Episode 2. George Eliot: education, utilitarianism, Feuerbach

George Eliot's education

Last time we talked about Eliot's life with the focus on her personal and social life.

But all that drama happened when she was already a mature woman. She met Lewes when she was 32 and started writing fiction in her late 30s so by that time her views and ideas were fully developed. But what formed her intellectually? This time we will look at her education and the development of her philosophy that later informed her novels.

To me it's always especially interesting to learn how female writers got their education at the time when there was very little formal education they could get. And their intellectual development rested largely on the circumstances. Like the gothic novelist William Godwin who encouraged his daughter's reading and writing and whose daughter would become Mary Shelley; or Louisa May Alcott whose parents were transcendentalists and she grew up among the most prominent American thinkers of the time, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau so she had access to their company and also to their libraries.

So what was Eliot's story?

She attended several schools as a child where she above all became very religious. But at 16 after the illness and death of her mother she had to leave school to return home and run her father's household. Her father hired tutors in Latin and German for her which was unusual for people of their station and for a young woman – especially with Latin. In Europe Latin was always the language of educated people; it was always taught to boys who were supposed to become gentlemen but never to girls. It is one of the moments of friction in Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss where a brother is taught Latin and he absolutely hates it whereas his sister is really good at reading and languages and Latin fascinates her but she's not given that kind of education because she's a girl. So having tutors in those languages was an unusual advantage. And I find this is often the case with the stories of the female writers: obviously, economic advantages enable people to pursue intellectual work (that's the whole point of The room of one's own by Virginia Woolf) and we see it here too, but there's also another important advantage that these writers usually had rather supportive parents. In this case Eliot's father could and would hire tutors for her even though it was unusual and, strictly speaking, unnecessary.

But most of Eliot's education at the time came from self-education with the help of a local library. And it wasn't a public library so why did she get access? Her father was a manager of an estate in the West Midlands of England – there Eliot was born, there she returned from school, and there she lived with her father. And this estate owned a really good library. So again Eliot had access to this library because of her father's position. And so she spent the rest of her teenage years: running her father's household, learning with tutors and by herself at the library. All this time Eliot was very religious, serious and dutiful; the piety developed in her childhood stayed with her as a teenager.

How young Eliot gives up religion

And so they lived until they moved to Coventry in 1841. Mary Ann, the future George Eliot, is just 22, and in this new place she meets very different people who introduce her to very different ideas. Her new acquaintances are free-thinking intellectuals and through them she gets acquainted with new theological and philosophical works that bring her a new outlook on religion.

It ends with her declaring to her father that she doesn't believe in God anymore. Her father is outraged but eventually they come to an agreement that she can keep her beliefs to herself, but she has to attend church as usual and act the same as before in public.

Then Eliot started translating philosophical works from German. In 1846 she translated The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined by David Strauss. The translation was so well done that Strauss himself praised its accuracy. Critics also admired its style. One critic wrote,

"In preparing so beautiful a rendering as the present, the difficulties can have been neither few nor small in the way of preserving, in various parts of the work, the exactness of the translation, combined with that uniform harmony and clearness of style which impart to the volumes before us the air and the spirit of an original."

In the book Strauss denies the divine nature of Jesus and treats the miracles of the Gospel as myth. This was scandalous; the book was a sensation in Germany. And Eliot's translation introduced it to the English public and also attracted some outrage. One contemporary called her translation

"the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell."

But though since her twenties Eliot was not religious anymore, she respected religion and especially appreciated its role in maintaining morality. Rejecting religion to her had nothing to do with discarding morality. We've seen in the previous episode how despite her "immoral" behavior in the eyes of society, moral life was what she truly looked for. And in fact all her intellectual work was aimed at finding what is the right, good way to live, what is moral, and this is what she explores in her novels.

Because of her early Evangelical upbringing she developed a character whose highest ideal was performing one's duty, and she retains this view for the rest of her life. It will influence all her later philosophy. After she left religion behind, she looked for a philosophical worldview that would explain and defend the need for morality and duty.

Eliot's relationship with utilitarianism

A lot of Eliot's later philosophical influences are connected to a journal, The Westminster review. Eliot worked there as an assistant editor for three years. In truth she acted more like an editor: she did most of the work, supervised the content and contributed her own essays. She was also concerned with the business side and even wanted to change the design of the journal.

