Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman won the 2022 HWA Non-Fiction Crown Award for Metaphysical Animals, their portrait of the ‘Wartime Quartet’: four women who, as undergraduates at Somerville College, Oxford, bought a new approach to philosophy during the war years and created a way of ethical thinking that remains with us to this day. Historia interviewed them shortly after they won the award.
The HWA Non-fiction Crown celebrates the best in historical non-fiction writing. What does winning the award mean to you?
We’re thrilled – it’s unexpected and absolutely lovely!
By training we’re philosophers, rather than historians, so it was an adventure for us to write in this genre. We wanted to have a go at presenting a philosophical argument through feminist social history and biography. And we also wanted to write in a way that made the philosophy accessible to a general reader, without dumbing down or losing any of the power and excitement of the ideas. Winning the award suggests we might have pulled some of this off!
What’s the premise of Metaphysical Animals?
The history of European philosophy is the story of the ideas, visions, hopes and fears of men – men, who, in the main, wrote their philosophy (much of it arid and technical) in the comfort and seclusion of the ‘ivory tower’, away from the practical and messy demands of everyday life.
Few people can name a female philosopher — even the word ‘philosopher’ conjures an image of a bearded man. In this book we wanted to paint a different picture – one that would inspire people who’d perhaps never thought of themselves as philosophers to do some metaphysics!
In particular we wanted to inspire young women. So, at the heart of our book are four incredible philosopher-heroines, growing up at a historical moment when philosophical questions about human life, truth and ethics were pressing in on them.
Our heroines are Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. The quartet arrived at Oxford University to begin their studies in 1939. When war was declared, and conscription introduced, the male dons and students were called away to fight. They were replaced by women, conscientious objectors and refugee scholars who had fled Nazism. So our four friends received a very unusual philosophical education.
We follow them through the 1940s and 50s, making their way in Oxford, London, Cambridge, Brussels and Vienna, as they develop as philosophers and acquire lovers, husbands, children and cats. We use the narrative of their lives to unpack the love- and beauty-filled philosophy they devised in opposition to the technical, scientistic, sceptical spirit of the age.
Why is now the time to look again at these four women?
The driving idea in the Quartet’s philosophy is that philosophy needs to be brought back to life. If philosophical thinking gets detached from the everyday messy reality of human life it becomes something dead and stultifying, rather than something that can help us to work out how to live.
The philosophy in this book is born in pubs, dining halls, living rooms and between nappy-changes. Our women were asking themselves how humans could understand and navigate environmental catastrophe, the Holocaust, nuclear war, mass displacement of people, change to the family, and rapidly expanding technology. These questions have never been more relevant or needed. Though fitted to the spirit of their age, this philosophy speaks directly to our current crises.
Their story also brings to light the critical importance of refugee scholars to philosophy in Britain. It reveals how vibrant and exciting thought can become once doors are opened to allow different voices to be heard and listened to – important lessons for today.
What was the most difficult part of Metaphysical Animals to write?
One thing that made writing difficult was the pandemic! We spent a week in the archives in London and Oxford in February 2020, and little did we know that we wouldn’t be able to visit again until after the MS was almost finished. We relied so much on the knowledge and generosity of archivists.
In terms of the writing itself, one of the major challenges for us in our writing was overcoming the habit of taking up the male perspective. It wasn’t just that much of what had been written before about each of the women and their context was written by men. It was more that we found ourselves naturally adopting a male-centring perspective. For example, by introducing a female character and giving a description of her father’s politics or her husband’s career. Or writing about an event as it would have been experienced by men.
We had to train ourselves out of it, and when we did it was like a door opened. We learnt to look at the lives of mothers, grandmothers and sisters, to foreground aspects of the social scene that would have been especially visible to women, and to ask what our women would have found noteworthy or interesting about an event, rather than taking the word of a male witness. It was astonishing to us how unnatural this initially felt and how much was revealed when we did it.
Did you come across anything unexpected during your research for the book?
