Anxiety, Reason, and Religion in the Age of Johnson
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A perusal of any biography of Samuel Johnson's life reveals a man so beset by anxiety and fear of mental breakdown that the fear of “the black dog,” Johnson's own shorthand for his mental weakness, is what so darkly colors the moral fabric of a man committed to keeping to a religious life of obedience and faith but nearly continuously ravaged by disease, doubt, and failure of will. The aim of this paper will be to attempt to contextualize Johnson's anxiety within the anxiety of his age in which religion and reason are being negotiated as the search continues for an ethical philosophy that can celebrate the humanity of enlightened man in purely secular terms. Against the overriding optimism about human nature and the rational will of the bulk of Enlightenment thought, especially as manifested in the line of Shaftesbury and the moral sense philosophers of Britain such as Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, but also in continental philosophers such as Rousseau and Kant, Johnson was of those who saw more darkness than light in the human heart. This is why he adhered so strongly to the need for the authority of revealed truth and tradition as manifested in the established Church and in the ancient constitution of the land of his birth. The conservatism of the Tory Johnson must be first and foremost understood as a matter of religious and philosophical persuasion that passive obedience to the divine will more than an enlightened faith in human will was the only human hope for security, if not in the choice of life, then in the choice of eternity.
Abstract
A perusal of any biography of Samuel Johnson's life reveals a man so beset by anxiety and fear of mental breakdown that the fear of “the black dog,” Johnson's own shorthand for his mental weakness, is what so darkly colors the moral fabric of a man committed to keeping to a religious life of obedience and faith but nearly continuously ravaged by disease, doubt, and failure of will. The aim of this paper will be to attempt to contextualize Johnson's anxiety within the anxiety of his age in which religion and reason are being negotiated as the search continues for an ethical philosophy that can celebrate the humanity of enlightened man in purely secular terms. Against the overriding optimism about human nature and the rational will of the bulk of Enlightenment thought, especially as manifested in the line of Shaftesbury and the moral sense philosophers of Britain such as Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, but also in continental philosophers such as Rousseau and Kant, Johnson was of those who saw more darkness than light in the human heart. This is why he adhered so strongly to the need for the authority of revealed truth and tradition as manifested in the established Church and in the ancient constitution of the land of his birth. The conservatism of the Tory Johnson must be first and foremost understood as a matter of religious and philosophical persuasion that passive obedience to the divine will more than an enlightened faith in human will was the only human hope for security, if not in the choice of life, then in the choice of eternity.
참고문헌 (15)
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