J.S. Mill and the Emotions II
Prof. Bill Long 11/17/06
Arriving at the Crisis
Though the outward circumstances of his life seemed under control, Mill faced the signal challenge of his young life in 1826, when he had just turned 20. Looked at from a distance of 180 years, this crisis is nothing other than what 21st century psychologists would call a natural process of individuation and separation. He had been so intellectually shaped and confined by the presence of his father that he really was in no way his own person. Everything, from his intellectual training, to his perspectives, to the first and only job he attained, was due to the influence of his father. For example, he felt that his father's book on the history of British India, no doubt not a bad book, was one of the best books ever written. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that he brought every thought and idea he had to his father's attention. All was subject to his most excruciatingly detailed scrutiny. Thus, from the perspective of years the crisis which Mill narrates in ch. 5 of his Autobiography was probably the most salutary thing that could have happened to him; it made him see the gaps in his education and it ended up giving him a fresh perspective on what he had learned. It enabled him to be "born again," though in a completely secular way.
Entering the Dark Tunnel
He narrates his distress in 5.2. Ever since he first read Bentham in 1821, he had been fired with the desire to be a reformer. Reform was in the air, and Mill wanted to devote his life to this noble aim. But in a particularly dull state of nerves in 1826 he asked himself the following question:
"Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?”
Mill answered the question as follows:
"And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for," (4.2).
Plunged into despair by his inability to solve this conundrum, Mill began to seek a culprit or a reason for his ennui. He found it in what he called his "habit of analysis." The earlier books of the Autobiography describe how his father not only taught him to read widely and learn classical languages but how to dissect and find fault with arguments. Mill believed, actually, that this skill in logic could and should be taught at a relatively young age--before one had the capacity to absorb vast quantities of facts or information-- so that when you developed the capacity to retain and understand more complex material (history; politics), you would have a razor-sharp analytical ability to discern the true strength of arguments. But now he realized how this ability had gotten him into difficulty. In the words of St. Paul, the very law that had promised life to him proved to be death to him. Hear his words:
"For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity—that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives," (4.5).
Analysis is great because it tends to "weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice." It enables us to "separate ideas which have only casually clung together." He concluded:
"Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling."
Analytic thoughts, then, were favorable to prudence and clear-sightedness, but were a perpetual "worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues." The people with whom he was brought up were of the opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings was the greatest and surest source of happiness. Indeed, he believed this, "but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling." His education had failed him in this one respect: it had "failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis."
Conclusion
Thus, here he was, the precocious kid, having developed the inveterate analytic habit of the mind as a child, now realizing that this habit was an albatross around his neck because it didn't allow him to cultivate his feelings. He says sadly:
"I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail.."
His mind seemed to be "irretrievably analytic." But as is often the case, the breakthrough comes when one is most convinced that the breakthrough is furthest away. The next and final essay describes how Mill got through this crisis.
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