Work and Happiness in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and in Thomas Carlyle

I have already discussed Carlyle’s thoughts on happiness (here), and his stance that the pursuit of same was self-defeating. Instead, he advocated the diligent performance of work as the central activity of a fulfilling human life. Slavoj Žižek is a more recent thinker who has rejected the relevance of happiness to humanity (I discussed that here). A further dismissal of the concept comes in Sigmund Freud’s late work, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), a long essay or short book, covering 106 pages in the Penguin Great Ideas series copy I will be referring to. It is a fascinating and wide-ranging book, not concerned with developing the “science” (as Freud considered it) of psychoanalysis like many of his previous works, but in looking at life in modern civilization in its totality. His psychoanalytic theories enter on occasion, but his thought ranges more widely and speculatively – more sage-like – than ever before.

Dr. Freud with a cigar, but maybe not just a cigar.

Early on, Freud offers his thoughts on happiness. Like Carlyle, he completely dismisses the idea of happiness being a valid or attainable goal for a human being:

One is inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ has no place in the plan of
‘creation’. What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden) satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature, it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces a feeling of lukewarm contentment; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself. Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. (16-17)

We are, much more often, unhappy, and Freud sees three primary sources of unhappiness:

Suffering threatens us from three sides: from our own body, which, being doomed to decay and dissolution, cannot even dispense with pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which can unleash overwhelming, implacable, destructive forces against us; and finally from our relations with others. The suffering that arises from this last source perhaps causes us more pain than any other. (17)

This is bad news. We cannot avoid our own body, we can only very imperfectly and temporarily block out the external world, and as for our relations to others, to do without them is for most still more painful than to endure them. Under that pressure, our “pleasure principal” does and must transmute into the “reality principle”. Under this new principal, we less and less seek positive pleasure, because the fruitlessness of that search leads only to further agony; we merely try to avoid suffering. How do we avoid suffering? By sublimating our urges which cannot safely be indulged in a civilized society. Civilization is, essentially, renunciation:

[I]t is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up on renunciation, how much it presupposes the non-satisfaction – by suppression, repression or some other means – of powerful instincts. Such ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large sphere of interpersonal relations. (44)

We make this renunciation acceptable to ourselves by sublimation:

[S]ublimation of the drives plays a part in this. We achieve most if we can sufficiently heighten the pleasure derived from mental and intellectual work. Fate can then do little to harm us. This kind of satisfaction – the artist’s joy in creating, in fashioning forth the products of his imagination, or the scientist’s in solving problems and discovering truths – has a special quality which it will undoubtedly be possible one day to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say, figuratively, that they seem to us ‘finer and higher’, but their intensity is restrained when compared with that which results from the sating of crude, primary drives: they do not convulse our physical being. The weakness of this method, however, lies in the fact that it cannot be employed universally, as it is accessible only to the few. is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes special aptitudes and gifts which are not exactly common, not common enough to be effective. (21)

According to Freud, then, we cannot be actively and consistently happy, but we can sublimate our desires in our work – at least if we have rewarding work such as that of the artist or scientist – and that is the best we can hope for. Note that Freud, nominally a scientist, puts the artist on the same level; indeed his first example is the artist rather than the scientist. Freud himself was more of an artist and less of a scientist than he was conscious of, and his admiration for artists helped provide the art that is in his writings and makes them so compelling. But here, his dismissal of happiness and endorsement of work is very reminiscent of an important emphasis in the work of Carlyle. The latter sage, too, was keen to overturn the happiness principle of the utilitarians, and replace it with a dedication to work as the central goal of human existence, and for fundamentally similar reasons:

Thomas Carlyle, reflecting on the illusory nature of happiness.

It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,–it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: ‘not of the slightest consequence’ whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labour and rust! But our work,–behold that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains;–for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore!

Past and Present, Bk. II, Ch. IV

[O]nly this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. (SR, II, 7, “The Everlasting No”)

[…]

Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two: for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: God’s infinite Universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like that of Ophiuchus: speak not of them; to the infinite Shoeblack they are as nothing. No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. —Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.  (SR, II, 9, “The Everlasting Yea”)

Carlyle, like Freud, knew that happiness was at best fleeting. That which in the short term brings happiness soon turns into a source of dissatisfaction for Carlyle’s rhetorical Shoeblack and, to a less dramatic extent, for all of us. Work completed diligently and unselfconsciously is the cure for unhappiness. The problem is, one has to be unconscious of it to truly experience it. The conscious fixation on happiness was, Carlyle felt, one of the great illnesses of the Victorian age, always tending to turn into a consciousness of its absence.

If so, it is one that has gone unremedied until the present, despite the admonitions of Carlyle, Freud, Žižek and others. We have codified and theorised happiness to the point of having an annual World Happiness Report, Ministries of Happiness and a Journal of Happiness Studies. Truly now with such a wealth of resources and research, we have no excuse not to be happy, and, knowing that, we can only feel deep anxiety about the difficulty we find in attaining that desirable state of mind.

The Gospel of Work in Carlyle and in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

A central concern of Thomas Carlyle’s and one that was widely pondered by subsequent Victorian writers was the existential importance of work. Without work, or the right kind of work, life was hellish, productive of morbid introspection and paralytic inaction. Carlyle’s first commandment, pronounced in Sartor Resartus (1831-32; Bk. II, Ch VII) and Past and Present (1843; Bk. III, Ch. XI) was: “Know what thou canst work at”. It was a riff on Socrates’ “Know thyself” but it had very different implications. Socrates’ injunction was about thought; Carlyle’s was about action. Carlyle was of a generation for whom thought, reflection, introspection and self-consciousness – all of which had been taken to hitherto unknown extremes by writers and poets of the Romantic school in the late 17th and early 18th century – were decidedly double-edged swords.

Carlyle reacted against Romantic doctrine by declaring that “the sign of health is Unconsciousness” and that “[t]he healthy know not of their health, but only the sick (“Characteristics“, 1831). If one’s psyche was healthy, then, one just did not think about it or reflect on it. One did not know it; it just was. How did one escape self-consciousness, the disease of the Romantic temperament? Through work: “Man is sent hither not to question, but to work” (“Characteristics”). Therein lay the key to contentment and feeling at one with nature and one’s surroundings.

