Victorian Era Term Paper

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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.

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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….....

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