The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature [1st ed.] 978-1-137-54793-4, 978-1-137-54794-1

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction (Barry Stocker)....Pages 1-37
Front Matter ....Pages 39-39
What Is Philosophical Dialogue? (S. Montgomery Ewegen)....Pages 41-59
‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’ (Michelle Boulous Walker)....Pages 61-79
Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary and Philosophical Narratives (Niklas Forsberg)....Pages 81-98
On Philosophy and Poetry (Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei)....Pages 99-122
‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography, and Autobiography (Christopher Hamilton)....Pages 123-142
Aphorisms and Fragments (Guy Elgat)....Pages 143-162
Front Matter ....Pages 163-163
Myth (Tudor Balinisteanu)....Pages 165-183
Epic (Michael Weinman)....Pages 185-202
Philosophy and Drama (Lior Levy)....Pages 203-220
Lyric Poetry (Mathew Abbott)....Pages 221-239
Philosophy of the Novel (Barry Stocker)....Pages 241-261
Romance (Marsha S. Collins)....Pages 263-291
Front Matter ....Pages 293-293
Analytic Aesthetics (Jukka Mikkonen)....Pages 295-314
Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy and the Romance (Isabel Jaén)....Pages 315-339
Hermeneutics (Hanna Meretoja)....Pages 341-364
Phenomenology (Alexander Kozin, Tanja Staehler)....Pages 365-384
Language, Ontology, Fiction (Frederick Kroon, Alberto Voltolini)....Pages 385-406
Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics (Simon Morgan Wortham)....Pages 407-425
Front Matter ....Pages 427-427
Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths (Michael Mack)....Pages 429-441
Rhetoric (Rosaleen Keefe)....Pages 443-466
Feminism and Gender (Kimberly J. Stern)....Pages 467-487
Psychoanalysis (Will Long)....Pages 489-517
Postcolonialism (Bill Ashcroft)....Pages 519-537
Front Matter ....Pages 539-539
Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance of Literature to Modern Legal Scholarship (Julia J. A. Shaw)....Pages 541-559
Politics and Literature (Michael Keren)....Pages 561-579
Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown (İlhan İnan)....Pages 581-600
Ethics and Literature (Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Hanna Meretoja)....Pages 601-621
Literature and Political Economy (Aaron Kitch)....Pages 623-643
Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern Theories (Shira Wolosky)....Pages 645-664
Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue (Michael Mack)....Pages 665-677
Back Matter ....Pages 679-779

Citation preview

THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE Edited by Barry Stocker and Michael Mack

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

Barry Stocker  •  Michael Mack Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

Editors Barry Stocker Istanbul Technical University Istanbul, Turkey

Michael Mack Durham University Durham, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-54793-4    ISBN 978-1-137-54794-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953690 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tomas Abad / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Barry Stocker

Part I Philosophy as Literature

  39

2 What Is Philosophical Dialogue? 41 S. Montgomery Ewegen 3 ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’ 61 Michelle Boulous Walker 4 Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary and Philosophical Narratives 81 Niklas Forsberg 5 On Philosophy and Poetry 99 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei 6 ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography, and Autobiography123 Christopher Hamilton

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7 Aphorisms and Fragments143 Guy Elgat

Part II Philosophy of Literature

 163

8 Myth165 Tudor Balinisteanu 9 Epic185 Michael Weinman 10 Philosophy and Drama203 Lior Levy 11 Lyric Poetry221 Mathew Abbott 12 Philosophy of the Novel241 Barry Stocker 13 Romance263 Marsha S. Collins

Part III Philosophical Aesthetics

 293

14 Analytic Aesthetics295 Jukka Mikkonen 15 Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy and the Romance315 Isabel Jaén 16 Hermeneutics341 Hanna Meretoja

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17 Phenomenology365 Alexander Kozin and Tanja Staehler 18 Language, Ontology, Fiction385 Frederick Kroon and Alberto Voltolini 19 Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics407 Simon Morgan Wortham

Part IV Literary Criticism and Theory

 427

20 Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths429 Michael Mack 21 Rhetoric443 Rosaleen Keefe 22 Feminism and Gender467 Kimberly J. Stern 23 Psychoanalysis489 Will Long 24 Postcolonialism519 Bill Ashcroft

Part V Areas of Work Within Philosophy and Literature

 539

25 Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance of Literature to Modern Legal Scholarship541 Julia J. A. Shaw 26 Politics and Literature561 Michael Keren

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27 Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown581 İlhan İnan 28 Ethics and Literature601 Liesbeth Korthals Altes and Hanna Meretoja 29 Literature and Political Economy623 Aaron Kitch 30 Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern Theories645 Shira Wolosky 31 Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue665 Michael Mack Bibliography679 Author Index739 Subject Index755

Notes on Contributors

Mathew  Abbott  is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Federation University Australia. Drawing on modern European and post-Wittgensteinian thought, his research is concerned with intersections of aesthetics, politics, and ethics. He is the author of Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy (Edinburgh) and editor of Michael Fried and Philosophy: Modernism, Intention, and Theatricality (Routledge). Bill Ashcroft  is a renowned critic and theorist, founding exponent of postcolonial theory, and co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to offer a systematic examination of the field of postcolonial studies. He is the author and co-author of 17 books and over 180 articles and chapters, variously translated into six languages, and he is on the editorial boards of ten international journals. His latest work is Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. He teaches at the University of New South Wales (NSW) and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Tudor Balinisteanu  is a Senior Research Fellow in English Literature at University of Suceava. He is the author of Religion and Aesthetic Experience in Joyce and Yeats (Palgrave 2015); Violence, Narrative and Myth in Joyce and Yeats: Subjective Identity and Anarcho-Syndicalist Traditions (Palgrave 2013); and Narrative, Social Myth, and Reality in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing: Kennedy, Lochhead, Bourke, Ní Dhuibhne, and Carr (CSP 2009). He also published in a number of UK, Irish, Canadian, and US journals. Michelle Boulous Walker  lectures in Philosophy at The University of Queensland in Australia. She is the author of Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (Bloomsbury 2017) and Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence (Routledge 1998). She is interested in the intersections of philosophy, literature, and film, and her research is on laughter. Marsha S. Collins  is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Royster Professor for Graduate Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She ix

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f­requently writes on romance and other idealizing forms of fiction and is the author of Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance (Routledge, 2016) among other works. Guy Elgat  is the author of Nietzsche’s Psychology of Ressentiment: Revenge and Justice in “On the Genealogy of Morals” (Routledge, 2017). He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. S. Montgomery Ewegen  is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, Connecticut, USA. He is the author of Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language as well as numerous articles on Plato, Heidegger, and the intersections of the two. Niklas Forsberg  is an Associate Professor and Head of Research in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pardubice. His areas of expertise are placed where logic and metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics intersect. The central themes of his research are questions about what carries philosophical conviction and of how our most fundamental beliefs are to be reconsidered or even expressed and elucidated. His research topics include philosophy and literature, philosophy of language, Iris Murdoch, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L.  Austin, philosophical methodology, ordinary language philosophy, philosophy of love, Søren Kierkegaard, philosophy and film, moral perfectionism, and Stanley Cavell. Jennifer  Anna  Gosetti-Ferencei  is the Kurrelmeyer Professor of German at The Johns Hopkins University. She is author of The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (Columbia University Press); Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press); The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (Penn State University Press); Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (Fordham University Press); and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, which won the Paris Review Prize. Christopher Hamilton  is a Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London. He is the author of five books, most recently A Philosophy of Tragedy (2016), and numerous essays and articles. His main academic interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and film. İlhan İnan  is a Professor of Philosophy, who took his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997, taught at Bogaziçi University for 20 years, and recently joined the Philosophy Department at Koç University in Istanbul. Most of his research is within the philosophy of language, specializing on the semantic and epistemic aspects of our ability to conceptualize and refer to the unknown. He has published extensively both in English and in Turkish and is the author of The Philosophy of Curiosity (Routledge, 2012). Isabel Jaén  holds PhDs from Purdue University and the University of Madrid. Her research focuses on early modern literature and cognitive literary studies, and her publications include Cognitive Literary Studies (U of Texas P, 2012), Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Oxford UP, 2016), and Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain: Studies in Honor of Howard Mancing (Juan de la Cuesta, 2017).

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Rosaleen Keefe  is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University, where she teaches historical rhetoric and rhetorical theory. She has published in the Journal of Scottish Philosophy, edited the Scottish Philosophy of Rhetoric (2013, Imprint Academic Press), and most recently held the Fleeman Fellowship at the University of St Andrews. Michael  Keren  is a political philosopher specializing in the relationship between politics and literature; a Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary, Canada; and the Dean of the School of Communication, Society, and Government at the Max Stern Academic College in Israel. Professor Keren is the author of many books including The Citizen’s Voice: Twentieth-Century Politics and Literature (2003) and Politics and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium (2015). Aaron Kitch  is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME), where he also co-organizes the Medieval and Early Modern Studies colloquium. His work on political economy and early modern literature includes an essay on money in Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge 2011) and Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2009). He is at work on a book project about Shakespeare in relation to natural philosophy. Liesbeth Korthals Altes  is a Professor of Literary Theory and French Literature at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She published mainly on narrative theory and analysis as well as on literature and ethics (e.g. “Narratology, ethical turns, circularities, and a meta-ethical way out”, in J.  Lothe & J.  Hawthorn, eds., Narrative Ethics, 2013). Her book Ethos and Narrative Interpretation (2014) was awarded the Perkins Prize 2016. Alexander Kozin  (PhD, SIUC, 2002, Philosophy of Communication) is a Research Fellow, Centre for Literature and Philosophy, University of Sussex, UK. He was also a Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany (2003–2009), and at the University of Edinburgh, UK (2010–2011). He has published over 50 academic articles and a monograph: Consecutive Interpreting: An Interdisciplinary Study (Palgrave, 2017). Frederick Kroon  is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. His research areas include philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and metaphysics. He is on the editorial board of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and is a subject editor for Twentieth-Century Philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Lior Levy  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa. Her work on Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of theater was recently published in The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting. She is completing a book manuscript on his philosophy of theater.

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Will Long  worked for several years for a therapeutic community looking after children with emotional, behavioural, and social difficulties from around the UK. He is completing his DPhil in English at the University of Oxford. Michael  Mack is the author of six single-authored monographs, including Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film (2016), How Literature Changes the Way We Think (2012), Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (2010), and German Idealism and the Jew (2003). Hanna Meretoja  is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (University of Turku). Her publications include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford UP), The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (co-edited, 2018, Routledge). Jukka Mikkonen  is a Post-doctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tampere. His publications include The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction (Bloomsbury 2013) as well as several articles in scholarly journals. Simon Morgan Wortham  is a Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. His books include Counter-­ Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber, co-edited with Gary Hall (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction, co-edited with Allison Weiner (London and New  York: Continuum, 2007); Derrida: Writing Events (London and New  York: Continuum, 2008); The Derrida Dictionary (London and New York: Continuum, 2010); The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy (London and New  York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); and Resistance and Psychoanalysis: Impossible Divisions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Julia J. A. Shaw  is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the Faculty of Business

and Law, De Montfort University. She is associate editor of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law and the Social Responsibility Journal. Her research spans the interdisciplinary fields of literature, philosophy, ethics and aesthetics as well as law, socio-legal theory, critical legal theory and social justice. Her recent publications include Jurisprudence (3rd edition, 2018), Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Justice, and the Global Food Supply Chain (2018) and Law and the Passions: Narratives of feeling in the administration of justice (2019).

Tanja Staehler  is a Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her publications include Plato and Levinas: The Ambiguous Out-Side of Ethics; Phenomenology: An Introduction (with Michael Lewis); Hegel, Husserl and the

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Phenomenology of Historical Worlds; as well as articles on phenomenological method, dance, aesthetics, pregnancy, and childbirth. Kimberly J. Stern  is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in gender studies and Victorian literature. Her previously published works include The Social Life of Criticism: Gender, Critical Writing, and the Politics of Belonging (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and a Broadview edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (2015). Stern has published articles in such venues as Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, and Prose Studies, and she serves as co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth Century Studies. Barry Stocker  teaches Philosophy at Istanbul Technical University. He is the author of Derrida on Deconstruction (2006) and Kierkegaard on Politics (2014). He is the editor of Post-Analytic Tractatus (2004) and Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings (2007). He is the co-editor of Nietzsche as Political Philosopher (2014). Alberto Voltolini  (PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, 1989) is a philosopher of language and mind whose works have focused mainly on fiction, intentionality, depiction, and Wittgenstein. He is a Full Professor in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Turin (Italy). He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside (1998), University of Auckland and Australian National University, Canberra (2007), University of Barcelona (2010–2011), and University of London (2015). He has been a member of the Steering Committee of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (2002–2008) and of the Board of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (2009–2012). His publications include How Ficta Follow Fiction (Springer, 2006) and A Syncretistic Theory of Depiction (Palgrave, 2015). Michael Weinman  is a Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin. He is the author of Language, Time, and Identity in Woolf ’s The Waves (Lexington, 2012) and Pleasure in Aristotle’s Ethics (Continuum, 2007) and articles on ancient Greek and twentieth-century European philosophy, most recently, “Doing the Impossible: The Trace of the Other Between Eulogy and Deconstruction: Rereading Derrida’s Work of Mourning”, Philosophical Papers (2015), and “Metaphysics, Lam and the Echo of Homer”, Philosophical Papers (2014). Shira Wolosky  was an Associate Professor of English at Yale before moving to the Hebrew University. Her writings include The Art of Poetry, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, Language Mysticism, Poetry and Public Discourse, and Feminist Theory Across Disciplines: Feminist Community and American Women’s Poetry, with other books and articles on religion and literature, poetics, and literary theory. Her awards include Guggenheim, ACLS, Fulbright, Tikvah, and Whiting Fellowships, Drue Heinz Professorships at Oxford, and Fellowships at the Princeton and Israel Institutes of Advanced Studies.

1 Introduction Barry Stocker

Philosophy and literature is a very wide field and this handbook does not try to cover every possible aspect. The coverage is however broad in that the philosophy and literature largely stemming from Ancient Greece on through the Western tradition is covered in many aspects. No judgement here is made of the value of the Western tradition in comparison with others. No claim is made that the Western tradition is itself self-contained and continuous in any pure way. It is simply the case that this philosophy and literature most known to an English-speaking audience and that a genuinely global and comparative approach, also making allowances for variations on the canon, would be a truly vast enterprise which would require more than one volume or would have to sacrifice depth and detail. There is no attempt here to summarise the chapters in the Handbook or offer bibliographical information except for suggested readings at the end. What is done here is to provide a view of the themes and topics explored in sections and chapters of the book, so that the structure of the book is explained and readers already have a general background to each chapter. The background provided in this introduction does not duplicate or summarise what each author has said, what it does is provide the context for what the author has said within the broad development of philosophy and literature according to the view of the editors, so it provides another perspective, though one shaped in accordance with the book as a whole and what has been done in the individual chapters. B. Stocker (*) Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_1

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The volume has been constructed on the understanding that philosophy and literature cannot be thought of just as a confrontation between philosophy and literary texts or on the application of philosophical aesthetics to literature. There are various gradations of philosophy and literary studies which must be taken into account in order to have something like a fully representative survey of the field. The chapters have very different ways of dealing with the relation between philosophy and literature, broadly distinguished according to the structure of the book. The chapters are organised into sections on: ‘Philosophy as Literature’, ‘Philosophy of Literature’, ‘Philosophical Aesthetics’, ‘Literary Criticism and Theory’, and ‘Areas of Work Within Philosophy and Literature’. There is of course no absolute distinction between these areas, but in the view of the editors these distinctions are the best way of articulating what comes under philosophy and literature. That is, we can see the main elements of the field in this construction.

Part One: Philosophy as Literature There is philosophy written as literature, the theme of Part One, which of course goes back very early in the history of philosophy and literature. There is no simple category of philosophy written as literature. The phrase itself might imply a kind of philosophy taking on the disguise of literature. This may be one approach to writing a literary kind of philosophy or thinking about the more literary aspects of philosophy, but what is more important is to think about the ways in which there is always something literary in philosophy and the more deep ways in which philosophy may be a particular kind of philosophy because of its literary style. Philosophy emerges from literature (also raising the status of myth in the beginning of both literature and philosophy) and is always at least in some minimal sense written in a style of some form, using figurative language and fiction to impress the reader. The most anti-literary kind of philosophical writing nevertheless appeals to imagination and the concrete nature of words at some points, because there is little chance of completely effective philosophical communication otherwise. What this part is more concerned with is the way philosophy can appear in the main literary genres. This includes some account of the way philosophy deals with discussion of the genre in question, since the philosophical discussion of genres and the philosophical use of genres are interactive processes. The main focus though is the ways in which philosophy can be written through literary genres.

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Dialogue The first philosophical works that survive as whole texts are Plato’s dialogues, and their appeal is certainly literary as well as philosophical. It is appropriate then that Dialogue is the topic of the first chapter of Part One. Aristotle also contributed to the literature of philosophical dialogues, though frustratingly these are lost. Cicero’s dialogues are less remarkable than those of Plato, but add to dialogue as a major form of philosophical writing. Cicero’s philosophical writings were part of his contribution to the formation of Latin style, towards the end of the Roman Republic. Boethius added to the use of dialogue in philosophy, shortly after the fall of the Roman state in the West. Later examples of philosophical dialogue include George Berkeley and David Hume, followed by passages in Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. This is philosophy written in such a way as to show the drama of ideas and of conflicts between ideas, presented though clashes between characters who speak. The genre of philosophical dialogue can itself be considered an element of novelistic form, since the conflict of ideas through the speech on characters features heavily in the novel, along with other forms of narrative including the more narrative kind of poetry. There is some division within philosophical dialogues between the ones with more literary and imaginative power, independent of the argument and the ones where the dialogue form seems more like clothing for the argument, maybe to make a provocative point of view seem more acceptable and more provisional since only held by a character in the dialogue. The former type begins with Plato and carries on through Kierkegaard. The latter type includes Cicero, carrying on through Berkeley and Hume. This is not to say that the latter type lack literary merit, but the dialogue form seems much more of a rhetorical adornment than a deep part of the argument. It is not clear that much is lost if they are transformed into direct prose, though of course even the role of dialogue here in making the argument more acceptable is a significant concern. The dialogue as a form for accommodating conflict of ideas expands into forms which are not immediately defined as dialogues but present voices with differing ideas within an authorial voice. Maybe the most striking examples are the spiritual struggles in Augustine of Hippo and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. In the latter case, a whole genre is developed, in part, through a displacement of conflict of ideas within a dialogue to rival ideas considered by the author.