It was an influential notion, sometimes known as the “Gospel of Work“, and several notable Victorian novelists, such as Eliot and Dickens, reflected substantially on its implications. In the work of Joseph Conrad, too, the importance of work to one’s life experience is central. Marlow, the narrator of most of Heart of Darkness (1899), is particularly preoccupied with this. The experience he recounts in HoD is substantially about what it means to be a worker, to be devoted with one’s work, to face disillusionment about the goal of that work and how to respond to that disillusionment.

When Marlow contracts the job of captain of a ship which is assigned to sail up the Congo river, he is relieved, but struck also by the discourse surrounding the job he is to do:

It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. 

Heart of Darkness, Ch. 1

Marlow identifies that there is something quasi-religious in the discourse: “emissary of light”, “apostle”. This recalls the “Gospel of Work” and the capitalisation of “Workers” also suggests the famously erratic capitalisation habits of Carlyle, who does capitalise “Work” and “Workers” at times in Past and Present. Marlow is somewhat skeptical of the whole thing, disassociating himself from such language.

His skepticism is confirmed when he lands in Africa and one of his first experiences is the famous grove of death scene. A few pages later he returns to a contemplation of the nature of the “work”:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

HoD, Ch. I

Here “The work!” appears as a single sentence fragment, the exclamation mark serving to contrast the reality – slavery and slow, brutal death – with the sanctified talk Marlow had been subjected to earlier. The Gospel of Work is so divorced from reality as to be both tragic and ridiculous.

As the story progresses, however, it is by no means so simple. Marlow cannot quite dismiss the notion of work as the essence of life. He tries to articulate his position:

I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

HoD, Ch. I

It is a rather delicate distinction. Marlow does not like work but he likes what is in the work. Without work, one sees only mere show and cannot tell what it really means. Work, then is the way to true knowledge and is the way to find yourself. This, in fact, has brought us very close to Carlyle’s position again, wherein work is the central activity for a properly developed self.

Even having seen what he has seen of the imperial work in the Congo, Marlow is still attached to the notion of work. He retains an optimism about work as embodied by the Great Man, Kurtz. The first section of the story ends with the observation:

I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there.

HoD, Ch. I

That illustrates the difference between Kurtz and the functionaries of the rubber company Marlow meets. The latter believe in money; Kurtz believes in the civilizing mission. Kurtz’s work is for the betterment of humanity. When confronted with what is actually going on in the Congo, so different from the talk in Europe, Kurtz is too honest to go along with it and descends into a mostly undescribed madness. Marlow is less idealistic than Kurtz, though, and throughout keeps his head. How does Marlow stay sane in that atmosphere of horror? It is simple: through attendance to his work.

I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day’s steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckiIy.

HoD, Ch. II

Work, then, keeps away “the inner truth”, and for Marlow that is a good thing. At the end of the story, Marlow returns to Kurtz’s Intended, and tells her the same lies he was told before he went to the Congo. His take on the Gospel of Work, then, is a) it is a cover for exploitation and greed which does not reflect the real world; and b) it is a necessary fiction to keep at bay the horror of the imperial mission and preserve the illusion of a beautiful world. Marlow goes along with the rhetoric of he Gospel of Work and becomes a liar. Conrad evidently put a good deal of himself into Marlow, but it would not be fair to say he goes along with Marlow’s dishonesty. If he did, he would never have described the grove of death or the other horrific realities he had experienced in the Congo.

“One huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine”: Carlyle, Existentialism and Schizophrenia

Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34) was one of the classic coming-of-age texts of Victorian Britain. The protagonist, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, based to a significant extent on Carlyle himself, endures a long period of aimlessness and ostracisation, which he calls the “Everlasting No”, before finding a sort of God and embracing life in the “Everlasting Yea”. One of the most powerful sections of the book is the description of the Everlasting No. This occurs in Teufelsdröckh’s mid-20s, a time when he has no vocation, no money, no friends, has been unlucky in love and has renounced the faith in which he was brought up. Carlyle provides a searing account of the existential despair Teufelsdröckh undergoes:

It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. 

[…]

A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: why should I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!

Sartor Resartus, Bk. II, Ch. 7

Men and women became figures or automatons to Teufelsdröckh, the universe is a huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, he has not even the consolation of a devil on whom to blame the state of his life. His angst and despair is not religious but existential. It is the angst of a non-religious age, when God is dead and leaves a gaping void.

Carlyle’s description is an early and particularly powerful articulation of the existentialist dilemma. Sartor Resartus is sometimes considered an early existentialist text, though perhaps not as often as it should be.

It is also the ultimate anti-poetic vision, the aesthetic nightmare par excellence, cited as such by Aldous Huxley in an appendix to Heaven and Hell. Huxley’s essay, a sequel to The Doors of Perception, is about the artistic vision, which he likens to a mescalin trip. While Huxley has to take mescalin to heighten the sense and, in his phraseology, lift the veil, the artist – Blake, Vuillard and so on – can do it without external stimulant. He goes on to note that a close relation to the negative artistic vision is the schizophrenic:

But for […] the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal – an intense electric glare without a
shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to [the schizophrenic] only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (Vintage, 2004), p. 89.

This schizophrenic, anti-artistic vision Huxley finds in Van Gogh, Kafka and in Sartor Resartus (which he discusses in Appendix VIII, p. 124 of the essay) and it is the Hell of the essay’s title, identical to that experienced by the individual on a bad mescalin or lysergic acid trip (p. 90).

Carlyle’s passage then, is not only a precursor of existentialism, but an early description of both the bad trip and the schizophrenic state. Indeed, R.D. Laing’s famous The Divided Self (1959), a detailed and ambitious investigation of schizophrenia from a combined clinical and philosophical (specifically, existentialist) standpoint, includes excerpts which bring Teufelsdrockh strongly to mind. Laing, too, cites Kafka as the prose artist of existentialism and schizophrenia, though not Carlyle. Laing refers to one patient who declared herself to be “frightened of everything, ‘even of the sky'” (Penguin, 2010, p. 59); another put it that she felt herself to be “scorched under the glare of a black sun” (p. 112). For both the threat is truly existential, emanating from the universe itself. Laing documented that schizophrenics experienced others as automatons, but this, he contended, was different only in degree and not in kind to how sane people did:

Most relationships are based on some partial depersonalizing tendency in so far as one treats the other not in terms of any awareness of who he or what he might be in himself but as virtually an android robot playing a role in a large machine in which one too may be acting yet another part.

