:: The Young Enthusiast ::

Some key terms that are defined in the book’s introduction:

Moral subjectivism: “the notion that there are features of our minds that give rise to moral behavior”

Moral Psychology: “the science of describing the features of our minds that are responsible for moral behavior”

Empiricist ethics: “seeks to understand how psychology grounds different aspects of our moral lives, from our moral sentiments to our normative social codes”

Introduction: Some Paradoxes of Moral Psychology: While this introduction doesn’t really have a concise, easy-to-summarize argument (after all, it does deal in paradoxes) it does introduce a number of themes that I think are quite interesting and important. The paradoxes mentioned in the title aren’t easy to cherry-pick from the text and summarize, but I think what Vermeule is referring to is the idea that morality is founded upon principles of self-interest, yet it asks us to avoid that very self-interest. Both modern moral psychologists and evolutionary ethicists as well as eighteenth-century writers struggled with reconciling these two apparently contrary aspects of morality.

Another big theme in the introduction is the idea of art as a socially normalizing force. Vermeule argues that in the 18c art became the predominant normalizing force in society (stronger even than religion or science) and high art culture became the place in which moral principles were enacted and spread throughout society. However, art does have limits in terms of the “work” it can do in this respect, one of those limits being that the artist cannot seem to be working from self-interested motives. So, artists walked the same fine line as everyone else in terms of working from self-interested motives and trying to expose the self-interested motives of those with whom they are in competition while retaining an air of disinterestedness to their own work.

Vermeule also briefly mentions the idea of “spectator morality,” by which I think she means the detached, objective attitude that writers like Addision, Johnson, Pope, Hume and many others took toward morality and ethics. She argues that this tone was pioneered in the eighteenth century and still resonates in the work of modern moralists, particularly that of moral psychologists and evolutionary ethicists.

Vermeule also briefly discusses her title phrase, “the party of humanity.” By this she means the social group that moralists invited readers to inhabit when they become a part of the ethical community. However, of course everyone has their own self-interest in mind (or, rather, in their sub-conscious since we are uncomfortable with assessing our own mercenary motives) so everyone expects to take out a bit more than they put into the social pool. I think the word “party” sums this idea up nicely as it has shades of a bunch of distinct individuals coming together to form a group rather than becoming completely homogenous.

Chapter 2: Formalism, Criticism, Obligation: This chapter is a sort of digressive history of Pope criticism, noting that the way Pope conceived his social world as consisting of poeople whose reputation he was to inflate and deflate has extended all the way to that of Pope criticism itself, which seeks in different instances to apologize for the author or to expose his own flaws. The most interesting part of the chapter is when Vermeule talks about how Pope criticism had a great deal of influence during the time in which New Criticism was the most popular methodology. Vermeule argues that this is because new critics saw poetic form as something automous, that existed separately from the author and Pope’s poetry played to this because of its strict formality and the way he built a sort of self-referentiality into his poems. In other words, Pope’s poetry created a self-contained world for itself to inhabit, and this worked quite well with the methodology of the new critics.

