Elizabeth Anscombe

It's 100 years to the day since Anscombe was born (h/t Constantine Sandis). I spent last week in Helsinki, where, among other things, I had a day in the National Library reading correspondence between Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. It's weird to find yourself holding a letter that talks about Wittgenstein in the present tense. But what struck me most is how heroic Anscombe was.

Three pictures of Anscombe, I think, are dominant. The main one presents her as a scary kook. The second one portrays her as something of a hero, but a champion specifically of Catholic values. The third one, recently emerging, has Anscombe as a feminist. There's something to each of these, but I think each one misses something important, and even adding all three together might well miss something, most obviously the value of her work as a contribution not only to Catholic thinking but to philosophy in general. 

People (including me) enjoy stories about her eccentricities of dress and behavior, and perhaps try to balance the disrespectful mockery that goes with this, however subtly, by bringing up her formidable intellect and imposing manner. I don't know why she dressed as she did (and, as Mark Oppenheimer points out, it's not particularly relevant), but I've heard that her sometimes wearing things like leopard skin trousers was more to do with shopping at places like Oxfam and having daughters who might borrow her clothes (leaving her only with theirs to wear) than it was any reflection of a punk fashion sense of her own. (And if she did have such a fashion sense then that should be celebrated.) Her eccentric behavior all seems to be to do with sticking up for herself. Two examples: she once talked a man in Chicago out of mugging her by getting him to see that she was a guest in his city, and there is a famous story of her, upon being refused entry into a restaurant because she was wearing trousers, simply taking them off.

These stories are funny, but they aren't only that. They both show courage and the imagination to look for, and find, a good alternative when faced with a seemingly no-win dilemma. This is exactly what she thought was lacking in people who wanted to bomb civilians in World War II. Think about this story:

She chain-smoked for some years, but bargained with God, when her second son was seriously ill, that she would give up smoking cigarettes if he recovered. Feeling the strain of this the following year, she decided that her bargain had not mentioned cigars or pipes, and took to smoking these.

Anscombe's cigar-smoking is a key part of the scary kook story, but consider of the circumstances in which she made this bargain with God. There's nothing funny about it at all.

The second, Catholic hero, picture is closer to the truth, but I think it's a partial picture at best, and one that invites misunderstanding. She certainly was a Catholic, and is greatly, and understandably, admired by others who share her faith. But she wasn't only a Catholic. She was also, for instance, a Wittgensteinian. And an individual with a mind of her own. Mary Geach (one of her daughters) reports that Anscombe said she didn't like to bring up Aquinas' name because doing so tended to make one sort of person (Catholics, presumably) uncritically accepting of whatever was attributed to him and another sort (non-Catholics) uncritically dismissive of it. No doubt this is true, but it shouldn't be taken as a license to read secret references to Aquinas into her work. Her interest in Aristotle, for instance, was surely quite sincere. Perhaps she thought of him as second best to Aquinas, but perhaps she didn't. Perhaps, like Aquinas, she simply believed that we have a lot to learn from his work. And approaching her work with anything like a presupposition that it is going to contain hidden Thomism is a recipe for both (potentially) misconstruing it and encouraging its dismissal by non-Catholics. As Mary Geach points out, "Anscombe drew upon [Aquinas'] thought to an unknowable extent" but did not write a lot about him, even in unpublished papers (see the introduction to From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe).

The third, feminist, picture is probably the closest to the view of Anscombe that I am coming to have, and want to promote. But, partly because of her Catholicism, she's an unlikely feminist. And, perhaps more to the point, I think I want both to emphasize that she was a woman in a man's world and, once this point has been taken, to forget it for as long as necessary/possible to appreciate her work just as work in philosophy. Calling her a feminist or focusing on her links with other women, such as Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch, risks obscuring the fact that she was a great philosopher. Calling her a great philosopher, on the other hand, risks obscuring the fact that she was a great woman philosopher, or that she was a woman.That fact doesn't, I suppose, need emphasizing, except that there is a human story, or a picture of Elizabeth Anscombe as a human being, that seems to get overlooked. And it's worth seeing, partly because it's true and partly because it's simultaneously horrifying and inspiring.

The best Anscombe biography I know of is this one, by Jenny Teichman. The period that most interests me is, roughly, 1942-1962. Anscombe married Peter Geach in December 1941 and first met Wittgenstein in 1942. By 1962 most of her best philosophical work had been done and, I assume, most, if not all, of her children had been born. The youngest would have been more or less grown up.

Teichman notes that:

Her work on part 1 of Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations) was carried out under [Wittgenstein's] guidance and completed shortly before he died in April 1951. The translation of part 2 was ready in time for the whole book to be published in 1953; Anscombe's English was printed en face with Wittgenstein's German. She later translated his Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics (1956), Notebooks, 1914–16 (1961) [...]

and other works. Teichman continues:

Anscombe's own writings comprised two books, Intention (1957) and An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959), and part of a third, Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege (1961, with Peter Geach). 

She also wrote numerous papers, including the hugely influential "Modern Moral Philosophy," which was published in 1958.

This is an incredible body of work to have produced, metaphorically speaking. But it's almost literally incredible when you think that she gave birth to seven children and, as far as I can tell, was their primary caregiver. (Along with Peter Geach, of course, but my impression is that she did more parenting and cooking, etc. than he did.) She must have been exhausted. And yet she went on. And the children weren't just numerous. They did things like get seriously ill, in one case, and hit by a car, in another. And her publications weren't just numerous either. They did things like change the course of philosophy (our understanding of Wittgenstein, the philosophy of action, and ethics). It's a remarkable achievement. Worth celebrating.