J.S. Mill: Philosophy in an Hour

Paul Strathern

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007466177
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of J.S. Mill in just one hour.

John Stuart Mill is remembered today as the leading exponent of Utilitarianism, arguing that our aim in life must be the attainment of pleasure and the minimizing of pain for the majority of people. The principle that lies at the heart of Utilitarianism is ‘the greatest benefit of the greatest number’ – an idea that perhaps seems self-evident today but one that was seen as radical within Mill’s own time. This central idea has become the unspoken founding principle of our modern way of life in the free Western democracies.

Here is a concise, expert account of J.S. Mill’s life and philosophical ideas – entertainingly written and easy to understand. Also included are selections from J.S. Mill’s work, suggested further reading, and chronologies that place J.S. Mill in the context of the broader scheme of philosophy.

Mill’s Life and Works

John Stuart Mill was born in London on 20 May 1806. From his earliest years his education was carried out by his father: James Mill was determined to turn his son into a genius. At the age of three, young John Stuart began studying arithmetic and ancient Greek. By eight he was launched into Latin, algebra, and geometry; by twelve he was deemed ready for logic and philosophy. But not everything went according to plan. Apparently at the age of seven young Mill read Plato’s Theaetetus in the original Greek. Although he understood the words and could follow the sentences, he found that he somehow failed to grasp the gist of the work. Considering that this high-minded dialogue of Plato’s is devoted to a lengthy discussion of the finer points of how knowledge itself should be defined, the child’s puzzlement is not surprising. Not so to James Mill, who instructed him to read it again.

Regardless and relentless, the child’s indoctrination began at six o’clock each morning, continuing throughout the day. He was isolated from all frivolous contact with other children and was allowed no holidays ‘lest the habit of work should be broken and a taste for idleness acquired’. Poetry was forbidden and imagination discouraged. Mill senior believed that private emotion should be suppressed in favour of restrained public expressions of general social approbation or displeasure. His guiding spirit was Walter Landor’s maxim: ‘Few acquaintances, fewer friends, no familiarities.’ James Mill – the leading public champion of Bentham’s pleasure principle and the benign mentor of the great economic thinker Ricardo – was in fact a classic Victorian monster in the privacy of his own home. His obsession with his son’s education knew no bounds. By the age of thirteen John Stuart Mill had in his own words finished ‘a complete course in political economy’. This was no exaggeration: he would now sit in on discussions between his father and Ricardo, absorbing the very latest economic ideas, even occasionally making his own astute contributions.

In 1821 the fifteen-year-old Mill came across Bentham’s Treatise on Morals and Legislation. By the time he had finished reading through this three-volume work, ‘I had become a different human being.’ His admiration for Bentham and his Utilitarian ideas knew no bounds. ‘From now on I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world.’

Bentham was never much interested in publication. He left it to his disciples to put together finished books out of his daily production of unfinished treatises and passing thoughts on every subject that took his fancy. At the age of eighteen John Stuart Mill embarked upon the mammoth task of piecing together thousands of scraps of paper, covered with Bentham’s scrawled handwriting, into a consecutive manuscript of more than a million words. This would eventually emerge as the multivolume work On Evidence.

As Mill later tellingly remarked in his Autobiography, ‘I was never a boy.’ One can imagine the domestic atmosphere presided over by a man described by his son: ‘for passionate emotion of all sorts … he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness.’ But what did young Mill’s mother make of all this? Either through fear, weakness, or resignation, she did nothing. She had evidently seen it all before: her mother had run an asylum. Indicatively, John Stuart Mill does not mention his mother once during the entire 325 pages of his Autobiography.

So successful was James Mill’s brainwashing of his son that by the age of twenty even John Stuart’s inner life was governed utterly by reason. He could allow himself no deviation from the tyranny of his indoctrinated mind. He even seems to have remained unaware of his exceptional talents, judging them to be ‘below rather than above par, what I could do could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity’. Such a judgment could only have come from someone who had simply never met – or freely conversed – with someone of his own age. Even so, a growing self-awareness gradually began to dawn in the young man who had never been a boy. Working obsessively as ever amidst the gloom of a foggy London autumn day in 1826, he found himself pausing to ask himself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised … would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ In his own words: ‘An irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.’ The young man who believed utterly in the philosophy of happiness was incapable of achieving this for himself.

John Stuart Mill was having a long-overdue nervous breakdown. Typically he appears to have kept this to himself. Even more typically, neither his mother nor his father seems to have noticed. Yet amidst the inner turmoil a sea change was taking place. Mill began reading the romantic poetry of Wordsworth and the writings of irrational thinkers such as the French social reformer Saint-Simon. Then one day he found himself ‘accidentally’ reading the Mémoires of the sentimental French poet Jean-François Marmontel. When he came to the passage where the poet describes the death of his father, Mill burst into tears. He claimed that he was moved by his own ‘vivid conception’ of the scene, though he makes no reference to what was actually taking place in it. His suppressed wish that such a scene should take place in his own life would not have been so transparent in those pre-Freudian times. Mill concluded that he was now cured: ‘The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone.’ John Stuart Mill would now devote himself to the introduction of humanity into his philosophy.

Although he retained his belief in the Utilitarian principle, Mill began to form critical judgments of its founders. Regarding Bentham, he realised: ‘Self-consciousness, that demon of the men of genius of our time [that is, the Romantics such as Wordsworth] never was awakened in him.’ He concluded that Bentham belonged to ‘a generation of the leanest and barrenest men whom England had ever produced’. This latter comment betrays more than a hint of subconscious antagonism toward his father. Yet at the same time he still believed that Bentham was ‘a great benefactor of mankind’. Besides introducing a human element, Mill would also seek to broaden the whole concept of Utilitarianism. In doing so he would transform what had begun as a far-reaching and ameliorative liberal idea into a distinct and logically argued philosophy.

Despite his pronouncement that he was cured, Mill only gradually recovered from his breakdown. He now courted his father’s disapproval by attending classical concerts. Yet in the midst of an enjoyable performance his overheated logical mind would be gripped with the fear that all music must inevitably come to an end. It had only a limited number of notes, and these would surely soon all be used up. (Despite this simple blunder, Mill’s exceptional logical powers were fortunately restored along with his sanity.)

The inevitably somewhat priggish, driven, and extraordinarily precocious young man whom Mill had been, emerged from his mental ordeal as a human being of rare quality. In place of the unimaginative rigidity instilled by his father, he became an exceptionally understanding man, habitually able to see and empathise with the other person’s point of view. His nobility of purpose was now tempered by practicality. He developed a wide feeling for what human happiness means and a contempt for narrow and unforgiving sectarianism.

Then the inevitable happened. At the age of twenty-four he fell in love with a woman he found darkly attractive and highly intelligent. The twenty-two-year-old Harriet Taylor was a poet of turbulent but contained emotion, and she immediately reciprocated his love. Unfortunately she w...