I

John Stuart Mill's nervous breakdown and recovery, according to his own account, is intimately connected with developments in his philosophy. The insights that Mill offers in his Autobiography shed light on the limitations of accounts that neglect the development of character. This observation is not new, but it becomes interesting when understood in relation to the role of Wordsworth's poetry in Mill's recovery. The aims of this article are threefold: first, to gain a better understanding of how the engagement with Wordsworth was significant in changing Mill's views on morality and psychology; second, to elucidate the philosophical import of Wordsworth's treatment of meaningful experiences of the natural world; and third, to suggest how a consideration of the distinct roles of poet and philosopher can help us to think about the apparent tension between hedonic and non-instrumental values in Mill's thought.

In section II, I provide the background to what will follow, examining Mill's description of his breakdown and recovery, and how this led Mill away from Bentham towards a qualitative account of pleasure and a focus on the cultivation of one's inner life. In section III, I discuss the role that Wordsworth's poetry played in Mill's recovery, and how this raises a tension between hedonism and non-hedonism that runs through Mill's work. In section IV, I consider how a similar tension is addressed and resolved in Wordsworth's thought, and I provide a detailed demonstration of this in section V by looking at a section from the Prelude. In section VI, I consider the extent to which Wordsworth's approach is compatible with Mill's philosophy, and how this relates to Mill's thoughts on poetry.

II

Mill wrote of his early years in his Autobiography, and they have been widely discussed since. This section does not provide novel insights about this stage in Mill's life, but supplies the background that we need in order to understand both the significance of Wordsworth's poetry to Mill, and the philosophical import of Wordsworth's own views.

Mill describes the onset of his depression as an evaporation of everything that he had hitherto regarded as the aim of his existence. He had, through James Mill and Jeremy Bentham's instruction, come to identify his success in life with realizing utilitarian goals. For some years he had taken to this project with a quasi-religious zeal, but in 1826 he ‘awakened from this as from a dream’:

Mill chooses the words of Coleridge to articulate his condition during this time:

This might be compared with a loss of religious faith, in response to which the subject encounters a void or a lack of purpose. The ‘unimpassioned’ griever can find no ‘natural outlet’, since all objects have been stripped of the importance that would allow them to serve as such. Mill experienced a loss of what had until then been the primary source of significant possibilities in his life.

But what was the world-view from which Mill found himself alienated? It may be instructive to employ Robert Nozick's distinction between ‘moral pull’ and ‘moral push’.Footnote ³ Theories that draw heavily on ‘moral push’ emphasize the person who is the subject of a moral life, her character and motivations. An emphasis on moral pull focuses on entities in the world ‘outside’ the moral agent as a source of value that generates obligations which exert a ‘pull’ on the agent.

In grounding his life in Benthamite utilitarianism, with its foundation in what Nozick sees as ‘moral pull’, Mill placed the focus of value ‘in the world’, at a step removed from what he experienced as the locus of his subjectivity. He was able for a time to maintain this by identifying his happiness with the broader project of maximizing utility, ‘through placing my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment’.Footnote ⁴ This was in keeping with James Mill's view that ‘the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.’Footnote ⁵ But with the loss of significance of this ‘great whole’, Mill appears to have experienced a loss of his identity: the identification of his own happiness with something ‘durable and distant’ proved unsustainable. Mill writes explicitly about how this identification of oneself entirely with projects that lie outside of the self is insufficient if the individual is to live a good human life, and explains how it eventually formed part of his new ‘theory of life’:

Mill articulates his new conception of well-being in a variety of ways, but the cultivation of character features strongly in his subsequent thought, expressed either through the language of higher pleasures in Utilitarianism or through the emphasis on the importance of liberty for self-development in On Liberty.

The account of pleasure held by James Mill and Bentham can be expressed in the famous slogan ‘pushpin is as good as poetry’. For Bentham, all pleasures are equal in quality. This means that, morally speaking, Bentham regards pleasure as homogeneous. It connects to Bentham and James Mill's view that the objects in which pleasure is taken can be viewed as both morally and psychologically arbitrary. The moral arbitrariness of the object of pleasure is often cited as a serious problem for Benthamite utilitarianism, in that it allows us to count pleasure taken in the suffering of others as having positive value, even if in many cases this is outweighed by the negative value of the suffering caused.Footnote ⁷ This is part of a wider concern that things (and people) are taken as merely instrumentally valuable.

