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Signs Times

Carlyle, from Tennyson’s introduction in Copley ed.

• Reception
  • Early on, a mystic, a radical
    • Victorians reject him then
    • Tries to promote German lit in England
  • Then, a respected sage
    • He is lauded
    • Dickens, Ruskin, Mill like him; listened to by Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning, Morris
  • After death, not completely respected: Emerson: he’s like a cathedral bell (rung from time by time to ruin the fun mood)
    • Rumors about relationship with wife bring him down
      • Samuel Butler: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four, besides being very amusing”
    • Literary reputation at its ebb (plus as fierce feelings against Germans win, Carlyle loses out)
    • Strachey called him a “Scotch peasant”
• Famous prose stylist
  • “lacks system” xxii: definitely avoided any system (in terms of structure/style of writing)
• Religious mystic
  • rejected the Calvinism of his family but found his own religion, dramatic encounter in wilderness in 1822
  • personal understanding of the divine: love God, see him in Nature which is God’s “clothing”
  • “animating spiritual life in the universe”
  • still never orthodox Christian
  • thus, rejects materialism and mechanistic viewpoints: instead, “a whole and organic life…sustained by God’s will and subject to his judgment” xxiii
    • he’s against the Victorian Zeitgeist, which he feels is skeptical, irreligious, literal, democratic
• Contempt for social measures of correction b/c change needs to begin with personal conversation
  • You have to see God in the universe to see the ORDER and harmony (which are God’s) that the world reflects
  • cf Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdrockh: “Be no longer a Chaos.” xxiv
    • universe truly reflects divine plan: the world and the flesh are illusory xxv
  • matter needs to be put under control to reflect spirit (hierarchy)
  • Modesty, truth, justice
  • Against Pride
  • Duty, renunciation, reverence, silence
  • Faith in heroes
• Method: interconnection: “It is a mathematic fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the center of gravity of the Universe!”
• Publically, known for attacking social problems of the day
  • The first one to isolate and analyze changes of Industrial Revolution (while the Romantics had fled from it xxvi)
  • Speaks out against injustices of laissez faire: exploitation
    • Ungodly, inhuman xxvi b/c makes men machines, makes you forget everything but profit and loss
  • Not a fan of liberalism
  • Doesn’t like utilitarianism (ie opposite of Mill)
    • Teufelsdrocke: “The Soul is not synonymous with the Stomach.”
• Hero worship: supports leaders
  • Why isn’t he a Tory conservative? The hierarchy he supports isn’t just the existing hierarchy
    • He wants the RIGHT hierarchy; not all people given same powers
  • He was more an enemy of democracy than a lover of aristocracy
• An Odd Combination xxvii: he attacks tradition yet keeps traditional morality; he uses Christianity to find reason; he’s an independent but still believes in God
• Style: Carlylese
  • “emphatic:” no “composure” or “balance” (thus very diff from 18th c prose ideals)
  • energetic, passionate, electric, vivid
  • sounds like preaching or oration
  • uses poetic and biblical language
  • use of second person, capitals, questions and exclamations; lots of dashes, new words, dependent clauses, parentheses
  • heterogeneous
  • epigrams everywhere, interjections, quips, oaths, puns
  • doesn’t always obey grammar
  • HOWEVER IT’S NOT THE SAME AS CHAOS: says the editor Tennyson. Remember Carlyle’s own belief that chaos of the visible hides the order of the true universe
• A fan of personal revolution: fix yourself

Signs of the Times: intro

• Carlyle’s v. significant 1829 contribution to the current discussion about the Zeitgeist of now, along w/Hazlitt, Mill
• Too many prophets: we need to stick to the present and its problems, not concern ourselves with the future
  • each prophet brings “frenzy” to thousands of others, like the French Revolution or Puritan witch-burnings
  • while the English aren’t killing each other with these frenzies, they still occur regularly like “visitations”
  • everyone is always proclaiming a crisis, and then making a prophecy: now it’s Millenarians, followers of Mill and Bentham, Utilitarians
    • Let’s wait for their noise to die down naturally
• So, let’s look calmly on Right Now, not Later
  • Will help us be less perplexed
  • Will tell us what we need to do

