Resisting the Enlightenment's Instrumentalist Legacy: James, Hamilton, and Carlyle on the Mechanisation of the Human Condition

Abstract

In the early post-Enlightenment period, informed by the history of Scottish and European thought, Thomas Carlyle (1795Á1881) and Sir William Hamilton (1788Á1856) alerted readers to a melancholy future emerging from mechanical theories of the mind. Opposing a Lockean strand in British and French philosophy, their concerns involved predictions about, among other things, a descent into pessimism and nihilism, and the end of metaphysics and moral philosophy. Arguably influenced by Carlyle and Hamilton, William James's (1842Á1910) much later Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) evinces a similar opposition to medical materialist psychology. Confronting a profound shift within Enlightenment thought, towards the increasing dominance of mechanical theories, Carlyle, Hamilton, and James were variously resisting the mechanisation of the human condition and an agency-eradicating instrumentalism. Part of that resistance involved humour and certain indications of hope for humanity that, as Carlyle put it, 'mechanism is not always to be our hard taskmaster'. Once immensely influential, Carlyle, Hamilton, and James are presently marginalised figures. However, Jü rgen Habermas's distinction between communicative and instrumental rationality suggests that what was at stake for these thinkers is of continuing relevance. Their work deserves to be explored to recover nineteenthcentury Scottish philosophy's participation in a discourse of transnational status and significance.

Introduction: Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

“…Ralph Jessop's article explores how the prominent Common Sense theorists Thomas Carlyle (1795Á1881) and Sir William Hamilton (1788Á1856) countered the alleged melancholy affects from mechanical theories of mind. 36 The scope of this piece also looks forward to the thought of William James (1842Á1910) who, as Jessop argues, appealed to the earlier thought of Carlyle and Hamilton in his opposition to medical materialist psychology. Jessop shows how the thought of these significant, yet often marginalised, theorists of the Scottish School of Common Sense is best understood through Jü rgen Habermas's distinction between communicative and instrumental rationality.…”