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Wandering Between Two Worlds: Schopenhauer's Pessimism, Feuerbach's Optimism, and the Quest for Salvation in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

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Wandering Between Two Worlds: Schopenhauer's Pessimism, Feuerbach's Optimism, and the Quest for Salvation in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy Wandering Between Two Worlds: Schopenhauer's Pessimism, Feuerbach's Optimism, and the Quest for Salvation in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. by Jane Brunning A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire. September 2008 uclanAW University of Central Lancashire Student Declaration Concurrent registration for two or more academic awards I declare that while registered as a candidate for the research degree, I have not been a registered candidate or enrolled student for another award of the University or other academic or professional institution Material submitted for another award I declare that no material contained in the thesis has been used in any other submission for an academic award and is solely my own work. Collaboration Where a candidate's research programme is part of a collaborative project, the thesis must indicate in addition clearly the candidate's individual contribution and the extent of the collaboration. Please state below Signature of Candidate Type of Award - PhD School Education and Social Sciences Abstract This thesis examines George Eliot's novel Middlemarch (1872) and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1896) in the context of the philosophical quest for salvation in a secularising nineteenth century. This is a quest which retains an exalted ideal of human seif-realisation, and foregrounds an ethical basis to the relationship between self and the world, individual and society. In the struggle between the potential for seeing the human as a reduced and ephemeral being, condemned to wander without object or value in an essentially purposeless world, and the quest for a still-transcendent vision of human possibility and a progressive future, pessimistic and optimistic visions of human place and the world are central. Fiction and non-fictional literature of the period interrogate the questions of human place, ethics, and destiny in both individual and social terms, and the role of philosophy in offering an alternative to religious constructions of the world is key for both Eliot and Hardy. Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimism is often recognised as having been influential on Hardy's work, while Ludwig Feuerbach's optimism is noted as having influenced Eliot. These two philosophies will be examined in detail, and measured against their value of and accessibility for ordinary existential human individuals in the world. This thesis makes an original contribution to current thinking by showing the extent to which Eliot's Middlemarch and Hardy's Jude develop dynamic relationships with both Schopenhauer's and Feuerbach's philosophical constructions of the world. This thesis shows that questions of optimism and pessimism rely on a complex set of relations, both in these two novels and in the philosophies of Schopeithauer and Feuerbach themselves, which belie previous critical tendencies to place all four writers in a polarised "pessimistic" or "optimistic" position, and reveals that both novels develop nuanced engagements with both pessimistic and optimistic visions of ethical salvation. Contents Abstract . . I Contents . ii Acknowledgements . . iv Introduction. Pessimism, Optimism, and Philosophical Salvation . 1 Chapter 1. Schopenhauer and the Pessimistic Vision of Salvation. .13 I. Schopenhauer and the positive experience ofHell. 13 H. Human consciousness: suffering, ethics, and time . . 18 III. Schopenhauer and salvation: individual transformation, hope, and value . . . 36 Chapter 2. Feuerbach, Optimism, and the Accessibility of Salvation 46 I. Feuerbach and the essence of the real . . 46 II. Human consciousness: the ethics of community, and the question of salvation . . 54 III. Teleological salvation and the individual: reality and value 64 Chapter 3. Victorian Britain and the Loss of Cod: Is Life Worth Living? . . 74 I. Pessimism and optimism: a sh4fting paradigm . 74 II. Victorian Britain: Is Life Worth Living, and ifso, how? . 79 M. Aesthetic salvation: 'Will the dreams not continue, when the reality has passed away?' . . . 101 11 Chapter 4. George Eliot, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer: Between Hope and Despair . 107 Chapter 5. Middlemarch, 1872. 'That Roar Which Lies on the Other Side of Silence': Despair, Transcendence, and Salvation in Eliot's 'New Real Future'. 120 I. Dorothea Brook and the elements of salvation: between 'self-despair' and 'the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self'. 120 II. 