Bentham's view that goodness could be understood only in terms of the propensity to cause pleasure led to an account whereby no objects in the world could be understood to be good except in so far as they produced pleasure in the creature experiencing them. This represents at once a linking, and in other ways a decoupling, of the notions of goodness and pleasure. By such an account there can be no goodness without pleasure, but there is no sense in which we can deem it appropriate to take certain types of pleasure in particular types of things, except to the extent that doing so is liable to result in further pleasure, either for ourselves or for others. In this sense, the link between pleasure and the object of pleasure is arbitrary. Mill connected this to a psychological thesis, which he holds to be evident in both Bentham and James Mill, that the relationship between the experience of pleasure and the objects in which pleasure is taken is merely associative:

This makes possible the view that ‘the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class’. According to Mill's account, this led to the sense that the project itself was empty: the happiness that Mill wished to attain from it was only ‘casually’ connected with its aims. Mill could equally have chosen a different ‘durable and distant’ ‘ordering of outward circumstances’ with which to identify, and the recognition of this led, as Mill recounts it, to a distance from his projects and inward character.

III

On a first glance at Mill's later remarks about Wordsworth, it seems difficult to grasp why this poet in particular would have a curative effect on Mill. He describes him as never ‘possessed by any feeling’,Footnote ⁹ and as guilty of ‘bad philosophy’.Footnote ¹⁰ I hope to show that the ‘bad philosophy’ is tangential to the function that Wordsworth served for Mill, and that what Mill regards as a pallidness of feeling is an essential part of what allowed him to serve such a function. I will do this with reference to the related concepts of Aristotelian phronesis and the idea of an emotional vision of the world.

Wordsworth allows Mill to see the possibility of an alternative to what he regards as a strongly externalist account of value in Bentham's utilitarianism by demonstrating how one might cultivate certain feelings:

The effect of Wordsworth was to express the way in which the poetic sensibilities could be aroused by natural beauty. The notion of expression, rather than explanation, is important, since there is good reason to suppose that reading Wordsworth had an effect on Mill which could not have been achieved through ideas outlined in a philosophical text, something that I will elaborate on in the final section.

This might draw us to conclude that the important thing at work is not so much the beauty in the natural landscape itself, but rather the poetic medium, and the sensibilities that Mill felt he had lacked because of the nature of his childhood and education. If this is correct, the beauty of natural landscapes is only valuable to the reader to the extent that it is a trigger for the poetic sentiments, the ‘higher pleasures’ with which Mill is concerned.

As we shall see, this move is too quick, and misconceives the nature of the higher pleasures: to make it would be to associate Mill with the prior Benthamite psychology whereby the objects of pleasure are regarded as arbitrary, and only the pleasures themselves as significant. The valuer cannot simply decouple the value of the objects from the pleasure that he takes in them. They cannot be valued merely because they evoke certain poetic sentiments. To view them thus would be to reopen the bottomless pit that Mill experienced as the loss of significance in his life, meaning that nothing could have value beyond the valuing response itself.

Nonetheless, it appears difficult to avoid this in the light of Mill's contention, famously expressed in On Liberty, that utility is ‘the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions’.Footnote ¹² Mill's reaction to Wordsworth is thus one way of revealing a tension, often commented on by Mill scholars, between hedonism and non-hedonism.Footnote ¹³

IV

A different way in which the value of nature might be perceived to be nothing more than instrumental can be found if we look to some interpretations of Wordsworth himself. On one interpretation, we might suppose that the value of natural objects for Wordsworth lies not so much in the objects themselves, but in their role in granting us access to a transcendent realm in which the unity of nature can be apprehended. This has been a source of criticism from some of Wordsworth's harshest contemporary critics. According to Frances Jeffrey, the effect of Wordsworth and his associates is to ‘introduce us to beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest observers of nature: and excite an interest in them . . . more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation’.Footnote ¹⁴

