‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. This book is about a philosopher who examined his life thoroughly. Anyone who subscribes to this Socratic dictum would be inclined to think of John Stuart Mill's life as thoroughly worthwhile. Elijah Millgram tells a different story: Mill's life was a ‘train wreck’. In fact, Millgram argues that any life structured around a single project is meaningless. As many philosophical lives fit the open-ended, means-end structure of ‘project lives’, the stakes are high. The ‘argument-by-biography’ especially makes this not your run-of-the-mill book.
John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life bears all the marks of a skilled analytic philosopher's hand: carefully structured, closely argued and clearly written. And though its author prioritizes the general reader's rather than the professional's needs, there is never a dull moment in the argument. According to Millgram, contemporary analytic philosophy identifies the ‘project life’, ‘a life that is coextensive (or as close to coextensive as possible) with a single project’ (p. 7), as the blueprint for lives with meaning. However, Millgram argues that project lives are not what they are ‘cracked up to be’. The strong coherence which a single, tightly integrated project demands makes project lives not choice worthy (pp. 13–14).
John Stuart Mill's life offers the perfect test case. Thanks to an extraordinary education, the ‘Greatest Happiness Principle’ fell naturally in its intended place: the keystone of his life's arch. Yet, Millgram claims, Mill paid too great a price in living the utilitarian project. He ‘lived perversely’ (p. 14). Millgram's account of Mill's work covers some familiar ground: moral freedom/unfreedom, liberty of thought and discussion, individuality, justice, and higher pleasures. Millgram also takes up Mill's ‘Association of Ideas’ psychology, originality, character and ethology, and inter alia the partnership with Harriet Taylor Mill. Concurrently, the tensions in Mill's life receive full play in the book. Some expectedly take centre-stage: he was brought up to be the self-assured bearer of the utilitarian torch, allowing it to burn out as he passed into adulthood before looking elsewhere to rekindle the flame; he was scarcely able to ‘keep off pain’, admitting that happiness could only be achieved indirectly; and he complied with authority throughout his life, often deferring to James Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor. Millgram identifies in these and in many other moments of Mill's intellectual biography a pattern of perversion: ‘Mill lived as though to spite his official views, and seems to have done so systematically’ (pp. 29–32).
Figuring out a way to deal with these tensions in Mill's life and work is part of what makes the book's life in focus deeply engrossing. In chapter 4, for example, Millgram argues that Mill's famous ‘crisis in [his] mental history’ is better conceptualized as a profound dissatisfaction with Bentham's performance in the manuscripts the twenty-year-old Mill had whipped into shape in Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827). Given the year of intense labour he spent working on the manuscript, his request that his efforts not be acknowledged is striking. Mill's request is especially conspicuous if we bear in mind, as Millgram reminds us, how much Mill praised Bentham after reading him for the first time: ‘It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion’ (Autobiography (1873), in Collected Works [CW] I.69). For Millgram, the desired anonymity six years later reflects Mill's realization that the utilitarian arch was a very shabby construction. With time, effort, and originality, Millgram goes on to show, the disillusioned young radical built it anew.
A lot happened to Mill during that ‘melancholy winter of 1826–7’, and each event could have triggered Mill's dejection. Could the appointment to a permanent position in the East India Company, under his father, have squashed his dreams of independence while at the same time shutting the door to a career in Parliament? Had he trained so intensely and sacrificed his childhood only to become a clerk? Likewise, Mill's sharp argumentative skill and impressive range of knowledge led to him being labelled in debating societies as a ‘manufactured man’, inauthentic, set to do merely prescribed work and unfeeling. How could Mill gain the respect of his peers when the first book with his name attached to it was a book by Bentham? What is more important, Mill's ‘crisis’ also served a literary purpose in his Autobiography: the incident that ushered Mill into the critical period which allowed the transition to an authentic organic period – stable and harmonious – of philosophical existence. That might explain why another ‘crisis’ roughly a decade later did not make it into the Autobiography. Mill's correspondence around the time of his father's death leads one to think that this might have been as important in his intellectual biography. In any case, it did leave him with a physical memento: a permanent twitch over the eye. All this is to say that as compelling as Millgram's reconstructions often are, they sometimes lack historical nuance. Those with a special interest in Mill might thus find it hard to accept all Millgram's suggestions. And, since much of the book's argumentative force hinges on the interpretation of the fragile coherence of Mill's life and work, they might find it equally hard to accept all of his conclusions.
