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Abstracting Passion: Hazlitt's Ideal of Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Hazlitt’s writings as a whole are distinguished by his close attention to the structures of power, political power not excepted. In a Morning Post article of March 1800, he writes,
... power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it to exist.?
(“Pitt and Buonaparte”, Political Essays; vii. 326)
“Power” in Hazlitt’s metaphysic refers to the mind’s innate faculty, its freedom from subjugation to external influences. His philosophy also connects power with liberty: the mind is free since it is subject only to the laws of its own innate constitution. By affirming innate “power”, Hazlitt refutes the empirical account of epistemology in which the mind, moulded from without, remains passive or subjected. He asserts in its stead that the process of knowledge is ab intra, directed by the mind from within. The creative genius celebrated in Hazlitt’s literary and artistic criticism exemplifies intellectual power in its highest degree, and so vindicates the core principle of his metaphysics.
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- Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 All quotations from Hazlitt are taken from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, P.P., 21 vols (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930‐3Google Scholar4). References are by volume and page.
2 Eagleton, Terry, “William Hazlitt: An Empiricist Radical”, New Blackfriars (1973), p. 109Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., p. 109.
4 Ibid., p. 110.
5 For an analysis of the tension between the literary and the political in Hazlitt's account of Burke, see Whale, J., “Hazlitt on Burke: The Ambivalent Position of a Radical Essayist”, SIR xxv, no. 4 (winter 1986), pp. 465‐481Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., p. 476.
7 Ibid., pp. 476,478.
8 It must be noted that although the intellectual self is the instrument of “good”, the material self is the basis of “right”, and self‐interest, its guiding principle (“Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation”, Political Criticism; xix. 303). Hazlitt defines the “right” of an individual as pertaining to his physical being: “… each person has a particular body and senses belonging to him, so that he feels a peculiar and natural interest in whatever affects these more than another can, … impty[ing] a direct and unavoidable right in maintaining this circle of individuality inviolate” (xix. 310). By defining “right” as sense‐based, Hazlitt is actually placing intellectual expression outside the domain of legislation: “As to matters of contempt and the expression of opinion, I think these do not fall under the head of force, and are not, on that ground, subjects of coercion and law” (xix. 314). By the same token, since morality belongs to intellect, there can be no law for the enforcement of morals (xix. 315). “Morals…ought never lo appeal to force in any case whatever” (xix. 304).
9 When poetry manifests the union of abstraction and passion, at once embodying a universal truth and an individual vision, then it is the poetry of genius, which indeed represents Hazlitt's radical epistemology. Emphatically, it is its abstract character that marks the distinction between the poetry of genius and what Hazlitl calls “mere” poetry (“Character of Mr. Burke”, Political Essays; vii. 229).
10 Eagleton, “An Empiricist Radical”, p. 116.
11 Foucault, Michel, “Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault”, Telos 32 (1977), p. 161Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., p. 161.
13 Eagleton, “An Empiricist Radical”, pp. 116–17.