To think about what ‘beings’ Jeffrey has in mind, we should consider that Wordsworth is sometimes described as being ‘Platonic’ in his outlook on nature. In his ode ‘Intimations of Immortality’, an important work for Mill, Wordsworth begins:

This has been associated with Plato's view that the child has a memory of the forms, which fades in later life. In Wordsworth's case, the childhood experience of nature reveals a truth and beauty that can only occasionally be grasped at as one grows older. Key to gaining these fleeting insights is an engagement with the natural landscape. Urban life represents a confusion of impermanence; it is only through a slower-paced life in rural surroundings that one experiences a form of stability and constancy, ‘because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’.Footnote ¹⁶

Plato's influence is certainly significant here, and we might take Wordsworth to be attempting to evoke a transcendent realm beyond the phenomenal world, of which we can only grasp vague intimations through flashes of emotional inspiration. It is this realm with which the poet, like the child, is particularly in touch, and able to convey through verse. Wordsworth emphasizes a sense of the unity of all things that can be experienced through nature, and the role of this in creating a sense of the fellowship of mankind, which is itself part of that unity.

As this stands, it might seem as though what is significant is the relationship in which the person, and humanity, stands to the universality of nature, a transcendent wholeness that lies beyond the value of the particularity of the individual experience and the objects experienced. The object in the natural world, like the poetry that describes it and the poet's communion with it, would be a mere medium through which eternal truth and beauty can be evoked. The value would not lie in the natural world of a moral being's experience, but at a step beyond. The pleasures taken in mountains, trees, lakes and the changing seasons would then be valuable to the poet and his audience not for their own sakes, but for the sake of the human apprehension of an overall unity in creation. This differs significantly from Bentham, but it might be said that this is still an account whereby objects in the natural world can only be valuable instrumentally.

Mill describes ‘Intimations of Immortality’ as ‘falsely called Platonic’.Footnote ¹⁷ Given the context that this remark occupies in the Autobiography, we might take it as comment on the idea that Wordsworth's poems are supposed to reflect the transcendent picture just described. Wordsworth's poetry undoubtedly reflects Platonic notions. It is partly a quiet reflective focus on stable and permanent forms, rather than dramatic change, that leads Mill to contrast Wordsworth with Shelley, and describe the former as ‘the poet of unpoetical nature, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes’.Footnote ¹⁸ While there are Platonic elements in this, it is the possibility of engagement of this kind that leads us from a distant inaccessible world of forms towards a sense that what is truthful and beautiful is immanent, made manifest in our lived experience of the natural world:

The idea of Forms ‘drawn down from the transcendent realm’ and ‘objectified’ in particulars suggests that Wordsworth is influenced by Aristotelianism as well as by Platonism:

The unity of nature as Wordsworth perceives and evokes it cannot be something that lies beyond or apart from the particular things. We can only get a sense of the unity of nature by contemplating the unique features of particulars, and the ways in which they are interconnected:

Rather than coming to associate pleasure with certain objects and experiences merely for the sake of realizing some further aim, the moral being apprehending nature must take seriously the significance inherent in the object itself, as it presents itself in their experience. This is not easily articulated, since an attempt at articulation is liable to describe the significance in terms of a theoretical abstraction that will fall short of the ‘romantic’ experience. This applies equally to the aim of cultivating romantic sensibilities as it does to pursuing one's happiness understood in a more Benthamite sense.

There are elements of Wordsworth's thought, described in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, which appear distinctly Benthamite. For example, Wordsworth emphasized the role of repeated association in the poet's developing certain emotional responses to subjects. However, these associations are developed through the contemplation of the subjects in question, which reveals ‘what is really important to men’:

This two-way communication between thought and feeling, combined with the view that the unity in nature is inherent in the specific features of particulars, means that while one's inner life can be cultivated and refined through habit and repetition, the association of pleasures with their objects is neither homogeneous nor arbitrary. There is an associationist psychology at play, as with Bentham, but the role of association is to reveal and reinforce what was already significant or meaningful, not to create significance or meaning in the first place. Again, we may see echoes of an Aristotelian ethic and psychology, with its emphasis on phronesis. Practical wisdom for Aristotle, in line with his views on essence, consists in attentiveness to particulars, as well as in wisdom concerning universal truths, and is something that comes to be acquired through practice and experience in dealing with those particulars.Footnote ²³

