Romantics. Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular

take their, their opposition to utilitarianism.

And, and that's something that I, I maybe should say a word about.

And it's a handy way of thinking in intellectual history, is to, to figure out

who the enemies of your figure, your point of focus, are.

So we, the scientist call this the[UNKNOWN] against whom are you

situating your thought. And the romantics their enemy and they

needed an enemy. Most thinkers do.

Their enemy is the utilitarian philosophy. For the, for the romantics in the, in the,

in the 1790s. Their, their point is that we don't just

receive impressions from the world. I mean in most general terms they are

rejecting this, this enlightenment Lockean notion in England that we are passive

receptors of the world and that we deal with the world through our sensation.

For the romantics, we make the world as we live in it.

The romantics have an activist notion of the intellect, even of the senses.

And then so where as the, where as the Utilitarians and Lockeans they're, they're

interested in what we receive. The Romantics are interested in how, in

the act of perception itself we, we make the world.

Now you may hear, if you're remembering from an earlier lecture, you may hear some

Kant in here right? Remember Kant said that you only know what

you make. Kant said that if you're wearing your

space time glasses you can have can have knowledge because when you have your space

time glasses on you're constructing the world as a rational place and so you can

know it because you've made it rational. You've made it knowable.

That too is an activist notion of the mind.

The mind makes the world available for knowledge.

The romantics go further than this, they have a [laugh] a mushier, less systematic

as if you make the world a poetic notion of what it means to make the world.

And they're so excited by the French revolution because, because the French

Revolutionists say we're making the world right now.

We're not just passively receiving the world.

We revolutionize a change in the world and we can know the world when we act on it.

This is the activist creed, right? I don't know the world by sitting back and

pondering it, letting it come at me. I know the world when I go out and do

stuff. And that's the romantic charge, not

calculating pleasure but making [laugh] making new forms of pleasure.

So Wordsworth who lived from seventeen seventy to eighteen fifty.

He saw the revolution taking place and was, in France, and was just head over

hills. He thought this is was the coolest thing.

He went over to France and was wildly enthusiastic about the people seizing the

initiative to remake the world. But by 1791 you start to see that, that

remaking of the world can get pretty ugly and that it gets pretty violent.

And for Wordsworth, there's this moment of disillusion.

After 1791 roughly as, when the revolution begins to spin out of control and then by

1793, you have the reign of terror. Wordsworth has makes out of this

dissolution of form of art, a romantic dissolution, a notion of loss that the

activist mind feels very deeply. A, a notion of being wounded by ones own

efforts to make the world a better place but then feeling wounded and making art

out of the wound of the failure to make the world a better place.

Wordsworth wrote in this prelude some of the most important poetry reflecting on

the revolution. And, and let me just read you, let me just

read you a little bit. Twas in truth and hour of universal

ferment. He's thinking back on the revolution.

Twas in truth an hour of universal ferment.

Mildest men were agitated and commotion, strife of passion and opinion, filled the

wall of peaceful houses with unique sounds.

The soil of common life, was at that time too hot to tread upon, The soil of common

life was at that time too hot to tread upon.

A revolutionary time. Everything, even the ground is, is

seething has, with heat, with change. I mean now that we've just kind of pointed

at Wordsworth's romanticism. Let me remind you of another key figure,

very briefly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived from 1772 to 1834.

His notion of romanticism included some, much of what, what I was talking about

with Wordsworth. But Coleridge goes on to write political

essays. And I just want to underscore one concept

from those, and that is the concept of the organic community.

The organic community. Coleridge goes to Germany as Wordsworth

went to France. And what Coleridge learns in Germany is

that the enemy of authentic thought and creativity, the enemy of those things is

what he called the egocentric universe. That is the individual, which is so key

for British thought, for English thought, the individual is vastly overrated.

For Coleridge, the medieval community offers an important alternative to modern

individualism and Coleridge emphasizes that religion is the path to community.

Religion is the path to community. Because religion still reminds us that

we're not just an ego in the world. And not just an individual in the world.

That we're part of something greater than ourselves.

That's really important because it goes very much against Bentham's utilitarian

notion, to the individualism in Locke. This, this romantic appeal to community

and religion remains strong in England. In, in ways that keep alive a, a, avenue

for talking about history community. Poetry and religion as, as alternatives to

the status quo of industrialism, utilitarianism and individualism.

Now, as we're getting closer to Darwin, I know [laugh] you keep probably thinking,

isn't this week about Darwin? We're getting closer.

But we have another figure just to talk about a little bit, and that's John Stuart

Mill. John Stuart Mill who in some other

versions of this class we would read on liberty or on the subjection of women to

really key texts of Mills. Mill is a fascinating figure because he,

he is the son of a great utilitarian philosopher, a friend of Bentham's.

James Mill. That's his father.

