Andrew's Wiki
Past Present

Carlyle (Wikipedia info)

• 1795-1881 Scottish writer (historian, essayist)
  • At first, a math teacher
• A Calvinist who lost his faith, but still maintains religious values
• Infl. by German Transcendentalism
  • Fichte: founder of German Idealism (which was based on Kant)
    • Combined Kant and Hegel
      • People even thought his early unsigned work was by Kant
    • Father of German nationalism
    • Wrote about consciousness too
      • Self-consciousness is social: you only become self-aware because of the existence of others (Foundations of Natural Right 1796), because of relation of “I” and “not-I”
      • “Relations of right” = people need to recognize others as rational
    • Not really a dualist: didn’t want to emphasize Kant’s “things in themselves” because that’s too skeptical (ie, division between the real and the perceived)
      • Instead, consciousness not actually based on contact with the real: it is based in itself
      • No thing-in-itself (Kant’s noumena)
    • Very much about intuition
    • Politics: state should be autarky: no trade with other nations; nation should be self-sufficient, closed
• As a reviewer
  • Expert on German lit
    • Translated Goethe
  • Increasingly distrustful of realism
  • Made him later associated with fascism b/c of hero worship that Hitler liked and his love of German culture and anti-democratic sentiment
• As an historian
  • 3 volume The French Revolution (1837)
    • Made him a household name
    • Intense, powerful, in the present tense often
    • Spiritual forces really behind history
    • Heroes must solve chaotic times in history
  • Biography of Frederick the Great
    • He shows transition from Enlightenment to modern liberal culture of “social dynamism”
• Chartism, 1839
  • Upset about “estrangement” between social classes
  • Critiques ruling clas
• Heroes and Hero-Worship
  • Heroes have creative energy (not necessarily perfect morals)
    • Asking your heroes for morality is asking this person to be conventional
    • Reminds me of Thornton in North and South
  • “A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.”
  • “All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.”
  • Muhammad: the prophet-hero who single-handedly organizes a people
  • Cromwell: also a hero
• Maintained non-materialist philosophy during Industrial Revolution: an oddity
• Silence: don’t talk until you have mature, well-considered thoughts
• Racism
  • Later in life, argued that slavery shouldn’t have been abolished b/c it let the ex-slaves become lazy
  • He defended despicable Governor Eyre of Jamaica (while John Stuart Mill worked for prosecution)
• As a writer
  • Victorian “sage writer,” like Ruskin and Arnold

