Anchor text: Pride and Prejudice — Austen's laboratory for rational moral judgment and its limits.
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1709
I came across the subject proposed by the Academy of Dijon as a prize essay for the following year: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?” The moment I read this I beheld another universe and became another man.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, 1769
The Enlightenment attempts to resolve the Baroque’s tensions by doubling down on reason. Newton has revealed a universe governed by mathematical laws; Locke has argued that legitimate government rests on consent; Kant has issued his rallying cry: Sapere aude — dare to know. The battlefield gives way to the drawing room, and the dominant mood is one of confidence that rational inquiry can illuminate everything it touches. The Enlightenment’s most interesting thinkers, though, know that moral knowledge — knowledge of other people, knowledge of oneself — is trickier than physics. Rousseau diagnoses amour-propre, the corrosive need to see yourself through others’ eyes. Adam Smith argues that moral judgment depends on sympathetic imagination, not calculation. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a laboratory for testing these ideas: a novel in which intelligent people go wrong in their judgments and must learn, painfully, to see past the distortions of vanity and social performance.