Friday, May 17, 2013

May Sinclair, Novelist and Philosopher

May Sinclair
Late in April on the Pea Soup blog, there was a query about philosophy in novels. I discovered that one such book was by Mrs. Humphry Ward (aka Mary Augusta Ward). The book, which appeared in 1888, was called Robert Elsmere. It was a bestseller and was reviewed by Gladstone. The novel amounted to a popularization of T. H. Green's philosophy.

Around the same time that Ward was at work on this novel, another British, female novelist was developing her own interpretation of Green. May Sinclair (1863-1946) had begun reading philosophy before she entered Cheltenham Ladies' College, but it was during her time there under the tutelage of Dorothea Beale that she took up philosophy in earnest. Sinclair's first publication, on Descartes, appeared in the college's journal in 1882. She published her first book (of poetry) in 1886 under the pseudonym 'Julian Sinclair'. She was the first female member of the Aristotelian Society, joining in 1917. In 1923, Sinclair presented a paper to the Aristotelian Society. It was called 'Primary and Secondary Consciousness'. Among those who commented on her paper that evening were Alfred North Whitehead and our old friend C. E. M. Joad.

It was Dorothea Beale who encouraged Sinclair to read the works of T. H. Green, who was the subject of 'The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism', which Sinclair published in New World in 1893. Green confirmed Sinclair's interest in the German idealists, including Schopenhauer, whom she read avidly.

Sinclair published her first novel (Audrey Craven) in 1896. She had a blockbuster hit with Divine Fire (1904) (reviewed here), the popularity of which led to her tour of the United States in 1905. While in the USA, she met William James and visited President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.

Sinclair's intensive study of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann left her receptive to Freud's new science of the unconscious. She was among the first novelists to incorporate such themes in her fiction, and she helped to establish one of the first psychoanalytic institutions in the UK (the Medico-Psychological Clinic) in 1913. According to Sinclair's entry in the Oxford DNB, she wrote the prospectus for the Clinic and was elected as one of its twelve founder members. She also sat on its Board of Management.

Sinclair is also known for being the first person to use William James' phrase 'stream of consciousness' in characterizing a work of fiction.

Her most highly regarded novel seems to be Mary Olivier. Here's a quotation from this work:
There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was ‘reine Anschauung,’ pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted ‘Wille und Vorstellung’ the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy. --Mary Olivier, pp. 292-3; quoted from James Thrall, 'May Sinclair: Mystic Modern'.
While philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, literary scholars have. Some of them address the philosophical themes in her work. James Thrall, for example (in the above-linked work), focuses on Schopenhauer's influence. Christine Battersby, while acknowledging Schopenhauer's importance, argues that Spinoza is the philosopher whose thought is most evident in Sinclair's fiction. Two dissertations of interest in this connection are Leigh Wilson's 'It was as if she had said....': May Sinclair and reading narratives of cure and Justine McCarthy's Edges of the mind : psychic margins and the modernist aesthetic in Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison.

Philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, but some have written about her. Bertrand Russell reviewed both of her books on idealism. He reviewed Sinclair's A Defence of Idealism in The Nation (August 31, 1918) and her The New Idealism in Nation and the Athenaeum (August 5, 1922). Both reviews appear in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914-1919.

It's unsurprising that Russell would be critical of books by an exponent of idealism, mysticism, and Jungian psychoanalysis. Still, he wrote to his mistress of the day, Lady Constance Malleson, that Sinclair's book 'was not very bad'. Russell took a generally respectful tone in both his reviews. He also corresponded with Sinclair about her defence of idealism.

Finally, we should admire Sinclair's courage in taking on Sir Almroth Wright, who had published an odious tract in which he opposed women's suffrage on supposedly scientific grounds. This prompted Sinclair not only to write a brief reply in the Times (of London) but also to produce a pamphlet called 'Feminism'. The details of this conflict are recounted by Jim Gough in 'May Sinclair: Idealism-Feminism and the Suffragist Movement'. Sinclair was a member of both the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Women's Freedom League.

