"[John Stuart] Mill was the public intellectual who believed that truth is discovered through argument rather than being established from on high, so that ideas become a ‘living truth’ through debate rather than a ‘dead dogma’ handed down by our superiors. And as Reeves draws out in his biography, Mill also revelled in intellectual eclecticism. He thought the truth lay somewhere in opposing arguments. As he wrote in On Liberty: ‘Conflicting doctrines, instead of the one being true and the other false, share the truth between them.’ (3) Just for the record, he didn’t mean, in a pre-PC relativistic fashion, that ‘all truths are equal’, but rather that truth is arrived at through the clash of ideas, the changing and tempering of views through open debate, rather than being set in authoritarian stone."-- From Tessa Mayes' Spiked! review of Victorian Firebrand, the Mill biography, written by Richard Reeves.
CMC, thanks for the JSM vignette! I like him, a lot. Did you know that JSM was a feminist? He wrote a mind-blowing feminist paper titled "The Subjection of Women" (1869). Look it up if you can -- great reading.
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E.
P.S. Now that I've actually read Mayes' piece, I see that she and Reeves talk about JSM's feminism. LOL.
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