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DANIEL DERONDA, PROFESSOR OF SPINOZA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2016

James Arnett
James Arnett*
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
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Extract

For almost a decade, George Eliot labored at a translation of seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics, and although completed, it never saw the light of day; it was the subject of a petty fight between the proposed publisher, Henry Bohn, and her partner, George Henry Lewes. The result was that for more than a century it was tucked away, first, presumably, in a drawer, and eventually, in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Although critics and scholars have long known that she had completed this work – references abound in letters and journal entries – it wasn't published until 1981, and even then, in an obscure imprint of the Salzburg University press. Copies of this published edition, which is limited to the Ethics and capably annotated by Thomas Deegan, are quite rare and difficult to get ahold of.

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Research Article
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Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 2016, pp. 833 - 854
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

The more knowledge a man has, the better he'll do's work; and feeling's a sort o’ knowledge.

—George Eliot, Adam Bede

Everything depends. . .on the nature affected, and the force that stirs it.

—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

George Eliot and Spinoza: Locating Ethics, Uncovering the Ethics

For almost a decade, George Eliot labored at a translation of seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics, and although completed, it never saw the light of day; it was the subject of a petty fight between the proposed publisher, Henry Bohn, and her partner, George Henry Lewes. The result was that for more than a century it was tucked away, first, presumably, in a drawer, and eventually, in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Although critics and scholars have long known that she had completed this work – references abound in letters and journal entries – it wasn't published until 1981, and even then, in an obscure imprint of the Salzburg University press. Copies of this published edition, which is limited to the Ethics and capably annotated by Thomas Deegan, are quite rare and difficult to get ahold of.

So it should be no surprise that the influence of Spinoza on Eliot has been critically underexamined since the inception of Eliot studies. Critics have foregone a substantial examination of his influence on George Eliot for more reasons than the above, I'd hazard: Spinoza's work is quite difficult to read; he is something of an anomaly even (at least until recently) in histories of philosophy; in spite of attempts to engender interest in his work during the Victorian era, he never quite caught on; and there's simply too much else to catch our eye and imagination in studies of George Eliot's work, which is more apparently preoccupied with other themes.

But George Eliot was not the only Victorian to evince an interest in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Her life partner had come to Spinoza as well, and G. H. Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy recounts a story wherein Lewes remembers hearing about Spinoza's immanent metaphysics in a club in London, although Lewes's interest in Spinoza also stemmed from his biographical research on Goethe. This text also contains some translated fragments of Spinoza's Ethics, as well as a brief biographical account of the philosopher's spectacular life. J. A. Froude was another partisan of Spinoza, and his work on Spinoza appeared in the Westminster Review in 1855 (the very journalistic organ that Eliot herself oversaw briefly). However, a full English translation of Spinoza's works did not appear until the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 1

There are many compelling arguments to explain the slow growth of popularity for Spinoza in the nineteenth century. As George Levine notes in The Realistic Imagination, the mid-to-late Victorian period saw a waning in the trust in God as a divine and omnipotent arbiter of human life.Footnote 2 As a result, and J. Hillis Miller concurs, Victorian thinkers and writers turned increasingly towards explorations of the material life, and sought ethical guidance in their fellow men, not in faith or dogma.Footnote 3

We need, however, to take a more rigorous look at the intellectual labor of George Eliot. We treasure her, of course, as a consummate Victorian realist novelist. But fiction was effectively the last movement in a long career that was deeply intellectual and wide-ranging, and one of her earliest endeavors was the work of translating philosophy: Strauss and Feuerbach, from the German; Spinoza, from the Latin, Hebrew and Greek. Key elements of her biography – her disavowal of her childhood religion and estrangement from her father as a result; her nontraditional partnership with George Henry Lewes; her fierce determination to support herself by the labor of her pen and mind – all originate with the work of translating philosophy; we would be remiss to ignore the deeply philosophical face of Eliot's work.Footnote 4

Recently, some few scholars have begun backtracking to the original texts, looking to trace out the influence of Spinoza, rendered subterranean and evasive after the intervention of subsequent critics preferring to mark out instead the impact of Feuerbach, Comte, Mill, Adam Smith, and others. Few studies of Spinoza and Eliot exist, although what does exist opens promising avenues of inquiry; Armstrong's essay in the new Companion to George Eliot is a particularly promising new addition to this field.Footnote 5 Her essay stresses, specifically, the confluence of extant work on Eliot and sympathy, and Eliot and the emotions, and grounds both analyses anew in Spinoza's philosophy. Sounding a note of caution, however, Nemoianu reminds us to tread carefully: “Eliot's agreement with Spinoza is not a passive reproduction of his thought,” but they are “mutually illuminating” (65).

The apex of this trend, but one that marks a fertile space for future scholarly work and speculation, is Gatens's Reference Gatens2009 essay “The Art and Philosophy of George Eliot.” In this essay, she strives, from the disciplinary perspective of a philosopher, to seek out the expression of philosophy in the work of the novelist, desiring not to “treat her novels as valuable raw materials that the discerning philosophical eye can convert into capital,” but rather to claim George Eliot's novels as a “new form of philosophical writing” (74). In claiming this, Gatens is repeating a commentary first offered by Leslie Stephen in 1902.Footnote 6 He makes the allied claim that inasmuch as George Eliot “had reflected long and seriously with all her very remarkable intellectual power upon some of the greatest problems which can occupy the mind,” she was a philosopher (115). And “what poor novelist,” he queries, “[can] forget all the thoughts that have occurred to him in his philosophical capacity, and to write as though he had no more speculations about the world or human nature than the most frivolous of his readers? If his ‘philosophy’ has really modified his own microcosm, can he drop it when he describes the world?” (113). In making such a claim, he is pointing towards what Gatens also realizes – that Eliot's commitments to fiction are a way of embedding and representing philosophy in a form not typically taken by the discipline. Gatens takes seriously that George Eliot's novels work out philosophy both inside of the content of the novel, and also in the form that the novel takes – literary realism is an ethical form.Footnote 7

Martha Nussbaum, in Love's Knowledge, also reaches the conclusion (vis-à-vis Henry James) that the novel can be a way to read, practically speaking, for ethics.Footnote 8 This is an intuitive conclusion sensitively reached: we read, Nussbaum argues, because we understand the implicit connection between the imaginative gymnastics spurred by fictional representation and our own, real, material lives. She proceeds to demonstrate, “Responding to a novel of Henry James, the reader may often implicitly conclude: ‘If a person were to be in circumstances sufficiently similar to those this character is in here, the same words and actions would be warranted.’” (38) Nussbaum is underscoring the conclusion that many critics and readers of Victorian realism have remarked upon – upon the moral, didactic, and ethical thrust of the mode.Footnote 9 Given George Eliot's philosophical commitments, however, it stands to reason that her commitments to the ethics of realism were embedded with the ethical philosophy she spent so long translating; and so to look at the influence of Spinoza on her realist fiction seems crucial.

