Mary Midgley - Surviving Quotes

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But my present point is a much wider one. What we need, in order to feel at home in the world, is certainly not a belief that it was made for us. We are at home in this world because we were made for it. we have developed here, on this planet, and are adapted to live here. Our emotional constitution is part of that adaptation. We are not fit to live anywhere else. (The possibility, such as it is, of surviving briefly, and at ruinous expense in space-craft and the like is just parasitical; it depends on extending the conditions we are used to into a few bizarre corners, not on our being able to live in other conditions.)

Mary Midgley
Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means-to-survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. It must be so because, in evolution, all sorts of contingincies and needs arise, calling for all sorts of different responses. An obsessive creature, constantly dominated by one kind of motive, would not survive.

Mary Midgley
The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural... An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive.

Mary Midgley