Concepts of happiness: The influence of Ludwig Feuerbach on the fiction of George Eliot.

Abstract

The search for happiness is a vital theme in George Eliot's fiction. Eliot's treatment of this theme owes much to nineteenth-century utilitarianism, which stemmed from Jeremy Bentham's "greatest happiness principle," and the religious demythologization of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who interpreted Christianity in terms of human consciousness. In 1854, Eliot translated Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christenthums, in which Feuerbach describes the components of man's being as feeling, thinking, and willing. George Eliot saw an opposition between utilitarianism and Feuerbach's humanism. This fact is fundamental for our understanding of the rhetorical structure of Eliot's moral universe. In her fiction, utilitarianism as utility, the pursuit of pleasure, utility, avoidance of pain, and calculation of pleasure over pain (the "felicific calculus") is shown by her, paradoxically, often to lead to wrongdoing, suffering, and even crime. For some of her protagonists, however, it contributes to a primary stage of their development, since their consequent suffering may lead to a greater awareness. The movement from suffering to sympathy in Eliot's novels is profoundly Feuerbachian, for it involves the "essence" of Christianity which he described as man's essential nature. Despite her scepticism as to the efficacy of Bentham's principle of utility, Eliot endorsed the utilitarian principle of consequences as a fundamental aspect of her ethic. A detailed analysis of the way in which Eliot counterpoints utilitarianism with Feuerbach's ethic in Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, "The Lifted Veil," The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, "Brother Jacob," Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda demonstrates that, in Eliot's fiction, true self-fulfilment, involving moral freedom, is consistently derived from adherence to the fundamental laws of human nature, as embodied in Feuerbach's particular description of the human "essence." Although other philosophical and psychological influences can be discerned, certain characteristics of Eliot's fiction, such as the melange of idealism and an abiding sense of human limitation and alienation, may be traced to her confrontation with utilitarianism through a Feuerbachian morality.