Throughout her letters, George Eliot remains committed to the pedagogical importance of her fiction. Pervasive in these letters is a refrain: she wants to “writ[e] what will stir men's hearts to sympathy” (George Eliot Letters 2: 353). Studies of George Eliot's sympathy abound, as it is so apparently the cornerstone of her aesthetic credo. It is a critical commonplace that, in some measure or form, her novels aim to excite the sympathy of the reader by portraying the coming-into-sympathy of her characters – or their failure to. D. Rae Greiner remarks that, “Critics never tire of talking about sympathy in Eliot,” but “that wealth of talk is disproportionate to the narrow fund of sympathy represented in her novels, especially Middlemarch. While the word itself shows up some thirty-odd times in one form or another, successful sympathy. . .is remarkably hard to come by in that novel” (300).Footnote 10 In the oft-quoted passage from Middlemarch regarding the squirrel's heartbeat, we are too egoistical and imperfect to live in perfect sympathy and harmony with the world around us, although nevertheless she embeds in her novel an exhortation for us to understand the other as an “equivalent centre of self” (243; bk. 2, ch. 20).Footnote 11 Astute readers of Feuerbach and Eliot have pointed toward the intersection of his philosophy – which, in rejecting the transcendent, anthropomorphized notion of God, insists instead on a materialism grounded in the encounter between the “I” and the “Thou” – and traced her insistence on sympathy to this philosophical text. I would like to argue, however, that it has, as well (if not more so) a debt to Spinoza's affective ethics.Footnote 12

Although not in the purview of this essay to rehearse the entirety of Spinoza's philosophical system, it is necessary to consider four cornerstone aspects of his philosophy.Footnote 13 Primary is Spinoza's concept of immanence, which, he argues, is the equivalence of all things as materially existing, and all things, moreover, as modes or expressions of one unified substance, which he calls God.Footnote 14 Because we are all, as humans, coequal in our substance and materiality, he can develop an ethics that describes our necessary interdependence and impingement – a fact that George Eliot especially takes up. We are all, inasmuch as we are living and human, striving to persist, a drive he labels our conatus; “Every thing, as far as in it lives, strives to persevere in its existence,” Spinoza explains (Ethics III.P6).Footnote 15 This striving “is nothing but the actual essence of that thing” (Ethics III.P7). Our conatus is that which essentially defines us; we want nothing more than to continue living. Moreover, because the mind is material, as are ideas, in Spinoza's framework, and as such, part of the fabric of our immanent materiality, our mind “strives, as far as it can, to imagine those things which increase or subserve the power of action of the body” (Ethics III.P12). In Spinoza's vision of immanence, because we are all interconnected, and because we all have the same essential goal, we are forever acting in the best interest of our own perseverance. This is not to say that we don't make mistakes, or on occasion act against our survival. We do not do so intentionally, but because we have mistaken or “inadequate” ideas about what will best suit us.

These actions are crucial for Spinoza, the materialist; and he explains that by “emotions” he understands “those affections of the body by which its power of acting is increased or diminished, is assisted or restrained” (Ethics III.D3). In more recent translations of his work, the more capacious term “affect” has been substituted for Eliot's choice of “emotions.” “Affect” is the word for the ways in which our actions register – that is, in the effect that they have, first and foremost on us, and also, inevitably, on others. Because we seek to persist, we act in our own self-interest and do what will aid us, even if we are mistaken about our actions’ actual consequences. So we are all, to use Deleuze's predominating image, objects on a plane; we are all attempting to move forward, and in doing so, taking actions that will propel us forward (in an “indefinite time,” Spinoza claims, ratifying the physics of the image [Ethics III.P8]). But there are other bodies crowding this plane, and our actions are not taken in a vacuum; the actions that others take have an impact on our ability to act further, inhibiting or enabling us, and doing so with an astonishing ambivalence; we can be inhibited from acting badly, or encouraged to act badly; we can be inhibited from acting well, and encouraged to act well. Our conatus remains the same: we ever pursue that which we believe is best for us, that which will best permit us to continue acting – even if we are working from inadequate ideas of the world.

This is the foundation of Spinoza's Ethics: that we are bodies that impinge on other bodies, and, insofar as we are always striving to persist, we act; when we act, our actions have ramifications and consequences that impinge on others’ ability to act and persist. Hence, Spinoza argues, we must understand the effects and consequences of our actions. When we act on bad information or inadequate ideas of the world as-it-really-is, then we disempower ourselves, or disempower others – and we do do these things: we are imperfect, erring creatures, a fact that George Eliot recognizes over and over again.Footnote 16 Hence, in order to act in ways that serve our interest, we must strive to understand the world as it really is. There are three orders of knowledge,Footnote 17 Spinoza claims, and we are always acting according to one of these levels. The first is inadequate knowledge, or knowledge gleaned from our senses, abstracted experience, hearsay, rumors, signs, or impressions. This knowledge is, in a way, “mutilated, confused, or [in an] unorderly manner [for the intellect]” (Ethics II.P40.S2). The second order of knowledge is adequate, deriving from “adequate common notions and ideas which we posses of the properties of things,” or reason (Ethics II.P40.S2). This knowledge also consists of deductions of cause from effect or conclusion from premises, the operations of rational thought (Wolfson, ctd. in Atkins 59). The third kind of knowledge is that to which we should aspire, inasmuch as it is “blessedness,” consists of “intuitive cognition,” and proceeds from “an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to an adequate cognition of the essence of things” (Ethics II.P40.S2). This last knowledge, in so many words, is a knowledge of the world as it really, essentially, is. The first sort of knowledge is the sole cause of falsity, and as the cause of falsity, is the motivator of our worst actions (Ethics II.P41); the second and third levels of knowledge are what permit us to act in our interest (Ethics II.P42). The third kind is something we will know when we have it: “He who has a true idea at the same time knows himself to have a true idea, and cannot doubt of its truth” (Ethics II.P43). Atkins asserts in keeping with standard readings of Spinoza that “knowledge of the third type is not attached to the intellect; it is intuited, directly felt” (60).

We must seek to augment and refine our knowledge and we must work to clarify and remedy our mistaken ideas. In doing so, we progress, at least, to rational thought – and from rational thought, we can engender actions that empower us; and from these actions, we learn to recognize that which is not just good for us, but good for others – and good for others in a way that is also good for us. This requires, although Spinoza gives short shrift to it, a certain kind of labor, if only of the trial-and-error variety. Adam Bede recognizes this labor, and also recognizes that the third sort of knowledge to which we should aspire is the purest form of knowledge: “The more knowledge a man has, the better he'll do's work; and feeling's a sort o’ knowledge” (Adam Bede 556; ch. 52).

Thus, we look to Spinoza's ethics for its eudaimonistic aspects: how does he encourage us to go about increasing our knowledge, and so improving our lots and the lots of others? Nimrod Aloni points out that in the silent center of Spinoza's Ethics is a eudaimonistic principle; it is silent, though, because “Spinoza is rightfully not considered an educator: he was not a teacher by profession, as a philosopher he never wrote a treatise on education, and one can hardly find references to his writings in academic courses on the history and philosophy of education” (531). Spinoza is clearly concerned with, Aloni asserts, the question of how best to live, and how to live in order to achieve blessedness; Spinoza admits that “It is therefore of the first importance in life to perfect the intellect as far as possible, and in this one point consists the supreme felicity or blessedness of man” (Ethics IV.Appendix). Indeed, “Spinoza's reluctance – conscious or unconscious – to deal with educational topics in his writing is perplexing,” considering how central a role our knowledge plays in his Ethics (Aloni 531). Perplexing, that is, until one considers the geometric structure of Spinoza's Ethics; this proof structure, because it requires sequential reading for the cumulative unfolding of the subject matter, enacts in its formal relationship to the reader the education of the reader, and in educating the reader in the ethics, is begetting a ethical subject. Eliot's investment in the realist novel as the ethical genre in which the reading subject can be best improved, is joining Spinoza in specifically yoking the form of philosophy with its desired result.

George Eliot, in addition to imagining the purpose of realism is to educate our sympathy, grapples with the core Spinozist tenet that to increase one's ethical efficacy in the world, one must struggle to find the right action – and, by extension, for the writer to depict it in order to empower others to act likewise. “Never to beat and bruise one's wings against the inevitable but to throw the whole force of one's soul towards the achievement of some possible better, is the brief heading that need never be changed, however often the chapter of more special rules may have to be re-written. I use that summary every day, and could not live without repeating it to myself,” George Eliot explains in a letter (GEL 4: 499). Implicitly, then, we must seek to improve our reason, and there is no more traditional space to do so than in education – and because George Eliot recognizes the novel as a pedagogic space, one that influences and informs our feelings, she also metareflectively includes scenes of education in her novels.Footnote 18

In drawing a distinction between the affectus (“the force of an affecting body”) and the affectio (“the impact it leaves on the one affected”), Megan Watkins argues that “it is this capacity of affect to be retained, to accumulate, to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities that is of interest. . . . It suggests that we grapple with [affect] as a pedagogic process, whereby a sense of self is formed through engagement with the world and others and the affects this generates” (269-70). So, even as ethics is communicated in the pedagogic relationship between the educator and the student, whereby knowledge is increased formally, it is also formed passively by participating in the world, and collecting and organizing those experiences, and acknowledging the impact and residue of these experiences. And, circularly, we must recognize the impact and residue of the interpersonal educative encounter. Daniel Deronda recognizes this transaction when he remarks that “Everything depends. . .on the nature affected, and the force that stirs it” (Daniel Deronda 711; bk. 8, ch. 58).

