William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice. As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice: the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse, but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion, to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.
Godwin from "Metaphysician" to Novelist: "Political Justice", "Caleb Williams", and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative
To William Hazlitt, the publication of William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams in 1794, only a year after Godwin had published his philosophical treatise An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, was something unprecedented: "It was a new and startling event in literary history," Hazlitt wrote, "for a metaphysician to write a popular romance."' What was remarkable was not just that a single person would write books in two such different modes but that the novel would clearly follow up the philosophical program expounded in the treatise. There may be no other case as prominent in which a novel succeeds a philosophical treatise so closely in time, is so closely connected to its concerns, and yet is so unprogrammatic. Accordingly, a number of critics have explored the relations between Caleb Williams and Political Justice, especially the complex ways in which the novel, while sharing and pursuing many of the political and philosophical positions of Political Justice, diverges from them. Yet there has been little discussion of what is arguably the central point of Hazlitt's comment: the difference in form between a narrative and a philosophical argument. Much of the incompatibility between Political Justice and Caleb Williams can be seen as arising from the conflict between the austerely logical approach of Political Justice and the narrative account of Caleb Williams. Political Justice proceeds as if proper (largely utilitarian) principles will enable us to make moral and political choices almost mathematically, as if we will be able to judge situations and persons in a straightforward way; it avoids narrative thinking. But Caleb Williams shows that situations and persons are understood by way of narratives, and (unlike Godwin's next novel, St. Leon [1799]) it emphasizes the problems inherent in
Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics
List of plates Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Archaeologies 3. The scene of aesthetic instruction 4. Revolution and the egotistical sublime 5. Revisionary aesthetics in The Prelude 6. The aesthetics of containment 7. 'Family of Floods' 8. Conclusion: aesthetics and poetic language Appendix Notes Index.