Spinozist-Deleuzian Learning and the Narrative of Apprenticeship: Pride and Prejudice

I examine how Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of “learning” is predicated on Spinoza’s “common notion,” and how Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a representative classical Bildungsroman in Britain, also works as a narrative of “Spinozist-Deleuzian learning.” Deviating from Lukacs’s definition of Bildungsroman as the maturation of “a problematic individual” and his/her “reconciliation” with the society, narratives of Spinozist-Deleuzian learning remind us of the importance of learning (apprenticeship) as an indispensable part of our lives even in the 21st century. Spinoza’s Ethics presents learning or apprenticeship as a crucial facet of his ethical project of active liberty where common notion as “a strange harmony of reason and imagination” plays a decisive role. Deleuze’s account of “learning” reformulates the differences between Spinozist common notion and Cartesian concept of truth (i.e. correspondence of an object with the mind’s representation of it) into the distinction of “learning” and “knowledge.” Simply put, while learning is a problem or a problematic field, knowledge is a solution; they are as distant as possible in nature. Pride and Prejudice exemplifies a process of learning in Spinozist-Deleuzian sense where Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy encounter to realize passive affects like pride as the core part of their selves and proceed to joy and affirmation through the formation of common notions. Furthermore, Austen’s novel evidences that the novel reader’s forrmation of common notions with characters and also with the narrator through sympathy and distancing is the mechanism of novel reading more pivotal than identification or sympathy. The novel is a singular space where imagination as the necessary condition of human knowledge is unfolded as well as what Spinoza calls the virtue (eminence) of the mind, i.e. the mind’s meta-power of being aware that it imagines as it imagines.