(p. 47)

R.D. Laing, from here

Laing felt that schizophrenia was a particularly 20th-century condition: not an illness, but a response to an insane world. Similarly, existentialism was the 20th-century philosophy. Reading about Teufelsdröckh’s Everlasting No in Sartor Resartus, however, we feel that Carlyle lived the 20th century before it happened, and that he articulated a form of being that was well before his time. It was so far before its time that it has been almost forgotten, subsumed by later articulations of that experience. Yet in Teufelsdröckh’s progress we find a powerful precursor to the existential anguish that was widely experienced in the 20th century and that is still relevant today in the perhaps even more anxious age we live in.

“Imposture, how it burns”: The Death of Krook in Bleak House and Carlyle´s Thoughts on History

Mr. Krook is first introduced in chapter 5 of Bleak House. As with many characters in Dickens, the character and the setting mirror each other. First we are introduced to the setting, the rag and bottle shop and its contents: “old crackled… discolored and dog-eared… rusty… bones in a corner.” Everything suggests age, lack of use and lack of utility. The bones in the corner further emphasize the lifeless quality of the place. Even the weather, and this is also typical of this novel, reflects the mood. It is “foggy and dark.”

So, before Krook enters the scene, we have a very fair idea of what to expect of the owner of such a shop. When he does enter, we are told he is “old… short, cadaverous and withered.” Just as there is something of the sepulchre about the shop, there is something of the cadaver about Krook. Already, we know he belongs to the realm of death. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, Dickens describes Krook´s breath as “issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if we were on fire within.” The first-time reader is very unlikely to divine the import of this simile, so it is there as an Easter egg for the returning reader.

Mr. Krook and His Cat, by Harry Furniss, 1910. http://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/furniss/170.html

Krook is not only closely linked with death, but he also has a disturbing omnivorousness. Just as death eventually claims us all, Krook is determined to take possession of everything he can, for reasons unclear to himself: “All´s fish that comes to my net”. Everything he touches come to partake of a soiled, unusable quality. This introduces another key theme of the novel: infection. Krook´s repellent and grasping being is not a colourful character quirk; it is a social problem that infests London.

Krook is from the beginning associated with the legal system, being “called, among the neighbours, the Lord Chancellor”. He is parasitical upon it and by his infectious deathliness he enhances Dickens’ critique of that system – emotionally if not in terms of rational argumentation. Dickens pours into him all his anger and disgust at the operation of the legal system in England.

Johnny Vegas as Mr. Krook in the BBC Bleak House (2005).

As noted above, the description of Krook´s breath suggesting he is “on fire within” is a foreshadowing. Krook is destined to die by spontaneous combustion, a fire that begins within and consumes his entire being. Dickens claimed there was some scientific validity to the move, though critics like G.H. Lewes disagreed (see also here). It was an audacious and original move by Dickens. Krook dies and, disembodied, becomes miasma, no less disgusting in death than he was in life: “a mouldering suffocating vapor” and “a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceilings” (Chapter 32).

Then, in a famous passage, Dickens denounces Krook in his strongest and most hortatory tones:

The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

Bleak House, Chapter 32

Here again, Krook is referred to ironically as the Lord Chancellor, and it is implied that his death is a result of “false pretences” and “injustice”. These are strange charges to bring against Krook, particularly that of false pretences. Krook’s speech is rather frank than otherwise. He is what he looks like and he doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

In this paragraph, Dickens’ more general anger against society has taken over. He is no longer talking about Krook but about what he symbolises. To make sense of this paragraph, I think, it has to be seen as a Carlylean denunciation of society. First, the apostrophical appeal to “your Highness”, creating an implied reader of the highest in the land, is an effect similar to that Carlyle uses throughout his then recently published Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), much of which is addressed to an unspecified “your Lordship”. For example:

Dismiss that hope, your Lordship! Let all real and imaginary Governors of England, at the pass we have arrived at, dismiss forever that fallacious fatal solace to their do-nothingism: of itself, too clearly, the leak will never stop; by human skill and energy it must be stopped, or there is nothing but the sea-bottom for us all!

¨The Modern Age¨, Latter-Day Pamphlets.

Similarly the notion of false pretences, and the analogous concepts of sham, imposture and insincerity are at the angry heart of the Pamphlets:

It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man’s real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,—a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,—a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther:—fallen insolvent; unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its pot boil any more for the present!

Ibid.

Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other. His sham-work oozes down; finds at last its issue as human Pauperism,—in a human being that by those false pretences cannot live. The Idle Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian quagmire of our affairs?

¨The New Downing Street¨, Latter-Day Pamphlets

Note in the second excerpt the sense of physical disgust contained in the imagery of work that oozes down, the Stygian quagmire and the poison-tank of drainage. This is a characteristic of both the Pamphlets and Bleak House. Note in the first excerpt the connection between falsity and fiery imagery. Carlyle´s powerful if under-argued suggestion is that an excess of falsity in societal relations will lead to overthrow of society as humans simply cannot bear too much falsity. To express the fearsome violence of this overthrow, Carlyle uses the image of “indispensable revolutionary fire”, building on the imagery of the bonfire of imposture in his earlier The French Revolution, one of Dickens favourite books:

IMPOSTURE is in flames, Imposture is burnt up: one red sea of Fire, wild-bellowing, enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois Mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drip fatness […]. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the Earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The world is black ashes […]. For it is the end of the dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is darkness and opaque Fire-damp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.

The French Revolution, 3.7.VIII

In the end, the death by spontaneous combustion of Krook gives Dickens an opportunity to explore Carlylean notions of the burning up of an insincere society. Like Carlyle´s own work, it does not necessarily all hang together in terms of argumentation, but remains powerful, allowing both author and reader to reflect on the insincerity and muddle of society and posit, not without satisfaction, the inevitable punishment and destruction of those who contribute to such a status quo.

Bullshit and the Art of the Plausible: Thomas Carlyle and Harry Frankfurt

The most influential academic work on the rather unacademic topic of bullshit is Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, first published in the Raritan Quarterly Review in 1986 and later in book form. Frankfurt goes to great lengths to elucidate the difference between bullshit and lying. Most strikingly, he argues that bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lying, and renders this paradox quite plausible.