'That element of tragedy': despair, self-consciousness, and the ethics of salvation 143 III. The 'new real future' and the issue of salvation: 'that roar which lies on the other side ofsilence' . . 163 Chapter 6. Thomas Hardy: Pessimism, Optimism, and Dissimulation 183 Chapter 7. Jude the Obscure, 1896. 'Nature's Logic' and the Crippling 'Gin Trap': Overlapping Circles of Tragedy and Salvation. 200 I. Schopenhauerian consciousness and Jude's haunted landscape: 'ghostly presences ' and 'the defective real' 200 II. Jude's 'ghost' and 'the isolation of his own personality': Hardy's Feuerbachian consciousness . . 221 III. Overlapping circles: 'Nature 's logic' and the crippling 'gin trap'. 244 Conclusion. Wandering Between Two Worlds . 259 Bibliography . . 271 'II Acknowledgements Particular thanks to Dr. Brian Rosebury for his invaluable support, incisive feedback and for his confidence in this project, and to Dr. Kay Boardman for her advice and encouragement. Thanks also to Professor John Walton and Professor Michael Parker, to Dr. Terry Hopton for a useful discussion of Feuerbach and the loan of books, and to Dr. Richard Walker, particularly for introducing me to W H. Mallock. Thanks to my friends and colleagues in the Department of Humanities and the Postgrad community for their support at various points throughout my studies, especially my climbing buddy Dr. Vikki Cook plus Dr. Esther 0 'Neill, Dr. Dave Abel, and imminent Drs Helen Monk and Munira G. Patel, Vikki Hulse, Dave McGrath-Wilkinson, Adam Pendlebury, Susan Pomfret, and Andrew Hobbs. Thanks also to those colleagues whose valuable work behind the scenes in the library, IT and technician departments, is much appreciated, particularly Derek Drummond, Mansoor Ahmed, and Ian Carrie, as well as Research Office staff particularly Margaret Fisher, without whom 'the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live'. Particular thanks to those who were supportive during the final two years or so of this project, including Professor Anne Wichmann and Margaret Fisher. I am immensely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their funding of this research project. I also thank AHRC stafffor their support and understanding during the final couple ofyears. And foremost of all, my deepest love and gratitude always to Chris, Tom, and Hattie, and to Uffer and Mimmel, for their love without measure, Elskan mm. iv for my mother, Eileen Ford 20" September 1933— 4th January 2007. Non, je ne regrette rien Introduction Pessimism, Optimism, and Philosophical Salvation. 'The age of systems is past... System is the childhood of philosophy; the manhood ofphilosophy is investigation.' George Eliot 1855' 'Let every man make a philosophy for himself out of his own experience.' Thomas Hardy 19012 In 1855 George Eliot agrees that "The age of systems is passed... System is the childhood of philosophy; the manhood of philosophy is investigation" as 'expressions' can only 'have their origin purely in the observations of the senses' (Eliot "Future" 133, 135). Eliot translated the works of a number of European philosophers in the mid-Victorian period, including German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach whose deconstruction of Christianity as a belief system simultaneously invigorates Victorian secularism with a new belief and direction. For Eliot, Feuerbach's philosophy reveals an inspirational present and future life without God, but which retains key (Christian) ethical values and the object of salvation in the world, and enables Eliot to suggest that: The fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man: and.., the idea of god, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e. an exaltation of the human). (Eliot Selections 453) Nonetheless Eliot rejects the idea of an holistic system of philosophy, even whilst embracing the shift from a religious to a philosophical framework grounded in the existential world 'of the senses' ("Future" 135) in fundamental terms. In those for whom religious belief is a thing of the past, questions of human place, individual and social direction, and the moral code of human relations take on a new urgency in letters, articles, philosophical treatises, and fiction of the period. George Eliot "The Future of German Philosophy". Selected Critical Writings. Rosemary Ashton (ed). Oxford: OUP, 1992, 133. 2 Thomas Hardy The Lfe of Thomas Hardy; 1840-1 928. London: Macmillan & Co., 1962,3 to. The central focus for many is the secularised quest for human seif-realisation - for salvation here on earth - and is bound to the question of ethical human relations which transfer core Christian values into a secular interpretation of human existence. Barbara DeMille recognises that: the question of moral standards and ideal conceptions, the notions of the perfectibility of man according to intangible paradigms... were seriously sapped of their vitality by religious scepticism and scientific discovery by
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