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Essays As has just been established, the essay as an aspect of philosophy and literature is very much associated in its origin with Michel de Montaigne. He developed the essay as an important form of writing and a philosophical approach concerned with subjectivity, at the same time. His philosophical legacy is the Essays, in which the possibilities of individual inquiry, storytelling, and discursive philosophising are all explored through essays which test the limits of coherence of writing. This approach permeates later philosophy, though the more digressive aspects of Montaigne’s are mostly curbed in later practitioners from Francis Bacon through David Hume and Ralph Waldo Emerson to the authors of current scholarly articles in philosophy journals. Even though the philosophical essay in Bacon, Hume, and Emerson is relatively restrained and coherent compared with the work of Montaigne, it does provide an alternative to the technical style of the philosophical essay as it has developed since Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Their approach can be taken back a bit further to Charles Sanders Peirce, though he wrote in a less technical style. The technical philosophical essay can be taken back further to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the seventeenth century. Montaigne’s essay writing carries on through forms other than the essay, in the fragments of Blaise Pascal which combine variegated insights, the maxims, and reflections of François de La Rochefoucauld, the various forms of writing in Rousseau, and so on through all the ways of writing French philosophy. This philosophical history writing cannot be separated from a literary history of letters, memoirs, plays, and novels onto Marcel Proust and since. The essays of Montaigne stand at the beginning then of the multiplication and intersection of ways of writing both philosophy and literature which spread quickly outside France as can be seen in the use of the essay on cannibals in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Derrida’s deconstructive style and the Analytic paper on necessary and sufficient conditions for use of a concept both come out of the form of the essay in Montaigne. Through Emerson, the essay becomes an expression of Transcendentalism; through Peirce it becomes an expression of Pragmatism. These philosophical positions were articulated following a literary model in Montaigne of establishing a position, exploring criticisms and alternatives, ending with a final position. The same applies to the most austere work of investigation into the philosophy of logic, language, and science.

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Narrative Narrative in philosophy goes back at least to Plato as does philosophical analysis of narrative. Narration is regarded with suspicion in Plato as a means to communicate false ideas, even while he often has narratives embedded into his dialogues. Homeric epic, the major narrative presence in ancient Greek culture is regarded with the deepest suspicion as the portrayal of immoral gods. Perhaps theatre is worse with its use of actors pretending to be someone else and its provocation to enjoy improper pleasures at someone else’s suffering. However, these are all present in Homeric epic which provides source material for ancient drama and which was sung by performers. In Aristotle, we see a more sympathetic approach to narrative, though with less use of narrative. On the latter point, it is still the case that Aristotle’s philosophy frequently relies on mininarratives, very short stories that illustrate and build up an argument. His analysis of narrative is in the Poetics, where pure narrative as in Homeric epic is held to be inferior to tragic drama in some respects, but is also more complete than drama. Long narrative is episodic, revealing a reality about the world and the ways in which events are dispersed and loosely connected. Narrative has always been part of philosophy given the latter’s tendency to use stories to clarify, reinforce, and emphasise. There is more of the latter in later philosophy. However, we do see elements of narrative in Cicero, Seneca, Boethius, and so on or even full-scale narrative as in Augustine’s autobiographical work. Descartes’ most widely read philosophical texts bring in narrative as central in the supposed birth of modern philosophy. The analysis of narrative is a far rarer thing in the history of philosophy, though a central work of Enlightenment eighteenth-century philosophy, Giambattista Vico’s New Science does deal with narrative. Vico puts Homeric epic at the centre of a philosophy of history in a repeated cycle of stages. It cannot however be said that there is much narrative analysis in Vico’s account. He provides more of an elevation of the earlier form of long narrative as revealing of the society which produced it. The central idea is that epic contains imaginative universals in which one thing stands for a universal class, while the development of philosophy shifts the whole of culture, including its literary aspect to abstract universals. The impact on literature is that narrative moves from myth to illustration of moral maxims. So though Vico does not really analyse narrative, he does set out a view of its cultural place and the transformation of narrative. There is philosophical work on the novel from the late eighteenth century onwards, but close discussion of narrative really emerges in the t­ wentieth century on the basis of linguistics, semiology, and hermeneutics, along with Analytic philosophy.

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Poetry Philosophy before Plato was often written in verse, so we can say that philosophy was largely poetry in the Miletian and Eleatic schools, and other pre-­Socratic contributions. The study of the earliest philosophy is often the study of poetry. Even in the time of Socrates, Anaxagoras wrote his poetry in verse. Centuries later Lucretius wrote in this way at about the same time as Cicero wrote dialogues. Boethius uses poetry as well as dialogue-marking a final point in the classical use of poetry in philosophy. The use of poetry in later philosophy is distinctly unusual, but Nietzsche sometimes includes poetry in his philosophical texts. Some writers considered poets more than philosophers were engaging with philosophy as can be seen in William Wordsworth and Friedrich Hölderlin. More recently Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Paul Celan are among those widely recognised to make a philosophical contribution, even if they are largely regarded primarily as poets. Since the time of Boethius, poetry has been seen as philosophical more through philosophical aspects of poetic language rather than the communication of philosophical ideas. The connection between poetic language and a deep experience of the linguistic, including what lies at the edge of language, is an idea from the Romantic era. However, we can see precedents for it stretching back into the Middle Ages, in the poetry or religious experience,  as in Dante Alighieri’s contribution and that of the Piers Plowman author. In comparison with later Romantic and Symbolist ideas of poetry, the religious and philosophical meanings are presented in very rhetorical ways, but still in a language connecting with the Romantic and postRomantic worlds. The analysis of poetry goes back to Plato, if in a rather cursory form suggesting it relies on non-reasoned inspiration which may convey truths, but not the highest way of knowing them. Aristotle provides a more systematic approach in the Poetics, but what we have does not say much about lyric poetry. Out of classical sources, we do get the idea of lyric poetry as a subjective form of literature. It is in the late eighteenth century in Immanuel Kant that these ideas gets elevated into lyric poetry as a particularly pure form of art, engaged with the deepest subjectivity. That idea is still very influential and informs continuing philosophical interest, even where as in Heidegger the idea of subjectivity is treated with suspicion. In the more Heideggerian approach, Being reveals itself in its selfconcealment in a particularly powerful way.

 Introduction 

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Autobiography and Biography The poetry which contains philosophy may have an autobiographical component as can be seen in Dante and Wordsworth. Philosophical texts may be written as autobiography. René Descartes wrote some of his philosophy as prose narrative, making storytelling part of the formulation of modern philosophy and more specifically bringing autobiography into philosophy. This is one part of the way that a lot of philosophy, particularly of the Analytic variety, despite its separation from literary style, uses storytelling, or at least brief imaginative fictions with some of the qualities of literature, as a main aspect of philosophical argument. Augustine wrote a literary classic, Confessions, which is part of his philosophical and theological output at the end of the Roman world in the West while also providing a paradigm for literary autobiography. Like Descartes’ Discourse, it is not strictly known as an autobiography but has elements of it and is an important part of the background. There are strong autobiographical elements in Boethius and Montaigne, continuing this tradition from Augustine. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions might often be regarded as part of his literary output but also contains philosophical positions and arguments regarding the nature of the self and memory. This is a relatively straightforward kind of autobiography pioneered by Rousseau but of course always conditioned by fictional and aesthetic concerns which are very evidently at work in at least two texts. The generally accepted paradigm of the modern biography, James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson appears later in the eighteenth century, suggesting that thought of this century, including philosophy, is entangled with the development of biographical form, through interest in mind, ideas, imagination, self-love, passions, and so on. Nietzsche presents philosophical autobiography as something much more detached from an account of a life and more the view of how a life is shaped from the point of view of philosophy.

Fragments and Aphorisms Friedrich Schlegel made a perhaps underrated contribution to philosophy through a style of fragments and aphorisms, himself following precedents in writers like Anthony Ashley Cooper (Third Earl of Shaftesbury), François de La Rochefoucauld, and Blaise Pascal who straddle philosophy and literature. The aphorisms and fragments of French writers are fundamental to the development of French literature as well philosophy. Ideas about the passions in French literature operate in close relation to philosophical, or moral, aphorisms

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which refer to paradoxical and conflicting aspects of the passions. The style of aphorism in Pascal and La Rochefoucauld itself conveys a view of the perpetually unsatisfied and incomplete nature of the passions. They pose a challenge to rationalistic views of the human and natural worlds, whether derived from antique Stoic or modern Cartesian sources. They are in some degree maxims, as the title of La Rochefoucauld’s book. His own contribution is accompanied by other writers of aphorisms and fragments in the Jena or Athenäum circle of German Romantics or Romantic Ironists. His style of writing and that of his predecessors is echoed in the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, so does form a large part of the philosophical tradition since the seventeenth century. Kierkegaard discusses the Jena Romantic Ironists early in his career; one of his books is Philosophical Fragments (though also translated as Philosophical Crumbs), and the whole of Either/Or I is a performative engagement with Romantic Irony including the use of aphorism and fragment. Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot were the most obvious followers of the aphoristic and fragmentary style in areas of twentieth-century philosophy centrally concerned with literary aesthetics. Blanchot himself wrote literary fictions as well as philosophy. It is not only in French and German philosophers of Ludwig Wittgenstein through his two contrasting major works, between them marking at least and often two major transformations in thinking about logic, language, metaphysics, mind, knowledge, and foundations of mathematics. Wittgenstein was a great admirer of Kierkegaard, and though there are many differences in preoccupations, Wittgenstein’s revolutionary philosophy is achieved using related forms of writing.

Part Two: Philosophy of Literature Part Two is again organised around genres, and there is some overlap with the selection of genres in the first section. This approach has been taken to accommodate the different ways philosophy approaches different literary genres. If philosophy and literature is about interaction, if it is about more than philosophy taking literature as an object and literature illustrating philosophical claims, then it must deal with the ways that differences between genres are an issue for philosophy of literature as well as philosophy as literature. Just as philosophy is itself changed according to which literary form it might have, philosophy must change according to the kind of literature it discusses. While there must of course be general pure aesthetics of some kind, this may at times obscure the degree to which different kinds of kind, and then different kinds of genre with individual arts, appeal to different aspects of philosophy. The

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9

aspects of language explored in the aesthetics of poetry must be different from those explored in the novel, and the weight of language is different. Poetry is where language will be most central, and the novel is the discussion of language as style is important, but not so much the details of linguistic devices which tend to be subordinate to narrative issues. So where there is philosophy of the novel, the questions are about integrating the complexity of events, characters, linguistic registers, and themes into a unity of some kind. In poetry, certainly in lyric poetry, unity of the complex is important but as the coming together of words and concrete ideas rather than the creation of a large literary world with time, space, structure, competing thoughts, and so on.

Myth Both literature and philosophy have what can be described as a beginning and as a prehistory in myth. There are major questions about how far both philosophy and literature can be said to be distinct from myth at any time in their development, which include questions about the relationship of philosophy and literature. Myth contains explanations for natural and social phenomena. It is clear that by the time of Plato it had become normal to think of myth as having some rational basis, so as something that could be read philosophically. Plato’s own form of rationalism still allows the deployment of mythic in his own philosophy. The investigation of the relation between myth and philosophy was central to the work of Giambattista Vico’s version of Enlightenment and Adorno and Horkheimer’s version of critique of Enlightenment. For Vico, his new science of the human world uncovers the reality behind myth, using the methods of philosophy and philology together. In this case, philosophy only has power to investigate the human world in conjunction with the study of literary texts, so is intertwined with literature. Homer’s epics stand at the centre of historical progress from origins of human community almost lost to rational reconstruction and to the law-governed world in which the meaning of myth is almost lost. Adorno and Horkheimer also put Homer at the centre, seeing these epics as founded in a struggle of reason against nature in which myth is obliterated but rises anew within reason. The anthropological study of myth, itself rooted in the growth of social science following out of the work of Vic and other Enlightenment historical philosophers, comes into literary studies and philosophy again through encounters such as Mircea Eliade’s philosophy of religion and history, or, Derrida’s commentaries on myth and early philosophy. The idea of the fixity and long-term nature of

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myth existing in contrast with the changeable and subjective nature of poetry can be found in Romantic thought, as can be found in the progress from Schlegel to Kierkegaard. In looking at myth in the context of philosophy and literature, we can then see two broad themes: myth as inspired or archaic thought versus reason and myth as dominating tradition versus individual subjectivity. The ways in which myth can be shaped to give an inspired aspect to philosophical argument while providing a carapace of traditional wisdom is itself an issue in Plato’s philosophical writing which can be brought into later use and discussion of myth.

Epic Epic is a way in which myth, philosophy, and literature mingle at the beginning of the development of literature and myth but not only the beginning. Homeric epic is a fundamental source for ancient Greek philosophy as well as an object of critical discussion. The successors to Homeric epic writing (Virgil, Dante, Milton, and others) have engaged with philosophical issues and in later development have become objects of philosophical discussion about their relations with romance and the novel. Homeric epic is also the source of stories taken up in Greek tragedy, itself leading us into philosophical questions about these genres and their relations. Ancient Greek drama, tragic and comic, interacts with Athenian philosophy as well as becoming an object for it. One route leads from ancient Greek epic to tragedy, another leads to Augustan Latin epic. Just as modern interest in Greek epic is almost entirely confined to Homer, interest in Latin epic is almost entirely confined to Virgil’s Aeneid. Later epics still attracting attention are very largely in English (John Milton) or are Medieval to Renaissance works featuring knightly combat, which could also be classified as Romances, as in the cases of Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto. The big exception is Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which can be grouped with John Milton’s Paradise Lost as the central work in epic after Homer and Virgil. Though Dante and Milton are separated by centuries in time, by language and many other things, they both have a religious centre to their epics. Homeric epic was the major source of information about the Olympian deities and archaic heroes for the ancient Greeks. Virgil created a civic religion interwoven with theology. So the most grand epics in the ­tradition have had deeply and foundational religious aspects which generally separate from other instances of the genre, though does justify complete marginalisation of the other instances. Epic exists in relation to Romance as well as to the novel. Remembering this should reduce any tendency to see epic

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as self-enclosed and monumental as has often happened. It should not be seen as the expression of a complete and untroubled world view which has been a tradition in looking at Homer in particular. In this respect, it may be useful to look at epic backwards; in the sense that when we look at Milton, we are able to place Paradise Lost in the context of other genres and his own variety of writing, in contrast to Homer where we lack framing texts and an idea of the writer as a complete author. We can further look at the epic tradition from its beginning in the context of the development of the novel. In his major novels, Joyce is engaged in encounter with epic in trying to write modern epic and play with the form of ancient epic. Hermann Broch gives another version of this in his novel on Virgil by making the context of epic creation and the presumed subjectivity of the writer a focus for a novel. This can be carried on through consideration of those novels (Miguel de Cervantes and Herman Melville), verse dramas (Goethe), and romances (Wolfram von Eschenbach) which have the most epic qualities.

Drama The philosophical discussion of drama begins with a very critical reaction in Plato and a rehabilitation in Aristotle. The illusion of dramatic performance and the enjoyment of bad pleasures are identified as reasons for suspicion in Plato who sometimes seems to wish for a Greek culture free of drama as well as Homeric epic. In his own writing, he provides a counter in that dialogue is a variation of drama even if not performed. The non-performance may be an advantage from Plato’s point of view. The essential quality of drama, that it is almost pure speech, is the essential quality of dialogue. Aristotle’s reaction is to define tragedy as the highest art and give it moral dignity as a way in which develop awareness of the horror that can come from an error in the actions of someone of good, though not perfect moral character, and elevated stature in the community. The movement from ancient to modern tragedy has provided a particularly rich source of inspiration for philosophical discussion through G.W.F. Hegel, Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, and others. For them the development of tragedy shows the differences for philosophy of history and social philosophy between communal societies in compact city states and modern individualised societies under an impersonal state. There has also been a ­particularly persistent discussion about the possible primacy of tragedy as a literary form and even as the highest form of any art, since Aristotle. Aristotle was himself following on from, and criticising, Plato’s criticisms of the immorality and irrationality of tragedy. Related comments have been applied to comedy.

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For Aristotle, comedy is inferior though as drama about low-status characters. The later discussion in German Idealism and Kierkegaard of comedy places it more as the counterpart of tragedy. What philosophy has often lacked with regard to drama is an account of the nature of the performance, of the specific qualities of text which should be turned into performance. Performance is always present in reading, which in earlier stages of history was very likely to be loud to an audience. The relation between text and performance to an audience is always an issue in literature and philosophy. Plato wrote philosophy which at least has some of the aspects of drama, in that his dialogues are dramatisations. The Ancient Greek dramatic performances brought together cities in ways which seem remote from modern theatrical performance, but do show how drama is embedded in the formation of community, the gathering of an audience for a collective experience. It is a community forming event in which writing and speech, text and body, interact and can pull against each other.

Lyric Poetry The lyric poem was discussed in the earliest Athenian considerations of literary forms, as well as in Augustan Rome. It found a central place in the great eighteenth-century growth of philosophical aesthetics, in which the question arose of whether it was the most pure form of literature in the concentration on words as objects. Romantic lyric poetry had significant influence on and interaction with Idealist and Romantic philosophy, going on to become the centre of literary analysis in the New Criticism of the twentieth century. Immanuel Kant was the main Enlightenment and Idealist exponent of poetry as the highest form of the arts, as his aesthetics suggests a detachment of poetry from meaning in pure imagination. The idea music as the highest art in Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer also elevated poetry. For Kierkegaard, the highest form of music’ is opera, the music exists through a poetic side. The poetic genre also attracted philosophical attention, particularly in the Continental philosophical tradition in its development from Romantic symbolism to modernism, with regard to the limits of words and meaning, sometimes of ethical hope. The lyric poem, in its most pure form, was a part of Renaissance literary high culture, where it had an elevated courtly and ­aesthetic status. It was however more part of rhetoric and less part of any ideal of aesthetic purity, at least with regard to the way it was understood. The journey of lyric poetry from the most subjective of the literary genres recognised by Aristotle, less significant than epic and tragedy, to a continuing tendency to

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regard it as the most pure and absolute form of literature is striking, though in Plato there is already the idea of poetry as coming from ecstasy which is maybe revived to some degree in Romantic thought. The ideal of poetry spreads beyond the lyric poem itself to the prose poem and the idea of the novel as a work which might use poetic language of a lyric extended over an epic length. This is part of how the novel itself becomes elevated as a form. The focus on lyric poetry also involves a shift in the moral and epistemological issues that appear as from the Romantic period on, poetry is often taken up in challenges to the world which may appear alien in its reality and more claims from the point of view of the poetic voice. On way of looking at the development of literature since the Romantic era is of a shift of lyric poetry from illustration of a metaphysical or moral point of view to epistemological and moral challenge, through the intense subjectivity now attributed to poetry.