Harry S. Frankfurt (1929- )

The liar, Frankfurt insists, must have a clear conception of the difference between truth and lies in order to lie successfully:

[I]t is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

Every true liar, then, has the capacity for honesty and knows very well what truth is. Yet now, consider the bullshitter. The bullshitter, for Frankfurt, may be telling the truth or a lie or (probably more likely, I would suggest) somewhere in the middle, a half-truth. The bullshitter  does not really know or care if he/she is speaking the truth or not:

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

So, while both the truth-teller and the liar are very much concerned with what the truth is, in order to express it or to avoid it, the bullshitter has no relationship with truth at all: they would not know truth if they saw it, and don’t want to know. Such an alienation from truth is the real danger, not the expressions of direct untruth that a liar provides.

Frankfurt’s arguments provide a theoretical underpinning of a phenomenon that had not gone wholly unnoticed by earlier writers. Thomas Carlyle, in particular, dealt with this at the opening of his more-or-less forgotten 1833 essay “Cagliostro“. This essay was a biographical account of the eponymous Italian adventurer and forger (real name: Giuseppe Balsamo; also known as: Joseph Balsamo), a mysterious figure who had been implicated in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace involving Marie Antoinette. (Carlyle also wrote about this). Cagliostro held a fascination for late 18th and 19th century writers: Carlyle mentions that Goethe and Schiller wrote about him, and so, later, did Dumas and Tolstoy.

Carlyle declares Count Alessandro Cagliostro to be “the King of Liars” and “the Quack of Quacks” (English and Other Critical Essays, Everyman, 1964, 244, 248). And this purity of quackism is something Carlyle finds fascinating and even praiseworthy. He looks through the pre-Cagliostrian history of liars, and finds some notable specimens there, but concludes:

[It must] remain doubtful whether any of these comparatively were much more than liars from the teeth onwards: a perfect character of the species in question, who lied not in word only, nor in act and word only, but continually, in thought, word, and act; and, so to speak, lived wholly in an element of lying, and from birth to death did nothing but lie,—was still a desideratum. Of which desideratum Count Alessandro offers, we say, if not the fulfilment, perhaps as near an approach to it as the limited human faculties permit. (244)

Cagliostro so perfected the art of falsity that Carlyle concludes that he is “not so much a Liar as a Lie” (248). The interesting point is that Carlyle considers such a liar to be much preferable to

he who is neither true nor false; who never in his existence once spoke or did any true thing (for indeed his mind lives in twilight, with cat-vision, incapable of discerning truth); and yet had not the manfulness to speak or act any decided lie; but spent his whole life in plastering together the True and the False, and therefrom manufacturing the Plausible. (243)

Carlyle’s idea of the Plausible, then, occupies the same position external to the True/False dichotomy and destructive of this very dichotomy as Frankfurt’s bullshit. The liar must know truth, but the speaker of the Plausible lives in twilight, with cat-vision, and is incapable of discerning truth.

Count Cagliostro (1743-1795), the Quack of Quacks.

Carlyle goes on to note that the speaker of the Plausible – that is, effectively, the bullshitter – is motivated by concerns regarding his/her own social placement and advancement.

Wretched mortal, who with a single eye to be ‘respectable,’ forever sittest cobbling together two Inconsistencies, which stick not for an hour, but require ever new gluten and labour[.] What, in the Devil’s name, is the use of Respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifullest of all men? I would thou wert either cold or hot. (243)

Carlyle would prefer someone to be hot or cold – that is, a liar or a truth-teller, rather than a speaker of the Plausible. Frankfurt would agree, as it is the latter who is the real enemy of the truth. It is the drive for respectability that creates such a discourse of Plausibility, in Carlyle’s view.

If we learn Carlyle’s lesson, then, we will acknowledge that bullshit is not of the individual. Rather, bullshit and the art of the Plausible are borne out of the individual’s wish to create a certain relation between the self and society (“respectability”), and to fill a certain position in society. It is perhaps comforting to reflect that in this conception we are not born bullshitters, rather we embrace bullshit as we try to fit into a society that seems to value the art of the Plausible and that, lip service aside, has limited tolerance for the speaking of truth.

Armed Eyesight: Metaphor in Carlyle and in 21st-century Economics

One might be tempted to think that the Carlylean figure of the sage or man of letters is no more. That there was a way of knowing the world articulated by 19th-century sages that can no longer be accessed, for good or ill. Yet echoes of the sage mode of discourse can be found among modern intellectuals and academics. Most ironically, economics may be the 21st-century equivalent of sage writing. Ironic because Carlyle famously described economics (then known as political economy) as the “dismal science”, and indeed railed against it at every opportunity.

It was a dismal science to Carlyle because of its reduction of people to productive units. Carlyle noted that the final consequence of this was that people were not valuable in themselves, but only in how they contributed to the overall economic situation. Thus a person who was not economically viable had no personal value, and was better off dead, being a drain on resources rather than a producer. This capitalistic phenomenon of a person being unable to find work was on that struck Carlyle forcefully:

A full-formed Horse will, in any market, bring from twenty to as high as two hundred Friedrichs d’or: such is his worth to the world. A full-formed Man is not only worth nothing to the world, but the world could afford him a round sum would he simply engage to go and hang himself. (Sartor Resartus, III, IV)

Carlyle rejected what he saw as the implicit premise of political economy that human worth was defined by economic factors, and so the calculations political economists made were anathema to him. He valued such systematic thought little, and instead envisioned the true intellectual as one who took a the widest, most inclusive view possible. The intellectual, for Carlyle, was the one who saw everything, and saw through everything. There was no end to the cultural artefacts that could be read by the true sage. In Sartor Resartus, for example, it is clothes which prove to be transcendentally revealing when seen through the eyes of a sage, and which indeed ranks for Carlyle above any more established field of study:

[T]his Science of Clothes is a high one, and may with infinitely deeper study on thy part yield richer fruit: that it takes scientific rank beside Codification, and Political Economy, and the Theory of the British Constitution; nay rather, from its prophetic height looks down on all these, as on so many weaving-shops and spinning-mills, where the Vestures which it has to fashion, and consecrate, and distribute, are, too often by haggard hungry operatives who see no farther than their nose, mechanically woven and spun?

