‘Is it true? … What is the meaning of it?’: Bentham, Romanticism, and the Fictions of Reason

Speaker: Dr Tim Milnes (Edinburgh)

About the seminar:

Assessments of the relationship between Benthamite utilitarianism and Romanticism were for a long time heavily influenced by John Stuart Mill’s characterisation of Bentham and Coleridge as the great counterweights of early nineteenth-century British thought. While for Mill the fundamental imperative of Bentham’s thought is epistemological and empirical, in Coleridge’s work, he claims, it is hermeneutic and aesthetic; accordingly, ‘[b]y Bentham […] men have been led to ask […], Is it true? and by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it?’ In this paper I suggest that this presents a misleading picture of both Bentham and his Romantic contemporaries. It is misleading because it overlooks the ways in which thinkers in this period respond to Hume’s arguments about the role of fictions of reason in thought. Bentham’s own incorporation of Hume’s theory of fictions led him to be more concerned with matters of meaning than with matters of ‘fact’. Conversely, the aestheticisation of ‘truth’ in Romantic essayists such as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb signifies not the abandonment of an Enlightenment model of factual knowledge, but its elegiac idealisation.

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