Pride and Prejudice and Empiricism and Locke

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice is related to empiricism. But how? Let's apply the rules of a rational process and analise the topic, only accepting as true what we can perceive in a clear and distinct way.

Time to do some philosophy. All you have to know is that you don't know anything.

You asked for bad and overused philosophy jokes? You get them :)

Since we haven't had the honour to introduce ourselves into Hume's or Hobbes' conception yet, I'm going to refer only to Locke's empiricism.

First of all, what exactly does empiricism imply? If you're an empiricist, in terms of epistemology, you accept that any knowledge that you obtain has previously passed through your senses. The logical consequence of this is the opposite of what Descartes' rationalism tries to sell us: any knowledge that we achieve exclusively by implementing rational arguments is not to be trusted if we can't prove it "experimentally".
In the book Elizabeth initially dislikes Mr. Darcy, but in the end, after realising that her vision was blurred, she falls in love with him. And this is how we relate Locke's empiricism with Pride and Prejudice. According to Locke, there are 3 main causes of bad reasoning in humans:

• Received hypotheses: Often we just accept what other people tell us without questioning it, sometimes this even happens unconsciously. In other words, we take the validity of others' statements for granted if they don't cause obvious suspicion. This is what happens to Elizabeth when she believes Mr. Wickham's tales about Darcy. Since his stories seem to reaffirm Elizabeth's first impression of Darcy, her prejudice is enforced and she doesn't even consider to doubt Wickham's words before reading Darcy's letter.

• Dominating passions: Pride and Prejudice is all about love and marrying. And I think we all know one thing for sure about love: it makes us blind. When you're madly in love with someone, all those heavy feelings you experience replace what, in normal conditions, would be rational thinking. There was this one sentence that I personally liked a lot, I'm not sure if it appeared in the film, the book or both... Anyway, it was: "We are all fools in love." You may think this is quite obvious, but in my opinion we tend to judge either ourselves or the other too strictly when it comes to love matters. After all, no one ever really knows what is the right thing to do when you feel great affection for someone else. Sometimes we just have to remind ourselves that others are as blind as us when it comes to love (while other people need to bear in mind that they aren't smarter than others).

• Authority: Similar to the first cause, we tend to believe in certain statements easier when claimed by people we respect. We are easily influenced by authorities, which can be teachers, parents, siblings, famous people or even friends and partners. I consider this one the most dangerous of all, because many people don't manage to make the giant step away from all those old opinions they have received by other people and reflect seriously about them, with their own rational arguments. Of course it is important to learn from others, but we must remember that not all authorities are trustworthy and even if they are, they're still humans like you and I and therefore, they make mistakes. The best way to avoid a narrow mind is to compare different opinions from different authorities. This helps us to reconsider things from other points of view. In Pride and Prejudice, their social status grants some people great authority, like for example Lady Catherine. But Elizabeth is clever enough to distrust people despite their authority.

Finally, we can conclude that it's the accumulated experience that lets Elizabeth perceive the truth about Darcy. His letter triggers a certain switch in her mind that makes her think: She starts to remember everything that happened, all the experiences she has lived in relation to Darcy and then she realises that these experiences tell her the truth and not her own prejudices.































































This is it. 2nd term blog posts OVER AND OUT