Additionally, part of what it means to be a poet is to have developed a capacity for responding appropriately to appropriate stimuli, and for conveying this. There needs to be a proper ‘fit’ between the objects concerned, and the nature of the one who apprehends them. In relation to the Lyrical Ballads, Cora Diamond remarks that:

Phronesis is not a goal for the individual, any more than happiness can be a goal for a person without something in which her happiness can be taken. The valued object has to stand independently of this.Footnote ²⁵ Thus it is not a project such as the cultivation of romantic sentiments (or Benthamite utilitarianism) that is the proper object of an individual's value. For Aristotle, ethical understanding is practical, and not merely conceptual. For him, as for Wordsworth, our feelings are ‘directed by our thoughts’, and our thoughts are refined and developed through the cultivation of our feelings. Practical wisdom cannot be fully articulated, it must be lived and evoked. We come to such an understanding through practice, and through learning from those who appear to possess it. This may help us to understand the importance of Mill's remark that Wordsworth's poetry showed him ‘the very culture of feelings’ that he was ‘in quest of’.

In this sense, Wordsworth served as a model of practical wisdom for Mill. This is not to say that Wordsworth's theoretical remarks about the role of the poet impressed Mill on an intellectual level. Rather, it was an example of practical wisdom in the true Aristotelian sense: an evocation of a life well lived, rather than a theoretical instruction manual. As Mill puts it:

Here we see another important feature of what it might be for someone to serve as a model of practical wisdom: any role-model must not merely show us that something is possible, but also show us how it is possible for us. In the Autobiography, Mill tells us that it was Wordsworth's ‘unpoetical nature’ that made his poetry so helpful: ‘unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is far more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.’Footnote ²⁷ What Mill means by an ‘unpoetical nature’ can be elucidated by looking at his ‘Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties’. A poetical nature is that of someone whose strong and deep feelings govern the succession of his thoughts. By contrast, Mill views someone with an ‘unpoetical nature’ as lacking in this intensity, because her thoughts are always the guiding force. For Wordsworth (Mill maintains) ‘the poetry is almost always the mere setting of a thought’, in contrast to Shelley, for whom ‘voluntary mental discipline has done little’, but for whom ‘unity of feeling [is] the harmonizing principle which a central idea is to minds of another class’. It is Wordsworth's primacy of ideas over emotions that seems to have allowed Mill to see a possibility of escape from his predicament. He was, as we have seen, in a state in which feeling seemed close to impossible, and in which practical possibilities seemed bleached out of his life. Wordsworth showed Mill how one could excite feelings through the conjunction and contemplation of associated thoughts:

This perceived feature of Wordsworth made it possible for Mill to see how someone like him, devoid of passion, but with an abundance of intellectual training and ideas, could summon up experiences of pleasure in response to the natural world. It also accounts for why Mill grew ‘to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me’.Footnote ²⁹ Once it became possible to find sources of joy in the world, other poetry acquired a greater lustre.

V

The foregoing discussion highlighted a tension apparent in much romantic art and literature between the value of the poetic sensibilities apprehending beauty in nature and the notion of celebrating nature as something that stands apart from us. We can see a good illustration of this in book VI of Wordsworth's Prelude, published a quarter of a century after Mill's mental crisis, but before Mill published On Liberty, Utilitarianism or the Autobiography:

Here it initially appears that nature has not ‘done its job’ in terms of what the romantic might expect from it. The ‘soulless image’ does not wed itself to thought or feeling in the way that Wordsworth conveys in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. The long-anticipated summit is an apex in geographical terms alone. But then:

It is the particularity of this experience of nature, not nature mediated through an abstract idea, which delivers the lessons that Wordsworth had sought. The poet requires an ‘unripe state’ of the mind and emotions, unencumbered by a consciousness of a pre-set conceptual framework, to reap the fullness of such an experience. The view of the summit had been anticipated, but the unexpectedness of the frozen rivers alerted the travellers to a particularity which had not already been incorporated into a predetermined schema:

So the aim cannot be the cultivation of romantic sensibilities and thoughts, since these can only come when one focuses on the reality of nature, rather than on a world of thoughts or forms or ideas that lies behind it. This isn't a bare transcendent reality ‘in itself’, divorced from our perception, but it is something that is experienced as ‘other’, and as indifferent to our projects. The abstract lessons that we can glean from natural scenes and objects are a function of valuing those things in their particularity, and are not learned in terms of something that the things represent. This means that the value of nature ‘for its own sake’ cannot, in practical terms, be separated from the human experience of apprehending it. In relation to the Ode Intimations of Immortality, which moved Mill the most, Thomas Woods remarks that:

The fact that ‘the world’ in question is the world of our experience, not one that lies beyond it, helps us to make sense of what Wordsworth means when he talks about ‘the passions of men’ being ‘incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’. These forms, being immanent in the world of our experience, become incorporated in our lives, just as we come to see ourselves as ‘interfused’ with nature. The value of nature is inseparable from the experience of valuing it and from the life of the one who values. It is unsurprising that Mill found in Wordsworth a way through his depression. The natural world, presented by Wordsworth, becomes a ‘component of a life’.Footnote ³⁴ Its value is already situated in the world of the one who values, rather than as a ‘durable and distant’ ‘ordering of outward circumstances’ from which one can detach one's commitment. If we take this seriously, Nozick's distinction between ‘moral push’ and ‘moral pull’ begins to dissolve. The ‘external’ world of our experience, upon which we act, also has a role in the constitution of our inner life, and vice versa.

VI

This notion – that the non-instrumental value of nature cannot be divorced from the moral being valuing (or potentially valuing) it – helps to reconcile the romantic tension between the sensibilities of the poet and nature ‘for its own sake’, but it is a further question whether it would enable Mill to reconcile the view that utility is the ultimate appeal on all moral questions with his conviction about the importance of the ‘inner life’ and the commitment to non-hedonic values that this seems to entail. Mill describes two conclusions which he developed when emerging from his period of depression in 1827. First, that

Mill, like Aristotle, thought that enjoyment must have an object for the one who experiences it, which goes beyond enjoyment itself. Thus the utilitarian must leave room for people to have goals that stand apart from merely hedonic ones. Second, Mill's new attention ‘among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual’ includes a new-found interest in the way that one's character allows the world to affect one's experience, through the cultivation and enrichment of the ‘passive susceptibilities’ as well as the ‘active capacities’. Wordsworth's poetry, focused as it is on the way that natural beauty could impress itself upon one without an active project or goal in mind, allowed Mill to see a way to having values in life which were not held for the sake of maximizing happiness.

One might argue from this that in so far as he adopts this approach, Mill is jettisoning utilitarianism, which must be based on hedonic principles. In places Mill appears to adopt the Aristotelian view that happiness consists of the flourishing of a life, rather than simply the experience of pleasure. He seems to be approaching this in On Liberty, in which he argues that utility should be understood ‘in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’.Footnote ³⁶ However, in Utilitarianism, Mill unequivocally states that:

In addition, Mill does not go as far as Wordsworth in terms of the view that poetry represents a truth in the world, which is inextricably bound up with the poet's sentiments. In his ‘Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties’, Mill maintains that ‘The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the scientific truth itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be contemplated.’Footnote ³⁸ What the poet does, so far as Mill is concerned, is not to reveal a truth or a mind-independent source of value in the world, but rather to evoke a way of looking at it, coloured by certain emotions, and of a distinct kind from the kinds of propositional knowledge to be revealed through science or philosophy:

The work of the poet has a different aim (in Mill's view) from that of the philosopher. The philosopher aims at ‘convincing or persuading’: the poet's aim is to illuminate and convey aspects of a rich emotional vision of the world. The moral philosopher can argue for the ethical importance of this vision, but it is the poet who can reveal it to the person who seeks to live a better life. While Mill understands that this has moral significance, he does not go as far as many later thinkers, most notably Iris Murdoch, who maintains that emotional ‘moral vision’ of this kind is part of the work of moral philosophy, and that such vision is connected with a truthful view of its object as much as it is with justice.

