Alienation and Dwelling: The Pursuit of Happiness in Late Eighteenth-Century Literature
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During the enlightenment a subjectivist concept of happiness became prominent and remains so today. This view, in which happiness is a mental state, instantiates a tension between happiness and ethics, happiness and reality, because it juxtaposes an inward condition with outward objectivity. This thesis argues that this conception is rooted in a zeitgeist of alienation, characteristic of certain strands of Enlightenment thought. Alienation can be defined as a failed relationship between self and world, self and other, the self and itself. In contrast to alienation, this thesis also explores the alternative zeitgeist of dwelling. Broadly speaking, this can be associated with the Romantic response to the Enlightenment. In dwelling, happiness, rather than being an internal mental state, tends to be conceived of as positive relationality. Happiness is a series of positive relationships between self and world, self and other, the self and itself. The introduction to the thesis draws upon the philosophy of Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor in order to articulate these two central concepts more fully and to situate them within eighteenth-century intellectual and socio-political history. The main body of the thesis explores how four writers — James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth — respond to alienation in their respective works. All four of them might broadly be described as autobiographical writers and have been chosen because, in writing the self, they seek to think through the alienation that typically threatens modern selfhood. Chapter one argues that James Boswell exhibits two alienated conceptions of happiness. The first, ‘aesthetic happiness’, is explored in his London Journal. Inspired by Joseph Addison, Boswell views happiness in terms of his capacity to imaginatively project beautiful images onto the world, in a manner intended to embellish dreary reality. The second, ‘principled happiness’, pursued in Boswell in Holland, requires that Boswell make his life over in accordance with a set of strict moral principles. Both of these, I argue, involve an over-investment in a particular conception of representation. Chapter two turns to Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy discloses a notion of ‘hobby-horsical happiness’. Sterne satirizes objectivity as dogmatism, pointing out that all knowledge emerges from within a particular perspective. As such, facts and values are not truly distinct. In resisting dogmatism, Sterne seems to support an extreme form of subjectivism, where everyone lives according to their own whims. The chapter goes on to explore whether or not there can be any escape from this hobby-horsical idiosyncrasy. The third chapter explores Mary Wollstonecraft’s grappling with alienation and her articulation of the possibility of dwelling. In the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft argues that if society were to be reconstructed in accordance with the rational-metaphysical laws of the universe, then, virtuous happiness would become possible for all. After the French Terror, her faith in reason fails and, taking a Romantic turn, she places her hopes for progress on the imagination. In Short Residence, alienated by what she views as the atomizing tendencies of commerce, she argues that the imagination can restore the relationship between self and other, human beings and nature. In doing so, human beings might recover a sense of dwelling. However, as Wollstonecraft becomes increasingly depressed, she begins to write of the imagination in escapist terms. After surviving a second suicide attempt, she writes ‘On Poetry’, now vesting a muted faith in progress in the figure of the poet. The final chapter explores Wordsworth’s great-decade poetry. Central to this work is a myth which describes how a primordial or childish receptivity to nature is superseded by the mind’s power to impose its will upon nature, that is, to reconstruct the natural world. Wordsworth hopes to once again dwell in nature’s presence, while maintaining this mental power. This is not easily accomplished, however. The chapter traces a persistent tension between nature’s presence and mind’s power, one which is replicated in two different conceptions of happiness: blessedness and Stoical ataraxia. The chapter concludes by exploring an analogous tension in Wordsworth’s understanding of language and representation. This is interpreted through the lens of Heidegger’s notions of techne and poiesis. The thesis concludes by reflecting upon the ways in which technicity influences our contemporary approaches to happiness and instead argues for the benefits of a poietic approach to the good life.