Jeremy Bentham: A Mind for Many Ideas
By Margaret Webster
The Ideas roamed the earth searching for fertile and receptive minds. [i]
They stalked through the halls of palaces and parliaments[ii]. They lingered in coffeehouses[iii] and ale houses[iv]. They sat sulking on the shelves of school rooms.[v]
Some Ideas had the knack of knocking on human minds. Liberty leapt from mind to mind, racing from the New World back to the Old until she circled the globe.[vi] Some did not. The Abolition of Physical Punishment for Children howled and howled that he was obviously right to little effect.[vii] Animal Rights was cold-shouldered for many millennia.[viii] One Idea dared not even speak its own name.[ix]
The Ideas first noticed Jeremy Bentham when, still in petticoats, he instructed his father’s servant to bring him a multi-volumed history.[x] They saw his love of facts over fiction.[xi] They shared his pain[xii] at the insincerity and mendacity of Oxford.[xiii] They swelled with pleasure[xiv] when he dismissed natural law as ‘nonsense on stilts’.[xv]
Energised by his vast potential, the Ideas swarmed to Jeremy. They demanded his attention in the books of Hume and Hartley.[xvi] They courted him during conversations with Adam Smith and James Mill.[xvii] They maximised[xviii] their power as he measured their rights and wrongs[xix]. They magnified their utility[xx] through his international[xxi] correspondence.[xxii]
Today, Bentham’s Ideas rest in the pages of his many manuscripts.[xxiii] As their codification[xxiv] progresses, they are re-joining the world and bringing a greater happiness to a greater number.[xxv] But more await us, biding their time until once again they can leap from a page and race like wildfire through human minds.[xxvi]
Jeremy Bentham
Nonsense exposer
Iconoclastic thinker
Happiness lover
Sources
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham
http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/bentham.html
https://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/
[i] This piece was inspired by 26’s brief, Elizabeth Gilbert’s charming belief that ideas are disembodied energetic life-forms with wills of their own, Richard Dawkin’s concept of memes and 99% Invisible’s episode on the chain reaction of ideas behind the kidney-shaped swimming pool.
[ii] Bentham corresponded with William Pitt, the Prime Minister, about his proposal for a national penitentiary. He also hoped to interest Catherine the Great of Russia in his ideas for penal reform when he lived there with his brother.
[iii] Coffeehhouses were places of intellectual and political debate in London during the 17th & 18th centuries.
[iv] Bloomsbury had a pub called ‘The Jeremy Bentham’ for many years.
[v] Bentham attended Westminster School.
[vi] Bentham wrote an essay titled a ‘A Short Review of the Declaration’ in response to the American Declaration of Independence.
[vii] Bentham called for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children.
[viii] Bentham was an early advocate of animal rights on the grounds that animals can suffer. (Most earlier thinkers argued that animals did not have rights because they are not rational.)
[ix] Bentham wrote an essay arguing for the decriminalising of homosexual acts, but did not publish it for fear of offending public morality.
[x] Bentham’s father told this story repeatedly as proof of his son’s precocious intellectual talents.
[xi] Bentham was a sharp critic of legal fictions.
[xii] Bentham believed that happiness is a “matter of experiencing pleasure and a lack of pain”.
[xiii] Bentham attended The Queen’s College, Oxford. He was not impressed and said, “mendacity and insincerity [were] the only sure effects of an English university education”.
[xiv] Pleasure, like pain, was a key concept in Bentham’s thinking.
[xv] This is one of Bentham’s most famous quotes.
[xvi] Bentham’s view of human nature – especially his view that pleasure and pain are objective states and can be measured – was influenced by David Hartley and David Hume
[xvii] Adam Smith and James Mill were both Bentham’s students.
[xviii] Bentham invented the word ‘maximise’.
[xix] Bentham believed that right and wrong could be determined by measuring the pleasure and pain that an action caused.
[xx] Bentham is considered the founder of modern utilitarianism.
[xxi] Bentham invented the word ‘international’.
[xxii] Bentham corresponded with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution and, as a result, he was declared an honorary citizen of France.
[xxiii] Bentham lefts tens of thousands of pages of manuscripts. He was an obsessive writer, but almost incapable of completing a work and publishing it. Since 1968, UCL’s Bentham Project has been creating a definitive edition of Bentham’s writings.
[xxiv] Bentham invented the word ‘codification’.
[xxv] Bentham defined the fundamental axiom of his philosophy as the principle that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”.
[xxvi] One of Jeremy Bentham’s most unusual ideas concerned the preservation of his body after his death. He instructed that it be transformed into an auto-icon so his skeleton was stuffed with hay and dressed in one his black suits. Today, it resides at UCL. His mummified head has inspired a few ideas in its own right – mostly pranks by UCL students.