And, and yet he is a, is a key figure in utilitarianism.

He has a, a crisis, he calls it. It's really a nervous breakdown.

And, and what's saves him, he says, is romanticism.

Mill was Joshua Mill was also an experiment of sorts as what brought by his

father. He, he was a prodigy.

I think he, as I recall, he learned Greek by the age of three.

He was doing higher level mathematics than I can do in my dotage at the, by four or

five, I mean, he had learned various languages.

He was James Mill wanted to show that our education system was, had a lot of wasted

time. And so that a, a young boy could learn a

ton of stuff if you just taught him all the time, new things.

And John Stuart Mills was a prodigy. He, he was a incredibly proficient and he

then had a nervous break down. >> [laugh] It wasn't really, it's not

really exciting. He wrote a book about it, his

autobiography. It's this beautiful account, unsentimental

in some ways. And the he has his crisis that he writes

about. Because you had been brought into this

utalitarian home where you know, that you just want to calculate what's going to

work well? And what's not going to work well and, and

you know what he was glad to work, right? He was working all the time.

So, John Stewart Mill, you have [laugh] no body really and he's own mind.

You have this combination utilitarianism. And, and, and romanticism.

John Stuart Mill he, was is most famous for developing a political philosophy in

which a liberty, justice, and toleration are fundamental.

He's his notion of freedom extending as far as another person's zone, of, of, of,

of, of freedom, that is that, you can, you can do what you want as long as it doesn't

hurt someone else. This notion of liberty is, is key for

modern political thought, but at some point and Mill I should say one, John

Stuart Mill was, was a uh,uh, project for his father, James Mill.

That is John Stuart Mill started his education in infancy and by three it was,

he knew Greek and, and he was calculating advanced mathematics at a horribly [laugh]

young age for those of us who have trouble doing it as adults.

He was the poster child for, how much you can learn how much you could be crammed,

in how much you could be crammed with an education in a utilitarian way.

And then as a young adult, Bill suffers this nervous breakdown because he asks

himself, if I had all this pleasure I thought I wanted, would I be happy would I

really be at peace with a, passive deep happiness?

And well he puts it this way. Suppose that all your object in life were

realized. Said John Stuart Mill in his

autobiography. Would this be a joy and happiness to you?

And irrepressible self-consciousness distincly answered no.

At this, my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was

constructed fell down. The whole foundation on which my life was

constructed fell down. And John Stuart Mill turns to the

romantics to understand his depression, to understand his crisis.

And what Mill begins to do then is to turn to the romantic poets.

He has, he said basically so I looked at utalitarianism and said what do you do

when you're depressed? And he said well don't be depressed, get

some pleasure. He said well yeah that's the problem,

that's what being depressed means, you know.

>> [laugh] I'm not getting pleasure. I said yeah, well you should.

Yeah, you need more pleasure. Okay you know, he asked another

utilitarian and he said well, have you tried flipping a coin?

I get a lot of pleasure out of that. Or wear funny shoes.

Or, you know or, and, and he kept getting and people kept or, you know, study more

because study always brought you pleasure. Well right now I, I, I don't have the

energy to study and I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

Okay. Why don't you take up the piano?

My brother, George plays the piano. It brings him great pleasure.

I don't want to. And so he went on and on and on, he kept

talking to people who talked about the calculus of pleasure, suffering, and he

kept talking to them. And they kept telling him, yeah, you need

more pleasure. And he kept sinking further and further

into sadness into isolation and, and of course since he was pretty well known,

came from a very fat famous family, and was, and was brilliant.

People kept saying, so what's wrong with you?

Why don't you get more, why don't you perk up?

You got everything going for you. Isn't that's a great phrase,when your

feeling down and someone says to you, gosh I wish that I was you at Wesleyan.

You should be happy. That, that usually makes somebody happy,

if he goes. You should be happy.

>> [laugh] What do you got to worry about? My mother said that to James Will.

>> [laugh] What do you got to worry about? And so Joshua Mill turns to the, he's a,

he's gasped by this. Because he, he really thought these people

had all the answers. Because they, they had a lot of answers.

They were very good at figuring stuff out and then he turns to Wordsworth.

And the turns to [unknown] He reads about dejection and melancholy.

And he says, these people know about life. They don't say oh, you should, you know

flip a coin, or, you should go and take a class.

Take another class. These people actually explore their

experience of sadness as a way of deepening their lives and creating art.

And Mill says, I have got to somehow create a bridge between this crude

utilitarianism and this romanticism. Which has produced these extraordinary

achievements in English poetry. And the rest of his life he focuses on

building a philosophy that combines attention to utility, attention to

calculation, but also attention to organic community, attention to the, the whole.

And it is that kind of combination that really is the most important background.

The most important context for the development of Darwin's work.

Re-imagining the World II

The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 1)

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