Pragmatically, George Eliot believes that in order for education to occur and to be efficacious, there must be an encounter between a subject and a stimulus (a knowledge, an experience, a revelation, an idea, an educator).Footnote 19 But more than that, the subject must be willing to receive, process, or internalize the knowledge conveyed; this constitutes the difference between Gwendolen Harleth and Rosamond Vincy. And so, from the outset, Eliot works to imbue Gwendolen with a porosity and a receptivity that renders her a student; she is worn down by circumstance, like Dorothea, and forced to reconsider her dearly-cultivated egoism. In Chapter 36, Gwendolen, having married Grandcourt, comes into an awareness of the tremendous misstep she's made, which leaves her open to the education she solicits from Daniel Deronda.

Professing Spinoza

It is only in her last novel that the reader sees the emergence of a real Spinozist praxis of sympathy emerge in her novels. If Felix Holt, the Radical enjoins that education is the means by which the selfish, egoistic human can achieve an awareness of others (and further describes the continuum between ethical, interpersonal sympathy and political ethics), and Middlemarch demonstrates that that awareness carries with it the imperative to action, this metaphorized or performed ethic of sympathy is explicitly expressed in Chapter 36 of Daniel Deronda. In Daniel Deronda, the ethic of sympathy becomes praxis – philosophy married to action. Chapter 36 gives specific content to the practice of this ethic of sympathy, prescribing for Gwendolen, and by extension, the reader, praxis.

In Eliot's application of Spinoza, sympathy is not about an unknowable, absolute other nor about the pre-Freudian mechanisms of projection, but rather about a phenomenological orientation towards, and responsiveness towards, others.Footnote 20 Compounding this is a respect for others that is grounded reflexively in our own, unavoidable egoism: we do for others what we would like done for ourselves, and we do for others that which allows us to do. Eliot frames out, in the intermittent dialogue between Gwendolen and Deronda, the ways in which a praxis of sympathy, in assisting, respecting, and engaging others, actually reflects such benefits back to us by means of the expansion of our knowledge. Sympathy, insofar as it is the recognition of “equivalent centres of self,” is the burgeoning knowledge of the mimetic alterity of the other – that the other, like us, is a mode of expression of the same substance (in Spinozist terms) but is also an other, not us but copresent. Grounded inside of immanence, sympathy is about expanding our knowledge, which in turn expands our ability to affect and be affected – which aids our conatus and allows us to progress toward a blessed knowledge of the world.

Gwendolen is the primary recipient of education in the novel, in spite of the many explicit scenes of instruction involving the Meyrick children, Mirah Lapidoth and Herr Klesmer, or Deronda himself at the hands of Mordecai. Education comes to those who seek to ethically evolve, and their teachers, literal teachers, assume the role and responsibility of teaching their pupils.

Whatever innocence Gwendolen can claim for her motives out of the dwelling-place of the first order of mistaken knowledge, she is a haunted woman. On the one hand, she is plagued by the “evil eye” Daniel Deronda cast upon her while she was gambling at Leubronn. In a novel full of repetitions, it should not be surprising that Gwendolen perpetually revisits the scene in her mind's eye and in conversation with others. Daniel Deronda is clearly at the heart of the novel, serving as its ethical compass. The opening scene, in which the narrator walks us through the thick, hanging smog of the gambling hall, directs us implicitly to the gaze of Daniel Deronda: “Was she beautiful or not beautiful? And what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?” (7; bk. 1, ch. 1). The ambiguity of the scene only vaguely resolves: the question of her good or evil rests only tenuously on the side of evil: she was “probably evil,” not certainly evil.Footnote 21

The larger result of this speculative passage is that Deronda's glance is tempered by an “inward debate” which “gave to his eyes a growing expression of scrutiny, tending farther and farther away from the glow of mingled undefined sensibilities forming admiration” (10; bk. 1, ch. 1). Scrutiny, in itself a neutral expression, in this figure only “tends” away from the ambiguously determined complex of affects that compose a feeling of “admiration.” His glance is ultimately undetermined, only seeming to drift in the direction of not-admiring, in itself a vexing rehearsal of indeterminacy. But his neutral gaze transfixes Gwendolen, and arrests her in a moment that she comes to revisit over and over again:

her eyes met Deronda's, and instead of averting them as she would have desired to do, she was unpleasantly conscious that they were arrested: how long? The darting sense that he was measuring her and looking down on her as an inferior, that he was of a different quality from the human dross around her, that he felt himself in a region outside and above her, around her, and was examining her as a specimen of the lower order, roused a tingling resentment which stretched the moment with conflict. (10; bk. 1, ch. 1)

She is only guessing at the content of his gaze, reading intuitively the conflict registered in the narrator's depiction of his gaze. Gwendolen is clearly riddled with guilt and anxiety in Leubronn, haunted in the wake of learning of Lydia Glasher's claim to Grandcourt. She has fled to Leubronn because she has come to the conclusion, “I believe all men are bad, and I hate them,”Footnote 22 and as she begs of her mother, “don't interfere with me. If you have ever had any trouble in your own life, remember it and don't interfere with me. If I want to be miserable, let it be by my own choice” (154-55; bk. 2, ch. 14).

It is in this misanthropic misery that Gwendolen stands imperiously at the roulette-table, and she is plagued by Deronda's gaze “like a pressure which begins to be torturing.” But though “many were now watching her. . .the sole observation that she was conscious of was Deronda's,” and after staking all of her money on one last, lost placement, she “turned resolutely with her face towards Deronda and looked at him,” only to register the “smile of irony in his eyes as their glances met” (11; bk. 1, ch. 1). We come to know Deronda well enough to know that the “irony” in his eyes is meant to be gentle, and not an absolute judgment or reproof: his later redemption of Gwendolen's turquoise necklace ratifies this. “Besides his superciliousness and irony, it was difficult to believe that he did not admire her spirit as well as her person,” the narrator admits, but “In Gwendolen's habits of mind it had been taken for granted that she knew what was admirable and that she herself was admired” (11-12; bk. 1, ch. 1). Her reception of Deronda's gaze complicates this preconceived notion of Gwendolen's. The narrator's underscoring of Gwendolen's “habits of minds” reminds us that her orientation toward the world is rigid and unwavering, that this belief in her attraction was the aggregate of a series of experiences and perspectives that had concretized itself into something egoistically unshakable, invoking the second order of knowledge that is composed of (merely) “adequate common notions and ideas we possess of the properties of things” (Ethics II.P40.S2). But Gwendolen is misreading Deronda's superciliousness and irony: Deronda does not feel himself superior to Gwendolen in particular, but rather to the vice of gambling; moreover, the tenor of the irony of his smile is not reproving, as Gwendolen reads it.Footnote 23 But both readings of his glance produce the same end, which is to establish Deronda as an ethical compass in the text, and the power of Deronda's glance is like the electric current rippling under Will Ladislaw's skin, emitting shocks. So it is that the ingrained habit of being admired “had received a disagreeable concussion, and reeled a little, but was not easily to be overthrown” (12; bk. 1, ch. 1).

It remains, though, that the “concussion” Gwendolen's fragile self-involvement has received has a lasting effect on her – the impact of his gaze leaves a scar on Gwendolen's psyche and erodes the remnants of her pride. She cannot shake the memory of his seeming-rebuke. In the moment it had struck her as an “evil eye” (10; bk. 1, ch. 1), a condensation of the gaze as a perversion of the very ambivalence registered in the narrator's question about Gwendolen's character in the opening scenes. Later, in the company of Grandcourt, she broaches the subject but backs away from the implications of her reading of his gaze: in this moment, instead of attributing moral condemnation to it, she teases it into a superstitious omen, merely having affected her luck. She cannot, in Grandcourt's presence, acknowledge that Deronda had prefigured the very guilt that persists under Gwendolen's demeanor in the wake of her having accepted Grandcourt's proposal. She is vexed by her projection of Deronda's presupposition about her character, but can no longer pretend that it was unmerited; by dislocating the gaze into the superstitious figure of an “evil eye,” she attributes to it a prediction of her later moral stumbles. Spinoza reminds us in the Tractatus that superstition resides in the lowest level of knowledge – that which is gleaned from prophecy, projection, and supposition. Accordingly, the gaze has crystallized into an introjected accusation, and she has turned the gaze in on herself; lacking moral guidance from all quarters, and accustomed so long to the force of her own “habits of mind,” she finds herself for once and definitively on the wrong side of a moral quandary.