Carlyle’s point was that this superlatively revealing element of our everyday environment was not considered a science, and so he was demonstrating that far beyond scientific disciplines could knowledge of humanity and society be gained. By treating the study of clothes as a science, Carlyle was parodying scientific discourse, but was also making a very serious point about the necessity to learn from and be attentive to everything in our social and natural environment. To insist on a rigidly disciplinary approach was thus, for Carlyle, to very precisely miss the point. And this disciplinary point-missing Carlyle saw exemplified in the dismal science of Political Economy:

It was a matter of vision, of being able to really see things, and see through things:

The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent. (SR, Bk. 2, Ch. II)

The irony, then, is that contemporary economics sometimes posits itself as exactly the kind of science of everyday life that Carlyle was looking for. In Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, the economist is the person who can look on the everyday and find hidden patterns and meaning therein. On the cover, the following quote from David Bodanis appears:

Reading this book is like spending an ordinary day wearing X-ray goggles.

It would be interesting to know how Carlyle would have felt about the X-ray metaphor. The technology of the X-ray had yet to come into being in the mid-19th century, however, so the metaphor was unavailable to him. Yet his metaphor of armed eyesight is very close. So Carlyle conceptualised the activity of philosophising in a very similar way to Bodanis’ conception of economics.

And in the opening lines of The Undercover Economist proper, Harford again emphasises visual metaphors:

[N]ormal people look remarkable in the eyes of economists. What is the economist seeing? What could he tell you, if you cared to ask? And why should you care? (1)

This is an attractive view of the economist, as one who simply looks upon everyday things, but rather than seeing only what we see, seeing through them to a deeper reality.

Yet, we cannot quite declare Harford to be a neo-Carlylean. Rather than looking on things with impartial curiosity, he brings to bear on them an astounding preconception:

[F]ree markets are just like Fletcher Reede’s son [in the film Liar Liar] – they force you to tell the truth. (60)

Harford believes that nothing that lacks value can survive in a free market, because people will only pay what an object is “worth”. Taxes, he believes, interfere with this “world of truth”.

Now you can begin to see why I say that prices “tell the truth” and reveal information […].[T]he value of the product to the customer is equal to or higher than the price; and the cost to the producer equal to or lower than the price. (62)

There are innumerable problems with this theory: what about alcohol to the alcoholic, a bet to the gambler, junk food to the unhealthy? Are these “worth” their price, or is their value actually negative? That is, these people appear to be paying to harm themselves.

Again, if the value of something is intrinsic and equal to price, why would a multi-million dollar advertising industry exist to convince people to buy, while also pushing up prices to pay for itself. Would not a true world of market truth abolish all advertising except the strictly informational?

Harford admits that the pure market as world of truth does not exist, yet insists on using it as a justification for the free market throughout the book. He does not address the issue that one could just as easily imagine a perfect socialist society, say, or a perfect anarchist society or any such arrangement. Why is it valid to imagine free market perfection and not those others?

In short, it is ultimately clear that Harford is looking at things through a very restrictive lens, seeing things not as they are but as they would be in a perfect free market. This is in line with an economist’s training, but seeing things from a Carlylean perspective, it is far from acceptable, and such a thinker runs the risk of becoming what Carlyle called “a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye” (SR, I, X). To really see through the phenomena of everyday life, as Hartford nobly attempts, would take a far lesser attachment to any such politico-structural ideal without a real-world existence. Sometimes, in short, an excess of theory is a greater epistemological flaw than no theory at all.

Thomas Carlyle and the Mind as Algorithm

In a recent post I reflected on the notion of human beings as algorithms that Yuval Noah Harari states is the current scientific consensus. Harari sums up this position as follows:

1. Organisms are algorithms, and humans are not individuals–they are ‘dividuals’. That is, humans are an assemblage of many different algorithms lacking a single inner voice or a single self.

2. The algorithms constituting a human are not free. They are shaped by genes and environmental pressures, and take decisions either deterministically or randomly–but not freely.

3. It follows that an external algorithm could theoretically know me much better than I can ever know myself. An algorithm that monitors each of the systems that comprise my body and my brain could know exactly who I am, how I feel and what I want. Once developed, such an algorithm could replace the voter, the customer and the beholder. Then the algorithm will know best, the algorithm will always be right, and beauty will be in the calculations of the algorithm. (383)

[T]wenty-first-century technology may enable external algorithms to ‘hack humanity’ and know me far better than I know myself. Once this happens the belief in individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to networked algorithms. (384)

You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and it is changing our world beyond recognition. (429)

We live in the age of Big Data, in which algorithms – sets of instructions telling computers what to do – are used in all fields, from the medical to traffic control, and Harari demonstrates very easily that the algorithm is central to our experience of the world. Nevertheless, the scientific dogma he cites may be entirely erroneous.

The notion of the algorithm entirely predates the current age of information technology, originating in 1600BC Babylon. Yet it never until very recently seemed to provide a likely basis for human existence. So engrossed are we in algorithmic knowledge that we see ourselves reflected in it. We can no longer conceive of ourself as anything but algorithmic, so dependent are we on algorithms for our technological, economic and social development.

To understand the inherent dangers in such metaphorical thinking, we need to re-examine what happened at the height of the industrial revolution, at a time when the development of the machine was the dominant technological and social fact. Thomas Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times” (1829) is a key reflection on the Industrial Age. Carlyle noted:

It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East; and the genius of the Cape were there any Camoens now to sing it, has again been alarmed, and with far stranger thunders than Gama’s. There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse invoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

Note how Carlyle begins with the categorization of machinery into inward and outward. We all know the outward developments of the time – the steam engine, the power loom – but the notion of inward machinery is also worth noting. Carlyle argues that the outward dominance of the machine produces effects within the human psyche and within our conception of what we are. One of the most famous lines of “Signs of the Times” runs: “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” By working constantly with machinery, and by an unquestioning faith in machinery, people were beginning to relate themselves to machinery, to define themselves in relation to machinery.

Through the 19th and early 20th century, developments in science tended to posit the human mind itself as a machine. This metaphor continued at least as far as Freud:

[D]uring much of Sigmund Freud’s life, the dominant technology was steam power. It was as omnipresent a century ago as computers are for us today. Not surprisingly, Freud chose the steam engine metaphor to describe what he called the ‘apparatus’ of the human mind—in which ‘psychic energy’ flows in a ‘psycho-dynamic’ system, and can neither be created nor destroyed.      

