The Novel and Prejudice

Abstract

The Novel and Prejudice Sarah Winter (bio) In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that since "all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice," modern historicism suffers from a fundamental hermeneutic blindness: "historicism, despite its critique of rationalism and of natural law philosophy, is based on the modern Enlightenment and unwittingly shares its prejudices. And there is one prejudice of the Enlightenment that defines its essence: . . . the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power."1 Gadamer's critique alludes to the Enlightenment attack on prejudice, defined as an automatic prejudgment based on customary or habitual patterns of thinking. For Gadamer, such "provisional" judgments (273) are fundamental, as they inevitably involve the Heideggerian "fore-conception" [Vorgriff], or the interpretive expectations that we bring to a text or experience.2 By implementing an Enlightenment critique of prejudice to foreground the constructed and changing status of human knowledge, modern historicism attempts to evade both the effects of what we know in advance of each interpretive act and the historical status of our "anticipatory ideas" (272), thus paradoxically exhibiting its own anti-historicist predisposition. Gadamer's German term Vorurteil lends itself to his attack on Enlightenment historicism because, as Gerhard Joseph points out, "the term means both 'prejudgment' and 'prejudice'" as negative bias, and has commonly been translated both ways since the eighteenth century.3 In English, however, these alternative meanings of prejudice coexist less comfortably because the Enlightenment philosophical connotation has fallen into abeyance.4 Gadamer's critique of modern historicism draws our attention to a set of tensions within the concept of prejudice that, in turn, help us to align the history of the novel and the history of human rights in new ways. I want to make the case that the novel participated in transforming an [End Page 76] Enlightenment empiricist notion of prejudice as automatic prejudgment into the more familiar modern notion of prejudice as an unjust bias against certain persons or groups of people. By characterizing the psychological states and plotting the damaging results of traditional social biases, the subgenre that I will identify and characterize here as the novel of prejudice played an important early role in framing the experience of prejudice as a significant epistemological, political, and ethical problem of modernity. This type of novel, I will argue, taught readers that specific prejudices could be isolated and extracted from the customary ways of thinking and behaving in which they had been embedded. Once recognized, such instances of bias could be examined and rejected when they failed the tests of reason, experience, justice, or morality. Conceiving of traditional prejudices as negative and exclusionary requires questioning the necessity of certain kinds of ideas and judgments. In order to be corrected, prejudices must be viewed as historically and culturally contingent, even irrational. The novel's characterization of prejudice as complicit with social injustices and thus as morally compromising was also based on an empiricist presupposition that because they are merely automatic and often irrational assumptions instilled through education and custom, prejudices can be overcome through counter-evidence, concerted mental retraining, or the activation of a just conscience. According to this skeptical empiricist perspective, certain customs can be quarantined from their larger context so that the abuses they have come to justify can be rectified, or, as has happened more frequently, so that local traditions can be discredited based on universal moral or legal principles. Because the attack on the legitimacy of biases against groups and persons displaces the value of the traditions or history within which such biases have arisen, however, it appears paradoxically anti-historicist. It is this tension between an historicist method that is fully cognizant of cultural differences and its accompanying normative critique of unjust biases within particular mentalities and institutions that the novel of prejudice both explores and makes recognizable as a characteristic modern dilemma of understanding and political commitment. This tension also inheres in liberal conceptions of human rights. Jack Donnelly has pointed out that "liberals, from Locke to today, have been champions of rights-based political change . . . . [Liberals'] principal use [of human rights] is to demand that old ways, however convenient or time-honored, give way to the legitimate demands of the equal...