Past and Present, 1843

• Contrasts monastic communities with present British communities
  • Past: spiritual values
    • Communal values
  • Present: mere economic values
    • Too impersonal
    • Individualistic, not looking at whole community
  • similar to Ruskin in that you compare British present with some past in order to critique the former
• Why? 1840, doing research for Cromwell biography, visited monastery Bury St. Edmonds
  • So, interested in life of 12th c British monastery: ordered, hierarchical
    • ruled by a just hierarchy b/c determined by talent
  • Compared to contemporary British situation: after visiting workhouses, for one, wanted to talk about squalid British present
    • British hierarchy merely born into it, no longer deserve it
• Worried about the movements towards democracy
• “Dismal science” of economics
• “The Centuries too are all lineal children of one another,” so that by describing 12th c monk environment, will reveal some things about the “newest grandson,” that is the present day
  • Can’t resist a nod to the fact that we too shall past and be dust like this monk whose chronicle I’m reading…
• Who’s the Chronicler who Carlyle reads and uses to prompt this book? The monk Jocelinus de Brakelonda, whom he calls a Boswell to the Johnson, his Abbot.
  • Patient simple cheerful shrewd
  • And has VERACITY above all things, which is the fount of genius 343
  • the monastery acted like a “Crib” that kept him as well-meaning and happy as a “child”
• Monks
  • 345 “singular two-legged animals” popular in the literature of Carlyle’s day
  • “so very strange an extinct species of the human family” (b/c any existing ones are “spurious” b/c today you have “The Gospel of Richard Arkwright”)
  • Compares this Chronicle to a fossil that’s been unearthed that “begin[s] to speak”
    • 1200 A D: “no chimerical vacuity….a green solid place that grew corn and several other things”
• What’s annoying is that Jocelin won’t tell us hardly anything of King Richard of Magna Carta fame, even tho’ we know Richard stopped at the monastery for two weeks
  • Only that Richard gave a paltry tip, one shilling and one penny, in return for all that room and board for him and his retinue
• Carlyle takes us on a visit to the ruins of the Abbey
  • He gives us slight sketch, noting what “dilettantes” would remark about, for example the architecture and suggests they start a subscription to prop up its falling gate
    • “placid dilettante simper”
  • St. Edmund was given quite a bit of the lands around it
  • He says there’s a temptation to see it and all history as “one infinite incredible gray void,” but “It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for! Yes, another world it was…” 348
  • What really matters: “Does it never give thee pause…that men then had a soul – not by hearsay alone, and as a figure of speech…. it is pity we had lost tidings of our souls: – actually we shall have to go in quest of them again” 348-9
  • What doesn’t have soul? “Manchester Hunger-mobs and Corn-law Commons Houses” 349
• We must remember history DID have flesh and blood people, not “Fantasms,” running about
  • For a moment, let you change places w/them: “we look into a pair of eyes deep as our own, imagining our own, but all unconscious of us; to whom we, for the time, are become as spirits and invisible!”
• Today
  • Dehumanized
  • Like Ruskin and Arnold, pessimistic about right now
  • Instead of spiritual values and human values, we follow economic imperatives, impersonal laws, and “rights”
  • Collapse of communities and social values; atomisation into individualism
• Some Topics
  • Manchester Insurrection, where hungry operatives rose up: people say they weren’t successful and that the English folks didn’t show bravery, but he says: wasn’t that enough? to show up?
    • You can’t take a shot at anyone when you don’t know for sure who the real enemy is
    • he says the insurrection was necessary
    • he can’t believe the heartlessness of the soldiers firing on the unarmed workers and their families
    • he says them just showing up to protest made it clear, this question that needed to be asked: ”’Just what are you going to do with us?’ in a manner audible to every reflective soul in this kingdom. All England heard the question; it is the first practical form of our Sphinx-riddle. England will answer it; or, on the whole, England will perish.” “most impressive question asked in the world”
      • Must lead them to work
    • “We will honor the poor Manchester insurrection.” with its “deep unspoken sense” “a right noble instinct of what is doable and what is not doable”
    • “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” he says is the “everlasting right of man. Indisputable as the Gospels…it must and will have itself fulfilled”
      • Obstacles: the world is so complex now with a a variety of vested interests (manufacturers, land owners, Tories, farmers, etc) that only God’s Justice will show us the way out. So when some people try to say that fair wages are impossible, he says, no just difficult, but inevitable
      • world is imperfect, but still it approximates the perfect
    • he notes they only want enough to keep them alive and laboring: when you can’t give them enough to keep them laboring, then you need to rearrange your system. Because Your System Is “Suicidal.”
    • they are “dumb” he says and “inarticulate” (remember he’s writing after Chartism but before the real organization of labor occurs)
    • says that all able-bodied horse have jobs, a full belly, a sleek coat
    • he warns that they had better fix it soon, “lest worse befall”—better to end a world where the workers starve while horses are well cared for
  • “I have got no Morrison’s Pill for curing the maladies of Society.” 30
    • Instead you must give up your “luxuries and falsities” “a radical universal alteration of your regimen and way of life”
      • that way your Life-Fountain can flow again: you must get down to your SOUL to find your conscience, to change your “heart of stone” for one of flesh: then you will see the changes made possible
    • not just by laws, either, or just by education
      • mere governmental changes of law, “still a Dishonesty, with a new dress on it”
  • It’s crazy we call ourselves a society yet believe only in “totalest separation, isolation”
  • Present: Two Qualities: Mammonism, Dilettantism (but no true faith)
    • Mammonism
      • We have forgotten that “Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings”
      • Thinking that money does away with all your social responsibility; that all you have to do is give wages: “The Universe is not made so.”
      • “to whom going to Hell is the equivalent of not making money”
      • he says the fact that government supports this idea is the result of 200 years of Atheistic Government (since Restoration) (and no wonder this is the moment he shouts out against deism, the clockmaker god)
    • Dilettantism
      • is idle, while Mammonism is at lest working
      • being “gracefully idle in Mayfair:” witty and ornamental, epigrammatic, inanity, full of insincere talk that will lead to insincere action
      • No One Is Being Serious
      • they talk about the “undecipherable disordered dusk of things” in smoke filled rooms, saying everything is uncertain and unintelligible
      • “game-preserving aristocracy”
  • Overproduction: It is the ruling class’ job to make sure that you don’t have a glut of goods and cause people to be unfed
  • Types of People: gives a typology of folks, the Mill-ocracy, the Idle Aristocracy, the Mammonistic Workers
    • Blames them all
      • for example the idle aristocrats by saying NO! the land is owned by God or, at most, by the generations who have worked and will work on that land
      • for example the working aristocrats: “money alone is not the representative of man’s success in the world, or of man’s duties to man”
• Wants “true government” instead of the “no-government” of laissez-faire
• All Work Is Noble
  • “a life of ease is not for any man”
  • This is in the chapter “Happy,” where he damns the present need to be happy all the time, and of people complaining of not having pleasant things
  • Soul is not stomach
    • One day, you’ll die, and it won’t matter if you were happy
    • Your happiness or unhappiness will vanish…and your work will remain: you’ll be dead, and you’ll hear, “Where is thy work? Where is thy work?”
  • Says that the “Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast becoming a rather unhappy one” b/c it in practice means people arguing for Free Trade so people get “Cheaper New Orleans bacon”...b/c it says we need bacon to be happy
    • Gives an anecdote of being w/a doctor friend who had a patient who was constantly sick b/c overate overindulged, but came to doctor to complain of Loss of Appetite!

Random

• Notes on how political economy is working: “The world, with its Wealth of Nations, Supply-and-demand and such-like, has of late been terribly inattentive to work and wages.”
  • People have been so “busy” that they’ve let what he calls “idle Laws and un-Laws” such as “Law of the stronger, law of Supply-and-demand, law of laissez-faire.”
  • “You have fallen terribly behind in that side of the problem!” he says, noting that you’ve got 1 million unsaleable shirts and a million bare backs
    • “Shirts are useful for covering human backs; useless otherwise, an unbearable mockery otherwise.”
      • Like Marx, use value rather than exchange value
  • When people say the changes he requires are impossible he says that’s just “vain jargon in favor of the palpably unjust”
• But not a Marxist, of course, b/c of his Hero-worship and belief in authority and hierarchy