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Hello fellow barstoolers. This week I’m sharing some thoughts from the famous utilitarian, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). He developed leftbrainitis early in his career, but still had intuitive presence enough to feel something had gone wrong with him psychologically. Indeed, Mill wrote about this struggle in the fifth chapter of his autobiography, “Crisis in my Mental History. One Stage Onward,” where he addressed the psychological crisis he endured from 1821 until 1828:
From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow labourers in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed on this; and I was accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment.
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. The very excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice; that it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung together: and no associations whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving force, were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connexions between Things, not dependent on our will and feelings; natural laws, by virtue of which, in many cases, one thing is inseparable from another in fact; which laws, in proportion as they are clearly perceived and imaginatively realised, cause our ideas of things which are always joined together in Nature, to cohere more and more closely in our thoughts. 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. They are therefore (I thought) favourable to prudence and clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermine all desires, and all pleasures, which are the effects of association. . . .These were the laws of human nature, by which, as it seemed to me, I had been brought to my present state. . . .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; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else.
Note here that the battleground is between the analogical and analytical, between the faculty that makes “associations” or “connexions” and the faculty that “separates” or “dissolves.” And Mill’s training led him to emphasise the latter over the former, something that he eventually came to apprehend as psychologically destructive. It is significant that he was immersed in Benthamite, statistical thinking, an exercise that empties human phenomena of their humanity. As I remarked in a previous article, Mill was involved in a field of study built upon statistics and probability:
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) famously recommended population control lest the horde outstrip its food supply. And his statistic-slinging brothers, the utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) advanced an ethics according to the motto: “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” The latter can be a very powerful and useful tool, but it also has the potential to trample the smaller number of people or “outliers.”
My point here is that the analytical mind does not only empty out the phenomena one studies, but also (potentially) the individual committed to analytical thinking because his mental habits develop only a part of the whole human being at the expense of several other critical aspects: one’s vitality, one’s heart life, one’s ethics and passions.
So what was the cure? What are the “natural complements and correctives” to the analytical mind? What is the “sail” of the ship? The answer lies in what Mill describes as the inner life of “feelings,” “the internal culture of the individual”:
The other important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and for action.
I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object. [emphasis added]
Significantly Mill’s search for the cure to his analytically induced neurosis and depression was immersion in the arts, especially music and poetry, but specifically the poetry of Wordsworth:
What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings. . .
In other words Mill found his way to a ground of common human experience that was not the reality of materialist naturalism and statistics, but instead the reality of one’s own inner life and vitality. And he discovered that in nurturing this neglected aspect of himself, he could emerge from the crisis.
My point in bringing in Mill here as a case study is to suggest how impoverished we are by the scientistic, overly analytical worldview that dominates our thinking today (including the thinking of administrators and the institutions they serve). Mill’s confessions anticipate the malaise that has become commonplace two-hundred years later. Mill also shows us the way out by demonstrating how a conscientious thinker, wracked with inner turmoil, may go about analysing the source of his own troubles and how he can find the cure in whatever art speaks most to his own heart and does the trick.
Perhaps what worked for Mill may also work for a society afflicted by the same ailment. . . not necessarily through Wordsworth, but through artistic experiences that conjure “states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty”: i.e. via experiences that connect the inner world with the outer. As the late poet laureate of England Ted Hughes (1930-1998) put it in his essay “Myth & Education”:
The character of great works is exactly this: that in them the full presence of the inner world combines with and is reconciled to the full presence of the outer world. And in them we see that the laws of these two worlds are not contradictory at all; they are one all-inclusive system; they are laws that somehow we find it all but impossible to keep, laws that only the greatest artists are able to restate. They are the laws, simply, of human nature. And men have recognized all through history that the restating of these laws, in one medium or another, in great works of art, are the greatest human acts. . .
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
I had not thought of JSM in quite a while and was delighted to see this post. In 1826-27 he went on with his "usual occupations," he writes, "mechanically, by the mere force of habit," because he "had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out of it." Then he quotes Coleridge: "hope without an object cannot live." I underlined this when I read JSM as an undergrad in the 60s; I didn't get much in those days, but I got that. Let the spirit life.
The power of art to merge the inner and outer worlds has been shown to me over the years while reading bedtime stories to my daughter, who's seven now. The art of storytelling has helped her begin to perceive some of these "laws of human nature" and the connectedness between her feelings and thoughts and the life around her that inspires them. Right now, for example, I'm reading her the old Norse myths, and she's found a soulmate in Loki. With some effort she can explain to me that she likes him because she identifies with his enthusiasm for mischief-making. She got excited when I told her that as a kid I'd also fallen for the great trickster god for much the same reason, as have innumerable other kids across the generations. It's as if that revelation about the universal appeal of bad boy Loki has opened a door in her heart between her and her fellow human beings. Thanks to the art of stories we can now have basic conversations about the good and bad in human nature and the feelings and thoughts that join us all to one another and to life in general.