Treating Mill's disease. (Philosophy & Ideas).(how John Stuart Mill's personal crisis and disenchantment led him to an appreciation of poetry)(Brief Article)

IN THE FAMOUS fifth chapter of his Autobiography John Stuart Mill recalls his nervous breakdown in the winter of 1826 when he was about twenty-one. At its heart was a disenchantment with the philosophy of life that had given meaning and direction to his every step--the creed of Jeremy Bentham, or Benthamism, which he had absorbed from his father as a sort of religion.

This religion inculcated a restless pursuit of knowledge and a subversive love of inquiry. It fostered a contempt for blind custom and vested interests. It valued the new broom over the merely conventional or traditional. It was confident that utilitarianism was the great discovery of the age, utility the touchstone of truth, and Benthamism the culmination of all preceding philosophy.

In his political, social or even personal decisions, the rational man does not rely on habit, tradition, intuition, authority, God or the Law. He decides after a calculus of happiness. "The greatest happiness of the greatest number," declared Bentham, "is the foundation of morals and legislation." Apply this principle of enlightenment, and the cobwebs of history and habit are blown away.

Bentham inspired a vast amount of English legislation from welfare reform to municipal government. His successes include: the establishment of a permanent civil service based on competitive examinations; the extension of the franchise; the modern police; the parcel post; the structure of modern government departments; a national system of education. When he died, in 1832, at the age of eighty-four, he had achieved the "boyish" (Mill's word) ambition of being "the Newton of legislation".

Believing in the overwhelming importance of education, Mill's father, a leading Benthamite journalist, had personally educated his son--on utilitarian principles. Young Mill could read Plato at ten and was learning Aristotle's logic at twelve. He spent his youth among his father's circle of kindred spirits--intellectuals, reformers, utilitarians.

But the moment came when Mill asked himself whether life would be worth living if all the Benthamite hopes for mankind were achieved. His answer was a clear and irrepressible No. Suddenly "the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down" and there was nothing to be done about it. "I seemed to have nothing left to live for." The nausea he felt may be called Mill's Disease, and it is one of the characteristic experiences of the modern, liberal and secular age. Baudelaire called it spleen. Heidegger called it Angst.

Mill continued for some months in a state of suicidal depression, unable to confide in anyone of his circle. He felt a hint of hope when he read the memoirs of the French writer Marmontel, whose account of his father's death moved Mill to tears. This made him realise that he had not entirely lost all feeling, that he was not after all a stone. "From this moment my burden grew lighter."