![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
When nineteenth-century public intellectual John Stuart Mill turns his philosophical craft upon himself he encounters the immobilising weight of an ‘incubus,’ a metaphorical ogre he associates with the Doctrine of Necessity as implicated in his ‘Logic of the Moral Sciences.’ Committed to an empiricist and mechanistic view of human nature, he wonders how to surmount the proposition that we are ‘the helpless slaves of antecedent circumstances.’ The perennial struggle over free will versus determinism pervades Mill's life story. For he must rid himself of the ‘incubus’ if he is to successfully defend cherished principles of self-determination and individual liberty. Mill's first-person narrative turns out to embody the central features of the philosophical autobiography: one or more scenes of self-transformation triggered by conceptual and emotional impasses, a theory of life stages linked to a philosophy of historical change, and the effort to reconcile the dialectical tension of reason and emotion and, in Mill's case, empiricism and Romanticism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
R. J. Manheimer teaches philosophy courses at OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute), conducts enrichment programmes for elementary schoolchildren, chairs the steering committee for the University of North Carolina at Asheville's Centre for Jewish Studies, and provides consulting for non-profit organisations. Until his retirement in 2009, he was research associate professor of philosophy at UNCA. Among his publications are: Kierkegaard As Educator (University of California Press, 1977); A Map to the End of Time: Wayfarings with Friends and Philosophers (Norton, 1999); Mirrors of the Mind: Reflecting on Philosophers’ Autobiographies (Jorvik Press, 2015) and Growing Up Existentially: A Journey from Absurdity to Consciousness (Jorvik Press, 2018).
Notes
1. One of the few scholars to pick up on Mill’s reference, Elijah Millgram (Citation2011) describes the incubus as a ‘supernatural sexual predator,’ (169), but makes no reference to Fuseli’s painting.
2. For a comprehensive review of the philosophical autobiography genre, see Schuster (Citation2003).
3. For a review of scenes of self-transformations in the autobiographies of philosophers from Augustine to Gandhi, see Manheimer (Citation2015).
4. John Stuart Mill was the eldest of five sisters and three brothers. He would function as their tutor, passing along lessons learned directly from his father, until he was around age 30. The Mill children all led a sheltered existence in accordance with their father James Mill’s pedagogical principles of controlling the outside influences of other children.
5. Jeremy Bentham is famous for what he called the ‘felicific calculus,’ a method for tallying up the amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to produce.
6. Fred Wilson, in his essay ‘Mill’s Autobiography’ (Citation2006) suggests Mill was familiar with the influential evangelical Methodist preacher George Whitefield (1714–1770), who also suffered from and wrote about dejection. As Wilson points out, unlike Whitefield, ‘Mill did not find his way out of his melancholy through a religious infusion of faith’ (187).
7. Curiously, though Mill may not have been aware of this, Coleridge’s plaintive ode was originally written to a Sara Hutchinson with whom the married Coleridge was smitten. The poem was eventually published without this personal reference. A line in the ode that Mill does not quote goes: ‘My genial spirits fail;/And what can these avail/To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?’ Mill’s dejection is not love sickness but the sinking heart of hopelessness and loss of felt purpose.
8. Coleridge dabbled in the philosophy of the German philosophers Kant, Fichte and Schelling who, in contrast to the tradition of British empiricism, asserted that the human mind came well-equipped with categories of perception such as space, time and number and that, therefore, speculative reason, through reflection, enabled the thinker to gain access to the deepest truths of reality. Mill’s branch of empiricism embraced the view that a person’s mind began as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, upon which sense perception recorded incoherent scribbles that, through the formation of image and the powers of associations, formed into ideas.
9. Mill, following Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (Citation2011), considered conventionally regarded sources of happiness such as money, fame and power as means, not ends, to the greater goal of personal thriving through the acquisition and practice of the virtues (e.g. temperateness, fairness, courage). In Mill’s case, and unlike Aristotle’s, happiness, in its association with pleasure, retained a strong element of the biological despite Mill’s later attempts to establish a hierarchy of types of pleasures. Hence, some pleasures (e.g. those derived from poetry, music, philosophy) are more worthy than others. This would lead to the criticism of elitism in Mill’s moral theory.
10. Nicholas Capaldi (Citation2004) takes the strong view that ‘Mill was the greatest of the English Romantics’ (365) in his repudiation of the scientific empiricism to which he had earlier subscribed. He sets Mill on the side of those who would engage in a critique of the so-called ‘Enlightenment Project.’
11. On the very first page of Mill’s Autobiography he describes his ‘biographical sketch’ as a ‘memorial’ that he has chosen to ‘leave behind.’ The memorial is in large part Mill’s acknowledgement of his debt to his father and to his wife, both deceased, and to the era of political reform in which he lived. Mill distrusted the motives of other authors of first-person narratives who published when they were still alive. He regarded their efforts as motivated by pecuniary gain and self-aggrandisement.
12. Jo Ellen Jacobs (Citation2002) speculates that Harriet’s husband, John Taylor, had infected her with syphilis earlier in their marriage, an illness not well understood at the time. Harriet’s own research and efforts to obtain mercury (then considered as having curative properties), argues Jacobs, shows Harriet’s awareness of the disease and, hence, the limitations to her sexual life with Mr Mill.
13. Directly attacked in The System of Logic but not made explicit in the Autobiography, were the views of Welsh-born utopian socialist reformer, Robert Owen (1771–1858) who, along with his followers, the Owenites, asserted that all human wants are socially determined and that individuals are, by the laws of necessity, the products of their conditioning and, hence, not responsible for their actions. The Owenites aimed to change these social conditions. Their efforts led to the cooperative movement.
14. Millgram (Citation2011) identifies Mill’s paralysis with what he calls ‘moral unfreedom’ and sees this idea of an act against compulsion as a key to Mill’s argument supporting the form of choice that, at a minimum, is a choice not-to-do something.
15. Mill does not use the Kantian term ‘autonomy.’ His equivalent is ‘liberty’ or ‘self-determination.’
16. Though perhaps rarely explicitly faced, every autobiographer grapples with the attribution of necessity. To narrate one’s life as a coherent whole revealing its own inner logic may imply that some underlying power – the ‘hand of god,’ ‘my destiny,’ or ‘fate,’ produced the trajectory of one’s life. As Beethoven expressed the sentiment so beautifully: ‘Muß es sein?’ (Must it be?) ‘Es muß sein!’ (It must be!). Those who resist this form of narrative unity may be more inclined to speak of chance, luck and accident in their life stories. They may be able to write as if they (and, therefore, we the readers) did not know what was going to happen next and that they are still engaged in the process of discovering fresh meanings hidden in the past.
17. Though Mill does not mention this in the Autobiography, we know from his letters that in his early 20s, he felt the need for a life partner who would share his objectives and with whom he could ‘associate on terms of equality.’ See St John Packe (Citation1954, 108–110).
18. Mill, as mentioned, was educated in music and the piano. Fond of Mozart, he also enjoyed playing improvisationally, which he did for Mrs Mill.