Sinclair's obituary in the Times (Nov. 15, 1946) appeared, suitably, under the heading 'Philosophy and the Novel'.
 

Sunday, May 12, 2013

A Kierkegaard bicentennial roundup

Sketch by Christian Olavius Zeuthen (1843)

May 5 was the 200th anniversary of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard's birth, as was noted by Julian Baggini. The anniversary was also the occasion for this piece by Andrew Torrance at Per Crucem ad Lucem.

I rounded up some Kierkegaard links a couple of years ago, including one for Hubert Dreyfus's paper on why Kierkegaard would have hated the internet. (I'm sure Kim Kierkegaardashian would disagree.) Dreyfus spoke about Kierkegaard earlier this month on Philosopher's Zone, hosted by Joe Gelonesi. The other speakers were Patrick Stokes and Tim Rayner.

Three older podcasts on Kierkegaard from: a 2008 episode of In Our Time; a 2010 one from Partially Examined Life; and a 2008 episode of Philosophy Bites.

A collection of videos about Kierkegaard. You can find others, by Dreyfus, on YouTube.

From the University of Edinburgh, Sean Turchin's on-line dissertation about the relation between Kierkegaard and Karl Barth.

W. H. Auden's Introduction (pdf) to The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard.

'The Oddest Prophet' -- Malcolm Muggeridge on Kierkegaard. 

A chapter on Kierkegaard and Sartre from Jacques Maritain's book called Moral Philosophy.

The text of Lev Shestov's Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.

From a 1945 issue of The New Republic, Jean Wahl's 'Existentialism: A Preface'.

Two pdf's: Merold Westphal's 'Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate' and Alastair Hannay's 'Kierkegaard: the pathologist'.

William McDonald's 'Love in Kierkegaard's Symposia'.

John Updike's 2005 review of a Kierkegaard biography in the New Yorker. The first part of Joakim Garff's biography.

From First Things in 2004: 'Kierkegaard for Grownups' by Richard John Neuhaus. Earlier this May, William Doino, Jr. has a piece on Kierkegaard in the same journal.

'Kierkegaard the Novelist and Three Kierkegaardian Novels: The Moviegoer, The Sportswriter and Rabbit, Run'.

Two items of interest in the NY Times.

Several volumes edited by Jon Stewart on Kierkegaard's influence.

A lot more Kierkegaard links.
 

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Confusion in the learning process

Derek Muller has created some great videos for science education. He posts them at Veritasium on YouTube. He summarizes one of his studies in the clip that appears below.

In this study, Muller had students complete a quiz about the force that acts on a basketball once it is thrown upwards. He then showed them a 10-minute video (actually one of a variety of 10-minute videos) in which a narrator presents the truth about this force. After viewing the video, the students completed the same quiz again and were asked what they thought about the 10-minute clip. Students seem to have liked the video, characterizing it as 'clear' and 'easy to understand'. However, their results on the post-video quiz weren't much better than on the pre-video quiz. It turns out that the students didn't learn much at all from the video even though they thought highly of it.

Muller decided to make a video that followed a different strategy. Instead of presenting a straightforward explanation of the force that operates on the ball, Muller's new clip showed one actor giving a popular but false account of this force. This was followed by another actor's correction of the first one's erroneous claims.

The pre- and post-video quizzes indicated that students learned more from this second clip. That's an interesting result -- students learned more by seeing an erroneous view (perhaps their own) exposed and corrected than by viewing a straightforward, correct explanation.

What strikes me as even more interesting is that the students didn't think as highly of the second video. They thought it was 'confusing'. The better learning experience was correlated with a more negative affect.

I guess this shouldn't be so surprising. Learning challenges preconceptions. Challenge and correction of an initial opinion are unsettling, breeding confusion as one realizes that one doesn't know what one thought one knew. Apart from the sense of embarrassment that can follow the exposure of an error in one's thinking (even if no one else knows about it), correction of an error goes against inertia, requiring more effort on the part of the learner in order to change her/his thinking.