Signs of the Times: qualities

• It’s a Mechanical Age
  • not moral, religious, or philosophical
  • instead, it’s about “adapting means to ends”
  • “nothing is done directly or by hand; all is by rule or calculated contrivance” 6 even for the “simplest operation” you look for an “abbreviating process”
• Why? Industrial advances in making machines; steam-engine
  • People are putting down their tools and letting machines do work for them
  • “we have an artists that hatches chickens by steam,” machines for cooking, and for sleeping he jokes (magnets)
• “There is no end to machinery…nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature” 6
  • we always leave the fight “loaded with spoils”
• More wealth, less labors, better food, clothes, and buildings
  • Yet division of wealth is getting worse, dividing the rich and the poor further and futher
  • “strangely altering the old relations” 6 (the not feudal anymore argument)
• Diffusion of mechanical genius into other areas of life
  • “internal and spiritual” not just “external and physical” 7
  • Education is now mechanical: “a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross” rather than “indefinable” and “tentative” and “perpetual variation”
  • Religious machines: Bible-Society is a machine, powered by money and chicanery
    • We think religion is waning, so we build more churches
  • Public meetings, committees are machinery
  • The magazine or periodical of each sect is its own engine, its windmill, its motive power that will “grind meal” 7
  • Machine: you combine with a party to do something
  • Hence, philosophy, science, art literature are machine run: Royal Academies, Scientific Institutions, Museums that are like “well-finished hives” that “stray agencies of Wisdom” supposed to “swarm of their own accord”
    • art turned into a “Public Kitchen” 8
    • even books WRITTEN and SOLD by machinery, not just printed b/c of “Editorial conclaves” and “Paternoster Row,” and Trade dinners
  • politics too
  • Science: Metaphysical and Moral Sciences yielding to Physical Science; there is no psychology (except in Germany)
    • All science now is “physical, chemical, physiological; in all shapes mechanical” 9
  • math too is now mechanical more and more: you aren’t creative as a mathemetician but handy in “aqcuired expertness in wielding its machinery” 9
    • calculus is an “arithmetical mill” 9 w/”steady turning of the handle”
  • metaphysics too: a material philosophy since Locke, not a spiritual one 10
    • Locke: “whole doctrine…mechanical;” “it is not a philosophy of the mind: it is a mere discussion concerning the origin of our consciousness….a genetic history”
      • the tradition he inaugurates atheism, fatalism, leading up to a French doctor saying, “as the liver secretes bile, so does the brain secrete thought” 10, and this French doctor examines the moral as if via “Leuwenhoek microscopes” and says that poetry comes from “the smaller intestines”
      • they go through the wonder and beauty of the world and see only “salt-petre, pasteboard, and catgut” 11 and notes the various mechanics who are trying to make mechanical creatures (Vaucanson’s duck, the Nurembergers’ wood and leather man
    • what are they missing? necessity v free will, relation of mind to matter, time and space, God, the Universe
  • most visible realm of life gone mechanical: politics
    • Society as a machine: the metaphor is okay, but it “hardens” and “will not depart at our bidding:” a Frankenstein (reified)
    • The belief that human happiness will be achieved by reforms changing in the system, is sign of mechanism
      • they believe that goodness depends on the external, not the internal: we believe that if you fix the laws, everything else will be just fine 12 (BUT he says look how unfree the gov of Elizabeth was, and yet Shax and Sidney; look how the slave St Paul made some great stuff)
    • Plus, government only cares about “physical, practical economic condition” anyway, not their spiritual health or morality: so its method and its aims are both mechanical
      • only cares about Body-Politic, not Soul-Politic
    • they say people have no love of country, only self-interest: that means that humans don’t have to be virtuous accg to government
    • government as machine: taxing-machine, property-security machine: a “constable” not a “father” 12
      • clearly Carlyle is for more paternalism
    • people’s “salvation as a social being” promoted by a machine
    • government becomes about “Codification,” that he compares w/fitting someone for pants, except that the gov doesn’t “measure” the body first: doesn’t fit the human (we don’t even care about the human anymore)
• We can no longer achieve anything single-handedly or without machine: we have to find a “corporation” and use “their oxen” to till our fields
  • His definition of a machine is very Deleuzo-Guattarian! Very cool
• “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind.”
  • Instead of “internal perfection” you have “external combinations and arrangements” 8
• So, we have “intellectual bias” towards external b/c when we investigate the internal via these external techniques, we find nothing 11
  • What does this mean? WE are more and more assuming that you cannot know anything about the internal b/c it doesn’t yield to mechanical investigation
    • we give it up. sad.
• Mechanism begins to look natural 13 “as if it could never have been otherwise”
  • And yet it only truly services a fraction of human interests and life—and not the BEST part of humans either
• What is the alternative he brings to us? “Dynamics”
  • “the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man” “Love…Fear…Wonder…Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion”
  • “vital and infinite”
• Poets, Priests, Moralists used to “regulate” these energies, but now we only have Political Philosophers
  • Political philosophy: purely mechanical, they “Count” and “checking and balancing” men’s motives
  • Why won’t this work? Men’s motives are “so innumerable, and so variable in every individual” 14
    • Arnold and Carlyle and Ruskin seem to agree that we need to protect the individual
• Mechanism will not lead to happiness: instead, instinct and Nature usually give man the best that he has 14
  • Science and Art don’t come from the University machine, but the individual: in the “obscure closets” of Bacon, Newton; art not a product of institutions or guild: Shakespeare… at most they only had “partial help” from institutions
  • No! Genius a free, spontaneous gift of Nature, part of Dynamical Man, not Mechanical Man
    • (He’s being Romantic here, but he isn’t ignoring industrial life…he’s confronting it)