Deronda's “penetrating” gaze carries with it a deeper force for Gwendolen, who intuits from this grave expression a “disturbing kind of form and expression which threatens to affect opinion – as if one's standards were somehow wrong” (330-31; bk. 4, ch. 29). Deronda is an inadvertent instructor of opinion and behavior; he cannot help but sway the beliefs and inclinations of those he gazes upon. Gwendolen feels simultaneously confirmed and challenged by this otherwise neutral expression: it remarkably has no adjectival modifiers other than “penetrating,” which denotes only the force of his stare. It sparks in her an “uneasy longing to be judged by Deronda with unmixed admiration – a longing which had had its seed in her first resentment at his critical glance” (331; emphasis added). Gwendolen is unsettled by his glance, but in such a way as spurs her to desire his admiration, which, we can infer from her interpretation of his gaze as accusatory, means that she desires to become better in his estimation – which would require her, she feels, to become better.

Throughout, Deronda espouses an ethic of non-judgment consistent with Eliot's larger narrative-ethical arc. In her earlier works, in Adam Bede especially, she toils to decommission the judgment and presumptuous moral high-ground of the reader. “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character,” the narrator of Adam Bede advises the reader (342; ch. 29). Likewise, Mr. Irwine – the test-case for Eliot's defense of flawed, imperfect characters – warns Adam Bede that “It is not for us men to apportion the shares of moral guilt and retribution. We find it impossible to avoid mistakes even in determining who has committed a single criminal act, and the problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed, is one that might well make us tremble to look into it” (460; ch. 41). Gilles Deleuze implicitly concurs with Eliot's reading of the rigorous absence of a transcendent Good and Evil in Spinoza: the “Ethics overthrows the system of judgment” (23). It is this which demarcates secular ethics from deist morality – a fact that Eliot adheres to. So it is that “the opposition of values (Good-Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence” (Deleuze 23). The axis of good-evil is unseated and replaced by a discernment of that which is good for us, and that which is bad for us – an evaluative model that enjoins us to recognize that which inhibits us or empower us, mirroring Eliot's intellectual evolution from her earliest Christian moralizing to her mature endorsement of Spinoza's ethics.

We are not to leap to judgment. Indeed, in a move typical of her final novel, Eliot eschews equivocation and instead directly expresses this ethic of non-judgment; as Deronda says “with his usual directness of gaze – a large-eyed gravity, innocent of any intention,” “I was sorry for it [for the condemnation Gwendolen is interpreting]. I am not aware that I told you of my objection” (332; bk. 4, ch. 29). Crucially, Deronda's gaze is “innocent of any intention,” but he nevertheless repeats the look from which Gwendolen recoils. Spinoza remarks that “The free man never acts with deceit, but always with fidelity” (Ethics IV.P72); he has no intent to lead her astray, but rather cannot help but mean to convey truth, not judgment. The narrator nevertheless confirms the power of Deronda's gaze:

His eyes had a peculiarity which has drawn many men into trouble; they were of a dark yet mild intensity, which seemed to express a special interest in every one on whom he fixed them, and might easily help to bring on him those claims which ardently sympathetic people are often creating in the minds of those who need help. In mendicant fashion, we make the goodness of others a reason for exorbitant demands on them. That sort of effect was penetrating Gwendolen. (332; bk. 4, ch. 29)

Those men who are organically and naturally good have no control over the interpreted effects of their gazes, as the narrator explains. There is a real ambivalence in the description of his gaze: he has a “dark yet mild intensity,” an image that first suggests the force of moral condemnation (“dark”) but which is mitigated or undone by its reduction (“mild”) and then once more emphasized (as “intensity”). Ambivalence is not sustainable in the minds of those compromised by egoism. Instead, they divine in such an ambivalent look an “ardent sympathy” that will serve to ease their minds. Indeed, according to the logic of the passage, Gwendolen is helpless to want to be judged by Deronda: she looks to receive the imputed accusation she projects into the gaze by way of his apparent sympathy. Spinoza describes Gwendolen effectively when he describes the pain felt by holding oneself up to the admirable actions and natures of others; “he [the subject] will be still more depressed in proportion as he believes himself to be inferior to others.” (Ethics IV.P57.S). This pain is rooted in Spinoza's definition of envy as admiration excited by the knowledge of another's ethical superiority: we become “mendicant.” Inasmuch as another presents himself as an arbiter of greater ethical knowledge, the envious subject will experience her own actions as “peculiar.”

Deronda's inherent sympathy is here stressed: it is a faculty that he has by nature, but which he has, as it were, also inadvertently cultivated. Deronda's sympathy is not pity, either; on pity, Spinoza remarks, “[pity] in a man who lives according to reason, is in itself [bad] and useless,” because he knows truly “that all things flow from the necessity of divine nature, and comes to pass according to eternal laws and rules of nature” (Ethics IV.P50).Footnote 24 By this time, of course, the reader knows of his self-sacrifice for Hans Meyrick, and his rescue of Mirah Lapidoth, two acts that Deronda unconsciously perpetrates because of the force of his innate goodness. Readers should not despair, however; even though Deronda has these qualities naturally as a result of his “ardently affectionate nature” and “inborn lovingness” (171; bk. 2, ch. 16), we readers have learned that even where these qualities are improperly formed at birth, they can be learned and cultivated. Indeed, as Spinoza remarks, “man strives to do nothing except what can follow from his actual nature,” even as “education encourages [one's] tendency” (Ethics III.P55S). Deronda has no desire to adjudicate or judge Gwendolen's behavior, but cannot help it – he has no wish to proclaim her “evil,” but instead works through Socratic dialogue to improve her knowledge of the world, and from that, her ethical efficacy.Footnote 25

Deronda's embrace of Gwendolen's interpellation, he begins to accept the vocation with which he later becomes associated – that desire, voiced at an early age as the desire to become a “Pericles or Washington,” not a “Porson or Leibniz” (173; bk. 2, ch. 16), the desire to lead by example instead of settling into the aloof pedantry of the classicist or philosopher.Footnote 26 The interpellation is internalized before it is, at the end of the novel, presumably projected outwards into the slot of his vocation – to found a Zion in Palestine. But as Roberts points out in Eliot's letter to Sophia Hennell, “I think ‘Live and teach’ should be a proverb as well as ‘Live and learn’” (GEL 1: 242). To this end, Carl Rosenberg is closer to the mark when he describes Daniel Deronda as a crypto-psychoanalyst, imbued with those traits that Freud was to elevate to professional requirements – empathy, sympathetic listening, responsivity, consolation, compassion, all “coupled with a satisfaction which derives from helping her redeem herself and reestablish her sense of having meaningful goals” (261).

Spinoza admits that “glory is not repugnant to reason; on the contrary, it may spring from it” (Ethics IV.P58).Footnote 27 Their desire to become more esteemable creatures, especially in the eyes of those they recognize to be ethically advanced, is an extensively reasonable desire. And, as Spinoza points out of the ethical subject, “The good which a man desires and loves for himself he will love more constantly is he sees that others love the same thing; therefore he will strive that others may love it” (Ethics IV.P37). Deronda implicitly resolves, out of his expansive sympathy, to be the educator that Gwendolen seeks: “The peculiarities of Deronda's nature had been acutely touched by the brief incidents and words which made the history of his intercourse with Gwendolen” (413; bk. 5, ch. 35). Nemoianu affirms this: “In Deronda's periodic encounters with Gwendolen Harleth, he is put in the position of moral exemplar or moral educator, roles which require him to take his abstract understanding of the necessity that governs human affairs and see it articulated and applied in the concrete immanence of a particular life” (75).

