Abstract
Modern consciousness began, according to Richard Rorty, in the seventeenth century when Descartes invented the mind.1 The notorious Cartesian cogito, ‘I think, therefore I am’, led to a theory of knowledge based purely on mental processes and to an epistemology based on the separation of mind and world that have been the focus of philosophical debate for the last three centuries. This founding of all knowledge on the principle of ‘my own thinking existence’ has tended to dominate European and Anglo-Saxon thought, providing most of the images which govern our thinking about ourselves and our place in the scheme of things: self and object become separated into realms of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’; knowledge becomes a transaction between a ‘knowing subject’ and an external ‘reality’; mind becomes a mirror which reflects the world of nature (hence the importance of ocular metaphors in our claims to truth); the self becomes the centre of experience and potentially the governing principle in everything we perceive.
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Notes
See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 3–13, and passim.
See Lionel Stevenson, ‘The Key Poem in the Victorian Age’, in Essays in American and English Literature ‘Presented to’ Bruce Robert McElderry, Jr., ed. M. F. Schulz, W. D. Templeman and C. R. Metzger (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1967), pp. 260–89; Alba H. Warren, English Poetic Theory, 1825–1865 (Princeton University Press, 1950); Lawrence J. Starzyk, The Imprisoned Splendour: A Study of Victorian Critical Theory (London: Kennikat Press, 1977); Alan Sinfield’s excellent account of the role of poetry within a society governed by Victorian utilitarianism, in Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); and David Shaw’s comprehensive study of poetic theory in the nineteenth century, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age (London: The Athlone Press, 1987).
In The Lucid Veil, Shaw relates changing theories of language and knowledge to ideological attitudes. See also Howard W. Fulweiler, ‘Poetry and the Problem of Language’, in Letters from the Darkling Plain: Language and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Poetry of Arnold and Hopkins (University of Missouri Press, 1972), chap. 1. Philosophy has always tended to separate its reasoned truth-claims from the contaminations of poetic or figurative language, particularly before Nietzsche’s observations about the reliance of philosophy on metaphor and textuality. For a discussion of the present state of the conflict between analytical philosophy and literary theory, see Christopher Norris, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory After Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985).
Isobel Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982).
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by J. B. Baillie (1910, rev. 1931; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), Preface, p. 94. Future references to this text will be documented internally by section and by page number.
Richard Harland, Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 72. Harland distinguishes between three traditions of philosophy: Anglo-Saxon empiricism; the ‘I’-philosophy of Descartes, Kant and Husserl; and the Metaphysical philosophy of Plato, Spinoza and Hegel (p. 70).
Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. W. F. Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 8. Hereafter cited as Solomon.
M. J. Inwood’s book, Hegel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), which appeared in the same year as Solomon’s work, offers a methodical study of the Hegelian system as a coherent whole; effectively this is to re-absorb Hegel into analytical discourse.
Robert C. Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds (1972; rpt. Humanities Press/Harvester Press, 1978), p. 49.
Frank Kermode’s discussion of the teleological structure of narrative in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1966) is of course well known.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972): ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (p. 158). The phrase is usually translated as ‘no outside-text’ or ‘no outside the text’; it should not be read in the manner of some literary critics as ‘nothing but the text’, as if it were a new critical slogan for pure formalism.
See Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: being Part Three of the ‘Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences’ (1830), translated by William Wallace, together with the ‘Zustze’ in Boumann’s text (1845), translated by A. V. Miller, with a Foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. viii. Hereafter cited as Mind.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Regel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 36.
See, for example, Kris Davis, ‘Browning’s Caponsacchi: Stuck in the Gap,’ Victorian Poetry, vol. 25 (Spring 1987), 57–66.
All quotations from the ‘Epilogue’ are taken from Browning: Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. Ian Jack (London: Oxford, 1970).
Herbert F. Tucker Jr., Browning’s Beginnings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 185–6.
Jacques Derrida commenting on Kant’s aesthetic of pure mimesis, in ‘Economimesis’, Diacritics, vol. 11 (1981), 11.
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© 1991 E. Warwick Slinn
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Slinn, E.W. (1991). Consciousness as Self. In: The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10452-9_2
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