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Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant

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Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Masters Theses Graduate School 8-2011 Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant Andrew Ragsdale Lallier [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lallier, Andrew Ragsdale, "Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2011. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/993 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Andrew Ragsdale Lallier entitled "Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in English. Allen Dunn, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Nancy Henry, Amy Billone Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant A Thesis Presented for the Master of Arts Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Andrew Ragsdale Lallier August 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Andrew R. Lallier. All rights reserved. ii I dedicate this thesis to my wife, Allison Miller, whose love and sympathy possess for me an incalculable value, and to my parents, Charles Wesley Lallier and Rebecca Anne Ragsdale Lallier, whose support and encouragement have always been there for me. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my thesis committee for their support and indulgence for this project. I owe a particular debt to Nancy Henry for reintroducing me to the works of George Eliot, for supporting me in preparing an article that provided some of the groundwork for this thesis, and for taking me on as a research assistant for her forthcoming biography, The Life of George Eliot. Allen Dunn‟s ready assistance and patient guidance have been essential in shaping and executing project, and are also greatly appreciated in pursuing a plurality of problems, critical and philosophical. I would also like to thank Amy Billone, whose interests and encouragement have been of great help in mapping out sites of engagement in nineteenth-century literature. iv ABSTRACT Connections between George Eliot and Immanuel Kant have been, for the most part, neglected. However, we have good reason to believe that Eliot not only read Kant (as well as many who were directly influenced by Kant), but substantially agreed with him on critical and moral issues. This thesis investigates one of the issues on which Kant and Eliot were most closely aligned, the need for duty in morality. Both the English novelist and the German philosopher upheld a vision of duty that could command absolutely while remaining consonant with human freedom and grounding a sense of moral dignity. This vision runs throughout the works of both writers, but is first developed and takes on a particular urgency in the works examined in this thesis, ranging from some of their early publications to Kant‟s Critique of Practical Reason and Eliot‟s Romola. The first chapter discusses duty in the wider context of debates about Divine Command Morality, in which the good is defined by its accord with the will or command of God, and which both Kant and Eliot resisted in formulating their own moral visions (while maintaining the language of law and command). This chapter also discusses evidence we have for Eliot‟s familiarity with Kant and establishes critical context for this paper. The second chapter discusses religion – in particular, religious enthusiasm – as a necessary background for duty, which exists in the absence of theological certitude, even as it seeks to preserve something of religion‟s capacity to command and its popular scope. Kant‟s path to the first Critique led through works foundational for, but also sometimes at odds with, the priorities and conclusions of critical science, and Eliot‟s first novel was preceded by a critical career that paints a quite different picture of religion than the sympathetic portrait of Dinah Morris. The third chapter deals with three dimensions of duty in Kant and Eliot, autonomy, reflection and respect, primarily through the second Critique and The Mill on the Floss. In the conclusion, I turn to Romola to illustrate the conflict and indeterminative power inherent in this conception of duty. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I: Command and Context ...................................................................................... 1 Chapter II: Religion and Criticism .................................................................................... 28 Chapter III: Autonomy, Reflection and Respect ............................................................... 79 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 115 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 121 Vita .................................................................................................................................. 129 vi Chapter 1: Command and Context Duty and Divine Command Morality Late into the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant declares “All of my reason‟s interest (speculative as well as practical) is united the following three questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?” (735). The focus of this thesis falls primarily on the second question, which is as much a statement about duty as a question concerning duty; i.e., both George Eliot and Kant presume that we do possess compelling moral obligations (there is something which I ought to do). The mentality which seeks after what one ought to do, knowing that such responsibility exists, already manifests a consciousness of duty, provided such a mentality neither submerges choice in submission to inclination, nor assumes the answer to be given in an arbitrary and external code. Kant‟s interrogative formulation and union of his three questions in a common interest should not be overlooked – duty, for both Eliot and Kant, is something requiring investigation (philosophical and literary), and questions about duty cannot be wholly separated from questions of knowledge and expectation. As Kant‟s Critique of Practical Reason explores the nature and implications of moral duty, Eliot‟s novels frequently take on duty as a central thematic and site for conflict and drama. These philosophical and literary investigations arise, in part, from the conclusions and developments of critical works preceding them, which destabilize prior religious certitudes even as they seek to maintain a space for meaningful morality. In an aphorism entitled “George Eliot” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes “In England, one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is” (The Portable Nietzsche 515, qtd. in Anger 92). In the same work, Nietzsche parenthetically identifies Kant as “a crafty 1 Christian, when all‟s said and done” (The Nietzsche Reader 464). Despite the apparent opposition between fanaticism and craft, one registers a similar sort of complaint being brought against both the English novelist and German philosopher: that the promise of liberation from theology incurs only a greater subjection to Christian morality. Nietzsche is anything but alone in this complaint – Kant had already been attacked on this account by Goethe, and Eliot‟s fall from favor in the early twentieth century was due in no small part to a moral seriousness that could come off as didacticism (Levine, “Introduction,” 1). Yet Nietzsche is indebted to a critical legacy running from Kant, through figures like Strauss and Feuerbach, to Eliot, their English translator – a legacy which surely played no small part in generating the intellectual climate in which Zarathustra could be surprised that the saint in the forest had not yet heard that God is dead. Distancing ourselves somewhat from Nietzsche‟s hostility, we can nonetheless affirm that religion forms a necessary background for understanding duty in George Eliot and Kant, and a background with which each writer has a complex relationship. Moreover, the terms Nietzsche employs get directly at the complexity of this relationship: both Eliot and Kant write in opposition to enthusiasm or fanaticism, yet both hold that there is something in morality which should inspire our awe. Likewise, rationality (satirized by Nietzsche as craft, and thus more the craft of Socrates than that of Odysseus) seems like a necessary component of morality – Eliot insists on the need for “intellect” to regulate “feeling,” as a means of correcting the evangelical excesses of Dr. Cumming, and Kant identifies practical reason and morality. Yet the prospect
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