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‘The very culture of the feelings’: Poetry and Poets in Mill's Moral Philosophy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Daniel Burnstone
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Extract

Interpretations of Mill's response to literature are often placed within a larger analysis of the development of his ethical thought. Such interpretations commonly seek to describe the importance to Mill's intellectual development of the episode in his personal experience, recollected in Chapter V of his Autobiography, which awakened him to the value of poetry and to the need for an active cultivation of personal feeling. The connection between the two is usually made by demonstrating how his mature ethical thought integrates ideas that were first brought home to him during this reaction against the logical rigour of his background and upbringing, a reaction that contrasts Mill's acceptance of the importance of personal culture and emotion with the scant regard afforded to these elements within Benthamite utilitarian thought. Thus the resolution of Mill's personal crisis is seen as shedding light on key limitations within the moral philosophy that he inherited from Bentham and from his father.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , May 1992 , pp. 81 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Dr Stefan Collini for his comments and advice at an early stage in the writing of this essay; I am also very grateful to Professor John M. Robson for his helpful suggestions and magnanimous critical attention.

References

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28 A prima facie case that Mill's moral philosophy is readily intelligible without recourse to an analysis of his response to poetry is provided by Fred Berger's recent and comprehensive discussion of Mill's ethical thought which makes no reference to literature and its functions. This absence becomes particularly telling in the pages explicitly devoted to examining the role of sympathy in Mill's work. See Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Berkeley, 1984, pp. 19–23.Google Scholar

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52 Ibid., p. 77.

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57 See Cairns, John C.'s ‘Introduction’Google Scholar to Mill, John Stuart, Essays on French History and Historians, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xx. pp. lv–lx.Google Scholar

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60 Ibid., 133.

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87 Ibid., p. 148.

88 Abrams, (p. 321)Google Scholar speculates that Mill's distinction between poetry and eloquence is an attempt to save poetry from the ‘distrust of rhetoricy’, which in Bentham overflowed into distrust of poetry. Mill's hostility to eloquence can also be referred more concretely to his disenchantment with contemporary means of political persuasion.

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71 The essay was revised for republication in both the 1859 and 1867 editions of Dissertations and Discussions.

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76 Ibid.

77 Ibid., 254.

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85 Mill, , ‘Writings of Junius Redivivus [I]’, CW, i. 370Google Scholar. Matthew Arnold's poem ‘Self-Dependence’ confirms this idea by making the star an image of stoical immunity from weakening reliance on human comparison: ‘And with joy the stars perform their shining;/For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting/All the fever of some differing soul’ (The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, Kenneth, London, 1965, p. 143, Ils. 21–4Google Scholar. I am grateful to Cathryn Wilcox for pointing this poem in my direction). Mill's admiration for these gifted natures contrasts with his satirical contempt for Whewell's attempt to make his moral philosophy ‘hang self-balanced in space’ on the strength of self-evident truths (‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, CW, x. 190)Google Scholar. For Mill's oppostion to Whewell and intuitionism, see Alan Ryan's introductory essay to Utilitarianism and Other Essays: J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham, London, 1987Google Scholar; his The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, London, 1970Google Scholar; and Schneewind, J. B., Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, Oxford, 1977.Google Scholar