Nonetheless, for Mill, poetry should be truthful in its depiction, not of its object, but of the inner life of the poet: ‘The lion may be described falsely or with exaggeration, and the poetry be all the better; but if the human emotion be not painted with unscrupulous truth, the poetry is bad poetry, i.e. is not poetry at all, but a failure.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, the vision of the world that we gain through poetry is not misleading, or an illusion, but perfectly compatible with veridical perception. In recounting a debate with John Arthur Roebuck, Mill recalls that:

Mill does not see a tension between utilitarianism and his new view of the inner life of the individual: in On Liberty he tellingly refers to ‘the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle’.Footnote ⁴² Nonetheless, it has been argued that such a tension exists, and forces Mill at once to accept, and at the same time to deny, non-hedonic values.Footnote ⁴³ Martha Nussbaum articulates this in terms of Mill being ‘torn’ between a non-hedonic Wordsworthian/Aristotelian influence and a hedonic Benthamite one, suggesting that these accounts of happiness are irreconcilable.Footnote ⁴⁴

I would contend that this problem is overemphasized, and that this fact can be illuminated through contrasting the role of the poet and the role of the philosopher. According to many plausible readings, Mill's reformed account of utility resembles a modified version of an Aristotelian account, whereby the deepest and most sustainable forms of happiness are to be found in the fulfilment of one's capacities over the course of a life.Footnote ⁴⁵ This allows experiences which are not themselves sources of hedonic pleasure to be incorporated into the structure of a life as a whole, in so far as they ultimately contribute to the development of a character capable of experiencing the higher pleasures. An important aspect of this, as with the Aristotelian strand in Wordsworth's thought, is that such experiences must be encountered and developed without a constant conscious goal of maximizing utility. The sources of the greatest pleasure throughout our lives are the frozen rivers that we encounter when we are not engaging in a project of self-improvement, and specifically when we are not doing moral philosophy. The poet can help us to develop and refine the capacity for this kind of experience.

The difficulty does not lie in the acceptance of non-hedonic values: on a sympathetic interpretation, Mill's new ‘theory of life’ suggests that valuing non-instrumentally is the only way that we can develop the capacity to experience the most meaningful and fulfilling pleasures. This is not a case of believing in values that are not really there, since (for Mill) valuing in this emotional sense is distinct from a propositional belief about the nature of value in objects.

Rather, there are more localized problems: how can Mill experience the pleasures that he speaks of, when his theoretical commitment holds that non-hedonic values are significant only in terms of hedonic ones? How, relatedly, is it possible for Mill's philosophy to give meaningful voice to such experiences, when their value to him as a philosopher is distinct from the kind of value that they would hold for him as a human being in the moment that he experiences them? The problem seems to lie, not so much in tensions in Mill's thought, but in tensions between thinking it and living it at the same time.

Mill is committed to the cultivation of the capacity for higher pleasures, but philosophy cannot inform us fully about what it is like to experience such pleasures, or how to cultivate such a capacity. Here the philosopher must wave to the poet, who can enter the gaps that philosophy cannot fill. The injunction that the poet should ‘show, not tell’ is comparable with the notion of being a model of Aristotelian practical wisdom, and at the same time serves as an injunction to do what theoretical philosophy is precisely not in the business of doing. As Aristotle says:

One might think, then, that when it comes to giving practical guidance for living, philosophy must give way altogether, and leave the poets to guide us instead. But Mill's view of the development of the capacity for higher pleasure, over the course of a life, leaves room for both, while retaining the distinction. The good Aristotelian might spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on the nature of the good, but most of his or her actions and interactions will stem from emotion and habit: a good life will require both of these elements to some extent. Similarly, we might say that, for Mill, one requires the guidance and direction given by utilitarian philosophy, as well as the evocation and modelling of pleasures into which the poet can give insight.Footnote ⁴⁷