Naomi Mitchison’s Rationalist ‘Heresy’ and Speculative Humanism in Beyond This Limit

Abstract

Chapter 5 examines Naomi Mitchison’s claim to be a Rationalist heretic and her attempts to reshape Rationalist priorities and values to better serve a new generation of left-leaning and feminist unbelievers such as herself. Mitchison was a life-long member of the Rationalist Press Association, though not always supportive of its aims. In articles and speeches, some of which were published in the RPA journal, she argued for a realignment of Rationalism to bring it closer to socialism, on the one hand, and, curiously, religion on the other. This was not, this chapter argues, a wholesale abandonment of Rationalist principles, especially not those concerning the limits of human knowledge. On the contrary, Mitchison re-orientates Rationalism in the direction of a speculative humanism that goes beyond the confines of scientific naturalism without sacrificing the primacy of human reason to some other, extra-human or godlike, way of knowing. This chapter turns to Beyond This Limit, the short novel Mitchison co-created with Wyndham Lewis, to explore the working out of her philosophy in fiction. Beyond This Limit posits the existence of an afterlife but in such a way as to suggest, that if this is to be a legitimate and rational form of conjecture, then the afterlife can only be imagined as an extension of the conditions of mortality—as a form of living on.