Why Forgive Carlyle?

Abstract

This essay discusses the troubled relationships, both intellectual and intimate, of nineteenth-century essayist Thomas Carlyle to understand why Ralph Waldo Emerson and other contemporaries decide to forgive him, while despising his ideas. Coming to terms with the intensity of their affection was also to admit that their forgiveness was inappropriate to their principles and beliefs. Thinking through forgiveness as a kind of convexity, or dispersal of focus, the essay asks what it means to object, but love anyway, and what the challenge of forgiving Carlyle says about the logic, and the relevance, of their judgments.

Speech Beyond Toleration: On Carlyle and Moral Controversialism Now

“…That Carlyle is enjoying something of a revival at present 19 has much to do with recognition (variously motivated) of how far the arch-antagonist of normative moral and political assumptions in the nineteenth century shared Mill's basic precepts-above all the understanding that "habit is the deepest law of human nature […] our supreme strength; if also, in certain circumstances, our miserablest weakness". 20 A core aim of Carlyle's "modern Gnosticism", 21 as of Mill's liberalism, was to dislodge habit and make his reader aware of the ways in which narrow upbringing, limited experience, insufficient familiarity with differences of custom and language, blinker us to (for Mill) a wider range of perspectives, (for Carlyle) higher truths.…”