At the Crossroads of Literature and Philosophy: Hardy’s Reception of Kant

Abstract

The year 1881, ten years before Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) was published, marked a centenary of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that was held in high esteem by Victorians. Despite the revival of Kant’s philosophy at that time, however, Victorians tended to present themselves as Kantians and anti-Kantians, especially as Kant’s concept of so-called transcendental idealism was put under philosophical scrutiny, and Hardy was one of those Victorians with reservations about this Kantian transcendental deduction. The aim of this paper is to briefly examine the ways that Hardy as an artist received Kant and then, to suggest that Hardy is an exponent of multivocality in literature. To do this, several scenes from Tess of the d’Urbervilles are analysed as a case study, in order to elucidate implications of which Hardy’s philosophical standpoints are presuppositions for the book. It is stressed that hybrid stylization charged with multivocality, which is bitingly effective in Hardy’s art, serves to undermine the alleged homogeneity of Kantian apodictic abstraction against which he guards. Hardy is highly averse to monothetic ideas, so much so that his book, with the hope of opening up a single authority and power to dialogic discussions, shows a marked concern with facilitating contact with what is belittled or suppressed by any dominant voice. So, in brief conclusion, it is underlined that by maximising this dialogic, democratic spirit, Hardy’s book manifests itself as one of the greatest works of art.