Along these lines, Deronda's conversations with Gwendolen become freighted with lessons; instead of disavowing the pedantic impulse read into his bearing, he begins to embrace the role. When Gwendolen proclaims that she finds fault with the world for being dull, he responds that “what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could any one find an intense interest in life?” (411; bk. 5, ch. 35). Gwendolen accepts the criticism, but prods Deronda, asking him if he ever simply “hates” people; he responds generously, “We are often standing in each other's way when we can't help it. I think it is stupid to hate people on that ground” (412; bk. 5, ch. 35). Deronda is patiently Spinozist; Spinoza was not a misanthrope but a realist when he concedes that most men are selfish and egoistic; it is with regret that he announces this is so, but also with charity – for he proceeds to systematically draft the means by which men can cast off that egoism. Hate, moreover, is disempowering, and so Deronda rationalizes the emotion away, preferring something akin to charity, which although imperfect, permits himself and others to evolve. Spinoza argues that “hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred,” which thus renders the emotion mutually disempowering (Ethics IV.P46). Gwendolen is testing Deronda's moral fiber: she tries to corner him into a confession of ill will, of judgment. Deronda parries by responding to her imputation that there is no sense in hating those who unwittingly do wrong: it is “stupid” to hate such people when they are acting out what they believe their own best interest is.

What Deronda is describing is an education that is praxis – specifically, in this case, with the interpolation of the “sentiments and affections” into the material of intellectual ideas, a Spinozist praxis. Ideas are fruitless if they are not yoked to action; if they are not acted upon, then they are not, as it were, either affective or effective; moreover, action must be discerned and developed from knowledge or experience. Deronda explain that praxis is the most important objective: “To delight in doing things because our fathers did them is good if it shuts out nothing better; it enlarges the range of affection – and affection is the broadest basis of good in life” (417; bk. 5, ch. 35). Here “affection” is not invoked in an abstract sense as a stand-in for “affect,” but rather expands into meaning good will and care. These positive affects, as Spinoza repeatedly notes, increase our perfection – which in turn increase our ability to know the world as it is, augmenting our blessedness. “The mind can undergo great changes, and pass at one time to a higher at another to a lower degree of perfection. . .by pleasure, therefore, I shall understand. . .that passion by which the mind passes to a higher degree of perfection” (Ethics III.P11S), and, as he notes in the opening section, “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing” (II.D6).Footnote 28 As we strive to increase our affection for others, we increase our joy; by increasing our joy, we increase our perfection – we augment our blessed knowledge of the world, and also increase, in so many words, our materiality. Joy – conceived of as a care for others – invoked by Deronda as a way to substantiate Gwendolen, to pull her from the paralyzing, disempowering morass of self-pity and self-indulgence; after all, Spinoza argues that self-pity is damaging, as pity itself is damaging and self-deprecation is a vicious cycle that invokes envy and hatred, which are compositely inhibiting. Deronda, in this passage, parrots the Spinoza directly, and the literary confirms the philosophical.

Gwendolen, therefore, entreats Deronda, “You must tell me then what to think and what to do; else why did you not let me go on doing as I liked and not minding? If I had gone on gambling I might have won again, and I might have got not to care for anything else. You would not let me do that. Why shouldn't I do as I like, and not mind? Other people do” (445; bk. 5, ch. 36). Here Gwendolen admits, finally, the subduing power of his gaze - unintentional and involuntary as it is – to check her selfish passions. She beggars from Deronda the absolute authority imbued in an educator, and considers herself helpless in his sway. Her egoism and passionate self-involvement, she considers, is a typical enough mode; other people do as they like, so why shouldn't she? She is invoking the latent pragmatism of Spinoza's Ethics, predicated as it is on the practical assumption that most men operate at the lowest register of ethical action, consumed by the mistaken pursuit of their imagined self-interest. Here we might recall the difficulty of parsing Spinoza by invoking Eliot in her letters: Spinoza “is saying what all the world already knows by rote” (GEL 1: 321). Deronda's response is to stress the higher duty of selfless action; one way to transcend the self-reinforcing egoism of imagining everyone else as selfish as one is is to accept the burden of acting more ethically than others. To do so, even, is a circuitous appeal to the other's ego, as Deronda cannily knows. “I don't believe you would ever get not to mind. . . . If it were true that baseness and cruelty made an escape from pain, what difference would that make to people who can't be quite base or cruel? Idiots escape some pain; but you can't be an idiot” (445; bk. 5, ch. 36). He acknowledges that Gwendolen is tacitly admitting, in seeking his instruction, that she is pained by having done wrong: his speech is a reminder that the conversation could not have occurred at all without the pain of conscience's pangs. She is no idiot because she feels pained by her egoism.

Accordingly, Deronda generates a list of actions in response to Gwendolen's entreaty: “Then tell me what better I can do.” To wit, he responds with a conscious grounding in materialism: “Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action – something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot.” (446; bk. 5, ch. 36). The list cycles through a dialectic of observation and reflection; the first, considered in light of Eliot's Feuerbach, is concerned with engaging the activity of the senses – “look[ing] on other lives besides your own.”Footnote 29 Spinoza and Feuerbach are here allied insofar as the activity of looking is turned on one's neighbors, in an effort to establish the shared ground of immanence and species-being. The next step is to translate the act of observation into direct action, that is, to “care” about others, and in considering what is best for those who suffer, to reactivate one's conatus – that instinctual desire to strive toward one's perfection – in light of the knowledge gleaned from others’ lots.

At the moment when Deronda prescribes action, the dialogic quality of their conversation becomes dialectical. Gwendolen worries that, in response to Deronda's evolving prescription that he implicitly considers her selfish and ignorant, but embracing the dialectical interpellation that has begotten this dialogue, Deronda can now safely vouch that “[She] will not go on being selfish and ignorant” (446; bk. 5, ch. 36). By virtue of this dialogue, Gwendolen's knowledge is necessarily increased; this increased knowledge imputes to Gwendolen a necessary self-change. She has crossed the dialectical threshold, and is in the realm of revolutionary self-change. Marx argues in the third Thesis on Feuerbach, “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice” (Tucker 144). As Eliot notes in Adam Bede, “The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of a faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength: we can no more return to a narrower sympathy, than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula” (577; ch. 54). Feeling is, after all, a highly-prized sort of knowledge: it is an intuitive knowledge, the third and best sort of knowledge that produces blessedness.

When, the next day, Deronda returns to reconvene their lesson, Gwendolen rehearses the lesson of the previous day: “You said that I could do many things. Tell me again. What should you do – what should you feel, if you were in my place?” (449; emphasis added; bk. 5, ch. 36). Gwendolen has internalized the lesson of sympathy, but perversely; it consists of recognizing the other not as the self, but as an other with an equally important claim to self.Footnote 30 Gwendolen's formulation turns the lesson on its head in a productive dialectical rebuttal. To wit, Deronda's response enigmatically contains precisely this lesson – it turns the mirror of “equivalent centres of self” back onto Gwendolen: “I should feel something of what you feel – deep sorrow” (450; bk. 5, ch. 36).Footnote 31 She is moved by the desperation of her inability, now locked in the inextricable bind of marriage, to make amends to those she has hitherto neglected or rejected, and her anxiety is framed out in her desire for forward momentum, for countervailing action. Deronda sympathizes,

That is the bitterest of all – to wear a yoke of our own wrongdoing. But if you submitted to that, as men submit to maiming or a lifelong incurable disease? – and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort towards a good that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common. There are many examples. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may well make us long to save other lives from being spoiled. (450; bk. 5, ch. 36)

Deronda's response is to confirm her forward momentum, and to prescribe counterbalancing action to atone for past wrongs. This is a repetition of a passage in Adam Bede, wherein the narrator urges, “Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy – the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love” (532; ch. 50). Deronda has internalized this lesson – “Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light,” stressing the means by which suffering or sorrow can be translated into benevolence by the labor of sympathy (452; bk. 5, ch. 36). Pain, suffering, subjugation must all be transformed into a reservoir for future action, granted present paralysis; that awful affect must be transposed into an awareness of others’ similar sufferings.

