‘Darkening Knowledge’

There are few more striking examples of the intellectual boundary that divided Romantic writer and utilitarian philosopher than the case of William Hazlitt's sojourn as the tenant of Jeremy Bentham at 19 York Street, Westminster, between 1813 and 1819. During this time Hazlitt never once met his landlord, who lived next door and, for his part, Bentham seems to have been aware of the essayist only as a source of rent, for the non-payment of which Hazlitt was duly evicted in the winter of 1819. However, in his portrait of Bentham five years later, Hazlitt does recall Bentham's original plan to pull down number 19, which had once been the home of John Milton, to make ‘a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster’ (xi, 6). ¹ In Hazlitt's profile, later the leading essay in The Spirit of the Age (1825), Bentham's indifference to the ‘cradle of Paradise Lost’ is depicted as symptomatic of an age dominated by abstraction, which, by seeking to ground all human life in factual truth, blinded itself to the non-rational powers of the mind that resisted such grounding: ²

[Bentham has] reduced the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation. ¼ If the mind of man were competent to comprehend the whole of truth and good, and act upon it at once, and independently of all other considerations, Mr. Bentham's plan would be a feasible one, and the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, would be the best possible ground to place morality upon. But it is not so. ¼ We are not, then, so much to inquire what certain things are abstractedly or in themselves, as how they affect the mind.

(xi, 8–9) The great irony of Bentham's work, Hazlitt suggests, is that its obsession with acquiring clear-sighted and comprehensive knowledge of life is the very thing that restricts its vision. Abstracted ‘like an anchoret in his cell’ Bentham's eye ‘glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought’ (xi, 6). Nowhere is this more evident than in his use of language, which, in insisting on neutrality, betrays its own rationalistic bias and, in striving for transparency, achieves only opacity:

126Mr. Bentham's method of reasoning, though comprehensive and exact ¼ is rather like an inventory, than a valuation of different arguments. ¼ He writes a language of his own, that darkens knowledge. ¼ The construction of his sentences is a curious frame-work with pegs and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance, but almost out of the reach of every body else. It is a barbarous philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses, formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin. ¼ In short, Mr. Bentham writes as if he was allowed but a single sentence to express his whole view of a subject in.

(xi, 14–15) What Hazlitt objects to most in Bentham is not specialized terminology as such, but a specific type of philosophical jargon that, with its semantic ‘pegs and hooks’, pretends to scientific objectivity but only ‘darkens knowledge’. Hazlitt could not have known Bentham's ‘Essay on Logic’, posthumously published in 1843, but passages such as Section vii, ‘Of Exposition by Paraphrasis, with its Subsidiary Operations, viz. Phraseoplerosis and Archetypation’, display many of the qualities of which Hazlitt complains. Of ‘paraphrasis’, for example, Bentham furnishes the following definition:

Paraphrasis is that mode of exposition which is the only instructive mode, where the thing expressed being the name of a fictitious entity, has not any superior in the scale of logical subalternation. Connected, and that necessarily, with paraphrasis, is an operation, for the designation of which the word Phraseoplerosis (i.e. the filling up of the phrase,) may be employed. ³

Hazlitt's charge is that this species of philosophical writing involves a kind of reification, which he calls abstraction, but which, following Gilbert Ryle and Clifford Geertz, we nowadays might term ‘thin’ description, or ‘beginning with a set of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law’. ⁴ Hazlitt's own prose, by contrast, is self-consciously thick with interpretation and rich with evaluation. It not only engages with Bentham in argument but becomes, with its punchy polemic and striking figures, itself a performance of that argument; of how both ‘things’ and, indeed, language ‘affect the mind’.