Aesthetic of empiricism: self, knowledge and reality in Mid-Victorian prose

Abstract

Long ago, in Keywords, Raymond Williams remarked with some justification that "Empirical and the related empiricism are now in some contexts among the most difficult words in the language." That difficulty has yet to be fully recognised or elaborated by contemporary criticism. In an era when discontinuity, difference and heterogeneity have become privileged tenets of criticism, empiricism has come to be regarded as the other of contemporary thought and synonymous with positivism or objectivism. Yet empiricism has rarely, if ever, had this philosophical implication; Dr Johnson, we recall, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of commonsense. Focusing on the mid-nineteenth century, this thesis argues that far from initiating a crude representationalism, empiricism predicated its search for knowledge on a profound instability, one embodied within the textual language through which it sought its articulation. That instability stemmed from the dominant view that the self was constructed in and through experience, and perforce restlessly alterable or unfinished, while also being central to the methodology of observation underlying the empiricists' view of the world. The contingent self was conceived simultaneously as the route towards knowledge and its obstacle. In the work of John Ruskin, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer the principle of relationality consistently shapes their view of reality and their epistemological drive. By considering a variety of their writing—philosophical, literary, psychological, scientific, critical—it will be argued that 'empiricism' provides a useful rubric for their common, primary, deep-seated epistemological impulse. In various self-conscious ways, their arguments unfold in destabilising narrative forms, dramatising the principles of limitation and provisionality so crucial to their meaning. Rather like the reality they attempt to describe, works like Bain's The Senses and the Intellect (1855) or Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1874-9) adopt a sprawling, proliferating structure which seems to register a restless struggle to unify knowledge, and by dramatising this resistance to the synthesising will they acknowledge in and through narrative itself the impossibility of some perfect (and therefore fixed) organisation. The many volumes and reworked editions in which mid-Victorian empiricism appeared provide formidable material evidence of this revisability principle, incorporating the theme of multiplicity at a narrative level. Novels like Middlemarch (1871-2), to take a famous example, not only make connective structures (networks, webs, tangles) a way of describing the morphology of communal life, they assimilate this logic of association into their narrative method. In all cases, associational possibility becomes encoded in form. After historically retracing these questions to the figure of David Hume, subsequent chapters explore different aspects of narrative and knowledge in these writers: the aesthetic of realism, the problems of perception, the knowing body, and the negotiation of relativism. To the extent that this relational epistemology shapes these works—whether multi-volume treatises, novels or periodical essays—it might be thought of as determining the aesthetic of empiricism.