ROMANTIC INDIFFERENTISM

The principal argument of this book is that English Romantic writing has a deep investment in the problem of knowledge, even as it attempts to conceal that involvement, and that it represents the first major attempt in Britain to retrieve philosophical thought from its confinement, first by Hume, then by Reid and the Scottish philosophers of common sense, to the margins of experience. The manner in which this retrieval is carried through, moreover, establishes a pattern for the treatment of knowledge which has been broadly followed by English-language philosophy to the present day. Paradoxically, part of that pattern is a denial of interest in epistemological questions, a cultivated indifference which is itself parasitic upon an urgent engagement with the twin questions of what, and how one knows.

Kant complained in his Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 that, caught between a despotic rationalism and an anarchic scepticism, the predominant attitude of late eighteenth-century thought towards the problem of knowledge had become what he called, using an English term, one of ‘indifferentism’. English Romanticism internalizes and continues this indifference to knowing. Lamb admitted in a 1810 letter to Thomas Manning that ‘[n]othing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them’.