George Eliot on the Hermeneutical Circle

This quotation from George Eliot's Middlemarch sounds a lot like Schleiermacher's (1768-1834) concept of the "hermeneutical circle":

Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his work-room, putting arguments for and against the probability of certain biological views; but he had none of those definite things to say or to show which give the way-marks of a patient uninterrupted pursuit, such as he used himself to insist on, saying that 'there must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,' and that 'a man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass' (Penguin Classics edition, 640).

I assumed at first that she got it from Schleiermacher himself. Since Eliot translated David Freidrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, and Strauss was influenced by Schleiermacher, it makes sense that she read Schleiermacher too. But I can't find any positive evidence that she did. However, we do know that Eliot read Spinoza, and if these two websites are correct it is Spinoza rather than Schleiermacher who first came up with the "hermeneutical circle."

Here's another dialogue that reminds me of romantic hermeneutics if not Schleiermacher in particular:

"I daresay not,' said Dorothea.... 'If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.'
'Can't you tell me?' said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
'No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know" (822).

George Eliot on Hypocrisy

I'll consider using this George Eliot quote in my Gospels class this fall (along with this description of the Pharisees):

"There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong..."

The assumption that all Pharisees were hypocrites is obviously problematic from a historical perspective (what about Paul?). Also pernicious is the assumption that all hypocrites are of the "coarse" variety. As long as we maintain an image of the hypocrite as a turbaned stick figure, the "other" from ancient Palestine, we can avoid reflecting that Jesus' warnings might possibly have some relevance to ourselves.

Back to Eliot, who continues her description of Mr Bulstrude with, perhaps, my favorite Middlemarch quotation:

"There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men."

Both quotes are from George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 619).

George Eliot on Egoism and Faith

"For the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief." - George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 521).

George Eliot on Introverted Academics

This is a longish quotation from Middlemarch (Penguin Classics), 279-280, but well worth reading if you (or someone you know) is inclined toward introversion and academia. George Eliot has all our little depravities down cold:

Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.

His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity.

. . . It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self - never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

Walking well wadded with stupidity

Some choice quotations from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

• If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (194)
• There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy. (197)
• Poor Mr Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and . . . easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labours. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight. (197)
  

Cleverness

"[T]hat epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character....She did not want to deck herself with knowledge - to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her conscience." - George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics), 86.

...There are a couple substantive posts in the works, but they must wait until marking is done.