Spinoza reminds us that reflection and consideration begets more rational action, and increases the ability of the person to act, by means of transforming passion into affect, thereby increasing the power of the subject. By reflecting on her emotions, she can come to understand them, and in time, govern them to behave along ethically-responsible pathways. “Fixed meditation may do a great deal towards defining our longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes,” Deronda says, as if citing Spinoza.Footnote 32 We must seek to learn to avoid excesses of emotion, inside of which we are capable of only compromised rationality. Our rationality is the key to the modulation of our emotions; “meditation” is the space into which we reframe our experiences of passion into something more useful and reasonable. “[Fear] may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision,” Deronda cautions Gwendolen (452; bk. 5, ch. 36). Spinoza explains, “An emotion which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it,” and “an emotion which is a passion is a confused idea” (Ethics V.P3). The only way to avoid the adverse effect of the inflammation of our affect is to weather it, and harness it to our cognition in order to engender actions that increase our capability to affect, instead of inhibiting it. The problem with affects is that they don't always permit our development and evolution: the negative affects prohibit us from striving to increase our perfection, and decrease our ability to enable others to augment theirs. Deronda has ultimately taught her all he has come to know about ethics and affect; the dialogue concludes and she must move forth into the world with the broadened consciousness germinating inside of her. Nemoianu reminds us the “For a human being to be free, the desires which determine her behavior must arise from rational knowledge of herself and her situation relative to other human beings and the rest of what is” (67). Gwendolen has been liberated.

George Eliot is seeking throughout the novel – but particularly in the scenes of dialogue (spoken and unspoken) between Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth – to depict the process by which we actually learn something about ourselves in relation to the material world. These scenes of instruction that proliferate in Daniel Deronda are but mere echoes of the instruction that Deronda himself delivers; the others are repetitive reifications of this pedagogical power that Deronda wields in the service of elaborating praxis.

Megan Watkins, elaborating on the dual impact that the reciprocal, quasi-phenomenological encounter between student and teacher, parses Spinoza into the quality of the didactic force felt, and the impact it leaves behind in the wake of the encounter. This quasi-dialectical model of education accords with the traditional Socratic dialogue.Footnote 33 Slavoj Zizek elaborates in The Parallax View, the dialectic is not a clean process; it leaves an excess, or residue. In the clash of dialectical oppositions, there is never a truly sterile progress of movement towards the next iteration of the dialectic; something moves forward and something is left behind. As Deronda progresses towards greater ethical duty in Zionism vis-à-vis his relationship with Mordecai, the residue is Gwendolen Harleth, who remains behind, and the novel ends on a paradoxically triumphant and melancholic note regarding the effect of her education. “It is better – it shall be better with me because I have known you” (810; bk. 8, ch. 70). It is precisely the double meaning of ‘shall’ – the future tense, and also the sense of obligation – that in turn doubles the tense shift from present (“is”) to future (“shall be”) and recapitulates, in some measure, the dialectical progression of her Spinozist education. It has rendered her more ethical in the present moment, and will continue educating her tacitly as she moves forward; it is both a present fact (“is”) and a future obligation (“shall be”). She has been recognized by Deronda as an ethically capable student, and Watkins asserts that “a notion of recognition. . .is a fundamental aspect of the pedagogical process” (271). Gwendolen's education is a gift that keeps on giving. No subject, in Spinoza's estimation, having tasted blessedness, is content to return to her petty, grasping life. Deronda, himself neither petty nor grasping, nevertheless also embraces an even-more-blessed knowledge of his impingement in a collectivized politics of Zionism. And so, as Deronda departs, Gwendolen remains, driven by a self-replicating desire. Gwendolen has not become an automaton, as if mechanically repeating to herself the question “What would Daniel Deronda do?”; she is free. Having internalized the praxis of sympathy, Gwendolen is liberated from the shackles of self and joins Dorothea Brooke in her newfound ability to move forward ethically into the future and act to increase her own capacity to act whilst increasing others’.

It isn't just, however, that the reader is meant to reflect on the content of Daniel Deronda without at least also unconsciously processing structure and intention of the form itself. As if constructing a hall of mirrors, the reader stands outside of the text, looking at the fictional action of the content of the text mirroring the slowly-dawning ethical realizations of the reader herself. Like Spinoza's use of the geometric proof as the structuring form of the Ethics, the form of the realist novel is as important as the content in assisting in the transfer of the knowledge cultivated by the characters contained therein. The unreal action of the novel – the fictionality of the world contained therein – is made real in the absorption of the reader. All of this calls to the mind the famous figure Eliot uses in Adam Bede to refer to the impossibility of correspondent mimesis in realism: she seeks “to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath” (193; ch. 17).

In this way, George Eliot is drawing out from Spinoza an implicit affirmation of pedagogy as the motor by which we progress toward a more perfect engagement with the world. This “transformative potential of education,” in Watkins's estimation, is what marks George Eliot's endorsement of it in the dialectical progress of education in Daniel Deronda, and she confirms that the residue left by education is a force that persists (284). None of this is easy – it involves, after all, Gwendolen's abandonment of her long-held and defensively cherished knowledge of herself. It is difficult to render ourselves open to education and reformation. But Spinoza reminds us in the final words of the Ethics, “But every thing excellent is as difficult as it is rare” (V.P42).

Footnotes

1. There is a comprehensive and eminently useful vertically-organized database of the primary European-language translations of Spinoza's Ethics that uses Elwes's late-nineteenth-century English translation. http://www.ethicadb.org/index.php?lg=en Spinoza's influence on British literature doesn't necessarily start in the Victorian era. Marjorie Levenson is working on a long project that demonstrates the currents of Spinoza's philosophy that run through the work of the Romantic poets.

2. Levine argues that one of the investments of nineteenth-century literary realism is to counterbalance the waning of faith in a transcendent divinity – Eliot, in particular, he notes, seeks to replace that God with something more like “humanism,” wherein the “secularizing movement” of the mid-nineteenth century permitted novelists to envision a “large, morally sanctified community” that supplants religiously-imposed dogma (11). In this, Levine cites J. Hillis Miller's study The Disappearance of God (1965), and it would be as useful to cite Raymond William's materialist description of this same movement as the creation of “knowable communities” (165).

3. Peter Dear argues that Spinoza's philosophy thematizes the transition from a sense of science as “natural philosophy” to empiricism, materialism, and utilitarianism, all of which sought to verify truths about the world in real, concrete terms, and with an eye to the production of useful knowledge.

4. Most of the standard biographies – Gordon Haight, Kathryn Hughes, Rosemary Ashton, Jenny Uglow – remark on the role that philosophy had in contributing to George Eliot's departure from Evangelicalism, which, among other things, enabled her to embark on her life with George Henry Lewes, and, in turn, to pursue fiction as her vocation.

5. Atkins's 1978 study, George Eliot and Spinoza, aims to redress the tendency she had hitherto noticed – that any mention of Spinoza alongside Eliot was limited, largely, to ham-handed associations of Spinoza and pantheism and, as she argues instead, George Eliot “took from him a sophisticated ethical system grounded in the belief that all reality is of the same substance” (3). Although Atkins's work is admirable, it is chiefly preoccupied in explaining Spinoza's philosophy to the reader of George Eliot. Zenzinger's belated response to Atkins's essay, “Spinoza, Adam Bede, Knowledge, and Sympathy: A Reply to Atkins” (2012), likewise concurs that Atkins's analysis is unfortunately limited: “I think that Atkins has focused too much on making Adam Bede fit with the ideas contained in Spinoza's Ethics; this fitting has, I believe, failed, but this does not mean that there is not something to be gained by reading Spinoza and Eliot together” (433). Flieschman, in George Eliot's Intellectual Life, too, rehearses the kid-gloves approach of most critics in concluding that “It is impossible to state with confidence which tenets of the Tractatus attracted or repelled Eliot, but her interest in translating it. . .suggests a broad measure of approval” (35). His generalization here is characteristic of the few studies of Eliot and Spinoza, even Atkins; it gestures toward the fertile space of intersection, but backs away from particulars. Armstrong's chapter, “George Eliot, Spinoza, and the Emotions” published (in 2013, unfortunately after it could have been a helpful interlocutor for the dissertation from which this essay was drawn!) in the spectacular new A Companion to George Eliot from Wiley-Blackwell, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, is an elegant essay that treads some of the ground covered in this essay (particularly in regards to the biographical narratives of her relationship to Spinoza and in her rapturous description of Eliot's interpretive Spinozism). Armstrong's essay – which makes a firmer claim to Eliot's engagement with Spinoza (she was “saturated in Spinoza's thought” in Armstrong's turn of phrase) – nevertheless points towards an interpretation of Spinoza's impact on Daniel Deronda that focuses primarily on the dichotomy between Grandcourt and Gwendelon, rather than Deronda and Gwendolen. They are “ideal foils for one another,” she claims, and concludes that “Eliot's achievement in Daniel Deronda is not to have confined contempt and repressed sexual feeling to the psychology of individuals but to have portrayed it as the structure of feeling in a whole society” (304-05). Armstrong's conclusions point to the wealth of possible discoveries the work at this fertile intersection could yield.

