Victorian era history and cultural significance

Victorian Philosophical Anti-Rationalism -- the anti-practical and anti-Utilitarian philosophy of Newman, Pater, and Arnold

The Victorian era in England gave birth to Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian philosophy of social governance, to the scientific philosophy of Darwinism, and to the application of scientific principles to social philosophy in the form of Social Darwinism. Perhaps this scientific and methodical era, an era that oversaw the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution's stress upon machinery into the transformation into the human body and mind as a machine-like worker drone, inevitably spawned a kind of counter-revolutionary philosophy and ethos for the age -- namely the idea and ideals that cohered and evolved over the course of the Oxford Movement, the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movement, and finally coalesced into the austere vision of the poet and philosopher Matthew Arnold.

One of the earliest counters to the pragmatism and utilitarianism so popular at the time of Victoria's reign was the Oxford Movement's stress upon neo-Catholicism and the importance of a spiritual and emotional connection with the world, as was seen, according to this movement's vision during the Middle Ages. John Henry Newman, one of the foremost members of the Oxford Movement, argued in his essay about the "Idea of a University: Knowledge Its Own End, Knowledge and Learning, Knowledge and Skill, and Knowledge and Religion" that religion's apparent failure to do 'real work' in the world was not an argument for religion's invalidation. Religion, he stressed, remained an important area of study for young men, perhaps the most important area of study, in fact, all the more important, given the mechanization of the human and religious spirit under industrial development.

Rather, Newman stressed, philosophy itself and the formulation of the human mind was the most important aspect of education. Newman drew an analogy between the Greek Olympic games, which were not specifically practical exercises for the human body, but exhibited the body in its fullest flowering of excellence for all to see. So philosophy, within the university system similarly allowed the minds of those who study to exhibit the human intellect to its fullest range of prowess, and trained it for more practical modalities of study.

There is something of an inherent tension in some of Newman's arguments, in his essay upon education and the university, however. Newman argued that learning for learning's sake is valuable -- for instance, one should not ask what is the purpose of one's education in monetary and practical terms any more than one asks what is the purpose of lifting weights in the gym. To train the body is the purpose of exertion, and to train the mind is the purpose of the exercise of philosophy within an educational context, rather than to merely convey a vocational skill or to achieve real work in the world. But even the athlete is training for something, not only to excel in an athletic endeavor, but also to have a fitter body for the rigors of life as well as sport. And ultimately, rather than a pure intellectual exercise, the life that Newman sees being prepared for at university is the clerical, theological life of study, which in Newman's religious view does have a 'practical' purpose, even if not a strict role in the capitalist world. Thus Newman, although he may quibble with the monetary price set upon human labor as capital in the capitalist, industrial world of Victorian England, still sees a purpose to learning and the university life -- that of theological preparedness for the vocation of the clergy.

In contrast, Walter Pater, a later proponent of the aesthetic movement, was more apt to argue for the value of learning for learning's sake alone. In his essay, "The Renaissance," Pater stresses the inherent subjectivity of any human being's reaction to a work of art, a subjectivity that has no qualified value, or even necessarily any spiritual value, according to Newman's analysis of theological scruples. Rather, to engage with art is to engage with an individual consciousness across a great divide of history, for no purpose other than enriching the self and soul.

Thus, for Pater, art is located almost entirely out of the social milieu that produced the work, nor must art to have a value possess any particular moral scruples to usefully elevate either the heart or the intellect, as might be assumed when reading Newman's philosophy of education. Rather, art simply needs to speak to the individual's self to be a successful work of art, along Pater's aesthetic philosophy. Pater thus argues even more powerfully against the strong pragmatic and utilitarian bias detectable throughout the Victorian culture, stressing that what is useful and the immediately applicable even on a moral level, or on the level of an intellectual exercise, is not important when aesthetically evaluating a work of art. The individual rather than the practical needs of many is what is important to Pater, in an aesthetic philosophy much enjoyed by the Pre-Raphaelites, a more secular branch of the Oxford Movement of Newman.

It was Matthew Arnold, however, who brought to light the most eviscerating critique of the values of the utilitarian and practical Victorian era, in his delineation of the Hebraic and the Hellenistic in the works of art of his period. Arnold disdained what he saw as the growing philistine element of artistic production, in other words, art produced for potential monetary gain. To produce art that was designed for mass consumption, suggested Arnold, was to devalue the true purpose of art. For Arnold, art must elevate the individual human spirit and the spirit of a nation. What was elevating was not necessarily what was useful and feasible on the marketplace, nor was it art that was necessarily comforting to one's personal ideals. Rather, it was art that fulfilled certain ideas of excellence that met the truest aesthetic criteria for greatness in the artistic sphere.

Arnold wrote against Pater's single-minded stress upon the need for subjective individual apprehension of a work of art, and again brought forth art as an expression of art's importance in setting religious and cultural ideals, much as did Newman in his discussion of a university education. For Newman, art and philosophy was an expression of a culture that ran counter to the industrial world, namely the intellectual and religious life of a university, and a rather cloistered and theologically focused university at that. Arnold wrote against art's service in the name of the British Empire, and the reduction of British cultural values to the merely monetary and the militaristic. In other words, Arnold stood against those values that supposedly could do real work in the world, that responded to the immediate and emotional needs of the masses, and did not conform to timeless aesthetic principles.