced reality or world, but all categorically different perspectives. This is how knowledge works.
Most imporantly, it is on this front that we find the freedom to locate knowledge outside of oursevles. That we are free to see values as occupying its own space, even as part of the same conversation. In fact, as Midgley points out, it is only within the different disciplines that value can be truly established. Humanism, for example, or the natural sciences, are the only places where values can be imposed on its subject from the outside. Which becomes an interesting discussion where myth is involved. Because such an acknolwedgment must at once recognize that it is the human subject affording this value, and yet it is also being pulled from the outside. Such is the nature of the discipline. Here Midgely points out that it is simply not the case, as the enlightenment has been want to believe, that we can move from a world of belief in God to a world in which the God is made human. Here science masquerades as ideology and value systems. Not just an age where we use science, but an age where we are guided by science. Since all human socities have engaged in science, it is the “guided” part that distinguishes the modern age. It wants to root all of the things science can’t be or do in science, while similtaneously defining science as the essential “human” accomlishment that raises us to the role God once occupied. It is “we” who have made the world better because of science. And it is the we that must be better than “them” in the myth of progress
This is my own aside, but it is interesting that the Christian story does in fact speak of a historical moment in which God is made human. The key difference is that this movement comes from the outside. It roots all value making in the notion that where all things exist in relationship, all relationship is rooted in Truth. It is that Truth that has the authority to afford the subject of this natural world value. As her final chapters unpack and point out, all else leaves us captive to the wildness of nature, forever attempting to reconcile evil as good and good as evil within the contexts and paramters of our social concern. Such becomes the illusive ebb and flow of our moral constructs, leaving us enslaved to irrational justifications of the natural world.
And really, this is the central problem. As Midgley points out, the scientific worldview represents knowledge as “building” information rather than as interaction with the world. It takes out that relationship componant which allows complexity to have a kind of agency in the conversation, and instead reduces the world to that which we can control. Hence why such a worldview is really about the progress of technology. Because in the end this is what intelligence becomes when we bind ourselves to such a myth (properly defined, not as a story that isn’t true, but as a story that brings to light the truths we are being shaped by). One such facinating insight the book provides is this concept of science looking both ways. If we can see science as the central human function that informs our relating to the world, captured as it is through all the varied disciplines it embodies, this allows us to look both ways, towards nature and towards God. Here Midgley is using God more as a metaphor, but I think she also gets at why “religion” is one of those necessary disciplines. It is as much a part of the world as anything else. Where we root that becomes a further discussion, but what’s important to note is that in both directions we are looking away from outselves and towards the whole. Defining one depends on our ability to define both. Even more so, how we define one dictates how we define the other. Which is why the stories, the myths, we tell are the ones we live by, precisely because they reflect what we really understand to be true about this world, this reality.
The Stories of my Life 