6. This is a notion also taken up somewhat haphazardly and indistinctly by Catherine Gardner in her work Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (2004). Gardner makes a fundamentally feminist argument that as historically philosophy has been understood as the work of men, women who sought to contribute to philosophy instead deflected their contributions into other genres of writing, like poetry and the novel. Although a compelling argument with a logical foundation, her analysis of Eliot's work is particularly weak, and it seeks to minimize the contributions of male philosophers to her own, unique brand of philosophy.

7. Of course, Miller's seminal work The Ethics of Reading (1987) is an extended meditation on the implications of literature's claims to philosophy, and worth reading for his nuanced reading of Eliot's peculiar position in the genealogy of ethical philosophy.

8. Nussbaum argues,

To bring novels into moral philosophy is not – as I understand the proposal – to bring them to some academic discipline which happens to ask ethical questions. It is to bring them into connection with our deepest practical searching, for ourselves and others, the searching in connection with which the influential philosophical conceptions of the ethical were originally developed, the searching we pursue as we compare these conceptions, both with one another and with our active sense of life. Or rather, it is to recognize that the novels are in this search already: to insist on and describe, the connections the novels have already for readers who love them and who read, like David Copperfield, for life. (24)

Nussbaum's passionate linking of literature and ethics is part of a career-long project to demonstrate the intellectual utility of reading at the juncture of philosophy and literature.

9. Almost every critic of realism has noted the impulse—with varying levels of disdain or approval—inherent in Victorian realism, but most scholars refer to what has become the classic study of realism, George Levine's The Realist Imagination, which, in tracing the genre from its genesis to its attenuation, has become an indispensible secondary text.

10. Greiner's essay, “Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel” (2009), is one of the better studies of the trope in Eliot's fiction. Also good are Argyros's “Without Any Check of Proud Reserve”: Sympathy and Its Limits in George Eliot's Novels (1999) and Purdy's “‘The One Poor Word’ in Middlemarch” (2004), each an excellent study probing at the limitations of grounding Eliot's work in a coherent discourse of sympathy. The proliferating studies of sympathy in George Eliot's work has engendered something of a critical backlash, moreover; this enables Armstrong to make the polemical claim that “sympathy” is “less likely to explain” the relationship between form and philosophy “than an understanding of Eliot's response to Spinoza” (298). Armstrong issues a call to action to shift the discourse of Eliot studies in this emergent direction.

11. Joseph's recent essay “In Praise of Stupidity: In Memoriam and Middlemarch” is a thoughtful and creative reading of what he says is Eliot's endorsement of intellectual and emotional self-limitation, although I fundamentally disagree.

12. In a notebook housed in the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, Eliot prefaces her notes and reading of Kant's ethics with a series of questions that points to an earlier node in her philosophical development. Headed “Questions,” the notes [“Notebook kept while studying Kant”] proceed:

Questions

The impulse to virtue.

The criterion of virtue.

The sanction of virtue.

of what stuff is virtue made?

How do we discriminate the genuine from the false?

By what means is the making (to be) stimulated?

How far is virtue, knowledge & feeling [a] habit?

Is it to be tested by its relation to human welfare, or is it to ascertained a priori?

Where is the scourge of the unwilling?

These reflections on Kant's metaphysical, theist ethics point to an important node in the gradual development of Eliot's ultimately materialist ethics, wherein considerations of the best good terminologically shift from the crypto-religious language of “virtue” to the more capacious, Spinozist “good” that leads through “blessedness” to “freedom.”

13. As mentioned above, Atkins does a tremendous job of distilling from Spinoza's work an intelligible version available to those unfamiliar with his work. Also helpful in understanding the scope and impact of his work are Della Rocca's Spinoza (2008), Nadler's Spinoza's ‘Ethics’: An Introduction (2006), or Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981; tr. 1988).

14. The concept of immanence has been a contentious idea over the course of philosophical history, and Georgi Plekhanov is one of the more important and first intercessor for Spinoza's materialism, and contemporary commentators on Spinoza's work – notably and chiefly Louis Althusser, Warren Montag, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Alexandre Matheron – all proceed, in some part, from the conclusion that Spinoza is a materialist, although they may disagree significantly on the rationale why. Nemoianu explains Spinoza's materialism without using the word: “For both Eliot and Spinoza, then, human freedom depends upon rational self-understanding in terms of the network of causes of which one is part,” underscoring that the subject is formed by a complex interaction of ideologies and external pressures, and in turn, beholden to the inescapable logic of cause and effect (73).

15. All quotes from Spinoza's Ethics are taken from the 1981 Salzburg Studies in English Literature printing of George Eliot's translation. When the more contemporary translation by Edwin Curley provides more clarity, his translation will be footnoted and referenced. In the manuscript of Eliot's translations, at the Beinecke Library at Yale, this particular section of the Ethics (Part II) is rife with Eliot's wrangling with whether or not “thing” and “being” were interchangeable as in the above quote; her insistence on choosing “thing” over “being” ultimately affirms the Spinoza's materialist immanence that argues – progressively, for the time – for the likeness of all things as coequal matter.

16. Atkins permits that this is one of the greatest appeals of Spinoza's philosophy: “If one finds satisfaction in Spinoza's ethical system, it may be due to his recognition of evil [sic] and error as the result of incomplete knowledge. There is no sense of the basic depravity of man in his philosophy, or the possibility of an alternate opposing force to goodness. There is no sense of a cruel and terrible fate beyond death for erring and imperfect humans. In Spinoza's ethical system, humans do indeed bear moral responsibility for their actions and inadequacy, but attainable knowledge is the means whereby ultimate goodness may be achieved” (62).

Of course, George Eliot, in the famous Chapter 17 of Adam Bede underscores, too, the implicit commitments of realism to depict the “more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people” (194) among whom we live, and not the “few prophets. . .[the] few sublimely beautiful women; [the] few heroes” (197). Beauty and perfection are unrealistic and, implicitly, unethical in their wheedling monopoly on our sympathy. “Thank god,” the narrator exalts, “human feeling. . .does not wait for beauty” (196). Human feeling must, and does, “flow” toward any worthy object, and so the narrator exhorts: “But let us love that other beauty too, which lies. . .in the secret of deep human sympathy” (196). We err and are imperfect; we are plain; we have crooked noses and bad breath, and we must be as worthy of sympathy as those beautiful and perfect creatures. Beauty, or “blessedness,” lies in our ability to admit that most others – and ourselves – lie in the camp of the normal and average, the erring and stupid; we are, nevertheless, worth of compassion and sympathy.

17. Throughout the manuscript, Eliot struggles to distinguish between “cognition” and “knowledge,” ultimately fairly consistently (although not absolutely consistently) leaning toward ‘knowledge’ to signal the result of understanding, and ‘cognition’ to point towards the actual activity of thinking itself.