The Westminster review has an interesting story of its own and is associated with the philosophical theory of utilitarianism. It was founded in the 1820s by Jeremy Bentham who was the founder of utilitarianism. He's the author of the concept of "the greatest good for the greatest number". His friend and fellow-thinker James Mill supported the journal financially and contributed his own writing. His son John Stuart Mill, another famous utilitarian, continued his father's work and was an editor of the journal in the 1830s. Later it was said that under the influence of George Eliot, when she became the virtual editor in the 1850s, the journal was at its best since the days of John Stuart Mill.

So the journal had this strong utilitarian background and George Eliot could not fail to become familiar with utilitarian ideas. Eliot read all Mill's major works and his utilitarianism appealed to her much more than that of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. Bentham was constantly criticized and even ridiculed by his contemporaries and ever since for his too rational ideas that ignored the emotional part of human nature and simplified human needs and human psychology in general. Karl Marx said that he took the modern shopkeeper as the standard human being, implying the lack of imagination and feeling in his treatment of human psychology. Eliot criticized Bentham for the same reasons. John Stuart Mill was Bentham's follower but he recognized the limitations of his philosophy and held a more subtle view on human nature so his ideas were more appealing to Eliot.

John Stuart Mill for gender equality

Among his other views Mill was a supporter of gender equality. In his essay The Subjection of Women Mill censures the idea that women are naturally inferior to men calling it a speculation – because it's not based on experience as it was never experimented what would happen if women were given equal opportunities.

"I deny that any one knows or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. Until conditions of equality exist, no one can possibly assess the natural differences between women and men, distorted as they have been. What is natural to the two sexes can only be found out by allowing both to develop and use their faculties freely."

I admire people who managed to realize this and stand for such ideas at the time when inequality seemed so natural in society. But at the same time reading this makes me really sad that you still have to prove these things to some people today.

Mill's ideas in this essay sound very modern and the overall message is utilitarian. He argues that emancipation of women will be for the greater good: it will benefit the whole society because it will double its mental abilities for the development of humanity.

George Eliot loved this essay and agreed with its points but she wasn't concerned about the position of women in all questions equally. For example, she always supported education opportunities for women but the question of the vote didn't seem to concern her and she didn't support the rising suffragist movement.

Pain or pleasure: utilitarianism vs. Feuerbach

So Mill's works and utilitarianism in general influenced Eliot. This philosophy states that the true goal of our actions should be happiness and we should choose actions that bring the biggest amount of benefits to our well-being. And the ultimate goal of society is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This search for happiness became an important theme in Eliot's novels.

"The principle of avoiding pain and seeking only pleasure contains a paradox: a behavior that is supposed to lead us to happiness can make us suffer."

But when she explores the theme she argues with another utilitarian principle introduced by Jeremy Bentham: the principle of always seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. In theory such approach should lead to happiness. But Eliot questions it. As she puts her characters into real life situations she shows how constant pursuit of only pleasure and constant avoidance of pain can lead to mistakes, misdeeds and to suffering. We know that the easy way is not always the right way. And most worthy things are hard to get. So the principle of avoiding pain and seeking only pleasure contains a paradox: a behavior that is supposed to lead us to happiness can make us suffer. This behavior defeats its purpose. Eliot shows that the logic is just wrong, it's simplistic and does not correspond to reality: always seeking pleasure doesn't lead to always having pleasure.

"it is exactly those mistakes and suffering that become important lessons for the characters and make them grow"

But Eliot doesn't simply condemn this pursuit of pleasure. In her novels she shows how it can lead to mistakes and suffering but it is exactly those mistakes and suffering that become important lessons for the characters and make them grow. They become experience for the characters that leads them to a greater awareness. So the point is not to avoid such mistakes but to always learn from them. And in the next episodes we will see how her characters are often clearly divided not into those who do right and those who do wrong but into those who can learn from their mistakes and those who can't.