The Novel The novel has a double history or prehistory in that its origins have been traced back to ancient epic and to ancient novels, along with other genres absorbed into the form. Despite its current place as a major component of literary culture, the elevation of the novel to a high aesthetic level worthy of extensive philosophical discussion is quite recent. The elevation of the novel in the culture maybe goes back to the mid-nineteenth century as the novel became the major literary way of commenting on the times or on history. The novel becomes part of history as it becomes part of the formation of nations, establishing a national language and a way of conceiving of the nation. The novel in a recognisably modern form does go back further, though exactly how far is itself not clear. There is a kind of double beginning of the novel in the sixteenth century with François Rabelais first in France with, then later in the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth century, Miguel de Cervantes in Spain. This itself conditions philosophical discussion of the novel, with the more idealising high canon discussions tending to place Cervantes at the beginning, while the more popular culture and anthropological discussions tend to place Rabelais at the beginning, most famously in the work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. The latter approach also tends to bring in the plurality of genres feeding into the novel rather than treating it as the inheritor of the most grand aspects of the epic tradition. The idealising approach can be found in the first really notable work on the philosophy of the novel in late eighteenth-century Germany, that is, the work of Friedrich Schlegel and other Romantic Ironists of the Athenäum circle in Jena. This

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approach which did elevate the status of the novel was resisted by Hegel, who generally resided the kind of elevation of subjectivity, fractured form, shifting perspective, and irony to be found in the Jena Romantics. For later readers, Hegel’s judgement tends to self-undermine because he holds onto a relatively low aesthetic status for the novel, as part of his argument that art cannot reach the highest level after the perfection of Protestant Christian theology and modern philosophy amongst the German Idealists, particularly himself. Really major work on the philosophy of the novel does not appear again until the time of Kierkegaard, where it has a strange status since the novel as form and object of analysis is both an important area of Kierkegaard’s and is not something he emphasises much. He discusses the form of the novel in his university thesis, along with some of his even earlier writing and later reviews. His own writing at some points can be regarded as a philosophical novel, an idea promoted by the Romantic Ironists. Kierkegaard does not present himself as a thinker about the novel, and the next work of lasting interest is that of György Lukács in the early twentieth century, followed by Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, René Girard, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot.

Romance Romance as a genre could be said to come between epic and the novel, suffering an eclipse as the novel takes over as the main long narrative genre of the culture. The rise of the novel itself includes a significant aspect of parody of romance, in Don Quixote. It can equally be said that romance lives on in the novel, which often brings in heroic, adventurous, and fantastic elements directly from romance or maybe reinvents them. Though it looks like the mediating term between ancient epic and the modern novel, it does not generally get much attention from that point of view. Attention tends to be limited to medievalist and Renaissance specialists, along with literary formalists, the archetypal criticism practised by Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell. However, romance has enormous current cultural relevance. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the most culturally significant works of twentieth-­century literature, is a mixture of recreated archaic epic and romance. The ways in which Arthurian romance and the theories of Joseph Campbell have been present in cultural creation are numerous. The role of the parody of romance in Cervantes is really more of a reason for reading romance than not reading it. Romance may summon images of medievalist fantasy, but does also include Renaissance foundations of modern English literature in Geoffrey

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Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Looking at the aesthetic philosophy of the twentieth century, work by Bakhtin and Benjamin mostly known for its relation with the novel does deal at length with folklore, a vital component of romance, while Bakhtin as noted above does give importance to romance as a forerunner of the modern novel. The work of Benjamin and Bakhtin, in particular, draws attention to the roles of timelessness, repetition, irrelevance of space, and the fulfilment of the hero in folklore which enter into romance. It is important not to see romance just in terms of a literary world lacking in modern subjectivity or formal play though. It draws on folklore but also incorporated the antique legacy along with the growth of medieval literary culture over centuries in which relatively realist and historical locations may combine with awareness of the impossibility of human desire and the failings of human institutions. Arthurian romance in its many iterations is a way of dealing with the role of kingship, the relation between religion and war, nature and human community, the conflicts between pure love and social community, at least in the later medieval versions, playing a strong role in sharing political visions of monarchy at the time. Romance is just as much about the tensions between the folkloric world and what appears to undermine its apparent certainties as it is confirmation.

Part Three: Philosophical Aesthetics The central section of the book is on philosophical aesthetics, which is maybe appropriate if you think of philosophising about literary aesthetics as the foundation and centre of philosophy and literature. While there are good arguments for why this might be the case, the editors prefer to think that any section could be taken as equally close to the centre and foundation of philosophy and literature. What this section certainly does is provide a transition from discussions of genre in literature to discussions which cut across genres. The topics here are a mixture of philosophical approaches and areas of investigation. The distinction is not absolute though since Cognitive Philosophy and Language, Ontology, and Fiction are areas of investigation which tend to assume a philosophical approach though we should of course regard this always open to challenge and transformation. Any attempt to deal fully with philosophical aesthetics in Western philosophy must deal with the distinction between Continental European and Analytic philosophical approaches. This distinction is itself complicated by a number of factors including the oddity that it appears to be a distinction between a geographical location on one side and a philosophical method on the other side, along with the uncertainty

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about whether cognitive philosophy should be grouped with Analytic philosophy or placed in a category of its own. The Continental-Analytic distinction is usually traced back to the nineteenth century, but has precedents from early on. Think about the antique distinction between Plato’s literary approach and Aristotle’s discursive approach, or the Renaissance distinction between Montaigne’s version of the essayistic and Descartes’ version of the philosophical discourse, or the early modern distinction between Pascal’s aphorisms and the logical model of Leibniz’s philosophical writing, or the Enlightenment distinction between Vico’s literary historicism and David Hume’s historically decontextualised work on ideas.

Analytic Aesthetics The Analytic approach in philosophy can be taken back to Aristotle as suggested above, and maybe those Platonic dialogues which seem closest to an Aristotelian mode, possibly because Aristotle had an influence on Plato from within the Academy. However, the distinction as a recognisable one in terms of the way philosophy is done now is usually taken back to the nineteenth century, maybe with reference to John Stuart Mill’s criticisms of European ways of doing philosophy. The real emergence of Analytic philosophy as we know comes later in the nineteenth century, in the essays and monographs of Gottlob Frege on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics followed by the related work of Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century. An earlier precedent might also be found in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce on pragmatist philosophy in the earlier nineteenth century. However, Peirce’s essays are much more discursive and less cornered with conceptual purity than the work of Frege and Russell, while at times also incorporating theological speculations foreign to the determination of Frege and Russell to exclude anything not strictly relevant to conceptual discussion. In one of the oddities of the Continental-Analytic distinction, the Continental side is usually traced back to the German philosophers who followed Kant, particularly J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, and Hegel, in a period distinctly preceding the emergence of Analytic philosophy. The Continental side of the distinction seems to assume that all philosophy before the German Idealists was Analytic, something of a concession. It is certainly the case that Analytic philosophy tends to see precedents in Kant and most pre-Kantian philosophy; however, not all such philosophy fits this pattern which is why it is suggested above that the distinction may in reality go back to antiquity. The Analytic position is less obviously tied to aesthetics than Continental approaches since the latter

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includes many philosophers who bring literary style into their philosophy and put aesthetics at the centre of their philosophy. Analytic aesthetics looks comparatively marginal; nevertheless questions of literary writing and the status of fictions can be found in Frege and Russell gave importance both to literary references and creating philosophical fictions. In this way, aesthetics may more be central to analytic philosophy than it appears to be, and this is why a chapter has been given to this topic. Looking at what is normally defined as Analytic aesthetics, there is a tradition going back to the 1950s which looks at conceptual questions such as: defining the art object, defining the location of aesthetic qualities, defining art as an institutional creation or an intrinsic quality, defining aesthetic appreciation as more cognitive or emotive, the nature of art criticism, the nature of metaphor, art, and the nature of consciousness. Cognitive issues appear in the list which might or might not be regarded as specific to Analytic philosophy.

Cognitive Philosophy Cognitive philosophy, that is, work on knowledge processes in the brain and mind, might be considered part of Analytic philosophy, and large parts of it are very clearly related to Analytic work on mind, epistemology, science, and language. Two things distinguish it from Analytic philosophy. One is that the analytic aspect of Analytic philosophy is usually taken to refer to some kind of priority for at least one out of logical, linguistic, and conceptual modes of analysis rather than to natural, or even machine generated, processes of any kind. The other thing is that cognition refers to an area of philosophical investigation so does connected with Continental European philosophy as well as Analytic philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty did not organise his phenomenology and philosophy of psychology around the theme of cognition, but cognition is a part of it, and Phenomenology of Perception is a major influence on recent work in cognition. Issues of cognition are clearly part of philosophy, but additionally in recent years they have also become a significant part of literary studies and should be included in a book on philosophy and literature. Cognitive philosophy of some kind goes back to the origins of philosophy, certainly appearing in the discussions of mind in Plato, Aristotle, and later schools of antique philosophy. The issues of cognition should also be recognised as part of literature from the beginning, since literature contains assumptions about how the minds of characters work at an individual differentiated level and at a more unified universal level. Literary texts do not generally contain complete theories of perception and cognition, but do constantly rely on a view of

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how these processes work, or it could be said they create fictional worlds in which they work in certain ways. This is partly an absorption of the views of the time and is partly a creation of a way of thinking about it. On top of this, discussion of cognition in literature now combines the study of the cognitive theories of the past in literature with cognitive theory as it is now, interpreting the cognitive theories of the past. One classic examination of this is Benjamin’s discussion of humours in the psychological assumptions of baroque (seventeenth-century) Europe. The theory of humours is itself a mixture of psychology and physiology. Current cognitive theory is concerned with neurology as well as psychology, perception as well as theoretical knowledge. Psychoanalysis may provide one entry point into these topics, but is doing something different in its concerns with the unconscious, and is of less weight within the broadly psychological aspects of literary studies than it used to be.

Hermeneutics Hermeneutics emerges out of German Idealism and Romanticism in the interpretation of the Bible and of ancient Greek philosophy. The key figure in the origins of hermeneutics is Friedrich Schleiermacher, who made major contributions to Protestant theology and to the interpretation of Plato, helping to establish the idea of a Socrates distinct from Plato within the dialogues. It is a philosophical approach to interpretation drawing on philology of classical texts and Biblical interpretation which are linked by the role of the philology of the Hebrew and Greek text making up the Bible. This is shaped by the rationalistic demythologised understanding of Christianity in Kant and Hegel, itself drawing on an approach to Biblical literature going back to Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century. After Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey took hermeneutics into the sphere of social science, distinguishing between explanation as a method of the natural sciences and understanding as the basis of social science. More importantly from the point of view of literary studies, hermeneutics was taken up by Martin Heidegger in early work as a major aspect of his approach along with ontology. Heidegger’s early philosophy is not itself a work of literary interpretation, but the centrality of ‘Being-­in-­theworld’ to its approach establishes philosophy in which anxiety, thrownness, care, authenticity, and inauthenticity along with other themes identified as part of the structure of ‘Dasein’ (the kind of Being humans have) interact strongly with themes both within literature and literary studies. The strong, but understated, roots of Heidegger’s early philosophy in the often literary philosophy of Augustine of Hippo and Kierkegaard gives an idea of how

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this philosophy relates to literary ways of dealing with experience. Later philosophical work of Heidegger does put literary texts at the centre. There is a major issue of how far there is continuity between earlier and later Heidegger. Leaving that aside as far as possible, it can be said that the later Heidegger continues to be concerned with Being as something that evades the more scientistic, logical, and empiricist forms of philosophy and that can to some degree be shown through poetic writing. Heidegger’s own writing of this period sometimes tries to incorporate these poetic capacities. The hermeneutic tradition was carried on in philosophy by Hans-Georg Gadamer who establishes more of a systematic aesthetic approach than Heidegger. Paul Ricoeur was another major figure in hermeneutics after Heidegger, tending to be more systematic than even Gadamer and giving even fuller attention to what can be described as aesthetics or poetics.

Phenomenology Phenomenology overlaps with hermeneutics particularly in the case of Heidegger, so also in all the philosophy that came after Heidegger and was influenced by him including Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. Phenomenology as a philosophical movement is associated with Edmund Husserl, who himself claimed Phenomenology was what philosophy had always been doing properly understood. In particular, he argued that he was carrying on the approach of both Plato and Descartes. He was more immediately building on work in psychology and philosophy of psychology, though he was insistent that phenomenology was anti-psychologistic. Husserl also built on work in philosophical anthropology, personalistic ethics, and other versions of phenomenology. His approach to phenomenology was formalistic, concerned with ideal objects and forms of intentional consciousness. He had a negative reaction to Heidegger’s way of continuing his approach. Towards the end of his life, Husserl became more concerned with history and ethical goals in history, but it is the formalism work which had a great influence. Husserl himself did not work on literature, but some of his followers, most famously Roman Ingarden, brought literary objects within the scope of phenomenology. Heidegger pointed the way towards a phenomenology more concerned with history, time, authenticity, poetic experience, and all the things described under hermeneutics above. Discussion of literature appears not only in later Heidegger but also in Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida. The reactions to phenomenology spread to philosophers not part of the phenomenological

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inheritance, most notably Gaston Bachélard who turned to writing a poetics of experience rather than his earlier work on the formation of science. JeanPaul Sartre’s most widely read philosophical work concerns phenomenology in the fields of imagination and ontology. Accordingly this work attempts to make questions of Being questions of concrete experience. There is not much discussion of literature, but it does establish a way literature might be discussed in philosophical terms, and Sartre had already undertaken the task a few years earlier in his novelistic work. Work on feminism by Simone de Beauvoir and colonialism along with racism by Franz Fanon confirms how far phenomenology can enter a variety of fields of human experience which can be taken up in poetics.

Language, Ontology, Fiction Issues of language, ontology, and fiction in philosophy have largely been part of analytic philosophy, both with regard to general objects of philosophical analysis and the status of literary objects. This specific but also broadly encompassing issue in Analytic philosophy does allow other modes of philosophy and brings philosophy and literature close to each other around very central issues. These are the issues of the reality of literary objects and the fictions constructed by fiction. The issue is one of the reality claims of entities that apparently only exist in language. Given that there are reasons why some philosophers consider all objects to be fictions constructed from perceptions, the question of literary fictions can readily move into questions of the reality of physical objects, along with the types of abstract entities often discussed by philosophers. The basis of the discussion of language, ontology, and fiction is deep in the origin of Analytic philosophy, as indicated above with regard to the chapter on ‘Analytic Aesthetics’. This is the issue of names and the place of fictions in philosophy as discussed by Frege and Russell. There is also an overlap with the tradition of phenomenology since Alexius Meinong is part of the discussion of fictional entities and was a part of the early history of phenomenology in the Austrian-German culture of the Habsburg Empire as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth century. This coincides with the emergence of Analytic philosophy. The progress of phenomenology, as described with regard to the chapter on Phenomenology above, largely takes it away from Analytic philosophy, with some exceptions for the role of some later phenomenology in the philosophy of the mind. However, there are areas of interaction associated with early phenomenology, particularly regarding the status of fictional entities. For Frege, a major aspect of his discussion of

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naming entities is the status of the terms ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Evening Star’ used for a long time to refer to the planet Venus seen in the morning and at night, without knowledge that it is Venus on both occasions. This brings up the problem of what the fictional entities ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Evening Star’ take as a reference and what the ontological status of the object is. Frege also raises the issues of the status of objects in fiction, more briefly. Bertrand Russell approaches these issues through the example of the sentence ‘The present King of France is bald’. In Russell’s view all sentences must be true or false, but there is difficulty where a sentence refers to a non-existent entity, such as the present King of France. Meinong is part of this discussion because he gave importance to the question of the status of sentences about fictional and impossible objects. Unlike Frege and Russell, he suggests they belong to an ontological realm of objects which have some kind of reality, but not existence. This has all fed into an important vein of discussion of the role of truth, meaning, and fictionality in literature.

Deconstruction Deconstruction clearly belongs to the Continental European tradition and for some represents its most excessive aspects. In any case, it has been very influential in literary studies and has brought literature in to the heart of philosophy with regard to the style of philosophical writing and themes of philosophy. It is the form of philosophising most concerned with finding a joint basis in language with literature, while also relating literature to ethical and political questions of naming, identity, and sovereignty. Despite its difference from Analytic style, notable attempts have been made to integrate it with Analytic philosophy. It is very associated with the name Derrida but has strong roots in Heidegger’s later philosophy, where the term ‘deconstruction’ was used for the first time, following Heidegger’s earlier use of ‘destruction’. As this indicates, there is no clear boundary in time or in other dimensions between Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy and other philosophical writing. Derrida himself suggests that deconstruction is something that is part of all philosophy and all writing. The emphasis on writing in general, which is open to all forms of communication, makes deconstruction a particularly powerful force for ­interdisciplinary work. While Derrida’s work is famously challenging to read, it’s central deconstructive claims can be summarised in a simple manner. There is no pure meaning and the search for meaning always demonstrates the possibility of different and contradictory meanings. The idea of meaning links with Being and various other terms, which all refer to the ideal of pure meaning,

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pure truth, metaphysical certainty, and so on. Deconstruction provides two main strategies to reveal this reduction and attempt to avoid it, though complete elimination of the reduction is never possible. The strategies are an affirmation of the differences beyond reduction to Being and a reduction to Being that itself shows the impossibility of the enterprise, manifesting the difference between Being and actual representation of Being. The first strategy is associated with Heidegger and Rousseau. The second strategy is associated with Nietzsche and with a literary writer, James Joyce. This is indicative of the extent to which Derrida explores his own philosophy through literary texts. Derrida’s approach provides a way of reading the history of philosophy and has influenced a variety of philosophers concerned with literary questions, as well as large numbers of literary critics. Paul de Man stands out as the literary critic with his own distinctive version of literary deconstruction coming from interaction with the literary aspects of the phenomenological tradition as well as Derrida. French thinkers in philosophy and literature whose work has developed partly through an interaction with Derrida’s thought include Blanchot, Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jean-François Lyotard. His influence on English language work across the humanities and social sciences has been very widespread.

Part Four: Literary Criticism and Theory The fourth section is on literary criticism and theory. The previous sections were already dealing with this, and there is no wish of any kind to suggest that a clear distinction can be made between philosophy, criticism, and theory. The work of philosophy certainly does not finish in these sections. However, it is necessary to acknowledge the contributions made largely by scholars in literature departments to the relation between philosophy and literature, through a practice of literary criticism formulated in the early twentieth century after the opening of departments of modern literature and then in the late twentieth century through absorbing philosophy, along with linguistics, semiology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, political, social, historical, and cultural thought into literary studies. Some of the hopes of establishing a very unified field of theory, often with specific political commitments, have not lasted. The idea of theory as a separate but domineering part of literature departments has not lasted either. We cannot really call this failure. Theory dispersed throughout literary work and was taken up a wide variety of scholars with a wide variety of commitments and interests. Some fragmentation was an inevitable part of this process as an aspect of growth. Theory has been

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absorbed into work on literature as part of its practice rather than as a distinct operation claiming sovereignty over literary studies and legislating for it. The idea of a massive rather mechanical apparatus for theorist literature through semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, or anything else has given way to forms of theory more intimately engaged with texts and with the history of literature, along with the historical context.

