In an interview on Reason and its Limitations

Your first book is Middlemarch, by George Eliot.

Many people will be familiar with this book. The main story concerns a young woman named Dorothea, who is very hungry for an intellectually and spiritually expansive life, though she’s not quite sure how to secure it. Given the time that she lives in, her first thought is to marry the man who can teach her the most, and this leads her to make an unfortunate marriage with the dry pedant Mr Casaubon. Casaubon turns out to be not only an impoverished thinker but a rigid and small-souled person. So it really is a book about her bucking convention and living with the consequences, and slowly finding her way toward moral clarity.

George Eliot was not only a great novelist, but a fine philosopher. You feel, underneath the workings of the plot, a very good philosophical mind thinking things out in a very original way. Only very recently, when I was writing something on Spinoza’s literary influences, did I discover that George Eliot had translated Spinoza’s work from the Latin into English. She only decided to turn to literature after she finished translating The Ethics. So here are these two great writers whom I love, Eliot and Spinoza, and Eliot had loved him. Still, Spinoza didn’t think much of the imagination. He didn’t think that it could be a cognitive instrument, whereas Eliot did, and you can sense her arguing with him through her fiction.

In an interview on Philosophy and Everyday Living

Let’s talk about Middlemarch, which I haven’t read in a while but is just fabulous. Before this interview, you told me that George Eliot was something of a philosopher – she translated Feuerbach and Spinoza – and that this book presents everyday moral dilemmas and issues in all their messy complexity.

It is a fantastic book. I think Virginia Woolf described it as the only English novel written for grown-ups. It’s got everything – it’s beautifully plotted, the characters are wonderfully drawn. When I come to the end of a semester I always treat myself to a big, long classic novel, and I just reread Middlemarch. What struck me is what a wonderful psychologist George Eliot is. One very nice thing about her is that, for instance, Casaubon, the dry, self-centred scholar who Dorothea marries, and the banker, Bulstrode, who is a pious hypocrite… she calls on the reader to pity them, because she sees they’re trapped in their way of being. No one in the book likes Casaubon – except Dorothea – and I don’t think any reader ever likes him. But several times she says, pity him, because he’s stuck. I love the sympathy with which she portrays characters that, from a moral point of view, we have to be very critical of. Casaubon has got no business asking Dorothea to marry him – it’s very much a self-centred, self-interested request.

What insights does the book give into the philosophy of the everyday?

Eliot is very good at showing how people act against their best interests because of subtle social pressures that lead them a certain way. One of the central characters is Lydgate, the doctor, who marries a rather shallow woman. He’s trapped into this marriage and they get into debt. He’s a noble character, who is ambitious in his profession, who wants to do good work in the world, and he finds himself dragged down. With the best will in the world, and very noble intentions, he can’t prevent the subtle social pressures of people’s expectations of him from dragging him down.

Another thing I noticed in the novel is that time and again social expectations prevent people from talking directly to others about difficult matters, such as whether they love each other or are critical of each other. But when they do, when they break through those social expectations, then something good happens. Lydgate, for example, is suspected of having taken a bribe from the banker Bulstrode. Dorothea crosses the threshold of social convention and says to him: “Just tell me directly. What happened?” She’s warned against doing this by her friends, who say, “You can’t do that.” But she does, and the fact she is very open and honest and truthful makes a big difference to Lydgate’s life. That happens several times in the book. The most admirable characters are people like Caleb Garth, who always speaks very directly and openly. For him, there is no fannying around, no dithering, no masking of intentions or euphemisms.

Aren’t social conventions a lot more relaxed these days though? Does it still apply?

It’s true they are a lot more relaxed and we probably find it easier today than in the 19th century to be straightforward and open because of the growing informality of social life – something I talk about in my book. There’s still a fair bit to be learned from Middlemarch though. The moral I’m drawing isn’t that everyone in all cases should always be straightforward and open and blunt. There are times when you have to make difficult judgements about what will be useful, and what won’t be. What Eliot is getting at, the need to cultivate the difficult, practical wisdom of knowing when to be blunt and truthful and when to hold back, still applies today.

This is definitely an issue I wanted to ask you about in the context of white lies. Say a friend is wearing a hideous outfit, and asks what you think of it. Do you automatically say, “You look lovely!” or do you tell the truth? Obviously, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but if you don’t, firstly, you’re lying, and secondly, the next thing you know, your friend will be wearing the hideous outfit again. What do you do?

I’m pretty chicken about that kind of thing. It all depends on the relationship. In the case of my wife, if she asks me, I just tell her the truth as I see it. She’s got used to that. She doesn’t like it; she’ll get annoyed when she asks me about a sweater and I say, “Nah. It makes you look fat.” She might protest a little, but she’ll take note. But that kind of honesty is only possible in certain relationships. If it was someone I knew less well, I wouldn’t say that necessarily. If it were someone who I thought was sensitive, someone I thought it would hurt, I’d perhaps be less honest. I wouldn’t want to hurt someone.

So you would just say, “The sweater is lovely”?

I have a difficult time lying, but yes, I’d probably say, “Oh yeah, it’s nice…”

Another thing about Middlemarch I noticed as I reread it is how acute George Eliot is on the subject of self-deception. Almost everyone is guilty of self-deception, and there are about a dozen different forms of self-deception in the book. Dorothea’s self-deception comes through a kind of idealism, Rosamond’s through callow self-centredness, and Bulstrode’s is a kind of religious hypocrisy. This is interesting to me, because there is a lot of philosophical literature on self-deception. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a lot about it. There’s a kind of mystery as to how we’re able to lie to ourselves given that we actually know the truth in some sense. Eliot offers not so much an analysis of self-deception as a very clever, insightful portrayal of the different forms it takes, and how it’s often linked to people’s self-interest.

Does she offer a solution? If I, as a person, want to know how self-deceived I am, how do I set about finding out?

In the book, often the solution comes from someone else. Self-deception tends to be shattered by other people, or by circumstances. Bulstrode’s is broken by circumstances; he’s exposed as a crook. But Rosamond’s self-deception never does get shattered.

Dorothea would have been a lot better off if she’d realised she was deceiving herself before marrying Casaubon, rather than after.

Yes, but fortunately he dies. One very interesting moment in the book is when he asks her to make him a promise about how she will behave after he dies. She agonises over whether she should make the promise. She thinks the promise is that she will carry on with his work, which she thinks is pointless, though in fact the promise is probably that she won’t ever marry Will Ladislaw. She goes out to the garden, having resolved to make the promise, and she finds Casaubon dead. If Dorothea hadn’t found him dead, she would have made the promise, and then, being Dorothea, she would have felt obliged to keep that promise. And she would have spent years and years engaged in an activity she thought was pointless, just because she made a promise to a dead man. George Eliot really invites us there to say what we think: “Don’t do it, Dorothea, don’t make the promise! And if you do, don’t keep it!”