Читать книгу Proust Was a Neuroscientist - Jonah Lehrer - Страница 17

George Eliot’s belief in positivism began to fade when she suffered a broken heart. Here was a terrible feeling no logic could solve. The cause of her sadness was Herbert Spencer, the Victorian biologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” After Eliot moved to London, where she lived in a flat on the Strand, she grew intimate with Spencer. They shared long walks in the park and a subscription to the opera. She fell in love. He did not. When he began to ignore her — their relationship was provoking the usual Victorian rumors — Eliot wrote Spencer a series of melodramatic yet startlingly honest love letters. She pleaded for his “mercy and love”: “I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, and that you will always be with me as much as you can and share your thoughts and feelings with me. If you become attached to someone else, then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me.” Despite Eliot’s confessions of vulnerability, the letter proudly concludes with an acknowledgment of her worth: “I suppose no woman before ever wrote such a letter as this — but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness.”

Spencer ignored Eliot’s letters. He was steadfast in his rejection. “The lack of physical attraction was fatal,” he would later write, blaming Eliot’s famous ugliness for his absence of feeling. He could not look past her “heavy jaw, large mouth, and big nose.”* Spencer believed his reaction was purely biological, and was thus immutable: “Strongly as my judgment prompted, my instincts would not respond.” He would never love Eliot.

Her dream of marriage destroyed, Eliot was forced to confront a future as a single, anonymous woman. If she was to support herself, she had to write. But her heartbreak was more than a painful emancipation; it also caused her to think about the world in new ways. In Middlemarch, Eliot describes an emotional state similar to what she must have been feeling at the time: “She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis … Her whole world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew … This was the effect of her loss.” In the months following Spencer’s rejection, Eliot decided that she would “nourish [a] sleek optimism.” She refused to stay sad. Before long, Eliot was in love again, this time with George Henry Lewes.

In many important ways, Lewes was Spencer’s opposite. Spencer began his career as an ardent positivist, futilely searching for a theory of everything. After positivism faded away, Spencer became a committed social Darwinist, and he enjoyed explaining all of existence — from worms to civilization — in terms of natural selection. Lewes, on the other hand, was an intellectual renowned for his versatility; he wrote essays on poetry and physics, psychology and philosophy. In an age of increasing academic specialization, Lewes remained a Renaissance man. But his luminous mind concealed a desperate unhappiness. Like Eliot, Lewes was also suffering from a broken heart. His wife, Agnes, was pregnant with the child of his best friend.

In each other, Lewes and Eliot found the solution for their melancholy. Lewes would later describe their relationship as deeply, romantically mysterious. “Love,” Lewes wrote, “defies all calculation.” “We are not ‘judicious’ in love; we do not select those whom we ‘ought to love,’ but those whom we cannot help loving.” By the end of the year, Lewes and Eliot were traveling together in Germany. He wanted to be a “poet in science.” She wanted to be “a scientific poet.”

* * *

It is too easy to credit love for the metamorphosis of Eliot’s world-view. Life’s narratives are never so neat. But Lewes did have an unmistakable effect on Eliot. He was the one who encouraged her to write novels, silencing her insecurities and submitting her first manuscript to a publisher.

Unlike Spencer, Lewes never trusted the enthusiastic science of the nineteenth century. A stubborn skeptic, Lewes first became famous in 1855 with his Life of Goethe, a sympathetic biography that interwove Goethe’s criticisms of the scientific method with his romantic poetry. In Goethe, Lewes found a figure who resisted the mechanistic theories of positivism, trusting instead in the “concrete phenomena of experience.” And while Lewes eagerly admitted that a properly experimental psychology could offer an “objective insight into our thinking organ,” he believed that “Art and Literature” were no less truthful, for they described the “psychological world.” In an age of ambitious experiments, Lewes remained a pluralist.

Lewes’s final view of psychology, depicted most lucidly in The Problems of Life and Mind (a text that Eliot finished after Lewes’s death), insisted that the brain would always be a mystery, “for too complex is its unity.” Positivists may proselytize their bleak vision, Lewes wrote, but “no thinking man will imagine anything is explained by this. Life and Being remain as inaccessible as ever.” If nothing else, freedom is a necessary result of our ignorance.

By the time Eliot wrote her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), she had come to see that Laplace and Spencer and the rest of the positivists were wrong. The universe could not be distilled into a neat set of causes. Freedom, however fragile, exists. “Necessitarianism,”* Eliot wrote, “I hate the ugly word.” Eliot had read Maxwell on molecules, even copying his lectures into her journals, and she knew that nothing in life could be perfectly predicted. To make her point, Eliot began Daniel Deronda with a depiction of human beings as imagined by Laplace. The setting is a hazy and dark casino, full of sullen people who act, Eliot writes, “as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action.” These gamblers are totally powerless, dependent on the dealer to mete out their random hands. They passively accept whichever cards they are dealt. Their fortune is determined by the callous laws of statistics.