Literature as Theory The dispersal of theory is partly apparent in the relatively recent field of literature as theory, which is related to anti-mimeticism. Here literature is discussed with regard to the truths and the world it creates, not themes of mimesis, representation, and reality. There is a strong rejection of any philosophical attempt to reduce literature to philosophical truths. The language of literature is recognised with regard to the truths of the violence of the world, so that literature can be seen as what incorporates the violence. Meaning itself comes from the forces in which words exist, they do not exist as abstract entities. Literature carries traces of the externalities, which are understood through violence, and is made up of these traces rather than serving as a secondary representation of the real world. In this approach, literature is seen not as a distant representation or abstraction of the world. It is more composed of many ways of creating a virtual reality in which the aesthetic is not pure aesthetic detached from reality but is rather an aesthetic that creates alternative realities. These realities have an ethical reality in what they show about the ethical possibilities of a virtual world. The emphasis in literary studies shifts from representation to performance. Theatre and other performative activities are given priority over representation. This draws on Baruch Spinoza’s criticism of transcendentalism and Arendt’s emphasis on politics as performance in ancient Athens. In the case of Spinoza, the issue is that in the Ethics, he argues for one substance in the universe. God cannot be a separate substance from the universe, so is immanent rather than transcendent. That is, God is present throughout the world rather than existing separately from it. The idea of art as a transcending representation of the world has always been intertwined with the idea of a creator God standing apart from the world. The Spinozistic move from the transcendental to the immanent in the understanding of the divine allows a model for art of oneness with the material, practical world which is the world of ethical and political activity. Arendt’s understanding of antique republicanism in Greece is that it is deeply bound up with the Homeric culture of the aristocratic semi-divine warrior hero. The formation of cities in ancient Greece

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leaves the aristocracy with a transformed heroic view of the politics of the city as a place for competition for the immortal glory sought by the Homeric heroes. So politics is an activity in the city, not a representation of the city. This still applies when democracy comes, as the people exercise their will through assemblies not representation. Philosophical and political critiques of transcendence and representation on these models inform literature and theory as a philosophical and political enterprise. This kind of recent work itself builds on and adds to traditions of literary studies across disciplinary boundaries.

Rhetoric Rhetoric is something that is itself being revived while itself coming from a long history in the sense that it is used to refer to a way of grouping studies in the humanities and social sciences round the literary and communicative uses of language. Compared with the origins of rhetoric in public persuasion, it is still less focused on debating victory. It does however cover something like the range of topics that appear in Aristotle’s work on rhetoric. The Aristotelian idea of rhetoric is very embedded in assumptions about the inferiority of public speech as an area of study compared with the parts of philosophy devoted to practical judgement (ethics and politics) and even more so compared with theoretical philosophy (metaphysics, nature, deduction). This low status of rhetoric is associated with Plato and Aristotle’s rejection of the Sophists, the first experts in rhetoric, as unconcerned with truth. Much more recently, de Man establishes a view of rhetoric as the set of value oppositions established within a literary text, undermined during the course of the literary text. There is something of the ancient sense of the fallen nature of the rhetorician in de Man, taken up in the idea that all writing is inevitable fully of rhetoric. More recently, the label rhetoric has been used to cover the university teaching of writing as well as a unifying approach to the humanities. For the political economist Deirdre McCloskey, rhetoric is a way of referring to the desirable non-formal aspects of economics and its relation with the humanities, including philosophy and literature. All of this takes place against the background of the loss of rhetoric as understood by Aristotle and later antique writers ­stretching on through the role of rhetoric in the school curriculum. Rhetoric continues to be central to the curriculum, via the contributions of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), dealing with these issues, until the eighteenth century. Rhetoric does not look like a subject that is renewing itself by the time of the Enlightenment. One of the early

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Enlightenment thinkers, Giambattista Vico, was a professor of rhetoric who moved from this background into an integration of philology and philosophy in a theory of the history of human communities published as the New Science. Vico puts the study of Homeric epic at the centre and takes the first steps towards literary studies as well as history as major independent disciplines. At this point, rhetoric appears to be spinning off into  different parts of the humanities as we now know them, including the more historical and literary aspects of philosophy. This is perhaps confirmed when we consider what is now the most widely ready work on rhetoric from the eighteenth century and the most widely ready since Aristotle, Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. These lectures contain a large amount of what we now call literary criticism, but connected with discussion of the development of language, the use of literary language in history, philosophy, law, and political theory in relation to the political system. Rhetoric here is both a unifying way of looking at the humanities and is on the verge of breaking up between the different humanities. This all leaves rhetoric with a strangely ambiguous status in which it is often closely linked to period studies, within the long period of time in which rhetoric was central to the curriculum and so was part of what linguistic form writers used.

Feminism and Gender The work of critics and theorists has been strongly affected by issues of gender difference and feminist analysis. This includes the themes of gender in literature, the study of literature overlooked and marginalised because of gender exclusion, and the place of gender analysis in relating literature to gender relations in society. These considerations themselves bring in questions of the roles of intimacy, desire, domesticity, and subjectivity which have been played down as feminine. The role of feminism in literature goes back at least to the late eighteenth century in the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on women writers of the time. Feminism as part of literary studies is a comparative later starter in that literature departments were not opened until the late nineteenth century and feminism as a major issue did not really enter then until Simone de Beauvoir’s work of the 1950s and other feminist writing of the time. The understanding of the novel is significant here as the difficulties in accepting it as an elevated genre are related to its status as feminine, as literature that appealed to a supposedly limited feminine taste and even corrupted that taste. Despite the constraints on women writers, literature has often been a way for women to have

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a voice denied in other fields including philosophy. Literary writing has enabled women to approach philosophy from a non-institutionalised position and therefore advance feminine and feminist perspectives. What feminism has often done is challenge assumptions about universal humanism, as gender biased so in need of reformulation or rejection, so providing a critical perspective on universalist humanist assumptions about literature along with appreciation for the ways in which literature may have always resisted this. The development of feminist theory after de Beauvoir has had significant presence in literary studies, which was not itself a major area of work for de Beauvoir, though she was a notable novelist. The most striking presence in feminist literary studies has been the influence of Freudianism and particularly the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. This emphasis on desire and the nature of subjectivity has been joined by interests in deconstructive approaches to gender difference and historical approaches applied to the literary history of female writers along with the broader historical context.

Psychoanalysis As noted above, Feminist literary criticism and theory has often employed psychoanalysis, which itself is highly literary in its origins. While Sigmund Freud had very scientific ambitions, clearly his work uses a literary imagination and often refers to literary texts. Despite Freud’s scientific ambitions, many see his work as more part of literary interpretation and creation in its approach to symptoms, dreams, and literature itself. Freud’s psychoanalysis also has an ambiguous relation with philosophy, particularly that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which serves both as precursor and a barrier to overcome, because it does enter the same territory as psychoanalysis. How much Freud takes from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is itself a major area of discussion. The work of Jacques Lacan in renewing psychoanalysis and returning it to what Lacan regarded as the real Freudian insights has been a major presence in literary criticism and theory. This comes from the role that Lacan gives to the symbolic, language and literature. Some of Lacan’s work can only be understood with reference to philosophy or literature or both. Equally his work has stimulated philosophical as well as literary debate about meaning in literary texts and the role that anxieties about meaning play in literary texts. Truth and the evasiveness of truth are intertwined with psychoanalytic and literary issues in Lacan and those who react to him, including Derrida and Deleuze. Discussion in Lacan and Derrida of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story

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‘The Purloined Letter’ established a central debate in literary studies about the use of psychoanalysis. The work of desire in literature and the forms of literature has been centrally understood with regard to Freud and what come after them. Literary critical use of psychoanalysis has also focused on the theories of infant development in Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, because the focus on infant use of language and understating of the environment may give insights into the more playful and mythical aspects of literature. The infant has a playful attitude to words along with a tendency to symbolise fears and anxieties. More recently, Slavoj Žižek has brought the established Lacanian approach more into relation with German Idealist philosophy and various political concerns to discuss literature. As this includes use of the kind of Lacanianism employed in film studies, there is an interaction between the Lacanianism of the literary text and of cinema images.

Postcolonialism Postcolonialism has become a major part of the literary theory field as a result of the work of those who have encountered literary from the point of view of subordination to colonialism and its afterlife. We can of course take this back before the formation of what we know as literary theory in the work of Frantz Fanon, along with others who both criticised colonialism and recognised the possibility of its ending. This area of work necessarily brings in issues of race, ethnicity, identity, and the migration from what were colonised regions to the old colonial centres. Though the main impetus has come from the colonised and the critics of colonialism, the field also develops perspectives from those who celebrated colonialism or at least shared some of its presuppositions. We can find an awareness of some kind of the colonial situations and the beginnings of its representation along with critical discussion. Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha have played central roles in this field which also addresses the literature of the colonised, the peoples of recently colonised countries, and the migrants from those countries. Since they often write in the language of the colonial centre, the field incorporates the changes of language, literature, and identity which come from these shifts associated with colonialism and its aftermath. Fanon’s work precedes the development of the field of postcolonial studies, but its impact was greatly assisted by the rise of his work centred around his experience as a black African subject of French colonialism in the Caribbean, then his move to Paris, and then his participation in the Algerian War of

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Independence in which he defected to the Algerian side. He interpreted this through his education in philosophy and psychoanalysis and a literary skill in his theoretical writing. All of these aspects of his life and work anticipate what became important in later postcolonial studies. The literary work of Aimé Césaire was also important to the formation of the postcolonial field before it became known as such. Edward Said’s work on Orientalism had a decisive impact on the field in its articulation of the relation between power and knowledge in colonialism, with reference to literary texts. Said also had a major influence on the understanding of Palestine, again bringing a rather existential concern with a postcolonial image known to him through his origins in British mandate Palestine.

 art Five: Areas of Work Within Philosophy P and Literature The final section is areas of work within philosophy and literature, ending the Handbook with ideas about where there are particularly strong focuses in the field, without trying to suggest that this is the only work that exists or is worthy of attention. This provides a way of bringing the themes of the previous parts together. There is not absolute distinction between the topics in this part and the topics in the previous parts. These topics do however seem particularly useful for showing what work does tend to highlight what brings philosophy and literature together, along with the ways in which they are articulated. What is particularly striking about these ways of bringing philosophy and literature together is that they are practically oriented, in the sense of the parts of philosophy referring to the social world rather than pure theoretical philosophy. Law, politics, ethics, and political economy all clearly belong to practical philosophy. The possible exception is philosophical fictions. These very often refer to ethical situations, but certainly do not always. However, when they do refer to issues of epistemology, language, mind, and metaphysics, they do so in relation to practical social world situations and show a way from theoretical philosophy into practical philosophy. Literature then is shown to have a role in relation to philosophy of emphasising its practical aspects. Practical in philosophical language is to be distinguished from applied. Practical refers to the sphere of human action and can do so in the most abstract ways. Applied refers to the use of philosophy in very particular situations, which can of course enter into practical philosophy, but is not the same thing.

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Law and Literature Law and literature brings out the ways in which literature relates to judgement whether in addressing institutions of justice or bringing ideas about justice into play. Many works of literature have put issues of crime, the legal system, punishment, and the understanding of justice at the centre. Notable examples include Charles Dickens and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. A huge genre has grown up since of crime thrillers and detective stories. The law enters literary works in other ways. Franz Kafka’s two major novels at the centre of modern literature revolve around laws, courts, judges, guilt, and punishment. Looking at the most recognised ancient epics, those of Homer and Virgil, we can see questions of laws of human communities and the consequences of breaking them at their heart. This is why Rousseau takes a quotation from Virgil as the epigram for his work on the social contract. Questions of justice are always present in literature, as there is always some sense of agency and responsibility. The very order of a literary work is suggestive of assumptions about moral order in the social world and maybe the natural world. Law and literature can deal with particular crimes and criminals, particular lawyers and court cases, in literature. The other side of this can be a sense of the literary in law, that is, the sense that the qualities of good judgement in court relate to interpretation of cases and legal texts. The justice derived from interpreting laws may differ from that derived from interpreting the facts of the case. This constantly possible dissonance between justice as law and justice as intuitions about cases is itself an issue for literary texts about law. It is a constitutive issue for law, that is in the question of how a court may resolve different understandings of what justice is. Here conflict between natural law and stature law, divine law and human law, individual justice and communal justice, outward actions and inner intentions, can all play a role. The ways the judge has of dealing with this, as well as of interpreting the legal tradition, all call upon forms of judgement related to literary judgement, that is, questions of how to interpret texts, resolve ambiguities and conflict, and form a whole from many parts. Questions of law may be questions of justice in relation to power, which is a political question as well as a legal question. So the law and its operations in literature raise questions of what unifies the literary work and how enters into questions of justice.

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Politics and Literature The field of politics, that is, power, is also a topic in itself. Literature may deal with this by incorporating the world of politics in the sense of high politics, individuals near the top of the power system. It can also deal with the lower-­ level impact of politics and resistance to that impact. Politics may also have a literary aspect in that political thought can be written as literature. The political figure may be a kind of storyteller and artist, who is in some way a reflection of literature on itself. Literature may refer to politics as generally corrupt or lacking in real effects, so exclude it, but that is of course still a political gesture. Literature can be quite propagandist in a political way, and while literature as political propaganda is generally given low value, the reality is that even sophisticated literary classics often have some kind of political partisanship, sometimes disguised as a non-political set of values which do in reality become political when closely examined. Politicians and the political process tend to be promising territory for satire, so can be seen as a major impulse to satirical literature. The world of politics in literature can include political utopias and alternative realities. This itself overlaps with philosophical strategies in which arguments are supported by a thought experiment, which supposedly decisively supports or refutes a particular claim. Political thinkers themselves have written works of literature, most obviously the novels of Benjamin Constant, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. On the other side, Dante wrote on monarchy as well as producing an epic which itself is full of political commentary. More recently JeanPaul Sartre and Albert Camus are examples of writers who wrote on political ideas and engaged in political struggles, which they bring into novels and plays. Leo Tolstoy provided amongst other things an account of the Russian politics of the time. The genre of tragedy was political in its Greek origins and has tended to be political, if less so, since its revival in ancient Athens. In lyric poetry, Walt Whitman’s poetry is tied up with admiration for Abraham Lincoln and a vision of American destiny. Though the idea of literature as political often encounters resistance, there is not much of complete and complex work in literature which does not have a political aspect, even if it is not like the novels of Anthony Trollope in nineteenth-­century Britain, famous for their insights into the church and political struggles of the time. Just about all literary works deal with power, state, and political concerns in some way, however hidden.

Philosophical Fictions and Thought Experiments Philosophical fictions and thought experiments as part of philosophy have been mentioned above and deserve a chapter of their own. The though experiment in

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philosophy may imagine a group formulating principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance about their place in that world, as in John Rawls. That is his suggestion that principles of justice for a society could be best drawn up by a group deprived of knowledge of what place they have in that society. For Rawls, this is bound to lead to the adoption of principles which most benefit the poorest in that society. Whether the designers of justice behind the veil would really take such a risk in worst possible situations minimisation strategy is open to debate, but it is certainly an impressive and memorable presentation, the best known and widely read part of a famous book. It of course follows on from a tradition of writers who suggest an early contract or covenant as the foundation of a society. The writers are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to which we might add Samuel Pufendorf. A contemporary of John Rawls’, Robert Nozick used a kind of thought experiment to argue for his rather different political philosophy, referring to how Wilt Chamberlain the basketball player became rich from people choosing to pay money to see him play. This is less of a philosophical fiction, as Wilt Chamberlain did exist and did take money from ticket receipts. However those were tickets to see a team, so we see that philosophy tends to need to simplify thought experiments. On less political and more semantic cases, there is the example of Hilary Putnam. The philosopher may imagine a twin earth with some very precise and limited difference between the two earths, as Hilary Putnam does to test a theory of meaning. Going back further in history, the philosopher may imagine a deceitful demon, as Descartes does, in formulating his views on knowledge. In this case, we have what is set up as a revolutionary moment in modern philosophy, coming from the belongings in a closed order. Going back even further, the philosopher may imagine an ideal city as Plato did, or think about what happens when Achilles tries to overtake a tortoise in a race as Zeno of Elea did. These are all instances where philosophy engages in something which has qualities of literary imagination and fiction and does so as philosophically decisive moments.

Ethics and Literature Just as philosophy may have literary moments, literature itself may have a kind of philosophical imagination in the way it deals with ethics. Some ethical element is always apparent in literature even where literature tries to avoid assuming ethically responsible agents itself. This is an act of ethical imagination questioning moral categories. There at least three major ways in which literature deals with ethics. Firstly, it may deal in a kind of ethical experiment where the actions and intentions of characters are evaluated as morally worse

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or better. Secondly, it may be concerned with what moral agency there is in humans or in the cosmic order. Thirdly, it may present a moral order to be evaluated. In the third case, the fictional world itself presents a kind of moral order in which we can see whether ethical ends are maintained. Literature may provide moral criticism through satire or through an unrelenting realism. It may provide suggestions of moral improvement through the actions of exemplary questions. It very often shows some kind of moral growth in which the protagonist learns to deal with the world and other people without causing harm. The moral growth may be more in terms of a kind of inner orientation towards integrity and even perfection. The love situations often at the centre of literature may deal with questions of how people may understand each other, learn to evaluate each other properly, become better through interaction with a compatible person, or become better through deserving an object of love. What literature can also deal with are moral failures and blindness in this kind of situation. Tragedies have provided particularly rich material for considering moral fault. The growth of the novel as a form is part of the growth of morality more oriented to universal sympathy and care about personal interactions. Some novels have been taken as sources of moral psychology as can be found in Nietzsche’s view of Stendhal and Dostoevsky. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel in Britain often seems like an area of exploration of moral dilemmas and moral growth. The novels of George Eliot are certainly formed by a wish to replace Christianity with a sense of moral seriousness and enquiry in literature. Thomas Hardy’s novels introduce a strong sense of tragic moral disasters in rural Southwest England. Literature has sometimes also been a scene of anti-moralistic revolt against religious, metaphysical, and social sources of morality. The fear that something like this might be the case goes back to Plato.

Political Economy and Literature Literature and political economy may interact in significant ways. Any work of literature that deals with money, work, consumption, investment, and management in any way is dealing with political economy. This applies to the farmer trying to make the land grow and the banker worried about the safety of investments, both of which can be and have been literary themes. Even the most aestheticised work of literature can deal with the decline of a great family whose land or investments are running out. This is of course a typical literary background. The decline of a great family may be particularly suitable material for a very aestheticised novel mourning the passing of a cultivated family,

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even a whole class. However, this is in itself a way of being involved in economic issues. Epic heroes and knights in romances have slaves and serfs, castles and farms, plunder and inherited wealth, and concerns about gifts and marriage. All of these topics are economic topics even if the economic side is played down. Equally economic texts have literary aspects, particularly if we go back to the original classics. Adam Smith and Karl Marx both wrote using a lot of literary background and a capacity for literary imagination. Smith himself, as mentioned above, lectured on rhetoric and belles lettres. Marx was very well read in ancient and modern classics, which often shows in his writing. This literary aspect declines as economics moves towards its current status as a specialised technical discipline. Nevertheless, economics is still sometimes written in relatively accessible non-technical ways, using at least some literary skill. John Maynard Keynes used some striking language and was close to the aesthete Bloomsbury group, which included Virginia Woolf. Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises all wrote non-technical economics during the twentieth century, as have Rosa Luxembourg, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Jeffrey Sachs. It would be a stretch to say that most of this has much literary value, but it can at least be said that they have tried to communicate with a broad audience and use language with some literary value. Drawing on the above, there is a recent growth of awareness of the relation between political economy and literature, with the ways in which literature is deeply embedded in the economic assumptions and anxieties of the time. Bankruptcy, inheritance, marriage, work, legal cases, and investments are all aspects of novels which, directly or less directly, refer to issues of property and economic exchange which are part of the world of political economy. The use of language in literature can and should be linked with its use in economics in mutually illuminating ways.

