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“The beginning of an acquaintance, whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.”
This comment of George Eliot's well describes the kind of unlearning that may have to take place before knowledge of a different kind can be acquired and meaningful change occur. It is a painful, uncertain and often confusing process. It involves the relinquishment of preconceptions, of acquired ways of thinking, of the defensive structures of bodies of knowledge and conventional learning, used all too easily merely as bulwarks against significant change, as tyrannical structures of thought, demanding acquiescence out of ambition or fear. Such structures engender inferiority and a decreasing capacity to think for onself.
It was a curious position for a woman of such profound learning and powerful intellect, yet it was deeply felt. The novels fundamentally challenged the current tenets of scientific rationality to which, with a part of herself, George Eliot gave full credence. In place of that positivistic way of thinking her works offer an alternative mode, much more readily recognisable to those familiar with the struggle to acquire the capacity to learn, to acknowledge and bear the truth about themselves — a struggle which lies perhaps at the heart of the developmental or psychoanalytic experience.
The dual moment of what A.N. Whitehead characterised as the mid-nineteenth-century “distracted mind” is well caught in George Eliot's prepublication review of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. She says: “We have been reading Darwin's book on ‘Origin of Species’: it makes an epoch, as an expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT … So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.”
The extent to which most o