Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
This chapter explores the work of two poets who were remarkably skeptical about the effects of thinking upon another person. Not from the point of view of the epiphenomenalists visited in Chapter 2, who flatly denied the existence of mental causation of any kind; but rather from the view that thinking about another – especially one you love – either does no good, or causes harm. They were attuned to the perils of diminishment, or destruction, attendant upon becoming an object of thought. Indeed, Patmore's and Meredith's pessimism conferred a great deal of agency on the act of thinking about another person, and hence deserves to be a part of this story as much as does the more optimistic view of the evangelists of thought-power discussed in Chapter 2. And, like the poets discussed in the latter section of Chapter 3, Patmore and Meredith made marriage the center and periphery of their speculations on thinking. In The Angel in the House and in Modern Love, they submitted marriage to intense scrutiny, parsing not only the complex relation between thinking about and speaking to an intimate other, but also the relationship between thinking about someone and knowing them.
These poets ask us, in other words, to think again about some of the epistemological questions that this book explicitly set aside in the Introduction. Surely, we might stop to ask, nineteenth-century writers must have viewed the act of thinking about another person as, among other things, a means to knowledge and understanding.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.