The Philosophy of Jane Austen
The Nature of Jane Austen's Novels Reveals Her Sense of Value
What is it that makes Jane Austen's novels perennial? She had a common attitude which informed them - a love for the little details of life.
Jane Austen did not write anything explicitly about philosophy. Yet her novels are redolent with philosophical insights and we can read between the lines of her books an implicit attitude to life, within which a certain ‘philosophy’ becomes obvious.
The Love of a Creator
Jane Austen is meant to have loved her characters so much that she had constructed 'after lives' for them, details about what really happened to them even long after the end of her actual stories, not included in any book. This seems excessive and yet it is perhaps the kind of dedication that gives her characters the authenticity that they have. It seems wrong to love literary creations such as characters, and yet perhaps this is what is required to flesh them out in their full humanity as she does.
Philosophy as Wisdom of Life
She is as astute a psychologist as she is a loving friend to her characters. And the philosophy that may be read in her books is all the more beautiful and penetrative for being implied, rather than explicit or dogmatic, and it is read through the various responses of her characters to events. What is most distinctive about the expression of her thoughts, even the most noble and abstract, is that they are all shown through the particular goings on of individual lives, seemingly imbuing the details of these lives with a meaning through her own delicate care and attention. Perhaps only Chekhov has come close to expressing such entirely applied wisdom since Austen, rather than philosophizing more self-consciously, for example, in the form of the soliloquy.
The Expression Fits the Experience
Most, if not all, of Austen’s writing happened in snatched moments of privacy in such a way as didn't interfere with the rest of her household duties. If a member of her family was to enter into the same room, she would simply put her writing away and get on with her needlepoint. To a relative who wrote great epic stories, she responded that she could not compete with this grandness, for she was describing what she knew, a scene of domesticity so small that, instead of an expansive picture, it was more like painting an intricate design on the enamel of a broach. Her books are however about what really is a universal experience - that life is ultimately small, because it is particular, and within a very specific context.
The Particular Is the Avenue to the Universal
Life is always individual and here and now. There is the smallness of the particular that must come with that, but rather than laughing this off and pretending to some worldly greatness, Jane Austen was happy to dwell where she was with the people she had and loved them in the littleness of the moment. She shows this through taking them regularly as the models for her study, even often employing, for character names, the names of loved ones or acquaintances. What someone trying to trace the great political and sociological movements of an age would have missed, Austen saw, such as the way one silence symbolized indifference, while another symbolized love.
The Importance of This, Here, Now
Without the appreciation of the particular results of the sciences, it would be impossible to build up reliable and empirical universal laws of nature, and similarly, without the attention to detail and the minutiae of life, it would be impossible to establish any universal moral norms. It is because Jane Austen was so down to earth, that she is so faithful a guide to the wisdom implied in moral philosophy
