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Plato, George Eliot, and Moral Narcissism

George Eliot in Middlemarch charts the course of various shipwrecked lives. Like many philosophers, she explores the terrain of human happiness, looking for the constituents of the good life and the properties of a character disposed to live such a life. The moral lodestar of the novel is Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman who enters a disastrous first marriage to Casaubon, an emotionally paralyzed, ineffectual scholar whom she has deified. Eliot chronicles, among other things, Dorothea's moral education, which enables her to flourish socially and affectively, and not incidentally, to make a far happier second marriage. Eliot deems egoism as the greatest obstacle to human happiness. Egoism, for Eliot, not only assumes different forms, but occurs in varying degrees of recalcitrancy in her characters. As Peter Jones shows in his rich philosophical study of Middlemarch, Eliot takes egoism to involve not only ascribing value to things in the world, but also describing them, so that her egoist both characterizes and evaluates the world from the vantage point of his own desires.1 In part because Eliot views the human being as a member of a social organism, she thinks that the failure to transcend one's idiosyncratic perspective dooms one to unhappiness. Thus, a necessary condition for well-being, on Eliot's account, is to try to view the world from the perspective of another person.2 She shows this not only by depicting the lives of her characters who collide and drift apart with different levels of self-awareness, but also by having her shrewd omniscient narrator disinterestedly occupy a multiplicity of standpoints. This narrative device displays the relation between a character's point of view and his perceptions, while providing us with a model of perception untainted by egoism. The most poignant of tragedies in Middlemarch is that of Dr. Lydgate,