Literature and Religion Religion and political economy have been taken together and the classical political economy certainly had roots in a mixture or religious prudentialism with regard to individual conduct and natural theology with regard to the possibility of a natural order within the world of human affairs. Religion itself has a frequent place in literature and has many literary aspects. The Bible is of course one of the major texts in world literature. Within English literature, we can add The Book of Common Prayer. The translation of the Bible into English as what we know as the King James Bible is one of the major events in the history of English language and English literature. For many people at many times, literature has really meant a few religious texts. In the history of English-­

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speaking countries, that has often meant the King James Bible, accompanied by John Bunyan’s pilgrimage story or maybe John Milton’s literary contribution in the form of epics. Sacred texts accompanied by literary texts on religious themes have been a large part of the role of literature. The questions of literary criticism and philosophical reading of literary texts are interwoven with questions of reconstructing, reading, and interpreting literary texts. Protestant Reformation models of individual reading and interpretation of the Bible established a model for reading literature. Hermeneutics and literary criticism have roots in the classical philology, which includes some Christian texts and in the Hebrew philology necessary to read the Hebrew Bible. They also have roots in the interpretative work undertaken throughout the history of Judaism and Christianity. Religion is evidently less central to the culture now but still frequently informs literature and philosophy. Derrida brought religion into the centre of his work, as a space that needs to be understood regardless of faith or lack of faith. The aestheticism of romanticism, romantic symbolism, and high modernism has a strong element of relocated religious sensibility in its reaching for purity of elevated use and of words and literary forms. Theology and literature is a necessary part of the literary critical and religious studies sphere as it is also a necessary part of the philosophy and literature sphere. There is high proportion of philosophy and literature which cannot be understood without reference to religion. Enlightenment, humanist, and liberal forms of religion have often turned towards literary criticism, as in the case of Northrop Frye, and hermeneutics to understand the explicitly and implicitly religious sides of literary texts, as well as to study religious texts in ways detached from rigid assumptions about their literal truth.

Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue The Handbook finishes with an chapter on the performative aspects of philosophy and literature, which also serves as an editorial afterword, from, Michael Mack. This picks up from the discursive work on the parts of Philosophy and Literature which form the collection. It is writing on and engaged with the relation between philosophy and literature, in which there is continuity and difference between themes as well as between philosophy and literature. This is show what it is to be in the field of philosophy and literature, as an addition which completes and leads on from what is said directly in the earlier chapters. Showing is the more literary part of philosophy and literature, or at least that is the usual starting point which can become complicated in more boundary stretching kind of writing. That is, the earlier chapters say what the discrete parts are of philosophy and literature, with the

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inevitable element of arbitrariness that comes from drawing boundaries. The chapter shows the continuity between philosophy and writing which have a performative aspect, showing this to be necessary in bringing philosophy and literature, saying and showing, together. Of course it particularly continues the themes of Mack’s chapter on ‘Literature as Theory’ but also serves to bring together many aspects of philosophy and literature discussed in other chapters. It does so through showing the limits of representationalism in literature and the importance of literature that is performative rather than reflective or representational. Modern poetry can enact moral concerns just as much as Plato does in his dialogues though in less discursive ways. It does so however by encountering the greatest moral disaster of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, and the sense of collapse of transcendence that follows it.

Note on Suggested Reading There are particular difficulties in assembling a bibliography of general readings in philosophy and literature, compared with single disciplinary studies. There are very few works which try to cover the integrated study of philosophy and literature. Some compensation can be had by assembling general books in philosophical aesthetics and in literary theory. However, adding the two kinds of book together is not the same as having books on philosophy and literature. The number of titles in both categories is very large and contains material not strictly relevant to current concerns, so only very few suggestions are made here, as a rather arbitrary starting point. Readings on the chapters in the book are available at the end of chapters as well as in the general bibliography at the end of the volume. There is little point in trying to reduplicate or expand on the work of chapter authors by suggesting more titles here and that is why the Introduction before this point does not offer bibliographical information. It is more of a précis of the field, in such a form as should provide a useful frame for chapters, rather than a guide to scholarship. The most useful bibliographical information it can offer is at the introduction and multi-authored guide level. The lack of material is a reason why it is important that the present volume should exist to stimulate work in the field, including future handbooks, anthologies, readers, and introductions. There is not much available in the way of multi-authored volumes in the field of philosophy and literature, but The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (Eldridge 2009) is a notable work of this kind. Monographs on philosophy and literature strictly speaking are no more common, and it is easier to find works on the philosophy of literature, including Christopher New’s Philosophy of Literature: An Introduction (1999) and Peter Lamarque’s The Philosophy of Literature (2009). A slightly different perspective on philosophy

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and literature is to concentrate on literature as the object of philosophy as Eileen John and Dominic Lopes do in the anthology they edited, The Philosophy of Literature: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2004). There is not really a great deal available beyond these works in the way of survey material though there is a very wide array available on specific topics within philosophy and literature. The best way of approaching the reading of multi-authored and introductory material in philosophy and literature may be to consult titles on philosophical aesthetics and literary theory. Some suggestions are made in the bibliography below along with the titles just mentioned.

Bibliography Cahn, Steven M., and Aaron Maskin. 2008. Aesthetics. A Comprehensive Reader. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Castle, Gregory. 2013. The Literary Theory Handbook. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Cazeaux, Clive, ed. 2011. The Continental Aesthetics Reader. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Cooper, David E. 1997. Aesthetics: Classic Readings. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Eldridge, Richard. 2009. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Feagin, Susan L., and Patrick Maynard, eds. 1997. Aesthetics. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Goldblatt, David, and Lee B. Brown, eds. 2016. A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts. 3rd ed. Abingdon and Malden, MA: Routledge. John, Eileen, and Dominic Lopes. 2004. Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings: An Anthology. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Lamarque, Peter. 2009. The Philosophy of Literature. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen, eds. 2004. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition. An Anthology. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Leith, Vincent B., William E. Cain, et al. 2001. The Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Lodge, David, and Nigel Wood. 2008. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. 3rd ed. Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge. New, Christopher. 1999. Philosophy of Literature: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Rice, Philip, and Patrica Waugh, eds. 2013. Modern Literary Theory. London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds. 2004. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Russell, D.A., and Michael Winterbottom, eds. 1989. Classical Literary Criticism. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Singer, Alan, and Allen Dunn, eds. 2000. Literary Aesthetics: A Reader. Oxford and Maldon, MA: Blackwell. Waugh, Patricia, ed. 2006. Literary Theory and Criticism. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Part I Philosophy as Literature

2 What Is Philosophical Dialogue? S. Montgomery Ewegen

What is philosophical dialogue? In his definitive text The Philosophical Dialogue: A Poetics and Hermeneutics, Vittorio Hösle offers the following concise and lapidary answer to this question: “The philosophical dialogue is … to be defined as a literary genre that represents a discussion of philosophical questions” (Hösle 2012, 45). Phrased otherwise, the genre of philosophical dialogue is a written articulation of the act of spoken philosophical dialogue.1 Throughout his book, Hösle offers a comprehensive and thorough inquiry into that genre, and anybody interested in learning about philosophical dialogue can hardly do better than to read his book closely and carefully. However, although one can indeed turn to any number of scholarly texts in order to answer the question “what is philosophical dialogue,” such texts cannot in principle be a greater source to which to turn than the very matter of philosophical dialogue itself. If any expert becomes an expert by familiarizing herself with the topic about which she wishes to be an expert, then it follows that the matter itself, as the very source of her expertise, is a more authoritative source than she herself could ever be. If one truly wants to learn something of the nature of philosophical dialogue, then, there is no better source to which to address this question than philosophical dialogue itself. Even if one reads all of the scholarly works on the subject, as any serious reader

S. M. Ewegen (*) Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_2

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should, it could only be for the sake of coming into closer contact with the matter itself. Ultimately, if one wishes to know about the essence of philosophical dialogue, one must ask a philosophical dialogue itself. But where does one find philosophical dialogues, in order that one may ask them what they are? Within the history of philosophy, no doubt. Within that history, there have been many philosophical works that have taken the form of dialogues. In the third century BCE, for example, there were the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon; in the first century BCE, those of Cicero; in the fourth century, those of St Augustine of Hippo; in the seventeenth century, those of Malebranche; in the eighteenth century, those of George Berkeley, David Hume, Denis Diderot, and Voltaire; and in the twenty-first century, those of Timothy Williamson. This brief list points to just a few of the dozens of thinkers whose works, when looking back upon them from the present, can all be grouped together under the umbrella term “philosophical dialogue,” even if such grouping risks committing irremediable violence to the many important substantive differences between these various thinkers. Where within this rich history would one best seek the essence of philosophical dialogue, so as to be able to determine with clarity what it is? Perhaps to gain one’s bearing, one might first look to a thinker who stands at the very end of that history and who delineated more thoroughly than any other thinker the ἀρχή, arch, and ultimate closure of that history. In a letter written to his wife Elfride—a document that is therefore itself already a kind of dialogue, a speaking taking place between two people—Martin Heidegger shares, with manifest excitement, an insight regarding the form of philosophical writing known as “dialogue”: I suddenly found a form of saying that I would never have dared use, if only because of the danger of outwardly imitating the Platonic dialogues. I’m working on a ‘conversation’ [Gespräch]; in fact I have the ‘inspiration’—I really have to call it this—for several at once.2 In this way, poetic and thoughtful saying [das dichtende und denkende Sagen] have attained a primordial unity, and everything flows along easily and freely. Only from my own experience have I now understood Plato’s mode of presentation … (Heidegger 2010a, 187; translation modified).

With this letter, one sees, from the mind of a thinker who stood at the end of the history of metaphysics, an enthusiasm to return to the beginning of that history: not, however, to any particular idea, matter, or problem belonging to that history, but rather to a manner of writing characteristic of that beginning. After the arch of the history of metaphysics had been traversed, an arch that

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therefore proves to be part of a vast circle, that thinker who stands at the end of that history felt obliged—if only for a moment—to assume the dialogical form of writing practised by the thinker he believed to be largely responsible for the beginning of that history. But why? Heidegger tells us. He had assumed such a style because with it “poetic and thoughtful saying have attained a primordial unity.” More precisely, they have re-attained this unity: for, in setting out to write his own dialogues, Heidegger had re-inscribed and resuscitated a form of writing that traces back 2000 years to Plato. The implication is, of course, that in Plato’s dialogues there is a unity of poetic and thoughtful saying—what we might somewhat violently re-inscribe as “literary and philosophical form”—whose force and richness have never been surpassed. In emulating this form, Heidegger wished to recreate or recapture something of that force, if only for a moment. As mentioned above, the history of philosophy is replete with examples of philosophical dialogue, any one of which might be fruitfully interrogated regarding the essence of philosophical dialogue as such. However, as Heidegger attests, none of them exhibits the richness and power of the Platonic dialogues. Although Plato did not “invent” the form of writing that has become nearly synonymous with his name,3 it is hardly hyperbolic to state that no other philosophical dialogues within the Western philosophical tradition have ever obtained to the poetic and thoughtful heights, the literary and philosophical peaks, of those written by Plato.4 To the extent that Plato’s dialogues serve as the highest expression of the form, every philosophical dialogue—at least within the history of Occidental philosophy—is either an ersatz emulation of it or an errant deviation from it. Thus, to truly see the form of philosophical dialogue at play, one may only look to the Platonic dialogues. To look anywhere else would be to ignore the very pinnacle, the very paradigm, the very essence, of the genera.5 Our task in what follows, then, will be to look to this form in order to learn something of its essential nature. By dialoguing philosophically with Plato’s form of philosophical dialogue—by asking it what it is—we will explore the nature of “the primordial unity of poetic and thoughtful saying” that properly belongs to it. Yet, within a single chapter such as this, one cannot dialogue with Plato’s work “as a whole,” if there even is such a thing. The corpus is too vast, the characters too numerous, the perspectives too various, and the content too multi-vocal to allow for a fruitful or even coherent exchange between them all. Attempting to speak with Plato’s work “as a whole” would be like trying to have a hundred conversations with a hundred people all at once. Even less can one dialogue with Plato “himself,” for not only has Plato the

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person long since become incapable of dialogue, but nowhere within “his” dialogues—not once—does he himself say anything at all in his own name.6 Simply put, a dialogue cannot be had with “Plato himself ” because Plato is nowhere to be found within the Platonic dialogues. Trying to dialogue with “Plato himself ” is like trying to converse with air: it’s all around you and yet nowhere to be found. The only viable alternative is to dialogue with particular dialogues themselves; that one undertake, in other words, to enter into a conversation with a few of Plato’s texts. Only in this way can the polyphony of voices be diminished enough, and the topic be narrowed enough, to allow for a fruitful exchange. In what follows we will attempt to initiate a dialogue with a number of Platonic dialogues—namely, the Cratylus, the Gorgias, the Theaetetus, and the Apology—and in such a way that those dialogues dialogue with one other. What binds these particular texts together is not some grand Platonic system or development thereof, but rather simply their ability to shed light upon the nature of philosophical dialogue. The following thus does not presume to offer the final word on philosophical dialogue or about Plato’s view of it, but rather attempts merely to open a dialogue about philosophical dialogue by way of an engagement with some of the best philosophical dialogues ever penned. * * * The very first thing to be noticed about Plato’s texts is that they, with rare exception, take place as conversations between multiple participants. Utterly unlike the form of philosophical writing that has dominated since Aristotle— namely, the treatise—nearly all of Plato’s texts occur as dramatized dialogues in which at least two participants enter into a common inquiry; and, indeed, this form comes to be the archetypical one for what is referred to as “philosophical dialogue.” With this multiplicity of voices, one finds a situation in which—again, utterly unlike the form of philosophical writing with which we are most familiar—no single voice dominates absolutely. Even when one finds an interlocutor who offers little more to the discussion than monosyllabic grunts of assent or dissent (as is sometimes the case), one still finds precisely thereby a λόγος that is characterized not by the monotonous drone of a single speaker, but rather the polyphonous interaction of at least two.7 In other words, one finds a dialogue.8 In any dialogue—written or spoken—a meeting of perspectives occurs. One can see such a meeting at the beginning of Plato’s Cratylus, where the character Hermogenes describes a disagreement that he and Cratylus have been having:

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Cratylus, whom you see here, Socrates, says that everything has a right name of its own, which comes by nature, and that a name is not whatever people call a thing by agreement, … but that there is a kind of inherent correctness in names, which is the same for all people …. For my part, Socrates, I have often talked with Cratylus and many others, and cannot come to the conclusion that there is any correctness of names other than convention and agreement. (Cratylus, 383a–384d; trans. modified)

The Cratylus thus begins with an encounter between two different and, it seems, incommensurable perspectives. Neither of these perspectives is privileged at the beginning of the text (nor, ultimately, at the end)9; rather, each is offered up as having an equal chance of laying claim to the truth of things. Cratylus and Hermogenes have already been discussing the finer points of the matter when they glance upon Socrates, whom they then call upon to join them in the λόγος to help determine which of these perspectives is true. In other words, despite the differing perspectives held by the two characters, an inquiry is entered into for the sake of coming to hold an idea together in common. This is evident in the very first line of the text: Hermogenes: “Do you wish that we should gather up in common with Socrates here in the λόγος?” Cratylus: “If it seems right to you.” (Cratylus, 383a; my translation)

Thus, although the dialogue begins from out of the collision of two incommensurable perspectives, a conversation is undertaken for the sake of having the interlocutors come to grasp the same perspective in common, even if this ideal is never actually realized.10 Such an engagement—namely, a movement away from one’s own (idiosyncratic) perspective towards the holding of a perspective shared in common with another—is only possible on the basis of an epistemological openness, that is, a willingness to change one’s mind. One sees such openness on the part of the character Hermogenes who, just after summarizing his own perspective on the matter of the correctness of names, states that “if this is not the case, I am ready to hear and to learn from Cratylus or anyone else” (Cratylus, 384e). Such a statement indicates a certain modesty and openness crucial for the progression of any dialogue: for lacking such openness, there is no possibility of meaningful exchange between interlocutors. If one is not willing to hear the perspective of the other, the possibility of dialogue—a speaking together of two—is precluded from the outset.

