Romantic Humility: Literature, Ethico-Politics, and Emotion, 1780-1820

What we now call “liberal individualism”—that is, the belief in the inalienable rights and freedom of the individual—first emerged in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods in Europe, and continues to be a defining feature of Western democracies. The liberal valorization of freedom as the sovereign moral concept was a consequence of Enlightenment philosophy, scientific progress, and secularization, which led to the view that human life is self-contained and without an externally defined purpose, and that human relations can be understood by considering society simply as an aggregate of individuals who are each driven by desire and self-interest. Values previously safeguarded by divine authority devolved into matters of choice by the individual will, and many observers have suggested that this change resulted in a moral lassitude that, paradoxically, made it more difficult to realize the Enlightenment ideals of universal liberty, rights, and justice. Arguments grounded in premises of natural freedom and rights often end up rationalizing absolute authoritarian power, as we see, for example, in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

This dissertation examines how British writers of the Romantic period such as Olaudah Equiano, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley responded to this moral dilemma of liberal individualism by developing a new understanding of humility in their works. The meaning of humility in the West has been fundamentally shaped by the Jewish and Christian traditions that view humility as a spiritual quality that disposes an individual toward reverence for and submission to God. As a quality that goes against the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and agency, humility underwent a steady devaluation in the eighteenth century and onward, perceived, for example, as a “monkish kind of virtue” by David Hume and a “slave morality” by Friedrich Nietzsche. This study argues that instead of returning to the religiously infused concept of humility, British Romantic authors developed a new form of humility for the secular age, one that not only preserves human agency but also emphasizes the need for human action for collective good. This humility does not focus on self-abasement but on a selfless mood, predicated on an immanent framework derived from Stoicism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which were influential in the eighteenth century. In three chapters, this study shows how Equiano, Godwin, and Shelley’s instantiations of Romantic humility respectively illuminate Romantic humility as it informs human relations, historical progress, and human-nonhuman relations. In so doing, this study shows that Romanticism cannot be viewed simply as an extension of Enlightenment individualism but also as an era of collectivist humility.