"Unacknowledged Legislators: Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake," Chapter 4 of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, continues to showcase Carl Trueman's literary-critical skills. While the connection of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the present age of expressive individualism is thin, the three eponymous English Romantic poets of of the early nineteenth century are a step closer. I will leave to to scholars of the English Romantics to evaluate Trueman's critical work but it certainly strikes me as the product of close, thoughtful reading.
Trueman begins this chapter where I left my previous post, how did the optimistic, self-loving ideas of Rousseau "become not simply the common currency of our society but so deeply embedded in such a way that most people never reflect on them?" (129-130) How did many in a society come to believe that it, rather than its individual members, was the source of so much of the evil and suffering present in the world?
That Trueman focuses on a set of poets picks up a theme from Rousseau, the importance of the aesthetic. For better or for worse, moral sentiments, the building blocks of ethics, have been for many years a matter of tuning, not reasoning: "the idea that poetry (and therefore the poet) fulfills a profoundly ethical task in ennobling humanity by cultivating the correct sentiments through the medium of art." (130) Accepting the accuracy of what Trueman proceeds to draw from Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake still leaves the question of precisely how the turns to the authenticity of nature (Wordsworth), the truth of nature (Shelley), and authenticity of natural sexual freedom (Blake) made it from the pages of poetry to the tacit understanding of the masses. But many chapters remain.
Trueman also addresses the eighteenth century cultural backdrop in England from which these poets sprang. In short, much had happened since the collapse of the overtly Christian Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century and the turn of the nineteenth. For an account of what had happened, Trueman draws almost exclusively on the work of historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala. On page 150 of his book Trueman summarizes Dabhoiwala's insights into the shifts in England in the 1700's as
(1) the increasing importance ascribed to conscience (basically understood as natural instinct) as a reliable guide to moral behavior, (2) a growing public distaste for judicial punishment of consenting heterosexual transgressors (such as adulterers) of standard moral codes, and (3) the rising view that the moral laws based on external authorities such as the Bible might in fact be social constructs and actually stand problematically over against the natural laws governing human nature.
My only contribution at this point is that another book I'm reading, the recent biography of King George III, The Last King of America by Andrew Roberts, confirms the debauchery that characterized England's upper classes during this time.
More acutely than Rousseau, the English Romantics identified religion--Christianity--as a principal source of oppression.
For Shelley, religion is a means of manipulation by which the powerful keep others subjugated and which is perpetuated primarily by the self-interest of those who have used it to gain the power they enjoy. God himself is the very prototype of human tyranny ... There is a clear connection in Shelley's mind between religion, political oppression, and restriction on sexual activity. (149)
A man far ahead of his times was Shelley and thus we should realize that the contemporary devaluation of the central role of marriage in social life is not a recent innovation.
I'm not entirely persuaded that "once aesthetics is detached from some universal understanding of what it means to be human, from some universally authoritative moral metanarrative, from some sold ground in a larger metaphysical reality, then aesthetics is king. ... When the sacred order collapses, morality is simply matter of taste, not truth." (160-61) First, Promethean hopes for ever-increasing human power had been growing since the early 1600s. Second, the English Romantics fully believed that human nature universally yearned to be free. But crucial to their social imaginary was the deep-seated belief that human suffering was not a consequence of an equally universal bent toward sin. Finally, the centrality of the aesthetic to their program of liberation reflected their own privileged positions. Yet adding aesthetic technique to the toolkit of the market certainly help explain our current state of affairs. The utilitarian mindset has swallowed all.
Earlier posts on The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self here, here, and here.
No comments:
Post a Comment