18. The scenes of education that proliferate in George Eliot's novels is another favorite theme of critics, and although Robertson fails to address the philosophical underpinnings of these scenes, she nevertheless explores with great sensitivity the social and implicitly political ramifications of these scenes in her 1997 The Power of Knowledge. Sypher cautions us about the trope in George Eliot's fictions that all too often, there is the subjugation of a female character to male rescuer, educator, or savior, who seeks to discipline her for her “excessive desires [which] not only lead to her own suffering, but also threaten the values of the wider community whose representative he seeks to be” (506). This Foucauldian argument is astute, and rings true with the long tradition in Eliot studies that points out how hard George Eliot can be on her female characters; there is the danger, always, of valuing pedagogy vis-à-vis patriarchy, but I maintain that although that dynamic is present in her fictions, it is not the driving force in this last novel, the way it is in Felix Holt, the Radical, wherein Esther Lyons’ attraction to Felix drives her interest in becoming educated by him, and the latter's education seeks to moderate the worst of Esther's self-indulgence and excess.

19. Erwin Hester rather benevolently labels such stimuli – largely in the form of the men who dispense education in Eliot's novels – “messengers,” in that they effect the change of untutored, unprincipled subjects into knowledgeable and ethical individuals.

20. Rachel Hollander, on the one hand, argues that Eliot's ethics are Levinasian – that they are about developing sympathy for an abstracted, absolute and unknowable “other,” while Imraan Coovadia argues that Eliot is tapping into pre-Freudian mechanisms of projection in crafting a sympathy that is ultimately self-interested.

21. Stone registers the reverberation that this scene has with apt feminist criticisms of Eliot's other novels – “It is no secret that beautiful women have a hard time in Eliot's novels; so when Deronda asks whether Gwendolen was beautiful or not beautiful, it is only another way of asking whether she can be saved or not – whether she can be made morally ‘loveable’” (29). Hence the “probably” evil – as if Eliot is lampooning her own tendencies to reduce attractive women to subjugated, but manipulative and ill-fated sybils. Deronda, vis-à-vis our narrator, is an adequate reader of Eliot's oeuvre, and the conclusion on the side of “probably” – which impels him to come to Gwendolen's assistance later – registers the complexity of the interpolated narrative voice in this opening passage.

22. There is a paradoxical echo of the conclusion of Eliot's own epistolary reflection on gambling halls – wherefrom she concludes that though the “the air, the waters, the plantations” of Homburg “are all perfect – ‘only man is vile’” (GEL 5: 312).

23. Rosenthal remarks in his excellent essay “The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers; or, Why George Eliot Hates Gambling,” that George Eliot's condemnation of gambling – here espoused by Daniel Deronda – is not particular to a single instance of error by Gwendolen, but a relatively total rejection:

I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling is a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the dull faces bending round the gaming tables, the raking-up of the money, and the flinging of the coins towards the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs – all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth. Burglary is heroic compared with it. I get some satisfaction in looking on from the sense that the thing is going to be put down. Hell is the only right name for such places. (GEL 5: 312)

Rosenthal's citation and reading of the letter does offer further illumination that George Eliot herself condemns the “vice,” and not the sinners. “Hard-faced” or “hideous” as these sinners are, they are merely temporary occupants of “hell,” succumbing to a wrong-headed and ignorant belief about statistical likelihood and magical thinking.

24. Eliot's translation includes the words “compassion” and “evil,” where they have been replaced with “pity” and “bad.” Her word choices work against the prevailing reading of Spinoza as indifferent to the concepts of “good” and “evil” inasmuch as they have been inherited from organized religion.

25. As many other critics have noted, Eliot is relentless in her critique of women's education in the nineteenth century, consisting as it did of education in the arts and languages with an eye to the accomplishments and adornments that upper-class women were meant to have to facilitate aspirational marriages. See especially Roberts's The Power of Education (1997).

26. As the only Eliot novel that mentions Spinoza by name, it strikes me that the mention of Leibniz is also a subtle means by which Eliot foregrounds the intentional philosophical undercurrents of this, her final novel. The contrast between the philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz is contentious ground, as it was in their own time, and is the subject of Stewart's eminently readable The Courtier and the Heretic: Spinoza, Leibniz and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2007).

27. Eliot has chosen the succinctness of the word “glory,” whereas Curley prefers the more specific, and less connotatively-freighted phrase “love of esteem.”

28. This is a crucial crossroads for Eliot in her translation; this moment in the manuscript is awash with proffered alternatives to the eventual dichotomy she chose – “pleasure” and “pain.” In a superscript above the first iteration of this duality in the Ethics, located in this passage, Eliot tries out first “pleasure & pain,” then the formula Curley uses, “joy & sadness” (although Curley favors “sorrow” for “sadness”), before settling finally on “pleasure & pain.” The choice to use “pleasure & pain” would seem to favor the influence of the connotation of that pair insofar as they encourage or inhibit. “Pain” also comes in for separate consideration in the manuscript, with the alternatives “sadness” and “grief” repeatedly tried and rejected. Whilst joy and sorrow can provoke or proscribe action, pleasure and pain are, conceptually, at least, more fundamental to the biomechanics of the brain and its relationship to the body (see Antonio Damasio's bridge from Spinoza to neuroscience in Descartes’ Error [2005]).

29. This formulation would seem to head off the accusations of Ward, who impulsively claims that in this particular instance, “the ethical advice that [Deronda] gives is not only banal but exceptionally non-specific even for platitudes” (107). Deronda's advice is full of material action, even as it might strike the reader as elusive or abstracted.

30. Here perhaps is the clearest example of how Eliot navigates between what might be understood as Adam Smith's sympathy and Levinas's sympathy; inasmuch as Gwendolen wonders what Deronda would do in her place, she is collapsing these two other systems of sympathy in a muddle that misses the point: the point being, of course, to recognize other's otherness and their claims of subjective agency.

31. Greiner's recent and creative reading of Adam Smith's concept of empathy is novel; Smith's sympathy, to my mind, seems like nothing more than a pre-Freudian framework of projection. Greiner's reading makes a case for us to consider the impact it may have had on Victorian realism; as she argues in relation to Adam Smith, “one need not feel what others feel in order to sympathize with them” (418), as sympathy is not a feeling but a process (417). She makes a compelling argument against empathy, which, she remarks, has come to be valued over sympathy (“Empathy has come to mean, roughly, ‘sympathy minus the attitude’”); sympathy, for the Victorian realists, “named a set of formal protocols for feeing ourselves thinking with real people and fictional ones” (419), a reading of sympathy that accords loosely with Martha Nussbaum's reading of the ethics inherent in literature.

Approaching the question of sympathy from an angle oblique to this essay, Armstrong nevertheless foregrounds the work of imagination in Spinoza's account of ethical development; in a particularly rapturous passage, Armstrong places front and center the materiality of imagination:

If we imagine; he who images; whatever we imagine. These are constant and invariable formulations used in almost all of the Propositions concerning affect and whenever Spinoza wants to described the arousal effected by emotion in the body. The subject does not immediately think or feel, it imagines. The arousal of imagination is continuous with the body, and reacts with it. It is a bodily form of knowledge . . . (300)

32. It bears repeating that Eliot chose to translate affectus as “emotion,” thereby foregrounding the psychosocial implications of “emotion” against the more philosophical and technical “affect” that appears in the contemporary translation of Spinoza and in Deleuze's study of Spinoza.

33. Hao Li rather unpersuasively traces Eliot's investment in ethics away from the most traditional and obvious sources – Spinoza, Feuerbach, Mill, Smith – to the writings of F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green, contemporary philosophers. She argues, not unlike I do here, that “the characters’ conception of moral ideals often reveals that importance of dialectical speculation,” arguing that the dialectic is the way to understand the tergiversation of Deronda about the value of right action (774) and that that dialectical waffling is rooted in the idealism of her British philosophical contemporaries. In such a way, Li concludes, “Eliot has independently created in Daniel Deronda an ethical idealism that is. . .metaphysical. . .but intellectually less restrictive, less determined, more spiritual, and more fluid” than Bradley and Green (783). Given the philosophical heft of Spinoza and Feuerbach – and their demonstrable influence on her work – it seems superfluous to map Eliot's novels against near-forgotten metaphysicists.

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