The Art of Cognition: British Empiricism and Victorian Aesthetics
type: CreativeWork
description: The British are credited—or charged—with establishing empiricism, the view that all knowledge is embedded in sense experience. My project argues for and describes an undercurrent of idealism within British empiricism: the writers of my study investigated modes of thinking that transform sensory experience. To see their idealism at work, it is necessary to look closely at how they conceived of ideas in the mind as pictures. Given that the term “picture” was used to refer to both inner ideas and actual paintings, it is not surprising (though rarely noticed) that when empiricists wanted to consider how the mind shapes ideas, they turned to the history of painting. Painting theory has long manifested a sharp tension between the ambition to reproduce observation and the drive to transform what the eye sees. For this reason, it has been a congenial medium for thinkers unwilling to give up the authority of sense experience but unsatisfied with its yields. I set nineteenth-century texts against foundational Enlightenment works to show how that later age worked within and against the tradition known as British empiricism. My argument centers on British figures who were compelled to revise the empiricism they inherited from the eighteenth century. Constrained as they were within their empirical moment, they found empiricism too rigid to accommodate their own modes of thought, the cultural products they encountered, and future imaginaries. I examine how a range of authors imported artistic concepts and images into theories of mind in texts of various genres: the philosophy of John Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury, the art criticism of John Ruskin, the fiction of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, and the anthropological scholarship of J.G. Frazer. They represent a spectrum of views about the relationship between empiricism and idealism, and degrees of skepticism about the relative explanatory power of either. Poised at an intersection of literary studies, intellectual history, an…
abstract: The British are credited—or charged—with establishing empiricism, the view that all knowledge is embedded in sense experience. My project argues for and describes an undercurrent of idealism within British empiricism: the writers of my study investigated modes of thinking that transform sensory experience. To see their idealism at work, it is necessary to look closely at how they conceived of ideas in the mind as pictures. Given that the term “picture” was used to refer to both inner ideas and actual paintings, it is not surprising (though rarely noticed) that when empiricists wanted to consider how the mind shapes ideas, they turned to the history of painting. Painting theory has long manifested a sharp tension between the ambition to reproduce observation and the drive to transform what the eye sees. For this reason, it has been a congenial medium for thinkers unwilling to give up the authority of sense experience but unsatisfied with its yields. I set nineteenth-century texts against foundational Enlightenment works to show how that later age worked within and against the tradition known as British empiricism. My argument centers on British figures who were compelled to revise the empiricism they inherited from the eighteenth century. Constrained as they were within their empirical moment, they found empiricism too rigid to accommodate their own modes of thought, the cultural products they encountered, and future imaginaries. I examine how a range of authors imported artistic concepts and images into theories of mind in texts of various genres: the philosophy of John Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury, the art criticism of John Ruskin, the fiction of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, and the anthropological scholarship of J.G. Frazer. They represent a spectrum of views about the relationship between empiricism and idealism, and degrees of skepticism about the relative explanatory power of either. Poised at an intersection of literary studies, intellectual history, an…
author: Kravetz, Rachel
keywords: Literature in English, British Isles
date published: 2017-06-02T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:38Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York