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It is from out of this posture of openness that Hermogenes calls upon Socrates, having reached a standstill with the laconic Cratylus. However, as the text makes immediately clear, Socrates is not called upon as an expert already possessing the wisdom which Hermogenes and Cratylus are pursuing. To the contrary, he enters the discussion as an additional interlocutor through whose perspective the truth might be obtained. As Socrates puts it, “I do not know what the truth is about such matters [i.e., the correctness of names]; however, I am ready to join you and Cratylus in common in looking for it” (Cratylus, 384c). Thus, Hermogenes turns to Socrates not as a definitive source about the nature of names, but rather as a partner or comrade who lacks such knowledge but who might therefore assist in the acquisition of it. Indeed, it is precisely because Socrates lacks such knowledge that he is able to enter into the pursuit of it: for if he possessed the knowledge, it would hardly be necessary (or even possible) for him to go looking for it. Socrates’s self-professed ignorance points to an essential component of any dialogue: namely, that the participants enter into their conversation from out of a posture of lack. If two people enter into a conversation, one of whom possesses the knowledge that the other person does not, then a dialogue—that is, a situation in which at least two people speak—does not occur. Rather, in such a situation, one person gives to the other information or knowledge, in the very same manner that one might give to another a banana or a cupcake. In such a scenario, no talking across or thinking through an argument occurs11: there is no interaction of differing perspectives, only the dominance and transference of a single one. Thus, for actual dialogue to take place, each person involved must lack knowledge of that about which they dialogue: each must be ignorant with regard to the matter at hand. To better understand the nature of this ignorance, a turn to Plato’s Symposium is instructive. Deep within the narrative mise-en-scène of the text, the character Diotima tells a story regarding the origin of the god Ἔρως, a story meant to help clarify the nature of human desire. After explaining that Ἔρως comes to be from out of a union of the gods Πενία and Πόρος (poverty and resource), Diotima offers the following extended description of the god: First of all, he is always poor; and he is far from being tender and beautiful … but is tough, squalid, shoeless, and homeless, always lying on the ground without a blanket or a bed, sleeping in doorways and along waysides in the open air; he has the nature of his mother [i.e., Πενία, poverty], always dwelling with neediness. But in accordance with his father [i.e., Πόρος, resource] he plots to

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trap the beautiful and the good, and is courageous, stout, and keen, a skilled hunter, always weaving devices, desirous of practical wisdom and inventive, ­philosophizing through all his life …. And as that which is supplied to him is always gradually flowing out, Ἔρως is never either without resources nor wealth, but is in between wisdom and lack of understanding. For here is the way it is: no one of the gods philosophizes and desires to become wise—for he is so—nor if there is anyone else who is wise, does he philosophize. Nor, in turn, do those who lack understanding philosophize and desire to become wise; for it is precisely this that makes the lack of understanding so difficult—that if a man is not beautiful and good, nor intelligent, he has the opinion that that is sufficient for him. Consequently, he who does not believe that he is in need does not desire that which he does not believe he needs. (Symposium, 203d–204a)

As this passage makes clear, a feeling of defect, of lack, must be present in anybody who genuinely wishes to know a thing. It is only from out of such a feeling of defect—which is nothing other than an awareness of one’s own ignorance—that one may enter into a dialogue with another. From out of the poverty of ignorance, one pursues the resource of dialogue as a means of overcoming such a lack. However, as mentioned above, a dialogue can only occur if both parties involved are operating from out of a posture of ignorance. Yet, if this is so, what possible benefit could occur from them speaking with one another? That is, if one person lacks the answer to the question being pursued, what good will come about from her questioning another person who also lacks such knowledge? What can a lack gain from a lack? To better understand precisely what occurs through a dialogue between two ignorant people—and what possible benefit comes about from such an occurrence—a brief turn to another of Plato’s texts, the Gorgias, is instructive. As was the case in the Cratylus—and, indeed, as is the case in nearly every Platonic text—the Gorgias presents a Socrates who claims to lack wisdom regarding the topic at hand. In order to better understand the nature of rhetoric, Socrates enters into a dialogue—or, in fact, a series of dialogues—with the characters Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. After teasing a working definition of rhetoric out of the sophist Gorgias, Socrates proclaims his deep-rooted love of inquiry: “if ever there was a man who dialogued [διαλέγεται] with another from out of a desire for knowing the truth of the λόγος, I am such a man; and so, I trust, are you” (Gorgias, 453b; trans. modified). Admitting that he does not have clear knowledge about the topic at hand (i.e., rhetoric), but only ungrounded suspicions, Socrates indicates his desire to pursue the λόγος with Gorgias. As Socrates puts it,

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Why is it that, having a suspicion of my own, I am going to ask you this, instead of stating it myself? It is not on your account, but with a view to the λὀγος [ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου], and to such a progress in it as may best reveal to us the point we are discussing. (Gorgias, 453c)

Thus, Socrates, lacking knowledge about the nature of rhetoric, wishes to dialogue with Gorgias for the truth of, and with a view towards, the λόγος. We see just this sort of commitment to following the λόγος, born out of a lack of knowledge, demonstrated again later in the Gorgias. After a difficult and protracted conversation with Socrates, the character Callicles grows tired and frustrated with the former’s indefatigable desire to dialogue and wishes to discontinue the conversation. Indeed, Callicles is so frustrated with Socrates and his style of conducting dialogue that he suggests to him that he might be better off “simply going through the λόγος” by himself (Gorgias, 505d)—that is, that he might be better of dialoguing not as two but as one. Thus, finding in Callicles a reluctant partner, Socrates agrees to carry on the conversation by himself, taking on the role of each speaker in turn. Thus, for the sake of the λόγος—that is, for sake of watching the λόγος unfold unto its conclusions— Socrates offers a one-man dialogue (which is not the same as a monologue), first offering the following proviso: Now I am going to pursue the λόγος as my view of it may suggest; but if any of you think the admissions I am making to myself are not the truth, you must seize upon them and refute me. For I assure you I myself do not say that I say as knowing it, but only as joining in the search with you; so that if anyone who disputes my statements is found to be on the right track, I shall be the first to agree with him. (Gorgias, 506a)

Here again, we see Socrates, ignorant of the topic at hand, wishing to dialogue with another for the sake of exploring the λόγος in pursuit of the truth. It is only because of his enduring ignorance—well attested in the Apology as elsewhere12—that Socrates is so eager, and able, to dialogue. In light of his insistence upon his enduring ignorance, what could Socrates possibly be said to contribute to the λόγος? That is, if he really knows nothing, in what way will his contributions benefit the inquiry? One additional passage from the Gorgias helps address these questions. Just after Socrates has engaged in a long dialogue with the character Polus, the ever-petulant Callicles calls Socrates out for making ridiculous and ironic statements. Socrates defends the statements in question by making the following remark, one to whose precise sense we must attend. Socrates tells Callicles not to be surprised by the strange things he says or to try to stop him from saying them, but

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rather to “make my beloved philosophy stop speaking thus: for she, my dear friend, speaks what you hear me saying now” (Gorgias, 482a; trans. modified). Socrates goes on to say that, unlike many human beings who are always changing their minds, “philosophy always [says] the same” (Gorgias, 482b). What does it mean for Socrates to say that, in the long dialogue in which he has been engaged, it is philosophy, and not he himself, who has been speaking? Such a radical statement can only be understood on the basis of the ignorance, the lack, that Socrates has previously insisted upon. Because he is lacking knowledge of the matter at hand, Socrates himself has nothing to say: he has nothing substantial to contribute. However, it is only because he lacks knowledge that the λόγος itself can unfold. Precisely because Socrates lacks knowledge—precisely because he has nothing to say—he is able to listen to and follow the λόγος wherever it may lead. If Socrates possessed knowledge of the matter at hand—or at least thought he did—then it would not be the λόγος that unfolded through conversation with another, but only Socrates’s opinions about it. Thus, in a dialogue, the speaking of each interlocutor is less important than the speaking of the λόγος. What this means is that dialogue occurs only when the participants, in recognition of their ignorance of the topic at hand, abandon their “own” opinions and perspectives in favour of coming to follow the λόγος as it unfolds from out of itself.13 Once again, we see that dialogue is not a matter of one person convincing another of her perspective; rather, it is a matter of each person withdrawing from their perspective in such a way as to make way for the λόγος.14 This unencumbered unfolding of the λόγος, transcendent of the convictions and biases held by particular humans, is nothing other than the event of philosophy. Through this event, the participants in a dialogue can come to hold the same view in common: that is, having abandoned their differing perspectives, they can come to hold what philosophy itself, who always says the same, says. In a word, both participants, having abandoned their own opinions, can come into relation to the truth. As Hans-­ Georg Gadamer puts it in Truth and Method, We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into a conversation, or even that we become involved in it. … All of this shows that a good conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it—i.e., that it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exists. (Gadamer 1975, 383)

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In light of all of this, one sees that there is a gesture of self-erasure at the very heart of philosophical dialogue. In order truly to enter into a dialogue, one must be prepared both to acknowledge that one lacks the knowledge that one seeks (i.e., that one is ignorant) and that one therefore has nothing substantial to say about the issue at hand. Upon acknowledging one’s ignorance about a thing, one becomes desirous of the knowledge regarding it. It is from out of this desire that one poses a question to some other. In posing the question, one already points away from one’s self and towards the other, effectively effacing oneself in favour of the other. Moreover, whenever one poses a question to another, one further (and indeed preeminently) poses the question to the matter itself about which the question asks: in asking about the matter, one poses a question to the matter. This “matter” is nothing other than the λόγος: that is, it is nothing other than the saying or the λόγος that will come to answer or at least clarify the question through its unfolding. Thus, when one poses a genuine question, one does so from out of an erasure of the self that makes possible a genuine reception of the λόγος. To better understand this, we turn to Plato’s Theaetetus. Theaetetus and Socrates (and occasionally Theodorus) have been engaged in a dialogue about the nature of knowledge, about what it is and how it is to be obtained. During the first part of the dialogue, Theaetetus attempts to defend the claim that “knowledge is nothing other than perception” (Theaetetus, 151e), a claim that Socrates shows to be substantively equivalent to Protagoras’s famous dictum that “the human being is the measure of all things” (Theaetetus, 152a; trans. modified). After having shown the various inconsistencies and aporiai that follow upon this claim, Socrates does something quite remarkable: he resuscitates the figure of the late Protagoras, takes on his persona as if it were his own, and ventriloquizes a staunch and robust defence of the sophist’s position during which Socrates’s and Theaetetus’s treatment of it is harshly chided (Theaetetus, 161–168c). At the end of this defence, the ventriloquized Protagoras comes to endorse and recommend a certain sort of dialogue as being best suited for philosophical discourse. It is impossible not to hear Socrates himself here as he gives voice to the late Protagoras: [L]et me make a suggestion: do not be unfair in your questioning; it is very inconsistent for a man who asserts that he cares for virtue to be constantly unfair in discussion; and it is unfair in discussion when a man makes no distinction between merely trying to make points and carrying on a real dialogue [διαλεγόμενος]. In the former he may jest and try to trip up his opponent as much as he can, but in real dialogue [διαλέγεσθαι] he must be in earnest and must set his interlocutor on his feet, pointing out to him those slips only which

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are due to himself and his previous associations. For if you act in this way, those who debate with you will cast the blame for their confusion and perplexity upon themselves, not upon you; they will run after you and love you [φιλήσουσιν], and they will disdain themselves and run away from themselves and take refuge in philosophy [αὑτοὺς δὲ μισήσουσι καὶ φεύξονται ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν εἰς φιλοσοφίαν], that they may escape from their former selves by becoming different [ἵν᾽ ἄλλοι γενόμενοι ἀπαλλαγῶσι τῶν οἳ πρότερον ἦσαν]. But if you act in the opposite way, as most teachers do, you will produce the opposite result, and instead of making your young associates philosophers, you will make them disdain philosophy when they grow older. (Theaetetus, 167d–168b; trans. modified.)

Here again, we see a way of conversation being proscribed, one that does not try to defeat the other in argument or win points against him, but rather one that seeks to dialogue with him in a friendly and solicitous way. Such dialogue unfolds in such a way that friendship, or love (φίλος), develops between the participants; and it is precisely this love (φίλος) of one another that brings them towards love of wisdom (φιλοσοφία). Utterly unlike the eristics with which it is being compared, dialogue is characterized by a love that unfolds between two people. However, it is crucial to observe that this love of the other that leads towards love of wisdom is necessarily accompanied by a concomitant disdain of oneself (αὑτοὺς…μισήσουσι). This “disdain,” as the passage makes immediately clear, is to be understood as a fleeing of the self in the face of the λόγος, an abandoning or effacing of the self in favour of a pursuit of philosophy. While eristic discourse is concerned with a bolstering and promotion of the self at the expense of the other (i.e., “winning” the argument),15 philosophical dialogue, to the contrary, is concerned with abandoning the self in favour of the other participant, and in such a way that one follows after the other into a radical transformation (i.e., into philosophy). Out of love for the other, one avoids or resists the desire to “beat” them by quibbling eristically with every little thing they say.16 Through resisting this, one resists the arrogant self-promotion that accompanies such quibbling (i.e., the self-assurance that one knows more than the other). Indeed, as one engages in this friendly dialogue (i.e., a philosophical dialogue) with the other, one comes to see one’s self—its pretensions, prides, and biases—as the principle roadblock keeping one from reaching wisdom. So it is that only through disdain of the self in the face of love of the other can the love of wisdom—philosophy—be discovered. Disdain of the self, and the erasure or withdrawal of self that accompanies it, is the ground upon which philosophical dialogue is based.

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Such disdain of the self is thus seen to entail an awareness that one does not know what one thought one knew, that one is therefore ignorant. One can better understand this situation by turning to Plato’s Apology, the most widely read of Plato’s texts. In the Apology, Socrates tells a μῦθος regarding a certain impetuous friend of his who went to the priestess at Delphi to inquire about whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. Upon learning of the oracle’s reply that “no one is wiser” than Socrates, Socrates himself became nonplussed and bemused: for he was very conscious of the fact that he was “not wise either much or little” and could therefore hardly be considered the very wisest (Apology, 21b). It was from out of this impoverished state of ignorance and confusion that the ever-resourceful Socrates set out on the following path: I went to one of those who had a reputation for wisdom, thinking that there, if anywhere, I should prove the utterance wrong and should show the oracle “This man is wiser than I, but you said I was wisest.” So, when I examined this man … I had this kind of experience, men of Athens, conversing [διαλεγόμενος] with him: this man seemed to me to seem to be wise to many other people and especially to himself, but not to be so; and then I tried to show him that he thought he was wise, but was not. As a result, I became hateful to him and to many of those present; and so, as I went away, I thought to myself, “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, who do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know.” (Apology, 21b–d; trans. modified)

It is thus from out of a posture of ignorance—or, rather, of knowing that he is ignorant—that Socrates embarks into the world of Athens to dialogue with others. Through these dialogues, Socrates accomplishes a twofold task. On the one hand, he demonstrates to the reputedly wise that they are in fact ignorant of that about which they feign (or genuinely believe) to have knowledge. On the other hand, precisely through this demonstration, Socrates also reaffirms his own ignorance: for the conclusions of his dialogues are that neither Socrates nor his interlocutors know anything worthwhile. The only wisdom that Socrates obtains through his dialogues is that neither he himself nor those with whom he dialogues have any wisdom: that they are all, with respect to wisdom, “worth little or nothing” (Apology, 23b). The apparent conclusion of philosophical dialogue thus seems to be identical with its beginning: one begins from out of a position of ignorance, enters into a dialogue with another, only to end up in a position of ignorance. However, it is crucial to note that the second position of ignorance is not the

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same as the first. What one reaches through the act of dialogue is a kind of clarified ignorance, a better awareness of one’s ignorance, and a greater knowledge of what does not constitute the knowledge being sought. Above all, one becomes aware of the necessity of continuing dialogue, if indeed one wishes ever to alight upon the truth. Thus, the act of philosophical dialogue has the effect of bringing one to a place of ignorance from which one earnestly desires to depart; and the only way to depart from that ignorance is through philosophical dialogue. The path of philosophical dialogue thus appears to be endless. It is for this reason that so many of Plato’s dialogues end just as they begin: with Socrates admitting that he lacks knowledge about the matter at hand, while simultaneously committing himself to an inquiry into it.17 It is also why Socrates, even after he has been brought to trial for this very practice on charges of corrupting the young, vows to continue dialoguing with everyone he can, pointing out their ignorance and exhorting them to practise philosophy (Apology, 29d–e). Only because Socrates remains embedded within a posture of ignorance is he able to go out and dialogue with people in pursuit of the truth. Were Socrates ever to find knowledge—were he ever to answer definitively the questions that he asks—the need, desire, and possibility of philosophical dialogue—and with it philosophy itself—would cease. Insofar as philosophical dialogue originates from out of ignorance, its shares its birth with the act of thinking itself. One sees this expressed in Plato’s Theaetetus, where Socrates says the following: [Thinking] is a λόγος which the soul has with itself about the objects under its consideration. Of course, I’m only telling you my idea in all ignorance; but this is the kind of picture I have of it. It seems to me that the soul when it thinks is simply carrying on a dialogue [διαλέγεσθαι] in which it asks itself questions and answers them itself, affirms and denies. (Theaetetus, 189e–190a; trans. modified)

Thinking is here said to be nothing other than a λόγος the soul has with itself, an internal dialogue in which the soul asks itself questions and proposes answers, affirming and denying those answers as is suitable. Given all that has been said above, such dialogical thinking is only possible if the person who is engaging in it is doing so from out of a posture of ignorance and self-disdain. One begins thinking by first acknowledging that there is a thing, a variable, that one does not know. From out of this ignorance one (silently) asks oneself a question, a question that one then considers. To consider a question is to entertain possible answers and follow them where they lead: it is, in other

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words, to let the λόγος unfold. If one ever alights upon an answer, one does so only to the extent that one is able to place one’s own opinions in abeyance and let the matter itself, the λόγος, unfold. Thinking is an act whereby one withdraws from one’s own opinions in favour of following the λόγος where it leads; and this act proceeds in the manner of philosophical dialogue. Thus, insofar as thinking itself is dialogical, philosophical dialogue is that action that best enacts—now with the help of another—the very act of thinking itself. * * * In the preceding paragraphs, we posed a question—namely, “what is philosophical dialogue?”—to the philosophical dialogues of Plato. Through letting the texts themselves speak to this issue, it was discovered that philosophical dialogue is that manner of conversing by which one abandons one’s own position along with another for the sake of letting a λόγος unfold, and in such a way that it can be held together in common by the speakers. In short, philosophical dialogue is that way of conversing whereby the participants strive to say not the same as one another, but rather the same as the matter itself: it is that way of conversing in which the speakers strive to withdraw from saying anything themselves precisely for the sake of letting the truth of the matter speak for itself. Furthermore, it was seen above that this process of dialogue is endless, insofar as ignorance permeates the end of philosophical dialogue no less than the beginning. Philosophical dialogue is thus that form of conversation in which the participants, embedded firmly within a place of ignorance, continually efface themselves so as to allow the truth to emerge from the unfolding of the conversation itself. In his Country Path Conversations—one of the dialogues that he admittedly wrote in imitation and celebration of Plato’s own—Martin Heidegger has the character The Guide suggest the following: “perhaps one could doubt whether a conversation [Gespräch] is still a conversation at all if it wills something” (Heidegger 2010b, 36). Rather, The Guide continues, a genuine conversation only occurs if those involved “are prepared for something to befall them in the conversation which transforms their own essence” (ibid., 37). As we have seen from the above considerations, such preparations take place through an erasure of the self-made out of love for the other, a gesture that makes possible a love of wisdom and thus a relation with the truth.

