Bruising, laceration, and lifelong maiming; or, how we encourage research

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 70, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 301-318

  Miller, Andrew H ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949846107     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2003.0007     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1994), 28. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
2. John Henry Newman, The Idea of A University (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), 96-97.
3. J. S. Mill. "Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews," in Collected Works, 33 vols, ed. John Robson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1965-1991), 11:231.
4. Mill, 254.
5. Thomas A. Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, ed. and trans. Joseph N. Tylenda (New York: Vintage, 1998), 152.
6. Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, trans. Eliot (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1989), 47.
7. Feuerbach, 140-41.
8. Feuerbach, 141. This emphasis on responsiveness and various denials of it, variously called knowingness, avoidance, and intellectual self-deception, are of special interest to me as they have re-emerged recently as objects of study within several distinct traditions or inheritances of philosophical writing: from Simone Weil to Iris Murdoch and subsequent writers on "virtue ethics"; from classical philosophy to Alexander Nehamas and Martha Nussbaum; from the patristics to Pierre Hadot; from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Jonathan Lear; from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida. On knowingness in particular, see my "John Henry Newman, Knowingness, and Victorian Perfectionism," forthcoming in Texas Studies in Language and Literature.
9. Eliot, Letters, 9 vols, ed. George Haight (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954-1978), 1: 269.
10. Letters, 270.
11. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 44.
12. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), 263.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollindale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 127.
14. Alasdair MacIntyre's attempts to provide criteria by which such ideals can be confidently assessed fail instructively, leaving his perfectionism, as many critics have noted, in a state of moral indeterminacy. See, for example, Alan Gewirt, "Rights and Virtues," in Analyze & Kritik 6 (1984): 28-48;
15. David Miller, "Rights and Virtues," in Analyze & Kritik 6 (1984): 49-60;
16. and Samuel Scheffler's review of MacIntyre in Philosophical Review XCII 3 (July 1983): 445-47.
17. Bradley, 276.
18. I've been led to see the importance of trust in moral perfectionism by Annette Baier's various essays on the topic in Postures of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995).
19. Andrew H. Miller, "The Specters of Dickens' Study," Narrative 5 (1997): 322-41.
20. Nietzsche, 144.
21. Eliot, "Poetry and Prose, from the Notebook of an Eccentric," in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), 16.
22. John Kucich makes this point in his Repression in Victorian Fiction (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 127-28.
23. "For the person in pain," writes Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), "so incontestably and unnegotiatiably present is it that 'having pain' may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to 'have certainty,' while for the other person it is so elusive that 'hearing about pain' may exist as the primary model of what it is 'to have doubt.' Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed" (4).
24. Shame, of course, is commonly understood as a concern about appearance and especially naked appearance. See, for instance, Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993)
25. and Gabriele Taylor's Pride, Shame, and Guilt (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).
26. This quotation and the next are from Harry Frankfurt's "The Importance of What We Care About," in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 88.
27. I've been instructed on these matters by conversations with Eileen Gilooly.
28. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, ed. Thomas Deegan, trans. Eliot (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1981), 195.
29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 158-59.
30. That Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Cavell's reading in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), foregrounds the more affirmative aspect of perfectionism's possibilities while Eliot foregrounds the more negative aspect is one place to begin thinking about the gendering of this dynamic, given the traditional understanding of Victorian women's selflessness.
31. Quoted in Neil Hertz, "Two Extravagant Teachings," in The End of the Line (Columbia Univ. Press 1985), 146.
32. Hertz, 147.
33. Hertz, 147, ("fantasy"), 159 ("concern").
34. Hertz, 149.
35. John Mearshimer, "The Aims of Education," in Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 150.
36. Wayne Booth, "Introducing Professor Mearshimer to his Own University," Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 176.