Browsing by Author "Fessenbecker, Patrick"

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Open Access
Autonomy, divinity, and the common good: Selflessness as a source of freedom in thomas hill green and mary augusta ward
(Routledge, 2018) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Berges, Sandrine; Siani, A. L.
An often-mentioned marker of the influence of British Idealism at the end of the 19th century is the best-selling novel of 1888, Mrs Humphry (Mary Augusta) Ward’s Robert Elsmere, which draws heavily on Idealist themes and is usually understood as a popularization of T. H. Green’s view. Yet Ward deserves credit as a thinker in her own right, particularly for her creativity in explicating one of the most difficult components of Green’s view: the idea that we can only realize ourselves through certain kinds of relationships with each other. In Robert Elsmere, Ward tells the story of a disaffected clergyman who finds a new outlet for his religious energy in the thought of “Mr. Grey,” a philosopher who helps Robert to see each individual religion as a step in the progression in the realization of the Divine Spirit. But the novel pairs this trajectory with the story of two women: Robert’s wife Catherine and Catherine’s sister Rose, both of whom struggle with the role of religion in their lives and with Robert’s newfound mission. Through her portrayal of their psychological struggles, Ward questions whether the consensus about the good Green’s theory requires for autonomy is in fact actually attainable.
Open Access
Conscience after Darwin
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-12-01) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Nottelmann, N.; Griffiths, D.; Kreisel, D.
Open Access
The fragility of rationality: George Eliot on akrasia and the law of consequences
(Taylor&Francis, 2020) Fessenbecker, Patrick
George Eliot often uses the language of determinism in her novels, but we do not understand her view very well by treating such phrasing as addressing debates about the freedom of will directly. Instead she uses seemingly deterministic terms, like the ‘law of consequences', to depict and analyse a particular problem in moral psychology: those instances where we ourselves make it impossible to act on our own best judgements. When we fail to act on our best judgement, this has downstream effects, since it can produce a gap between prudential rationality and one's all-things-considered judgement. Surveying depictions of this problem in Silas Marner, Adam Bede, and Romola, I argue that it's a revealing problem for Eliot’s larger view, bringing together her objections to consequentialism, her recognition of the fragility of virtue, and her account of the role of sympathy in practical deliberation.
Open Access
The Gospel of work
(Oxford University Press, 2018) Fessenbecker, Patrick
In 1843, Thomas Carlyle proclaimed a new “Gospel” for modern England: “Work, and therein have wellbeing.” Inspired by Carlyle’s vision, writers such as George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Friedrich Engels, and others subsequently developed their own version of his spiritualized conception of work, reimagining the relationship between work, the self, and society. Indeed, the centrality of work is one of the primary characteristics of Victorian thought: as Walter Houghton remarks in an oft-quoted line, “after ‘God,’ the most popular word in Victorian England was ‘work.’” Certainly, the emphasis on work appeared across Victorian culture, appearing in Victorian painting, self-help manuals, and even board games. Yet Carlyle and the Victorians were also influenced by a longer tradition: the gradual investment of worldly professions with religious energy inherent in the idea of a secular “vocation.” The fundamentally philosophical nature of the “Gospel of Work,” and of the idea of a secular vocation more generally, appears in its basic form in Carlyle’s argument for it. When one sets to work, he contends, a sort of moral transformation occurs: agents forget the searching questions of religious skepticism and the distractions of incidental desires and remake or realize themselves. Moreover, a society of such workers would no longer be founded on the cash “nexus”; in other words, social relationships would no longer be determined by economic structures. In that sense, meaningful work is essential for the healthy person and the healthy society. But when taken seriously and applied broadly, this seemingly straightforward philosophical claim encountered a number of philosophical difficulties and ideological tensions. Most obviously, it was not clear whether the sort of industrial labor actually available to most people could have the effects Carlyle and others imagined. Correspondingly, to advocate for the importance of the Gospel of Work under industrialism began to seem politically suspect, especially after versions of the Gospel of Work served to justify imperialist expansion. Then, too, it gradually became apparent how thoroughly the Gospel of Work was interlaced with elaborate assumptions about gender. Finally, the vexed status of the productions of writers and artists pushed at perhaps the hardest question in the Gospel of Work: what, after all, is “work,” and how is it different from other human activities? This research has been supported by the Danish National Research Foundation, grant number DNRF127.
Open Access
He had taught himself to think: Anthony Trollope on self-control in knowledge and belief
(Edinburgh University Press, 2018) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Van Dam, F.; Skilton, D.; de Graef, O.