The steam engine is no longer a technology of such importance, thus the notion of creating a theory of the mind from it strikes us as extremely odd (though a remnant of this thinking has survived in the use of the figurative phrase “letting off steam” to describe emotional release). Nevertheless, when we think how the rise of the algorithm has affected scientists’ approach to the mind, we can begin to understand Freud’s thought processes. And indeed, reading the mind in terms of dominant or emerging technology is older even than the industrial revolution. The mind and consciousness were then, and to an almost equal extent remain still, a mystery – the last frontier, the one truly “hard problem“, faced with which, the enquiring mind resorts to metaphor as a denial of mystery. It may turn out that algorithms have something to tell us about the mind, but the history of mechanical metaphors of mind indicate that this “something” will be far less than all, and that the study that sees algorithms in the mind is unwittingly metaphorical rather than scientific.

Related:

Article by Rodney A. Brooks calling for the retirement of the computational metaphor for mind and body

Comparing Dickens and Carlyle using Voyant

My last post did some basic analysis of a selection of Thomas Carlyle’s writings using Voyant. Now I want to use Voyant to compare Carlyle’s writings to those of his contemporary Charles Dickens. Dickens was primarily a novelist, and I am going to use here four novels and one novella for analysis. Specifically:

Oliver Twist (1838)

The Chimes (1844)

Bleak House (1853)

Hard Times (1854)

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Dickens is, then, generically different from Carlyle. Carlyle was not a novelist or fiction writer. Indeed, from our point of view, it is difficult to place him generically at all. However, to his contemporaries he was a Sage. I have earlier noted that the Sage exhibited features of both the novelist and of the philosopher. Like the philosopher, he was concerned with life in the widest sense, but unlike the philosopher, the Sage did not employ logical argument to prove his validity as an interpreter of life. Rather, he used a myriad of techniques, including several from the novelist’s toolbox: narrative, characterization, dialogism, irony, sarcasm, parable, exhortation, sermonizing, and, in Carlyle’s case, sheer abuse. The abusive mode is one that is now rarely used, but it is not without power. Take this example from Carlyle:

Get out of that, you ugly and foolish windbags: do you think the Eternal God of Nature will suffer you to stand in the way of His work? If you cannot open your eyes and see that this is a thing that must be done, you had better betake yourselves elsewhere – to the lowest Gehenna were fittest – there is no place for you in a world which is ruled, in the long run, by fact and not by chimera. (Latter-day Pamphlets)

Carlyle is here contemptuous of his readers, the “foolish and ugly windbags” referred to. He does not try to convince through logic, but by the strength of his contempt for any opposing position. He almost orders the reader to convince themselves: If you cannot open your eyes… His position holds little logical authority, but its intensity is often effective. Ruskin, Carlyle’s disciple, also used this mode, as I have discussed elsewhere.

Dickens is an interesting comparison with Carlyle, both because he is the pre-eminent novelist of the time (in the Anglophone world, at least), and because his debt of influence to Carlyle is well established. He inscribed Hard Times (1854) “To Thomas Carlyle” and claimed to have read Carlyle’s French Revolution five hundred times. They had certain of the same social and perhaps even artistic aims, yet they were received very differently by the public and the press. Perhaps by comparing Carlyle with the great novelist, we can get a better idea of what the Sage was doing, and how he was doing it.

Most frequent words:

In the selective corpus inputted to Voyant, the most frequently used word is Mr, and it is followed by said, little, sir and know in that order. Remember Carlyle’s most used words were man, men, world, like, and shall. A major overlap appears to be the overwhelming male bias in their lexica. Both authors are far more interested in a specifically male experience of the world, with the female equivalents being far less commonly used. This bias is more pronounced in Carlyle, though, as woman, Miss and Mrs do also feature fairly high in Dickens’ list. The most surprising word on Dickens’ list is little, which appears 1959 times (for comparison, large is at 237; and big at 22).There is probably no other writer in whose corpus this adjective would be so prominent – and the books analyzed don’t even include Little Dorrit or The Old Curiosity Shop (protagonist: Little Nell), so the results could have been even more striking. The concept of littleness, then, is clearly central to Dickens’ work. Other than that, Carlyle’s choices are more distinctive and revealing than Dickens’. I will not repeat what I have already written about Carlyle, but regarding Dickens it is really striking how commonplace and unliterary are all of his most frequent words. Forty of the top 50 words are monosyllables, and the only entries of more than two syllables are the trisyllabic gentleman and Oliver (as in Twist, the only character name in the top 50).

Word cloud on Voyant showing Dickens’ most frequent words.

Vocabulary density:

Carlyle’s most dense text was Sartor Resartus at 0.137, with French Revolution the least dense at 0.073. With Dickens the range was from The Chimes at 0.138 to Bleak House at 0.065. Even from my few initial Voyant analyses, I can see that this measure is rather misleading if taken in isolation, as a shorter text will almost always have a higher density than a long text. So the two authors’ longest works are also the ones with the most repeated words and the lowest density. At the other end, the comparison is more revealing, as Chimes and Sartor have almost equal density, though the latter is much longer: 85251 words as opposed to 34124. So Carlyle actually demonstrates a much higher vocabulary density than Dickens, and a much larger vocabulary. In total Carlyle uses 32294 unique words, Dickens 22432. This is a strikingly large gap. Carlyle has a significantly larger vocabulary than Dickens.

Words per sentence:

I noted in the last post that Carlyle’s average wps ranged from 22.6 to 31.5 across the selective corpus. Dickens’ wps ranges from 15.7 in The Chimes to 18.6 in A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. In fact, apart from Chimes having a noticeably lower wps, there is little variation across Dickens’ texts. But they all have much lower wps than Carlyle. Carlyle was particularly fond of long sentences and complex structures. At the same time, there may be a generic reason for the big difference here: Dickens’ fiction has a lot of dialogue, and this will generally be comprised of much shorter sentences, including one-word sentences (replies like “yes”, “no”, etc.).

To ascertain the role played by such factors as genre on wps would of course require analysis of a much wider range and larger number of texts. This initial analysis does raise several interesting points about the differences between Carlyle and Dickens. The biggest surprise for me is the degree to which the statistics seems to suggest a greater sophistication in Carlyle’s works. I may perform further comparisons using other Victorian writers – novelists, Sages and other – to get a more nuanced understanding of this.