In Eliot’s elaborately plotted work, the casino is no casual prop — it is a criticism of determinism. As soon as Eliot introduces this mechanical view of life, she begins deconstructing its silly simplicities. After Daniel enters the casino, he spies a lone woman, Gwendolen Harleth. “Like dice in mid-air,” Gwendolen is an unknown. Her mysteriousness immediately steals Daniel’s attention; she transcends the depressing atmosphere of the casino. Unlike the gamblers, who do nothing but wait for chance to shape their fate, Gwendolen seems free. Daniel stares at her and wonders: “Was she beautiful or not beautiful? And what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?”

Eliot uses the casino to remind us that we are also mysterious, a “secret of form.” And because Gwendolen is a dynamic person, her own “determinate,” she will decide how her own life unfolds. Even when she is later entrapped in a marriage to the evil Grandcourt — “his voice the power of thumbscrews and the cold touch of the rack” — she manages to free herself. Eliot creates Gwendolen to remind us that human freedom is innate, for we are the equation without a set answer. We solve ourselves.*

While George Eliot spurned the social physics of her day, she greeted Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the start of a new “epoch.” She read On the Origin of Species when it was first published in 1859 and immediately realized that the history of life now had a coherent structure. Here was an authentic version of our beginning. And while positivists believed that the chaos of life was only a façade, that beneath everything lay the foundation of physical order, Darwinism said that randomness was a fact of nature. In many ways, randomness was the fact of nature.* According to Darwin, in a given population sheer chance dictated variety. Genetic mutations (Darwin called them saltations) followed no natural laws. This diversity created differing rates of reproduction among organisms, which led to the survival of the fittest. Life progressed because of disorder, not despite it. The theologian’s problem — the question of why nature contained so much suffering and contingency — became Darwin’s solution.

The bracing embrace of chance was what attracted Eliot to Darwin. Here was a narrative that was itself unknowable, since it was guided by random variation. The evolution of life depended on events that had no discernible cause. Unlike Herbert Spencer, who believed that Darwin’s theory of evolution could solve every biological mystery (natural selection was the new social physics), Eliot believed that Darwin had only deepened the mystery. As she confided to her diary: “So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development theory [Darwin’s theory of evolution] and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the process.” Because evolution has no purpose or plan — it is merely the sum of its accumulated mistakes — our biology remains impenetrable. “Even Science, the strict measurer,” Eliot confessed, “is obliged to start with a make-believe unit.”

The intrinsic mystery of life is one of Eliot’s most eloquent themes. Her art protested against the braggadocio of positivism, which assumed that everything would one day be defined by a few omnipotent equations. Eliot, however, was always most interested in what we couldn’t know, in those aspects of reality that are ultimately irreducible: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she warns us in Middlemarch, “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.” Those characters in her novels who deny our mystery, who insist that freedom is an illusion and that reality is dictated by abstract laws (which they happen to have discovered), work against the progress of society. They are the villains, trusting in “inadequate ideas.” Eliot was fond of quoting Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, /Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

Middlemarch, Eliot’s masterpiece, contains two reductionists searching for what Laplace called “the final laws of the world.” Edward Casaubon, the pretentious husband of Dorothea Brooke, spends his days writing a “Key to All Mythologies,” which promises to find the hidden connection between the varieties of religious experience. His work is bound to fail, Eliot writes, for he is “lost among small closets and winding stairs.” Casaubon ends up dying of a “fatty degeneration of the heart,” a symbolic death if ever there was one.

Dr. Tertius Lydgate, the ambitious country doctor, is engaged in an equally futile search, looking for the “primitive tissue of life.” His foolish quest is an allusion to Herbert Spencer’s biological theories, which Eliot enjoyed mocking.* Like Casaubon, Lydgate continually overestimates the explanatory power of his science. But reality eventually intrudes and Lydgate’s scientific career collapses. After enduring a few financial mishaps, Lydgate ends up becoming a doctor of gout, and “considers himself a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.” His own life becomes a testament to the limits of science.

After Casaubon dies, Dorothea, the heroine of Middlemarch, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eliot, falls in love with Will Ladis-law, a poetic type and not-so-subtle symbol of free will. (Will is in “passionate rebellion against his inherited blot.”) Tragically, because of Casaubon’s final will (notice the emerging theme), Dorothea is unable to act on her love. If she marries Will, who is of low social rank, she loses her estate. And so she resigns herself to a wid-owed unhappiness. Many depressing pages ensue. But then Will returns to Middlemarch, and Dorothea, awakened by his presence, realizes that she wants to be with him. Without freedom, money is merely paper. She renounces Casaubon’s estate and runs away with her true love. Embracing Will is her first act of free will. They live happily ever after, in “the realm of light and speech.”

But Middlemarch, a novel that denies all easy answers, is more complicated than its happy ending suggests. (Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”) Eliot had read too much Darwin to trust in the lasting presence of joy. She admits that each of us is born into a “hard, unaccommodating Actual.” This is why Dorothea, much to Eliot’s dismay, could not end the novel as a single woman. She was still trapped by the social conventions of the nineteenth century. As Eliot admonishes in the novel’s final paragraphs, “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”

In her intricate plots, Eliot wanted to demonstrate how the outside and the inside, our will and our fate, are in fact inextricably entangled. “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending,” Eliot confesses in Middlemarch. Our situation provides the raw material out of which we make our way, and while it is important “never to beat and bruise one’s wings against the inevitable,” it is always possible “to throw the whole force of one’s soul towards the achievement of some possible better.” You can always change your life.