Millgram also oddly dismisses Mill's notion of an ‘Art of Life’. I say oddly because, first, sections such as ‘Teleology, or the Doctrine of Ends’ and ‘Necessity of an ultimate standard, or first principle of Teleology’ (A System of Logic (1843), CW VIII.949–52) seem pertinent to a book which discusses open-ended, means-end structured lives. Second, the name itself – ‘Art of Life’ – may imply an attempt on Mill's part to draw inspiration from the rich philosophical tradition of the ars vitae, to which the question of meaningful lives is integral (going back to Socrates). Third, the consistency of Mill's utilitarian project is widely accepted thanks to revisionist, mid-twentieth-century interpretations of the ‘Art of Life’. Fourth, the discussion of the ‘Art of Life’ was incorporated in Logic at a period during Mill's life when he was under the authoritative direction of Harriet Mill. And Millgram does use the revisions to Principles of Political Economy (1848) to discuss her influence on Mill (e.g. as regards socialism). Fifth, Millgram dismisses the ‘Art of life’ as one of those tensions which fuel his book's argument:
in what was evidently meant as the segue from the System of Logic to his Utilitarianism, Mill suggests that there is an Art of Life, and that utility (‘the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings’) is its defining goal or ‘general principle.’ If I am right, this is a misstep on his part: Mill does understand an ‘Art’ to be built around a ‘desirable object’ or ‘end to be attained’ (VIII:944, 949, 951). But as we have seen, he also came to understand that what structures a life had better not be any single goal, desirable object, or end. (p. 215 n. 26)
The misstep seems too serious a complication to the argument to be brought up in a note. Perhaps it is more of a lost opportunity: Mill did ‘not mean to assert that the promotion of happiness should be itself the end of all actions, or even of all rules of action. It is the justification, and ought to be the controller, of all ends, but is not itself the sole end’ (Logic, CW VIII.952). This brings to mind James Mill's view of happiness as the ‘grand selecting’ and the ‘grand suggestive’ principle in a coherently structured life (Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), vol. 2, pp. 302–3). This might be another lost opportunity for Millgram's thesis on the younger Mill's enlargement-of-the-utilitarian-creed project.
The ‘Art of Life’ is significant for another reason. For Mill, the ‘Aesthetic’ family of ends of the ‘Art of Life’ includes ideas of beauty, worth, nobility and virtue, which make up the ancient Greek notion of to kalon. Mill did think that the aesthetic dimension was missing from the theory of his utilitarian predecessors. For example, James Mill considered acts to be ‘hurtful or beneficial', ‘moral or immoral’, and ‘virtuous or vicious’, but thought it was ‘only an abuse of language to call them beautiful or ugly’ (Fragment on Mackintosh (1835), p. 263). In contrast, the younger Mill insisted in On Liberty that ‘[a]mong the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself’ (CW XVIII.263). Since the idea of a beautiful character had direct bearing on John Mill's reconfiguration of the utilitarian project, Millgram's analysis seems incomplete.
Mill's aesthetic ideas also come with complications. In 1867, Mill urged the students at the University of St Andrews ‘to idealize, as much as possible, every work we do, and most of all, our own characters and lives’. He argued that we should strive to make our characters and lives a work of art, that is ‘as good as possible, though something less good would have answered the purpose’. Such characters and lives are part of:
the ultimate end from which those studies [i.e. the course of university education Mill had just sketched] take their chief value – that of making you more effective combatants in the great fight which never ceases to rage between Good and Evil, and more equal to coping with the ever new problems which the changing course of human nature and human society present to be resolved. (1867. ‘Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews’, CW XXI.256)
The mention of an ‘ultimate end’ seems to conflict with Millgram's preferred definition of a project life as open-ended. Similarly, the invitation to join in the battle between Good and Evil had religious, not just aesthetic, connotations. As Mill wrote in a letter to Florence Nightingale:
It may be, that the world is a battlefield between a good and a bad power or powers, and that mankind may be capable by sufficiently strenuous cooperation with the good power, of deciding, or at least accelerating, its final victory. I know one man, of great intelligence & high moral principle, who finds satisfaction to his devotional feelings, and support under the evils of life, in the belief of this creed. (23 Sept. 1860, CW XV.709)
In the Autobiography, Mill noted that he heard his father ‘express surprise, that no one revived’ ‘the Manichean theory of a Good and an Evil Principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe’ (CW I.43). Mill's grievances as regards his education's lack of emotional cultivation often obscures the emotional cultivation he did receive, raised as he was on the side of Socrates and Plato, who inspired love for virtue through a ‘stern resolution never to swerve from it’ in their ‘great fight’ against the evils of the commonplace and custom. Contrary to how Mill understood virtuous character, Millgram argues that Mill's life of obedience to duty was a life of coercion: a life of self-conscious imposition of consistency.
To summarize, Millgram expertly balances overall argument with fascinating asides. Mill's life best instantiates the textbook definition of a ‘project life’: all of his achievements ‘contributed, in one way or another, to the very large project that served as the meaning of his life’ (p. 149). Millgram thus tests the merits of one of analytic philosophy's defenses of a meaningful life. As Mill's life was ‘a very quiet tragedy’, Millgram expresses serious doubts about the choice worthiness of project lives. The tensions in and about Mill's life and work, Millgram concludes, strongly suggest that the project life is ‘not an available conception of a coherent life’ (p. 154). Yet, despite the book's depth (sometimes hidden in the numerous and substantial notes), its original thesis might leave those with a special interest in Mill somewhat sceptical. But then again, this is not a book meant primarily for them.
