High Corrie Philosopher
By Peter Finlay
Philosophy is such a strange pursuit. There from the beginning of time surely, and certainly from the times of the ancient Greeks. It has always had a perennial fascination for us humans. Rather lovely that one lady who practised it had a home here in High Corrie. Eva Schaper, originally from Germany, was a member of the philosophy faculty at Glasgow University for 40 years from 1952 till her death in 1992. For the last many years she was the Professor of Philosophy there.
During this time she became the owner of little Goatfell Cottage in High Corrie and a friend to many of the people there. She also took part in the occasional Quaker meeting in Kathleen McLellan’s cottage. Interesting that Robert had himself been a philosophy undergraduate. Her stepson was the stain glass artist, Richard Leclerc who inherited Goatfell Cottage from her at her death.
Eva’s special interest was in the philosophy of the great Immanuel Kant – the one who was ‘awakened from his dogmatic slumbers’ as he himself said, by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume awakened Kant by his questioning of the notion of causality, a notion so basic to our ordinary lives and indeed to the whole of science.
Hume thought our sense of causal links between events was derived purely from experience and habit. He thought we saw one thing following another and as it repeated over and again we became convinced there was a profound link (and this he questioned and ultimately denied) we called ‘cause and effect’ connecting the two events. Hume, whose basic philosophy was to test every statement by what we actually experienced, pointed out we never actually saw or experienced this mysterious ‘causal link’. We only saw one event followed by another. Hume’s thinking jolted Kant into wondering if there was not more to it than this – a more secure foundation for matters so fundamental.
Then Kant perceived there were other things we deemed very real but which we never actually experienced directly. Space and Time for instance. This set him thinking along lines which led to what he called his Copernican Revolution in thought. Just as Copernicus saw that the sun did not have to go round the earth to explain its movement as we experienced it – the earth going round the sun would do just as well, Kant had the insight that if Space and Time and Causation and several other fundamentals were all somehow built into our way of perceiving then that would explain everything about the way we thought about them and thought about the world outside us. We do not learn causality and other fundamentals from experience we bring them to experience. All that we experience is of necessity determined by the way our minds impose certain structures on our perceptions – space, time and causality and other structures too.
Generating these perceptions is the mysterious ‘Thing in Itself’ (Ding an Sich in German) which we can never know as it truly is in itself. Very frustrating – but Kant could see here a kind of space as it were that would make sense of our moral lives – a place where ‘free will’ could operate in an otherwise causally determined universe. The very heart of reality might well be beyond the causal determinism which would undermine free will and along with that morality itself. Thus he felt he could save the moral beings we are from a sheer, unmitigated determinism so destructive of any real moral existence.
Kant’s best known saying is perhaps this: ’Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above us and the moral law within us.’
What fascinating realms to be exploring. Eva Schaper knew them well. She also had a deep interest in aesthetics or the philosophy of the beautiful. Indeed she was the co-founder and later president of the British Society of Aesthetics and she wrote on the subject as in her book ‘Prelude to Aesthetics’ where she has much of interest to say about many things including Kant’s own understanding of art and the beautiful. One of his more curious statements which she quotes is that works of art and things of beauty exhibit ‘purposiveness without purpose’. That brain-teaser could certainly be the subject for an essay or two!
She would certainly have appreciated and loved the beauty of High Corrie and loved the simple beauty of her cottage in its harmony with its surroundings with the other cottages here, the wild flowers, the mountains above and so on. A fitting home for a philosopher indeed – or for her stepson creating beauty from glass.
Featured image shows Goatfell Cottage, High Corrie. Photo credit: Marjorie Finlay. Unfortunately an image of Eva could not be sourced from the internet.