So in Eliot pain is an essential part of human experience and is a factor necessary for growth. This idea corresponds to the philosophy of Feuerbach. Eliot translated his book The Essence of Christianity in 1854 and Feuerbach's philosophy found its way into her novels. Feuerbach saw love and suffering as essential parts of human nature and for him suffering was a redemptive and healing experience. And Eliot explores and unravels these ideas in realistic stories showing how they play out in common relationships of ordinary people.

Individuality and societal pressure (and why Nietzshe hated the English)

It is such ideas as this of necessary suffering that provoked the harsh criticism of Friedrich Nietzshe. He blamed Eliot for giving up Christianity but not Christian morality. The interesting thing is that he saw her philosophy as somehow characteristically English. He wrote:

"They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. 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. That is the penance they pay there."

The irony is that, as we have seen, her ideas developed largely on the basis of German philosophy to which Nietzshe belongs. And in general all her primary influences are Continental, very not English in fact.

She was too revolutionary for some and not revolutionary enough for others.

I find it very characteristic that Eliot was essentially attacked from both sides. Her life with a man outside marriage was already a reason for respectable society to shun her, but the fact that she gave up religion alienated her even more. Still others criticized her for not giving up enough of conventionalities. She was too revolutionary for some and not revolutionary enough for others. Like she was never enough and never in the right for the majority of people.

"our fellow-men become our objective conscience"

And it made me think about the problem of society and the individual. Judging others is a way of society to regulate the behavior of one another. For example, the modern – well, the most of the modern – society condemns physical violence, at least in ordinary circumstances. It's not only the legal punishment that keeps people from hitting one another but also the opinion of society. Actually in the moment only the opinion of others matters and regulates people's behavior. So it's a good regulating mechanism. Actually, Feuerbach wrote about this too: he said that our fellow-men become our objective conscience so connection with others helps to assert morality in society.

"the opinion of others can be stifling to the individuality."

But at the same time the opinion of others can be stifling to the individuality. And the advice not to mind what others say can be helpful only to a certain extent. Because we do live in a society, and no man is an island, so unless you can live in total seclusion, you have to navigate between these Scylla and Charybdis of social rejection and the sacrifice of your individuality. And it becomes a constant bargaining between your personality and the limitations and obligations that society in general or your specific group projects onto you; between your individuality and your desire to belong and be loved. Actually this is a theme which I'm going to discuss in the episode about The Mill on the Floss. But the short answer is there is no easy way out of this problem. You know, as in economics: you can gain nothing without a cost.

Of course this is a problem only when you are for some reason in a group that doesn't share your values or can't accept you as you are for some reason. And then there's always an option to leave completely and look for a better community for you. Sometimes this is the only solution if you want to be true to yourself.

Divine human qualities: why personal relationships are the greatest achievement

But let's return to Feuerbach. He argued that God is a creation of a human mind. So essentially it is man who created God. Divine qualities are in truth human qualities – the best human qualities. God is divine not because he is God but because people ascribe those perfect divine qualities to him. So God is basically a representation of a perfect human, an example for any human being.

"man who created God"

But as the divine qualities are human, it means that all humans already have the divine inside them. And that highlights the responsibility we have to develop our divine qualities but also to recognize that every other human being has them inside too. And so instead of talking about loving God, people should love people, and instead of imagining the all-loving God, we should emulate such love. And it's not even some abstract general love for humanity. Feuerbach considered a very concrete love for another human being, for another individual as the highest spiritual aim.

"instead of talking about loving God, people should love people"

This became the basis of his criticism of Christianity. In his eyes Christianity promoted faith over love. He argued that Christianity mistakenly made faith the cornerstone of religion. And in his eyes faith was the opposite of love. Because it was discriminatory. Faith divides people into believers and non-believers. Whereas love is universal and uniting, faith is dividing. That's why he saw it as the false essence of Christianity and insisted that love should become its true essence.

This is an important idea for Eliot. She emphasizes this primary role of individual love in Middlemarch:

"There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our mortality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men".

Eliot strongly believed that this direct love for individuals teaches and develops a person more than any philosophical ideas. And so personal relationships and individual love should be valued above all.

So this is the first part of my research into Eliot's philosophical development and I will continue next time.

Visit the podcast's instagram @no_inkling to look at additional visual materials and to share your opinions or message me. I really want to hear from you!