{"id":201,"date":"2016-05-13T16:12:06","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T16:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=201"},"modified":"2016-05-13T16:13:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T16:13:43","slug":"mills-determinism-and-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=201","title":{"rendered":"Mill’s feeling and determinism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part two of a continuing series about Victorian character. First part here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last time, I tried to highlight what Mill calls \u201cthe feeling of moral freedom\u201d (27) that informs his notion of a deterministic \/ \u201dnecessitarian\u201d logic of character as the possibility of self-improvement. Circumstances determine one\u2019s various willed actions that, once congealed, become habits and the basis of one\u2019s character, but Mill insists that a space of agency remains in order to allow individuals to alter their circumstances and thus their habits. Moral freedom is the feeling of this space, the ability to trouble one\u2019s circumstances and habits, even if not an ability that one uses.<\/p>\n

Mill needs character to be deterministic because he wishes to propose a new science, Ethology, \u201cthe science which corresponds to the act of education, in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of national or collective character as well as individual\u201d (54). Mill wants Ethology to be a deductive science\u2014in other words, to begin from general principles and thus to adduce facts\u2014and sees this as approaching questions of psychology from a more speculative ground. It\u2019s clear that Ethology would be a political science, allowing one to analyze the psychological, historical, and social context before offering prescriptions. Hence Mill\u2019s consistent turn to \u201cnational character\u201d (52), a turn of phrase that may call to mind Betteredge\u2019s jokes about Franklin Blake\u2019s many-sided character in The Moonstone. <\/em>Mill admits the \u201chigh order of complexity\u201d (50) such analysis would have to address, but rejects experimental science precisely because of the difficulty replicating such complexity. By contrast, the reductiveness of political economy\u2014what he calls \u201cthe geometrical, or abstract method\u201d (74)\u2014he views as more effective in its ability to find functional prescriptions. However, he dislikes the Utilitarian position\u2014essentially, a prescriptive reading of the final book of Smith\u2019s Wealth of Nations\u00ad<\/em>\u2014that political rulers retain power by ensuring that their interests as rulers are \u201cidentical with that of the governed\u201d (78). Instead, Mill writes:<\/p>\n

I insist only on what is true of all rulers, viz., that the character and course of their actions is largely influenced (independently of personal calculation) by the habitual sentiments and feelings, the general modes of thinking and acting, which prevail throughout the community of which they are members, as well as the feelings, habits, and modes of thought which characterize the particular class in that community to which they themselves belong. (79)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The deductive principles that should be all controlling\u2014identical selfish interests\u2014are instead opened to variation through \u201chabitual sentiments and feelings.\u201d Mill\u2019s argument is poised and ready for the arrival of Darwinian natural selection, and it\u2019s easier to see how Huxley\u2019s arguments might have their genesis in a shared worldview with this aspect of Mill. Self-interest may be the controlling characteristic of the individual, but feeling has shaped that interest in ways that political economy has failed to take into account. More than that, Mill goes as far as to argue that the \u201cresponsibility to the governed is the only means practically available to create a feeling of identity of interest\u2026 where that feeling does not sufficiently exist\u201d (80). At first, I read this as a potential privileging of social feeling over political economy\u2019s selfish interests. That\u2019s a positive way to interpret this focus on feeling. Yet on further reflection it seems equally possible that Mill proposes something much more troubling here: feeling separates the political economic identities of interest to reveal the power of political sentiments as separable from economic determinations. There\u2019s a certain realism to this analysis, but it also indicates a sense that rulers can\u2014and likely should\u2014focus their attention on this shared feeling rather than shared prosperity. When one considers that these ideas come from a man who had already been working for the East India Company for eleven years when the Logic <\/em>was first published in 1844, it\u2019s difficult not to see the attempts to reground political economy in a broader sense of shared feeling as bound up with the discursive mechanisms of colonial exploitation.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, then, Mill uses feeling to create a kind of Althusserian relative autonomy within his imagined science of character-determinism. On the one hand, feeling ameliorates the individual\u2019s experience of determinism as a kind of virtual agency, and authorizes the determinism that Mill needs to deduct individual actions from general principles as a consciousness of one\u2019s (limited) freedom to alter one\u2019s circumstances. On the other, feeling offers rulers a tool that allows them to maintain distinct interests and outcomes from those of their subjects. My kneejerk Marxist reaction is to call this manipulation through feeling, but that is likely too reductive. At another level, couldn\u2019t one say that it is rather that feeling becomes the space of the political? Moreover, it is a politics deeply bound to a forward-projecting temporality, an affection of the present that means to alter the future. Collini describes the Victorian notion of character in one memorable phrase as \u201ctraveling\u2026 to unknown futures\u201d (113), but, insofar as I can tell, he doesn\u2019t focus on how this opening of temporality operates through feeling. It is that binding of sentimentality and temporality that, one might say, feels most Victorian.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930. <\/em>Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.<\/p>\n

Mill, John Stuart. The Logic of the Moral Sciences. <\/em>La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1988.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part two of a continuing series about Victorian character. First part here. Last time, I tried to highlight what Mill calls \u201cthe feeling of moral freedom\u201d (27) that informs his notion of a deterministic \/…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic","category-new-project"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t