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The genre of philosophical dialogue, for its part, seems to be that genre of philosophical writing that mimics or represents the act of philosophical dialogue and therefore the act of thinking itself. The Platonic dialogues, as the highest expression of that genre, bring that act to its fullest culmination: they allow, to the upmost extent, the λόγος to unfold. And yet, it is not at all clear that they do so in the mode of mimicry or representation. As suggested in the beginning of this chapter, if one wishes to know about the nature of philosophical dialogue, one should look first of all to the Platonic texts. And yet, it is not the case that Plato’s texts recorded or reproduce conversations that actually occurred: rather, they poetically present the fictionalized interactions of various characters, some of whom likely did not even exist, but all of whom are seen through the poetic lens of Plato.18 The dialogues are thus not representations of philosophical dialogue, but rather original presentations of it: they present, as though for the first time, philosophical dialogues in enactment. The Platonic dialogues are the most archaic, and the very finest, example of philosophical dialogue available to us, and it is from them that we first learn of the nature of philosophical dialogue and thus of thinking itself. Every philosophical dialogue in which we engage is, at best, a pale imitation of what was brought to perfection in the works of Plato. Insofar as the texts present something new that did not exist or occur before, they could be called poetic, so long as one kept in mind the fundamental meaning of the Greek word ποίησις from which the English word poetry is derived.19 As works of ποίησις, Plato’s dialogues create something, something that would not exist were it not for that act of creation. What do Plato’s dialogues create? They create worlds.20 Individual lives are created by the text, along with personalities, perspectives, concerns, emotions, and ideas that belong to those lives. Furthermore, situations and settings are created in which multiple lives interact with each other, sometimes with friendliness and sometimes with enmity.21 Each Platonic text creates a world in which the lives of various characters play out alongside one another, and it is this act of creation that exemplifies the poetic aspect to Plato’s texts: each text is a world in which human beings wander about the stage of existence. As readers, we come to occupy the world that Plato created and in such a way that we find ourselves engaged with the concerns and ideas of the characters. Because this world is full of so many different voices, ideas, and perspectives, it is never immediately clear what the meaning of the text “as a whole” is, or whether there even is such a meaning. Whether Plato “believed” the ideas that the characters put forth—even if that character is Socrates—is not

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something that can be determined from reading the texts. Rather, the dialogues, as dialogues, put various ideas into play, without settling for the reader which of those ideas stands as the final word regarding the matter at hand. The effect is that a reader is never left with any less than a polyphony of ideas with which to dialogue: the very form of dialogical writing provokes a dialogical reception on the part of the reader. The result of this polyphony is that one must continually reengage the text in an effort to discern its meaning: one must continue to interrogate the text in an effort to discern its sense. John Sallis touches upon this point in his seminal work on Plato, Being and Logos, casting the issue there in terms of play: “It is in play that one begins to philosophize, and, at least to the extent that it is this beginning which the dialogues aim to provoke, their playfulness is appropriate and calls for a responsive play on the part of one who seeks to interpret them” (Sallis 1975, 21). In other words, owing to the inherent playfulness of the Platonic dialogues, one is bound by necessity to play with them—that is, to interpret them. To generalize this a bit, one could say that philosophical dialogue is that form of writing that best provokes and promotes the act of philosophical dialogue on the part of the reader: to read a philosophical dialogue is to embark upon a philosophical dialogue.22 Given all that was elucidated above, it follows from this that the philosophical dialogue is that form of writing that best brings the reader to a position of ignorance: for as one dialogues with the dialogues, one becomes aware of the fact that one is not as certain about the matter as one thought; one realizes that, very much like the characters themselves, one is ignorant of the matter at hand. It is precisely from out of that ignorance that one is inclined to continue to dialogue with the dialogues, with the hope that through such dialogue the truth will be obtained or at least approached.23 However, despite this hope, such truth is rarely given within a Platonic dialogue in the form of an answer. Rather, the form of the Platonic dialogues, and of all dialogues that approximate them, remains stubbornly interrogative. In the end, it is by posing questions, and not by resolving them, that philosophical dialogues best provoke their readers into thinking for themselves, where thinking is nothing other than the soul’s dialogue with itself, a dialogue that takes place as the posing of questions. Philosophical dialogue is thus that form of writing that best brings about the act of thinking itself; and thinking, for its part, is nothing other than the soul’s posing of questions to the matter at hand. The dialogues of Plato, as the highest expression of that form, are those texts that best provoke the reader into posing and pursuing philosophical questions. Questions, perhaps, such as “what is philosophical dialogue”?

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Notes 1. See Sallis (1975, 7): “In the dialogues philosophical activity is concretely presented, it is presented in an individual mode.” 2. This would become Feldweg-Gespräche (GA 77), translated by Brett W. Davis as Country Path Conversations. 3. There are many archaic examples of philosophical dialogue that antedate Plato’s works. For a partial list, see Hösle (2012, 71–73). 4. See Hösle (2012, xviii): “Whitehead’s famous remark that Western philosophy ‘consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’ strikes many people as an exaggeration; but there is no doubt that it is true of the philosophical dialogue. No one who had access to Plato’s works could have escaped his influence; even in the dark centuries his indirect influence can be seen.” 5. Indeed, Plato is the first author on record to use the noun διάλογος. See Jazdewska (2014, 19). 6. See Kahn (1996, 41): “The anonymity of the dialogue form, together with Plato’s problematic irony in the presentation of Socrates, makes it impossible for us to see through these dramatic works in such a way as to read the mind of their author.” 7. At the time of Plato, the word λόγος carried many different (though related) significations, including “speech,” “discourse,” “word,” “statement,” “story,” “account,” and, arguably, “argument.” I leave it largely untranslated throughout this chapter in order to avoid hastily deciding in favour of one of these significations to the exclusion of the others. On the risks involved in such hasty decisions, see Sallis (1975, 14–15). 8. The word “dialogue” is often mistakenly believed to refer specifically to a conversation between two people, an argument erroneously based upon the conflating of the Greek δία (meaning “through” or “across”) with the Greek δι (meaning “two”). However, the Greek word δiάλογος does imply a conversation, that is, a speaking involving at least two. (On the origin and history of this term in antiquity, see Jazdewska 2014, 17–36.) In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates at one point holds a dialogue with himself. (This passage is mentioned in greater detail below.) In light of this, one might say that a dialogue entails a conversation between at least two perspectives, even if it does not literally involve two people. 9. For a much more comprehensive treatment of this text along these lines, please see Ewegen (2013). 10. On this point, Hans-Georg Gadamer is quite lucid: “Reaching an understanding in conversation presupposes that both partners are ready for it and are trying to recognize the full value of what is alien and opposed to them. If this happens mutually … it is finally possible to achieve … a common diction and a common dictum” (Gadamer 1975, 387).

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11. Both meanings draw upon the original sense of the Greek διάλογος and διαλἐγεσθαι. 12. See Apology, 21b–e, et al. 13. See Gorgias, 454. See also Gadamer (1975, 383). See also Sallis (1975, 3). 14. See Gadamer (1975, 367–68). 15. See Protagoras, 337a ff. 16. See Gorgias, 454b. 17. See, for example, Euthyphro, 15c–d; Protagoras, 361c–d; Cratylus, 440a–d; Theaetetus, 209b–d. 18. Even Plato’s Apology, which is ostensibly a record of Socrates’s trial, is highly poetized. 19. Ποίησις derives from ποιέω, which principally means make, create, or produce. 20. On this, see Sallis (1975, 14–18). 21. For a similar point, see Hösle (2012): “By essence, a philosophical dialogue necessarily includes a philosophical question, argumentative efforts to answer it, their linguistic articulation, and a plurality of participants in the conversation. Accordingly, the philosophical dialogue has the task of clarifying the relation between certain kinds of people, certain philosophical views, and certain forms of debate, between certain arguments and the emotional reactions to them, between ways of thinking and ways of life, and also ideally between thoughts and language” (48–49). 22. See Sallis (1975, 22). 23. As Jill Gordon puts it, Plato’s dialogues are, in this way, “an occasion for selfexamination” (Gordon 1999, 9).

Bibliography Ewegen, Shane. 2013. Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gadamer, Hans Georg. 1975. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York, NY: Continuum Publishing. Gordon, Jill. 1999. Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato’s Dialogues. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2010a. Country Path Conversations. Translated by Bret W. Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010b. Letters to His Wife. Edited by Getrud Heidegger and translated by R.D.V. Glasow. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hösle, Vittorio. 2012. The Philosophical Dialogue: A Poetics and Hermeneutics. Translated by Steven Randall. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Jazdewska, Katarzyna. 2014. From Dialogos to Dialogue: The Use of the Term from Plato to the Second Century CE. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 54: 17–36.

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Kahn, Charles. 1996. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 1914. Apology. Translated by H.N.  Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1921. Theaetetus. Translated by H.N.  Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1925. Gorgias. Translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1926. Cratylus. Translated by H.N. Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2001. Symposium. Translated by Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sallis, John. 1975. Being and Logos. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

3 ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’ Michelle Boulous Walker

Essay (noun): A trial, a test; an experiment. Assay. A trial specimen, a sample; an example; a rehearsal. An attempt, an endeavour. A short prose composition on any subject. A first tentative attempt at learning, composition, etc.; a first draft. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles 2007, 864)

Discussion of the relations between philosophy and literature inevitably hits up against the question of boundaries. Perhaps no more so than in the case of the essay. While some position the essay as an autonomous form between philosophy and literature, others see it more as a bridge linking the two—a bridge implicated on both sides of the abyss. Indeed, even as an autonomous form, the essay is more often than not understood to have a privileged access to, or relation with, both philosophy and literature. While we can chart a history of the essay in the West, where this privileged access to both is the case, we can identify moments where the essay colonizes philosophy, in order to become its privileged form. Before going on to explore the essay as this privileged form of philosophy, let me suggest that the question of whether the essay is literature or philosophy, or both literature and philosophy, is arguably a question that the essay itself resists. To the extent that the essay resists firm boundaries and strict categories—that it challenges us to rethink these—the essay carries out the work of art. Given this, a philosophical exploration of the

M. Boulous Walker (*) The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_3

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essay may place us in a better position to return to and reconsider its place within the complex relations between philosophy and literature.1

Historical Notes In his Plato and Platonism (1983), Walter Pater identifies three distinct literary styles in philosophical writing: poetry, treatise, and essay. He thinks of these as ‘necessities of literary form’ corresponding to three different ways we relate to questions of truth. For Pater, while poetry captures ‘enthusiastic intuitions’, and the treatise is dominated by the ‘ambitious array of premise and conclusion’, the essay proceeds by a sceptical suspension of judgement (Pater 2012, 30). It is common to situate this sceptical form of the essay with the emergence of the Renaissance in sixteenth-century Europe and with the groundbreaking publication of the Essais by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays remain an influential body of work devoted to experiment and an unmethodical method,2 one that resists the pretensions of systematic thought. He is the first to use the term (essai), which in French approximates to trial or attempt.3 The essay is from the beginning provisional, open-ended.4 Montaigne is fond of representing his essays as meandering thoughts that resist the clear and delineated path of system: ‘My style and my mind alike go roaming’ (Montaigne 2003, 925 ‘Of Vanity’ Book III, chap. 9). Donald Frame, one of Montaigne’s most notable English translators, captures this peripatetic form in the following description: ‘vivid bold images; the epigrammatic word play; the meandering, associative order, disdainful of logical connectives; the obscenity, which is a studied protest against man’s rejection of the body’ (Frame in Chadbourne 1997, 570). Max Bense, himself an important figure in the history of the essay, situates Montaigne’s achievement as the early moments of a protesting critical spirit that stretches from the 1500s to Gide, Valery, and Camus (Bense 2012, 73). This spirit refuses an absolute knowledge, and welcomes, as Nancy Mairs suggests, relation over strict opposition, plurality over dichotomy, and embodiment over a disembodied intellectualism.5 It is worth noting, too, that this protesting critical spirit births not only the essay but significantly the very idea of discovery. Both emerge at a time when a ‘new’ philosophy questions traditional and received opinion. This philosophy, as Michael L.  Hall suggests, introduces a ‘spontaneous, tentative, open-ended, and even unfinished’ thought (Hall 1989, 79). In response to advances in the Renaissance sciences of astronomy and geography, the very ‘idea’ of discovery is embedded in the emerging essayistic form. According to Hall:

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… the essays of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon as well as later examples by John Donne and Sir Thomas Browne—different as they are in their formal qualities—exhibit not only similar rhetorical strategies but also a common attitude, a spirit of exploration… in certain important respects the essay emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a product of the Renaissance ‘idea’ of discovery and in response to it. (Hall 1989, 73)6

These ideas of discovery and exploration sit well with the upheavals of Montaigne’s essayistic writing and thought, with his uncertainty and his tentative style. ‘[W]ithout any system’, he writes, ‘[I] present my ideas in a general way, and tentatively’ (Montaigne, 824 cited in Klaus 2012, xvi). Free from the strictures of premises and conclusions, the essays wander or ramble in the most exploratory of ways, and in so doing, they set the tone for the form of the essay to follow. What follows, according to Carl Klaus, is a series of continuities and discontinuities that find the nineteenth-century essayists endorsing an ‘impressionistic rather than definitive thought’ (Klaus 2012, xvii), one in which style has arguably become substance (Hardison 1989, 25). In the twentieth century, freedom from form is the driving force of the essay and this results in opposing the essay to the scholarly article. This attack on what Klaus refers to as the ‘certitude of the article’ opposes the organic essay to the technological values and mechanistic forms of the article: Essayists were aroused by a distrust of specialized studies, heavily reliant on factual information that they regarded as symptomatic of an ill-placed confidence in the reliability of systematized and impersonal approaches to knowledge. (Klaus 2012, xx)

Systematized and impersonal approaches to knowledge herald the increasingly instrumentalized nature of Western culture. Since the positivist turn in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the essay has faced the growing threat of more and more specialized forms of knowledge and knowledge production.7 Evidence for this is seen in the development of ever more rigid distinctions between the essay and systematic thought, distinctions that work to marginalize the essay from philosophy proper. R. Lane Kauffmann depicts this process in terms of choices drawn between ‘ideology and science; between doxa, mere opinion, and epsitémé, scientific knowledge’ (Kauffmann 1989, 227). Along with the marginalization of the essay comes the ‘alienation of thought from lived experience’ which, as Kauffmann notes, ‘Montaigne protested in his essays’ (227). It is in this climate that the essay retrieves its legacy as a protesting critical spirit in order to resist the hierarchical imperialism

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of the positivist scientific world view. The essay, in its tentative and undisciplined manner, resists the systematic pretensions of totalizing modes of thought (232). Openness and open-endedness refuse the closure of predetermined thought. For Kauffmann, the essay undertakes the pressing task of a ‘critical discussion of culture in the public sphere’ (234). In the process, philosophy regains its ethical vocation which, at this time, manifests as a sustained refusal of instrumental reason: As long as instrumental reason reigns, and as long as its injunctions prevail in society, the essay’s aim will be to redress the imbalance through the critical interpretation of culture, as culture both registers and resists those injunctions. (Kauffmann 1989, 237)8

By the twentieth century, the oppositional nature of the essay, a theme to which we will return, refuses the closed and instrumental cultural forms it finds itself within. In this way, the essay moves from its early path-breaking beginnings in personal reflection (Montaigne) to something closer to cultural critique, (although there are connections here as well). Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno each write on the essay, forming collectively something we might refer to as a ‘theory’ of the essay.9 But can the essay be theorized?

Can There Be a ‘Theory’ of the Essay? If the essay is famously the form that resists form, can there be a theory of the essay? Can we separate the practice of the essay from a theory attempting to account for it? Can we define the essay? If the nature of the essay is to resist definitions, its own primarily, then what is there to say? “An essay can… never be a theory in itself, it can only be the beginnings, the birth of a theory…” (Müller 1997, 83). In a helpful manner, Réda Bensmaïa contends that the essay is not a genre but rather: ‘a moment of writing before the genre’, before form takes place (Bensmaïa 1987, 92; Chesterton’s ‘leap in the dark’, perhaps (Chesterton 2012, 57)). As trial, attempt, rehearsal, the essay moves tentatively towards form and is, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests, the ‘genre of spiritual provocation’ (DuPlessis 1996, 23). For DuPlessis, it is not that we cannot define the essay, but more that the ‘nature of the essay asks one to resist categories, starting with itself ’ (23). If we are to define the essay, even if only tentatively and provisionally, then DuPlessis would have us drawn towards its ‘attentiveness to materiality, to the material world, including the matter of

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language’ (24). We might add to this that the essay is attentiveness to the materiality of thought, or to thought thinking itself—to Martin Heidegger’s andenkende Denken (Harison in 1989, 26). In the case of the essay, thought explores, experiments, extends: … the genuine essay has certain persistent core features that have helped distinguish it over centuries, from its late sixteenth-century inception to its more recent post-modern examples. The essay has always been experimental, experiential, exploratory, and open-ended. It is hardly ever categorical, dogmatic, systematic, or conclusive. (Atwan 2012, 201)

While a strict theory of the essay may be problematic, there are those who ascribe to a poetics of the essay. Klaus looks at these historically and suggests three separate yet interconnected ways of thinking through what makes the essay the form that it is. He identifies the following: (1) The essay is contrasted with conventional and systematized writing, including rhetorical, scholarly, and journalistic discourses. (2) The essay’s openness or looseness (even ‘naturalness’) is opposed to the methodical structure of conventional discourses. And finally, (3) the essay is motivated by exploration, trial, and reflection rather than by persuasion or conviction (Klaus 2012, xv–xvi). With this in mind, let us now chart a poetics of the essay in the work of the Germanic writers we have mentioned above. Let us turn to Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno, in order to explore the ‘formless’ form that the essay conceals. In a piece entitled ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’ in Soul and Form (1910), Lukács situates the essay as an autonomous art form mediating philosophy and literature. Here the essay builds bridges between the two, ensuring new and alternative pathways for thought and writing. Lukács stresses the essay’s ambiguous form, borrowing as it does from both art and science. He writes: ‘Science affects us by its contents, art by its forms: science offers us facts and relations between facts, but art offers us souls and destinies’ (Lukács 1974, 3). The space between the two is, for Lukács, the space of the essay. While the essay is neither art nor science it is, significantly, closer to art in that its form is the form of questioning—a questioning that seeks no solutions or finalities. In the essay: ‘[t]he question is posed immediately: what is life, what is man, what is destiny? But posed as a question only: for the answer, here, does not supply a “solution” like one of the answers of science or, at purer heights, those of philosophy’ (Lukács 1974, 7). For Lukács, the essay is thus the form of questioning and of problematization, a protean and formless kind of form that resists a final verdict. In his account of Lukács’s contribution to what we are calling here a poetics of the essay, Arpad Kadarkay confirms that,

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for Lukács, the questions posed by the essay are not ones to be solved—that the posing of questions is the work of art the essay achieves. This fits with Lukács’s early desire to distance the essay—as art form—from the finality of a certain kind of systematic philosophy: ‘[Contra Hegel] Lukács elevates the essay to an art form, designed to capture the absolute or permanent in the transitory, fugitive, and contingent, and distinguish it from the icy final perfection of philosophy’ (Kardarkay 1997, 499, emphasis added). As art form, the essay undoes finality in order to perform the fragmented experience of thought itself.10 In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin champions digression and the fragment—and the special roles these play in the essay—as counters to a systematic philosophy (Benjamin 1977, 27). Benjamin goes further, and in a different direction to Lukács, ensuring a central role for the fragmentary in essayistic practice. As Kauffmann observes: ‘Whereas the pre-Marxist Lukács had assigned only provisional value to the essay’s fragmentariness, Benjamin’s prose experiments made fragmentation the heart of his method’ (Kauffmann 1989, 229). In his many essays, and particularly those gathered together in One-Way Street (Benjamin 1997), Benjamin challenges the limits of traditional modes of thought and writing. The essay serves, in this context, as an alternative mode of critical work, one that incorporates both collage and montage within its very form of representation. Adorno’s work ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958) is influenced in complex ways by both Lukács’s and Benjamin’s thinking (Adorno 2000b). There are four references to Soul and Form throughout his essay and countless influences from Benjamin’s work more broadly.11 Moreover, Klaus claims that Adorno’s critical equation of the neo-positivists with Scholasticism connects his work with Montaigne’s experimental project.12 In this respect, Adorno’s essay echoes ‘the ultimate yearning of essayists to be free from any systematized form of thinking or writing’ (Klaus 2012, xxi). In effect, this positions the essay as ‘a place of intellectual refuge’ (xxi), though one largely neglected by the mainstream of Western philosophical discourse. For Adorno, this neglect is the consequence of the dominance of a certain scientific methodology, one that culminates in the progressive rationalization of the modern world. Instrumental reason comes from the reduction of thought to system and measurement, where reality is quantifiable and calculable. In this case, culture loses its ability to reason and to think. ‘Thought’ is reduced to a tool for identifying facts and systematizing what is known—or measured. When philosophical thought succumbs to instrumental reason, it literally loses its ability to think. It is the role of the essay, then, to resist this generalized reduction of culture. In this context, the essay is a critical force, a space for the critique of ideology.