Dickens Voyant analysis: https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=dcc74d10fbfc6d00c4dc79b07670a90c

Carlyle Voyant analysis: https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=38b0c430d5a5179d802fac046003b23d

Voyant analysis of my PhD thesis https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=f259039874058130cc7d18fbf033b91d

Analyzing Thomas Carlyle’s Writings with Voyant

A useful and user-friendly tool for basic digital analysis of texts is Voyant. I used it to analyze five works of Thomas Carlyle, taken from Project Gutenberg. The works chosen were:

Sartor Resartus (1834)

The French Revolution (1838)

On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (1841)

Past and Present (1843)

Latter-day Pamphlets (1850)

These were partly chosen as they are perhaps Carlyle’s most important works, but also because Gutenberg doesn’t have all Carlyle’s works. For example, I would have considered Chartism (1840) had it been there, but it wasn’t (though it can be accessed online via Google Books). Similarly, the massively influential Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838) were not there.

There are a couple of other minor caveats:

1) The version of Latter-day Pamphlets used was not the complete version. Like many versions, it consists of only five essays, omitting the final three.

2) The Gutenberg pages analyzed contained not only the texts of the works, but also various paratexts: title and publication details, Gutenberg’s copyright statement, and so on. This is most important regarding Past and Present, which contained an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson from the first US edition of the work. For a proper academic analysis, one would have to work on finding or creating a webpage or file with no such paratexts, but for the purposes of this blog, the superfluous material wasn’t enough to seriously upset the findings.

So, I simply copied and pasted the five links to the relevant pages on Gutenberg, then Voyant did the rest, returning a page filled with analysis of Carlyle’s works. First is a word cloud:

This can be adjusted to include from 25 words up. The adjustment bar, however, is very fiddly (at least on my iPad), and it’s hard to adjust the number of words with accuracy or tell what number of words are being shown. The cloud above has about 100 words, the 100 most common words across the texts. The larger the text, the greater the frequency. A quick look tells you that the most frequent word across all the texts is man. Still more pointedly, the second most frequent word is men. By clicking on the words in the cloud, we find that man gets 2293 mentions, men 1815. This tells us already a lot about Carlyle’s writing: he was interested in the male experience, he was troubled and obsessed by ideas of manhood, constantly working through these ideas. The words women and woman get only 182 and 56 mentions respectively. Already we see how Carlyle’s thought is out of kilter with these times.

We can toggle between cloud view and list view of most popular words, and while the former is perhaps more immediately striking and certainly more redolent of digital humanities, the latter view is better for a more exact picture. It allows us to ascertain for certain that he third most popular word is world. This presence illustrates the grandeur of Carlyle’s ambitions. He was a wide-gazing sage, not the narrowly focused expert that is valued in the 21st century. The frequency with which the word world occurs defines perhaps the most important difference between the Victorian intellectual and the contemporary scholar: he is not an expert an any particular thing, but rather strives to comprehend the world as a totality.

Shall is also in the top five. By clicking on the word, we can also see which work it is most popular in. In this case, it’s The French Revolution by quite a distance. This work is ostensibly one of history, but Carlyle is using shall to slip back and forth in time, to predict the future of the past, such as in the word’s very first appearance. This comes in a passage which is very typical of Carlyle, an address to the poverty-stricken masses of pre-revolutionary France on the occasion of a police crackdown on public protests/riots:

O ye poor naked wretches! and this, then, is your inarticulate cry to Heaven, as of a dumb tortured animal, crying from the uttermost depths of pain and debasement? Do these azure skies, like a dead crystalline vault, only reverberate the echo of it on you? Respond to it only by ‘hanging on the following days?’ –Not so: not forever! He are heard in Heaven. And the answer too will come,–in a horror of great darkness, and shakings of the world, and a cup of trembling from which all the nations shall drink. [My italics and underlining]

The cup of trembling was of course the French Revolution itself, which struck fear into the rich and privileged of all countries, and Carlyle is here tapping into the fear among his British readers that the Revolution could spread. So the use of shall here and in other parts of this work is a function of Carlyle’s particular mode, which might be called retroactive prophecy. It harnesses the power of the prophetical voice, with little of the epistemological risk (that is, it can hardly be wrong, because the things prophesied have for the most part already happened).

Table in Voyant showing relative frequency of “shall” in Carlyle’s works.

Voyant also supplies word count for each text. The French Revolution is the longest; Latter-day Pamphlets the shortest – though it is, as noted above, missing part of the originally published material. Not much to analyze there. Potentially more interestingly, there is considerable variation in vocabulary density across the works. Vocabulary density refers to the ratio of different words used to total word count. Carlyle’s highest vocabulary density occurs in Sartor, indicating that it is a more linguistically varied text, perhaps a more demanding and difficult text. As a particular admirer of Sartor, I think it also indicates that this work is the product of a more supple and questioning mind than the other works. The least vocabulary density is found in On Heroes. When one remembers that this work began as a series of lectures, this seems a deliberate choice by Carlyle, streamlining his vocabulary to make his ideas more accessible to a listening audience without the possibility of going back and reading over difficult parts.

Average words per sentence is another indicator of complexity. Here On Heroes has lowest wps, showing it again as the least complex text. The highest wps, though, is Pamphlets. This is an interesting development, as Carlyle’s wps had previously fallen from the heights of Sartor, but here hit a new peak. This anomalous situation warrants more developed study than I can give it here.

In the screenshot above, the final category is Distinctive Words. This means the words which characterize individual works but rarely or never appear in the other texts analyzed. Most of the words involved are proper nouns, generally the names of the works’ main characters: so Teufelsdrockh is the most distinctive word in Sartor, because Diogenes Teufelsdrockh is the book’s protagonist; abbot is the most distinctive word in Past and Present, because Abbot Samson is that book’s focus. Thus, this category seems too predictable to be really insightful, at least in the examples here.

I have only scraped the surface of the many possibilities of Voyant, not only for studies of a single author, but also, and perhaps especially, for comparison between authors. Thus I will undoubtedly return to this tool sooner rather than later, perhaps to compare Carlyle’s texts to those of some of his contemporaries. The most impressive things about the tool, in my opinion, are its astonishing ease of use (fiddly bar accompanying word cloud aside) and user-friendliness, and the fact that it is, as of now, totally free.

The Carlylean Hero and Zero Dark Thirty

The Carlylean type of hero is not a major presence in our society. There are certain aspect of contemporary heroism that don’t fall in with Carlylean ideals. The 21st-century Hero is much more domesticated. This is a contemporary trait that is often seen in adaptations of 19th-century fiction, most clearly, perhaps, in North & South, wherein Thornton as Carlylean Captain-of-Industry type enters into dialogue with contemporary conventions and emerges a gentle, father-type figure more interested in his children than in organizing and subduing the urban proletariat. Or just think about the recently anointed best-selling movie of all time, Avengers: Endgame, whose central hero, Tony Stark, has to balance the needs of the universe with those of being a father – and puts the latter first, though still managing to save the universe. The male hero, then, is far more domesticated and indulgently paternal than he used to be. But if we want to understand the Carlylean hero, there are a small number of contemporary narratives that provide suitable protagonists.