We set off to write a book about our four women heroines, but along the way we discovered so many more incredible figures. We found tracing the lives of the refugee scholars who came to Oxford from the mid-1930s onwards very moving and were excited to discover the connection between our quartet and the brilliant Warburg scholar Carlotta Labowsky. She came to Oxford penniless as a refugee in 1933, along with her mother and sister. Lotte was offered a job as the college librarian and later became a lecturer and a friend of Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe.
How did you decide who researches what, and who writes which parts of your book?
We didn’t really work like that. We spent a lot of time reading and plotting the book before we started writing. And (before the pandemic got in the way) a lot of time drinking coffee and eating cake together and talking about the personalities of the four women, and their friendships, and what they would have felt and thought at different points in the story. And the structure of the book is a quite detailed philosophical argument, which unfolds through the plot.
So we both knew the book inside out before we sat down to type anything. Once we were ready to start drafting the chapters, we each just picked the bit we fancied working on that week and had a go. We were constantly swapping documents back and forth and editing each other’s writing. In the end every sentence is probably a mixture of the two of us!
If there were one thing you hope readers will take away from your book, what would it be?
We would like our readers to come away thinking, ‘I am a metaphysical animal!’, and to be inspired by that thought to find the world that little bit more wonderful and strange.
The thought has two parts. First, that we are animals. Not machines, AIs, brains or consciousnesses. This means that in order to understand ourselves, our relationships and our place in nature, we need to understand the patterns and rhythms and ways of going on that are natural to animals like us. These patterns can, of course, be altered by institutions and technology.
When we recognise that we are animals, we come to see the planet not as a resource to plunder, but a habitat and a home. This new way of seeing brings with it new ways of acting and living.
The second part is that we are metaphysical animals. Asking metaphysical questions – questions about life, death, beauty, goodness, and about our own nature – is natural to us. Even children do it. And the questioning becomes louder when human life is threatened and disrupted – be it by war, or personal tragedy or environmental collapse. This part of our nature is reflected in the art, poetry and stories we invent and share.
Metaphysical questions go beyond what can be observed and measured, and sometimes, just by asking them, the pattern of our lives can be changed. This is why – and when – philosophy matters.
Are you working on another project together?
Yes! We have loved writing together and are looking forward to getting on to our next book. We are planning a more traditional philosophical work that brings the philosophy in Metaphysical Animals to bear on today’s problems. And, partly inspired by the HWA, we would like to have a go at a work of historical-philosophical fiction.
That’s excellent news! And to end with a hypothetical question: if you could time travel for a day, what time and place would you go to? And what object (one each) would you bring back?
Iris Murdoch was an avid journal writer and her archives at Kingston University house a large number of them. But frustratingly the journal she wrote for our period is missing – perhaps because of her involvement with the Communist Party, she seems to have destroyed it. We’d love to go and rescue it just before she disposed of it!
Secondly, we thought we’d like to co-travel into deep history, perhaps the Upper Paleolithic, and return with a song – an immaterial object that is expressive of the kinds of animal we are. Metaphysical Animals!
Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman was published on 3 February, 2022.
Dr Clare MacCumhaill is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. Dr Rachael Wiseman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.
Clare and Rachael direct the Women in Parenthesis project, which studies the philosophy of the Wartime Quartet and aims to understand why there are so few women in philosophy and to work out what can be done about it.
This is the second in our series of interviews with authors of winning and shortlisted authors from the 2022 Crown Awards.
The first was with AJ West, who won the HWA Debut Crown Award for The Spirit Engineer.
See more about the 2022 HWA Non-Fiction Crown Awards.
Images:
- Rachael Wiseman (left) and Clare MacCumhaill with their Crown Award at the awards party in 2022: ©John Behets 2022
- Dame Iris Murdoch, portrait by Bill Strain: Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
- Philippa Foot’s matriculation photograph, 1939: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Elizabeth Anscombe: Clever hans for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- The Dining Hall, Somerville College, at the time when the Quartet studied there: Courtesy the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford
- Somerville College, Hall and Maitland Building: Philip Allfrey for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
