In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the narrator writes with empathy and concern for the human characters she conjures. In a famous passage early in the book, Eliot writes of the narrator’s task:
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (91)
The “particular web” in this case is the fictional village of Middlemarch. Eliot’s novel is a study of the behavior of some of this village’s inhabitants, yet the “web” that is Eliot’s overriding concern is the universe and everything that inhabits it. It is her ultimate aim to expand the horizons of her readers and their knowledge of emotions, an aim that drives her provisional focus on a particular web of human lots. In other words, Eliot’s ethology (or “the science of the formation of character,” as John Stuart Mill described it in 1843) establishes an ethics. In this essay, I explore Eliot’s concerns with ethos in both its forms to elaborate on her non-humanist humanism: that is, how she puts the human front and center without demeaning the non-human. As I will show, Eliot’s overriding concern for human flourishing is undergirded by theological and ontological commitments to the more-than-human.
Continue reading “Ethos Between Ethics and Ethology: Middlemarch and Spinoza”