The single most Carlylean figure in contemporary Hollywood is Maya (Jessica Chastain) in Zero Dark Thirty (2012). There are many similarities. In discussing Sherlock Holmes in an upcoming publication I noted three elements of the Carlylean Hero that Holmes displayed. In short:

1 The Hero evinces an absolute dedication to work in a cause which transcends him or herself as an individual

2 The Hero possesses an immediate and infallible insight. Insight truly Heroic, and is always superior to knowledge:

The healthy Understanding, we should say, is not the Logical, argumentative, but the Intuitive; for the end of Understanding is not to prove and find reasons, but no believe […]. [T]he man of logic and the man of insight; the Reasoner and the Discoverer, or even knower, are quite separable — indeed, for most part, quite separate characters. (Carlyle, Characteristics, 1831)

A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks through the shows of things into things. (On Heroes, 1841)

3 The Hero is not prone to self-consciousness. Carlyle posits it as a maxim that: “The sign of health is Unconsciousness” (Ibid.)

So work, insight and the absence of self-consciousness. These are three of the central traits of Carlylean Heroism, and the three I found most applicable to the figure of Sherlock Holmes. They are dealt with in more detail in the essay linked above. To begin with, we can map these onto Maya:

1 Maya is dedicated to her work at the expense of all else. Interestingly, though this is a perfectly obvious observation to make regarding the film, there is no explicit textual reference to Maya’s attitude to work in the film. However, she is almost never seen doing anything other than work, and the attitude of focused intensity she shows at work contrasts with the lethargy and disinterest she displays on other occasions (e.g. when having dinner with Jessica). In the film’s shooting script, there is a direction that sums it up: “Maya is here too, working. She’s always working.”

Jessica Chastain as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty. (IMDb)

2 Maya brings about the death of Bin Laden (according to the movie) through her irrational confidence that she is right about his whereabouts in Abbotabad, Pakistan. As one of the soldiers’ about to undertake the mission says: “Her confidence is the one thing that’s stopping me getting ass-raped in a Pakistani prison. I’m cool with it.” As this soldier knows, there is no sufficient proof that Bin Laden is in there. As the committee approving the mission note, there was better evidence for WMD in Iraq than for this mission. It, and several previous steps in the process, is based on an insight of Maya’s rather than concrete proof. An insight that transcends rationality is the pre-eminent characteristic of the Carlylean Hero.

3 The theme of self-consciousness is not dealt with directly in Zero Dark Thirty. Of course, a person who is not self-conscious does not talk about their lack of self-consciousness; they are, by definition, not conscious of it. But that is the whole point. Unselfconsciousness does not know itself. That is its strength and its Heroism.

Aside from these elements Maya holds in common with Sherlock Holmes, there are several further points that link Maya to the Carlylean Hero:

4 The lack of importance of personal relationships in her life. This is something of a corollary to Point 1, and is central to a number of Carlyle’s portraits, from the fictional Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (Sartor Resartus) through Abbot Samson (Past and Present), Dr Francia and Frederick the Great. It is almost unheard of for a modern Hollywood film to show its protagonist as friendless, sexless, family-less and unconcerned about this state of affairs. Even Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films rely heavily on his friendship with Watson and give him a sexual life of sorts. But Zero Dark Thirty is truly radical is this sense: Maya never speaks to or of any friend, partner or family member. In a scene with Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), Maya is gently prodded about her love life:

Jessica: Little fooling around wouldn’t hurt you

Maya: [Sigh]

J: So no boyfriend

M: Mmm-mmm

J: You got any friends at all?

This last question is greeted with a long silence, mercifully broken by Jessica’s phone ringing. The implication is No, Maya has no friends, and this is borne out throughout the film.

5 The dissociation from the concept of happiness. Carlyle was very big on this idea, that happiness was not the goal of man. It was not something that could be attained, or should be striven for. Historically, he felt mankind had never been motivated by happiness, but rather the opposite: “They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man” (On Heroes, Lecture II). Maya’s refusal to ever show or, it appears, feel happiness or contentment is of a piece with the Carlylean conception of heroism rather than that of our culture, which almost invariably ends with the Hero in domestic bliss. Maya doesn’t end in domesticity, or in bliss. At the end of the film, in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Bin Laden, as the men congratulate each other, Maya stands aloof and inscrutable, physically present but emotionally inaccessible. Just after this, in the final scene of the film, she takes a seat alone in a cargo plane. The pilot enters and asks her where she wants to go. She doesn’t answer but her eyes well with tears as she gazes into the empty distance. It is at this moment that Maya becomes truly heroic in the Carlylean sense. Nothing could be more Carlyleanly heroic than to meet with total triumph and to be unable to enjoy, unable to feel happiness for even the briefest moment, a moment of absolute triumph over one’s greatest foe.

It this point it would have been easy to show Maya overcome with happiness, or returning to the bosom of a loving family. That Zero Dark Thirty does not do this removes it from mainstream contemporary depictions of heroism.

6 The willingness to indulge in violence in the name of the great goal towards which one is working. This was the most contentious element of Zero Dark Thirty – not violence per se but more specifically torture. Zizek, among others, has had much to say on this topic. Maya was readily prepared to participate in torture, to Zizek’s chagrin:

When Maya, the film’s heroine, first witnesses waterboarding, she is a little shocked, but she quickly learns the ropes; later in the film she coldly blackmails a high-level Arab prisoner with, “If you don’t talk to us, we will deliver you to Israel”. Her fanatical pursuit of Bin Laden helps to neutralise ordinary moral qualms.

Maya looks on while her colleagues torture their detainee into submission, and (according to the film) important information leading to Bin Laden is attained thereby.

In sum, in her attitudes to work, relationships, self-consciousness, happiness and violence, Maya is the closest thing contemporary Hollywood has to a true Carlylean hero. The distinguishing feature is that she is a woman. Carlyle never conceived of a female hero in On Heroes. Yet in a 21st-century when male heroism has moved away from the Carlylean vision, the Carlylean Hero as Woman is finally born.