Chapter 3: “To Virtue Only and Her Friends, a Friend:” A Sequence of Early Portraits: Vermeule characterizes Pope’s friendships as being borne equally out of esteem and self-interest, particularly his tendency to flatter his friends (which he apparently had much skill at doing). Vermeule compares the duplicity of these motives to Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, implying that while they cannot be separated they also cannot be reconciled. However, since Pope did not attempt to conceal either of these motives it is difficult to fault him for them. Next is a section on Pope’s attacks on Dennis in his Essay on Criticism. Dennis was a disciple of Longinus, and rather than assert that Dennis was not sufficiently Longinian, Pope makes fun of his Longinianism. One of the ideas in Longinus that one of the ways in which the sublime comes about is when an author blurs the line between himself and his creation, such as Homer experiencing the madness of Ajax while composing those passages. While this is portrayed positively in Longinus, Pope uses this trope to make Dennis seem like an empty vessel, devoid even of consciousness, “a mute object of power.” Vermeuele then explores some of Pope’s friendships with older poets, noting in particular how the exchange of obligation between Pope and Wycherly went sour when Pope realized that Wycherly could no longer be of any use to his reputation. The chapter ends with a discussion of the culture of politeness read against the turbulent relationship between Addison and Pope. Vermeule examines the 18c ideal of “complacency,” in which a person acquiesces his own opinions and feelings in favor of the stability of the group (it is rather like Adam Smith’s idea of bringing one’s passions down to a pitch that is in tune with the rest of the assembly). Vermeule notes that this ideal doesn’t so much require that one actually conform to the group, only that one seem like one is conforming to the group, an idea that complicates these sorts of moral stories quite a bit. She illustrates this with a story in which Pope essentially blackmailed Addison, sending Addison a draft of a satirical sketch of him that he was writing, which forced Addison to pretend to be nice in public in order to illustrate the principles of politeness he advocated in his philosophy.

Chapter 4: Abstraction, Reference and the Dualism of Pope’s Dunciad: The main thesis of this chapter is stated succinctly at the beginning: “According to the empiricist linguistic tradition that begins with John Locke, abstraction is unavoidable when we seek to refer to objects. Following out this line, we could shape the thought this way: abstraction of language causes a complicated failure of poetic reference; this in turn causes the poem’s failure to achieve material effects on real people” (96). What Vermeule means that just as proper names serve as the building blocks of language in Locke’s system, so do proper names serve as the building blocks of Pope’s poem. However, just as in Locke’s system once language takes off its relationship to those building blocks becomes obscure, so does Pope’s poem become less about people and more about poetics as you beging to work through it. In other words, the relationship to the poem’s basis in the real, material world gets lost in the poem’s complexities. Vermeuele further argues that satire must always be general because of its lack of real referentiality; even when the satirist names names it is no guarantee that his audience will know who he is talking about. Vermeule then illustrates her point by examining one of the references in the Dunciad; she examines Pope’s historical relatioship with James More Smythe, but after uncovering the details about the dispute she isn’t able to add any sort of significant meaning to Smythe’s portrayal in the poem. She argues that Pope recognized this disjunction between the poem’s two streams of reference (i.e. to the outside world and to the world within the poem), which is why he revised the poem and made the portraits more general and (he hoped) more meaningful within the context of the poem.

Chapter 5: The Kindness of Strangers: Johnson’s Life of Savage and the Culture of Altruism: Vermeule begins with a reading of the scene in Life of Savage in which Savage divides his last guinea in half with a prostitute. She argues that Johnson presents this act both as an example of his altruism and his imprudence, two qualities that Johnson attempts to oppose in the narrative but is, ultimately unsuccessful. Further, Vermeule argues that Johnson attempts to make Savage both the object of pity and the object of moralization (since Savage needs so much moral correction) in the biography, two positions which she argues are essentially incompatible. Vermeule then engages in a lengthy examination of “spectator morality,” or the relationship of a social structure to the way that morality is conceived and enforced among a group of people. According to Vermeule, Savage repeatedly resisted being entered into this social system because of its tenet of reciprocal obligation; being unwilling to take on obligations himself, he constantly sought to flatten his character, freeing him of the social responsibilities that come with being a fully-formed human being. Vermeule then enters into a discussion of what she calls “family thinking,” or referring to those who are not related to you as family members. Vermeule argues that Savage employs this strategy both in his role as object of sympathy and object of moral reprehension; his own mother’s abandonment of him has forced him to find a family besides his biological one, but he does use this strategy in an extremely manipulative way. Vermeule ends the chapter by summing up her point as follows:

Morality comes from having to take other people’s interests into account, which means that we are already moral. Johnson’s exploration of the limits of sympathy and the moral command delivers good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is nothing special we can do to be moral; the good news is that as reciprocal altruists we already are moral.

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