Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and the Modernist Literary Character: Rethinking the Subject through the Everyday

Abstract

The last decade has seen veritable resurgence of theme of in philosophical and critical debates. While for decades preference had been accorded to either active forces of will and desire or contingency and abruptness of Event, thinkers have recently come back to from different paths and perspectives (Bennett et al.; Sparrow and Hutchinson; Carlisle). The polarization of attention around theme of almost seems to mirror veritable explosion of discourse on which took place about two centuries ago. Even though philosophical reflection on can be traced at least as far back as Aristotle it was at end of eighteenth century and in early nineteenth century that theme of habit, as asserted in entry habitude of Encyclopedie Philosophique Universelle, became a new philosophical as an effect of the refusal of innate ideas; sensualist project deriving modes of understanding from experience (generally exterior experience); refusal, finally, of Hume's category of causality and its reduction to pure habit (1108; my translation). In France, was an extremely popular theme among spiritualist or proto-spiritualist philosophers such as Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, who considered it bridge between spirit and matter. In Germany, Hegel tackled problem of in The Philosophy of Right, making it basis of custom on which true ethical life is grounded. In Italy, reprehensible antisocial habits fell under magnifying glass of Turin positivist school and became pivotal part of Lombroso's analysis of criminal mind. In English speaking world, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was probably most original contributor to debate on in second part of nineteenth century. He used notion of to challenge Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, conceiving as channel through which unconscious memory can be passed down from one generation to next, preserved in experience of species and its determination to evolve into more complex forms (see Willey). Samuel Butler's theories have been widely disregarded among professional philosophers, because of his idiosyncratic and counter-intuitive use of notion of and due to fact that his arguments have often been seen as amateurish. Nonetheless, several leading twentieth-century thinkers, such as Gregory Bateson and Gilles Deleuze, have repeatedly extolled visionary power of Butler's ideas and admitted their debts towards them. Moreover, Butler's theories of were influential among several modernist writers, such as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Valery Larbaud, and E. M. Forster and they contributed both to these authors' understanding of crisis of modern subjectivity and to their attention for representation of habitual behavior and everyday. In this paper I intend to demonstrate how Butler's theory of habit--in particular as it is presented in his seminal work Life and Habit--once it is disentangled from anti-Darwinian debates on theory of evolution from which it first emerged, can offer considerable contribution to contemporary philosophical debate and allow better understanding of history of idea of at turn of century. Moreover, I intend to show how import of these ideas was promptly acknowledge by several modernist writers, who turned to Butler in an effort to investigate habitual side of life through their characters. In doing so, they were moved by belief that modern ethos, as well as modern idea of subjectivity, could find their proper mode of expression precisely in that previously neglected dimension of life. Butler's theory of stems from heated late nineteenth-century debate concerning Darwinism and theory of evolution. Charles Darwin's On Origin of Species (Willey 70 and ff.) had pivotal influence on Butler's life and thought, determining his abandonment of Christian faith and his conversion to agnosticism. …