4 - Thinking and knowing in Patmore and Meredith

Summary

This chapter explores the work of two poets who were remarkably skeptical about the effects of thinking upon another person. Not from the point of view of the epiphenomenalists visited in Chapter 2, who flatly denied the existence of mental causation of any kind; but rather from the view that thinking about another – especially one you love – either does no good, or causes harm. They were attuned to the perils of diminishment, or destruction, attendant upon becoming an object of thought. Indeed, Patmore's and Meredith's pessimism conferred a great deal of agency on the act of thinking about another person, and hence deserves to be a part of this story as much as does the more optimistic view of the evangelists of thought-power discussed in Chapter 2. And, like the poets discussed in the latter section of Chapter 3, Patmore and Meredith made marriage the center and periphery of their speculations on thinking. In The Angel in the House and in Modern Love, they submitted marriage to intense scrutiny, parsing not only the complex relation between thinking about and speaking to an intimate other, but also the relationship between thinking about someone and knowing them.

These poets ask us, in other words, to think again about some of the epistemological questions that this book explicitly set aside in the Introduction. Surely, we might stop to ask, nineteenth-century writers must have viewed the act of thinking about another person as, among other things, a means to knowledge and understanding.