Continued

• Every high attainment won dynamically
  • Denies that Profit and Loss have done anything for humans 15, never been “Grand agents”
  • Any time they are engaged w P and L, it’s for “some invisible and infinite” goal: passion and soul move people
    • Ex: religion causes Crusades, Reformation, English Civil War; an idea causes Fr Rev: Right and Freedom
• Man’s systems and theories are temporary
• They have power over what they do (this echoes Marsden), not the other way around
  • “For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer” 16
• We have plenty of historical evidence that this is true, but people won’t recognize it b/c “the memory of them seems to have passed away” or is just “faint tradition, of no value as a practical principle”
  • Arnold too believed that Victorians were special but still that history has its models for them
• Our Goal: To correct the balance and mixture of the Mechanical and the Dynamical
  • We want moral force, but not so much that we’re idle and impractical: want a midway point
• Characteristic of the Present: moral force is being destroyed
  • This age, we are inferior in development of morality and dignity, though we excel all others in external development 17
    • “This is not a Religious age.” We only care about material
  • “Mechanism has now struck its roots down into man’s most intimate, primary sources of conviction; and is thence sending up, over his whole life and activity, innumerable stems” 17
  • Virtue now is conditional, not absolute
  • “no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.” 17
• Now, even Intelligence merely means Logic and Argument, cause and effect, HOW not what
  • Instead of What is good? What is it? Meditation
  • Philosophers now are “Logic-mills” of cause and effect rather than “create anything”
• We no longer have Wonder. 18
• Determinism: “For it is the ‘force of circumstances’ that does everything; the force of one man can do nothing.” 19
  • He says this is nothing more than a metaphor (society as machine)
  • Even tries to make poetry like “bricklaying,” and tries to make religion have a “Natural History” (cf Hume’s Natural History of Religion”)
• Filled with Unbelief
  • Religion should be “psalm from the heart of Man” wherein God is revealed via True, Beauty, Goodness
  • No! Religion itself is an expedient: “Religion too is a Profit, a working for wages” “Hope and Fear” not Reverence 20
• Literature nowadays reverences the Strong, not the Beautiful 21: that is, we like the “strong” works, not the “true” ones (They have to move you, terrify you etc)
  • ex: Byron and the love of Byron (his relative disappearence by 1822 Carlyle says is good)
• Nowadays morality is merely a kind of “Police…called Public Opinion” 21
  • Virtue measured in terms of the pleasurable and profitable
  • “we worship and follow after Power” 21 rather than Truth
  • rather than true honor, we settle for Popularity 22
• Worries About Agency
  • “By arguing on the ‘force of circumstances,’ we have argued away all force from ourselves” 22 making us “leashed together, uniform in dress and movement”
  • He’s all about human agency and individuality, but what does he see around him? “We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes” (that is public opinion) 22
    • and we must “realise the sum of money…it expects of us. or we shall be lightly esteemed” 2
• We have tons of civil liberties, but “moral liberty is all but lost” 22 so we are still in “feudal chains”
• He says he doesn’t have despair, and recognizes that all historical periods have their mechanistic tendences (more or less)
  • Still believes “the happiness and greatness of mankind at large have been continually progressive. Doubtless this age also is advancing…its discontent contains matter of promise” and education promises lots of good to come b/c more people are truly thinking 23
    • 24: “The time is sick and out of joint” as well as full of progress.
  • B/c the problems are of opinion, you can easily change them (not natural problem) 23: “This deep, paralysed subjection to physical objects comes not from Nature, but from our own unwise mode of viewing Nature.”
  • Even if “temples” of religion are being destroyed, we can “rebuild” and “recover”
  • Mechanism WILL be our servant
• Refers to political turmoil as all nations calling for change; Fr Rev is “offspring” of this general movement; and the end of it hasn’t been seen yet
  • We will struggle towards higher freedom, past mere political freedom
  • And of course we are being guided by “a higher guidance than hours”
• To begin change, to reform, it must be a slow, solid reformation that “what each begins and perfects on himself.” 24 (that’s the last line)

Notes

• Carlyle believes that Opinion will lead to Action (thus agreeing w/Hegel)