Open Access
Honesty and inquiry: W.K. Clifford’s ethics of belief
(Routledge, 2020-07) Nottelmann, N.; Fessenbecker, Patrick
W.K. Clifford is widely known for his emphatic motto that it is wrong, always everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. In fact, that dictum and Clifford’s condemnation of a scheming self-deceptive shipowner sum up how his ethics of belief is most often remembered and how it has been subsequently interpreted. In contrast to other recent interpretations, we argue that the motto is misleading as a guide to Clifford’s position. It is best understood as essentially a rhetorical flourish. Moreover, in important ways the scheming shipowner is not stereotypical of the kind of believer Clifford thought blameworthy. A careful study of Clifford’s various writings on the ethics of belief finally reveals him not to be an evidentialist in the Humean tradition. Rather, inspired by Charles Darwin’s work in moral psychology, he applied an evolutionary-functional virtue ethics to the doxastic realm. This perspective allows a fruitful examination of his engagement with contemporaries like Matthew Arnold. It also allows us to recognize him as a predecessor to modern attributionist accounts of blameworthy belief.
Open Access
Literature, economics, and a turn to content
(Duke University Press, 2021-05) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Yazell, Bryan
In much of the recent scholarship on economics and literature, the depth of insight is inversely proportional to the status claimed for literature as such. For example, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro’s Cents and Sensibility argues that economists need to read literary works for their great moral wisdom, and they fault literary scholars for ignoring this appeal and for failing to understand basic economics. But as this survey of recent publications demonstrates, the conjunction of these critiques is odd: literary critics have been skeptical of claims about genuine value precisely because they have attended so closely to the markets structuring cultural production. What ultimately stands out in recent scholarship on economics and literature is its turn away from complex accounts of the nature of literary form and its turn toward considerations of the representation of economic life.
Open Access
The role of literary fiction in facilitating social science research
(Nature Publishing Group, 2021-11-03) Yazell, Bryan; Petersen, Klaus; Marx, Paul; Fessenbecker, Patrick
Scholars in literature departments and the social sciences share a broadly similar interest in understanding human development, societal norms, and political institutions. However, although literature scholars are likely to reference sources or concepts from the social sciences in their published work, the line of influence is much less likely to appear the other way around. This unequal engagement provides the occasion for this paper, which seeks to clarify the ways social scientists might draw influence from literary fiction in the development of their own work as academics: selecting research topics, teaching, and drawing inspiration for projects. A qualitative survey sent to 13,784 social science researchers at 25 different universities asked participants to describe the influence, if any, reading works of literary fiction plays in their academic work or development. The 875 responses to this survey provide numerous insights into the nature of interdisciplinary engagement between these disciplines. First, the survey reveals a skepticism among early-career researchers regarding literature’s social insights compared to their more senior colleagues. Second, a significant number of respondents recognized literary fiction as playing some part in shaping their research interests and expanding their comprehension of subjects relevant to their academic scholarship. Finally, the survey generated a list of literary fiction authors and texts that respondents acknowledged as especially useful for understanding topics relevant to the study of the social sciences. Taken together, the results of the survey provide a fuller account of how researchers engage with literary fiction than can be found in the pages of academic journals, where strict disciplinary conventions might discourage out-of-the-field engagement.
Open Access
Sympathy, vocation, and moral deliberation in George Eliot
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) Fessenbecker, Patrick
Critics have tended to portray sympathy in George Eliot as an alternative to moral judgments based on principles. But this account overlooks Eliot's emphasis on the way principles can be morally transformative: in particular, agents' vocations create in them the capacity to work for something other than mere self-satisfaction and thus serve as a resistance to egoism. Read against this background, sympathy appears not as an alternative to moral principles but rather as a vital check upon them. Sympathy for Eliot thus functions like the categorical imperative test in Immanuel Kant's ethics, as a form of practical reasoning that ensures selflessness in action.
Open Access
Varieties of self-realization: art, work, and the self in late Victorian England
(University of Chicago Press, 2020) Fessenbecker, Patrick
A wide body of scholarship agrees that the “aesthetic” writers of the late nineteenth century offered a new conception of the self that challenged Victorian norms and proclaimed a new theory of freedom. Murray Pittock for instance claims that Walter Pater “stresses the autonomy of the human spirit: that we create ourselves, and are the measure of our own value.”1 Kate Hext expands this view, contending that Pater sees autonomy as a fragile achievement, a delicate structure constantly threatened by material conditions inside and outside oneself.2 Of course this connects to a rich philosophical literature on the unstable but perhaps therefore free identities of the flaneur and the “dandy”; as Len Gutkin puts it, the nineteenth-century dandy was first and foremost “a figure of supreme autonomy.”3 To mention one famous example of such scholarship, Michel Foucault departs from Charles Baudelaire’s account of the “dandy”—who “makes of his body … a work of art”—to develop an account of the “aesthetics of existence.”4 And more recent research on women writers of the period has supplemented rather than refuted the view that new ideas about freedom and the self were central to the period’s literature; Talia Schaffer has shown how women writers challenged masculine assumptions about the structure of the work of art and developed creative fusions of new and old forms of femininity.5 Admittedly, in regarding the aesthetes this way, such criticism reflects the writers’ understanding of themselves, a point distilled well enough in Oscar Wilde’s claim that “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”