3 - The concept of dread

Summary

This chapter is devoted to an English genealogist of morals who succeeded in being and doing even more than she knew she was doing, which was itself considerable. For Friedrich Nietzsche she was a ‘little bluestocking’, sullying her insight (into the vanishing of the divine) by replacing it with a shabby idealism. But I want to argue that George Eliot is the true, unknown candidate for Nietzsche's praise:

The English psychologists to whom we owe the only attempts that have thus far been made to write a genealogy of morals are no mean posers of riddles, but the riddles they pose are themselves, and being incarnate have one advantage over their books – they are interesting. What are these English psychologists really after? One finds them always, whether intentionally or not, engaged in the same task of pushing into the foreground the nasty part of the psyche, looking for the effective motive forces of human development in the very last place we would wish to have them found, e.g., in the inertia of habit, in forgetfulness, in the blind and fortuitous association of ideas.

(Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, first essay)

The argument of this chapter is that George Eliot did know very well where the sources of ‘human development’ were to be found. In the nasty parts of the psyche, in passive, mimetic, regressive movements of dread and desire. But she did not always want to know that she knew that. In her last, most ambitious novel, she wants one character – the spokesman for the noble gospel of sympathy – to ‘win’.