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In ‘The Essay as Form’ Adorno calls for an alternative philosophy, one able to counter the dulling effects of instrumental reason. He insists that the essay resists all structures that reduce and limit critical thought. The essay is, paradoxically, a form that resists form—an open and open-ended approach to thinking and writing. With Lukács, he places questioning at the heart of the essay, and with Benjamin, he argues that the essay explores the fragmentary and partial, concerning itself with the unfinished and the incomplete. The essay ‘does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. It revolts above all against the doctrine—deeply rooted since Plato—that the changing and the ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy’ (Adorno 2000b, 98). In this embrace of the fragmentary and the inconclusive, the essay detours from systematic philosophical paths in order to meander or ramble in its own time and place, evidence that ‘thought does not advance in a single direction’ (101). The essay ‘takes the anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure’ (100) and resists the rule-bound tradition that Adorno equates with Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637).13 It challenges the structure, hierarchy, and ­general organization of systematic philosophy with its own open weave.14 This openness connects with Adorno’s notion of the configuration, the internal cross-connections that crystallize in thought: ‘In the essay discreetly separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaffolding, no edifice. Through their own movement the elements crystallize into a configuration’ (Adorno 2000b, 102). Elements are coordinated rather than subordinated to a conceptual whole (109). For Adorno, the essay’s time is both uncertain and unfashionable and what he means by this is that the essay embodies a kind of heresy that refuses the limitation of thought. In a culture dominated by instrumental relations, the essay is both out of time and out of place, and it is precisely this that makes it (paradoxically) so timely: The relevance of the essay is that of anachronism. The hour is more favourable to it than ever. It is being crushed between an organized science, on one side, in which everyone presumes to control everyone and everything else… and on the other side, by a philosophy that makes do with empty and abstract residues left aside by the scientific apparatus… The essay, however, has to do with that which is blind in its objects… Therefore the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible. (Adorno 2000b, 110)

Adorno’s work on the essay provides us with an alternative philosophy, one that ushers in a new (or revitalized) relation with thought. Here we see the

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essay transform from one possible form of philosophy to what can arguably be seen as a privileged form for philosophy. Indeed, already in 1931, Adorno had argued for the essay as ‘the appropriate form for contemporary philosophy’ (Kauffmann 1989, 229).

The ‘Form’ of the Essay Our very brief discussion of the work of Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno suggests the basics for a poetics of the essay.15 This work, with complex ties back to Montaigne’s exploratory essays, provides us with some key terms and understandings. Amongst these, the following emerge as helpful in any contemporary philosophical appreciation of the essay and its various forms. Ambivalence, experiment, complication, and opposition go some way towards gathering the complex form that distinguishes the essay in our time.16 To begin with, the essay occupies a marginal or ambivalent relation with the scholarly institution. It sits at times uncomfortably with the scientific report, scholarly treatise, or article. Not quite science, not quite philosophy, not quite art, the essay arguably develops its strength, and certainly its autonomy, from its marginal status. By resisting system and definition, the essay ensures both its difference and distance from the dominance of the scholarly article, with its often frustrating restrictions and limitations. Although ambivalent in its relation with the institution, the essay can, as Graham Good suggests, ‘flourish around the margins of academic disciplines or at their origins’ (Good 1997, xx). When it does flourish, the essay provides an important and often strategic base for oppositional cultural practices. This ambivalent and marginal relation from the scholarly often provides the essay with a general and considerably broader readership. ‘The essay typically eschews specialized jargon and is addressed to the “general reader”… It avoids the application of pre-established methodology to particular cases, but rather works from the particular toward the general…’ (Good 1997, xx). The essay remains tentative and sceptical and resists what we earlier referred to as the certitude of the article. By rambling or meandering along the margins of the institution, the essay relieves itself of the obligations of the factual and the systematic in knowledge narrowly conceived (Klaus 2012, xix). The experimental nature of the essay is arguably its most notable form. As its etymology suggests, the essay is first and foremost an attempt, a trial, an experiment. Max Bense, writing in 1947, captures this in his discussion of the essay as distinct from the treatise: ‘the essay is an experimental method: it is about writing experimentally, and one needs to write about it in the same sense that one speaks of experimental physics, which distinguishes itself from

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theoretical physics rather cleanly’ (Bense 2012, 71). For Bense, theoretical physics remains law-bound and determined by mathematical necessity. It demonstrates ‘analytically, axiomatically, and deductively’ (71), while both experimental physics and the essay proceed experimentally without an attempt at knowing. Experiment goes hand in hand with criticism and this links the great French sceptics (such as Montaigne) with protest and a critical orientation: ‘the essay originates from the critical essence of our intellect, whose desire for experimentation is simply a necessity of its manner of being, its method’ (74). Given this experimental nature of the essay, there cannot be a theory of the essay, only the sense of a theory to come (Müller 1997, 83). Bense’s insistence on the experimental nature of the essay and its critical orientation accompany his strong commitment to critical thought more generally. In Sound in the Street: Descartes and the consequences II (Bense 1960), he calls for a new type of thinker to embody this critical mode: ‘a new type of thinker needs to be developed: a thinker who exhausts the rich possibilities of human intelligence not only as researcher or scholar, but at the same time as critic and as writer’ (Bense in Müller 1997, 83).17 Along with experiment comes many of the characteristics we associate with the essay.18 The essay embodies experimental form: it may be provisional, tentative, exploratory, open-ended, reflective, meandering, rambling, spontaneous, unpredictable, unsystematic, unmethodical,19 fragmentary, and even poetic.20 Such experimental forms are evident in the work we have already seen in Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno primarily because each of these writers embraces a proximate relation with what we can loosely refer to as art. Art infiltrates the prose of the essay with experiments in form. Art opens a space of reflection, and this reflection provides a necessary counter or antidote to the excesses of instrumental thought.21 In this following passage, Bense charts the play of poetic and prose elements that weave together to form the characteristically experimental quality of the essay: …one can see that there is no perfect border to poetry here. These are, so to speak, the elementary sentences of an essay, which belong to prose and poetry alike. They are fragments of a ‘perfected speech of sense,’ that is, fragments of a linguistic body which touches us like part of nature, and they are fragments of a bluntly expressed thought, that is, fragments of a completed deduction, which touch us like a part of a Platonic idea. One must take it upon himself to read in both languages if one wants to partake in the full satisfaction of an essay…. (Bense 2012, 72)

Experiments in form account for the sometimes meandering or even rambling quality of the essay which is often positively equated with a kind of artful or

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aimless wandering. Guillermo Díaz-Plaja describes the essayist as an ‘arbitrary wanderer’ (Díaz-Plaja 2012, 100), while, for Fernand Ouellette, the essayist is a ‘rambling and playful spirit’ preferring to ‘sally forth’ and ‘accept wandering absolutely’ (Ouellette 2012, 97). Michael Hamburger insists that the spirit of the essay is a walk, though one that should be distinguished from the walking of routine and compulsion: ‘The spirit of essay-writing walks on irresistibly… and is glimpsed now here, now there, in novels, stories, poems or articles, from time to time in the very parkland of philosophy, formidably walled and strictly guarded though it may seem, the parkland from which it escaped centuries ago to wander about in the wild meadow. But it is never glimpsed where that wild meadow has been banned from human consciousness even as a memory or possibility, where walls have become absolute and walking itself has become a round of compulsion and routine’ (Hamburger 2012, 93). He adds that only in totalitarian systems (he is writing in 1965) has aimless or purposeless wandering become a crime (92). The implications for the essay and the experimental form it embodies seem clear to us here. Whatever the experimental form—be it fragment, ramble, or poetry—the essay performs its experimental and exploratory method in tension with system and theory. The essay is not art; the essay is the tension between art and less open forms of work. Tension and conflict between art and system are arguably the generative forces motivating the essay, and this brings us to the next of our key terms—complication and its connection with complexity. The tension that motivates the essay manifests the complications of thought and writing, and the essay provides us with the resources to engage with the complexity that issues from these complications. The essay affords us the leisure of time and place to confront complexity without immediately reducing it to something manageable, something contained. Here the essay’s temporal qualities come to the fore; the essay takes its time, it rambles and meanders. The essay returns, time and again, to the same questions in order to rethink their valency. The essay ruminates, wonders, imagines. All the while, the essay resists the instrumental desire to decide, to finalize, to capture, and to determine. The essay is, in effect, never done. The essay’s ambivalent relation with the institution authorizes this uneconomical waste of time. The essay condones. Niklas Luhmann describes the university as an institution that generates complexity. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht borrows Luhmann’s account22 arguing that significant philosophical or critical work is only possible within an institutional context that stages encounters with complexity (Gumbrecht 2004, 128). For this to occur we need time; the university needs to recognize and safeguard the existence of excess time: ‘We need institutions of higher education to produce and to protect excess time against the mostly pressing

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temporalities of the everyday… the academic institution is [or should be] all about such untimeliness’ (Gumbrecht 2003, 87). The essay is, par excellence, the form of untimeliness. The essay safeguards our relation with time, and in so doing, it takes a critical stance in relation both to knowledge and knowledge production. Finally, we come to the essay’s oppositional form. Here we discover a form that encompasses, amongst other things, provocation, meditation, and questioning. By posing itself in opposition, the essay assumes its critical function. Of its many commentators, the oppositional nature of the essay in the West is perhaps most forcefully voiced in the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. In ‘f-Words: An Essay on the Essay’ (1996) DuPlessis claims that the essay provides a uniquely oppositional reading of its cultural context; essays are, she says, ‘acts of writing-as-reading’ (DuPlessis 1996, 17). These oppositional readings are motivated—in the latter half of the twentieth century—by the social and cultural context of ‘1968’, and much that went before. In saying this, DuPlessis identifies the New Left, women’s and African civil rights, and peace and anti-nuclear war protests as the ground of an important essayistic culture of resistance. The oppositional politics that underpin these forays into essayism include: a ‘desire to scrutinize the ideologies and powers at work in one’s own socio-cultural formation’; the work of ‘poets and artists theorizing their poetics and its historical agendas’; and philosophic and psychoanalytic theorizing ‘related to the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Spring’68’ (18). Of the numerous writers and texts that DuPlessis identifies in this culture of the oppositional essay, works by Frantz Fanon (1982) and Edouard Glissant (1989) stand out—both for the force and vitality of their arguments and for the reason that they represent important early texts on ‘“race”, the colonized, and the colonizer’. These writers are, in her words, ‘practitioners of a steely analytical essay of social reading’ (DuPlessis 1996, 18).23 For DuPlessis, the essay promises to lead us into new places, and here she celebrates the articulation of formerly unheard voices, the ‘muttering, semi-­ silenced members of disparaged social groups’: Women, blacks, gays and lesbians, Latinos and Latinas, Asian Americans, and others are claiming voice in an efflorescence of difference… these narratives of repression, assimilation, and marginalization are dramas well suited to the essay. The essay is serviceable for the bricolage of tools and packs, the space or continent to be trekked, giving range to the stamina and passions of both investigation and findings, to the affirmations and their undoings. Given that the essay is all margin, marginalia, and interstitial writing, it rearranges, compounds, enfolds, and erodes the notion of center…. (DuPlessis 1996, 20)

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DuPlessis goes beyond Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno, in her very modern reformulation of the essay—though she remains with them as well. With Adorno she characterizes the essay as the critical mode par excellence, claiming that it ‘ruptures the conventions’ of any writing claiming the ‘scientistic ethos of objectivity’ (26). The essay offers, in its place, an ‘ethos of intense examination’ (27) and of ‘political provocation’ (29), an ethos at one and the same sceptical, alert, and yearning (37). The essay’s oppositional form brings it close to what is perhaps all too often described as ‘the feminine’. Given its qualifications in wandering, fragmentation, distrust of system, excess, and disruption, the essay has been co-opted as a feminized space—at least for some.24 DuPlessis notes this and responds in a characteristically ambivalent manner. On the one hand, this seems an important move forward, in that it represents ‘a major alteration in thought’. While the feminine ‘is a difficult and untrustworthy word’, she writes, it nonetheless ‘makes an exciting gesture… Feminine by virtue of a certain wayward turning of practice’ (33). On the other hand, this privileging of the feminine as disruptive of orthodoxy risks playing into long-held stereotypes unless it is accompanied by a critical political project. Such stereotypes ground Thoreau’s observation that (as DuPlessis reports) ‘Extravagance… wandering around, eccentricity, excess, overdoing it in the strangest ways—why it’s a description at one and the same time of The Essay and The Female of the Species’ (34). The critical political project that shifts the feminized space of the essay to an oppositional mode is, of course, a feminist agenda.25 Not feminine but feminist. The essay as (at times) a feminist space makes more likely a feminist reception, insisting, as this does ‘on the critical legibility of gender’ (34).26

The Essay as the Privileged Form of Philosophy Celebrations of the essay are often, though not always, accompanied by farewells to conventional and more formalized philosophical forms. Such a farewell is evident in Adorno’s work. In ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958) and the much earlier ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ (1931),27 Adorno turns away from systematic philosophy, claiming that interpretation, riddle-solving, and the essay serve the work of critical thought more faithfully. The essay is, above all, a critical form—even perhaps the critical form. In this sense, we witness the elevation of the essay—even if only provisionally—to the privileged form of philosophy. Here the question of the relations between philosophy and literature returns. Literature, or more generally art, offers philosophy the form of its own transformation—not as art, but rather in tension with art. This

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anachronistic form undoes the pretensions of a philosophy reduced simply to ‘science’. If philosophy’s proper role is now (as it has been at times in the past) a critical engagement with culture in the public domain, then the essay provides philosophy with a privileged form for this engagement.28

Notes 1. Kauffmann suggests that question of whether the essay is literature or philosophy takes us back to Plato’s ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. In the contemporary context, the question breeds the following further questions: what are the philosophical claims of the essay; what is the methodological status of the essay; is there a need to choose between the literary and philosophical natures of the essay—and what are the implications of doing so; what are the roles or functions of the essay in the contemporary humanities? (Kauffmann 1989, 222). 2. Jean Starobinski famously writes: ‘the form “essayed” by Montaigne approximates as fully as possible the absence of form’ (Starobinski in Chadbourne 1997, 570). 3. The French assaier suggests to try to do or to test. O.B. Hardison notes that in German the two words approximating essay are Abhandlung, a ‘dealing with’ something, and Aufsatz, a ‘setting forth’. He notes that Aufsatz has ‘an altogether lighter touch’ than the more ponderous Abhandlung (Hardison 1989, 12). 4. While Montaigne’s essays inaugurate a new form of philosophical writing, there are classical influences that he acknowledges; Plutarch’s Moralia is prime amongst these. Chadbourne suggests that Horace, Seneca, and Plato should be included and notes that Cicero’s boring definitions and logical arguments act as an ‘anti-model’ or ‘anti-essay’ for Montaigne (Chadbourne 1997, 569). Despite these influences, Hardison claims that the essay is decidedly something new: ‘the essay is the opposite of an oration. It is a literary trial balloon, an informal stringing together of ideas to see what happens… it does not seek to do anything, and it has no standard method even for doing nothing’ (Hardison 1989, 14). In their preface to the collection Essayists on the Essay, Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French contend that the precursors to the essay stretch as far as Ancient Greece, Rome, China, and Japan. What distinguishes Montaigne, they think, is that he is the first to reflect on the ‘nature and form’ of the essay (Klaus and Stuckey-French, 2012, xii). 5. Mairs points that while this may, for some, make Montaigne sound something of a proto-feminist, this is certainly not the case. Nonetheless, she claims that Montaigne’s essays provide a space for the inscription of a feminine experience overlooked elsewhere: ‘whether intentionally or not,

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Montaigne invented, or perhaps renewed, a mode open and flexible enough to enable the feminine inscription of human experience as no other does’. The significance of this contribution, she claims, has been ‘largely overlooked’ (Mairs 2012, 143). 6. For a discussion of the differences between the essayistic work of Montaigne and Bacon, see Mairs (2012, 143–45) and Hardison (1989, 17–24). 7. Jean Starobinski notes the positivist rejection of the essay: ‘The University, at the peak of [the] positivist period, having fixed the rules and the canons of serious exhaustive research, rejected the essay and essayism to foreign darkness, at the risk of banishing at the same time the splendour of style and the audacities of thought’ (Starobinski 2012, 112). 8. However, Kauffmann warns against a ‘faddism’ or ‘dogmatism’ of the essay, one that refuses to register the tension between essay and system. He calls for an equipoise that would allow the essay to ‘entertain systems, to glean their energies and insights, without entirely succumbing to them. At the same time, it would enable [the essay] to resist the siren call of anti-systems, with their reverse absolutism and methodological velleities’ (Kauffmann 1989, 237). 9. In his preface to the Encyclopedia of the Essay, Graham Good distinguishes between the French practitioners and the Germanic theorists of the essay. While there is some sense in this distinction historically, I think it ultimately collapses when we consider the self-reflective nature of Montaigne’s comments on essay writing and the brilliant essays produced by the Germanic ‘theorists’ themselves (Good 1997, xix). In the contemporary era, French poststructuralist philosophers have continued the Germanic practice of simultaneously performing and ‘theorizing’ the essay as fragment. 10. In ‘On the Essay’ (1914), Robert Musil explores the essay’s connections with both ethics and aesthetics. For Musil, the essay’s space between knowledge (science) and art (life) allows a form of judgement that refuses finality or verdict. Such a judgement is transformative. He writes: ‘There is no total solution, but only a series of particular ones’ (Musil 1990, 49). This brings him close to Lukács’s work in Soul and Form (Lukács 1974). 11. Kauffmann argues that Adorno ‘developed Benjamin’s ideas into a full-scale theory of the essay’ (Kauffmann 1989, 229). 12. Klaus suggests that Adorno’s equation of the neo-positivists with the Scholastics, and his rejection of both, echoes Montaigne’s condemnation of the ‘system of the scholars’ and his contrast of this approach with his own (Klaus 2012, xx). 13. Adorno sees Descartes’s Discourse on Method (with its four principles) as inaugurating a discourse of absolute certainty through an exhaustive quest that omits nothing (Descartes 1912). 14. Irving Wohlfarth raises the question of whether Adorno’s unmethodical method becomes its own method, thus elevating the essay to a new canonical value (Wohlfarth 1979, 979).

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15. Friedrich Nietzsche’s work should be included in any discussion of the essay. Though his works traverse the myriad styles of aphorism, fragment, exaggeration, and hyperbole, John McCarthy argues for the underlining essayistic quality of Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche eschews straight-line approaches (McCarthy 1997, 603), privileges the fragment and the fragmentary (602), experiments self-consciously with genre styles (603), and questions unceasingly (603). Indeed, the play between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in his Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche 1993) can be thought of in terms of the tension between a disruptive art and an ordering science in the form of the essay. 16. For a discussion of the contemporary relevance of the essay for philosophy (and its political valence), see my work on essayistic reading: Boulous Walker (2013, 2017). 17. Müller claims that Bense embodied this thinker in his own essay writing on those of his contemporaries who were engaged in artistic experiment—Ponge, Benjamin, Stein, Mayröcker, and others (Müller 1997, 83). 18. G.K. Chesterton proclaims the experimental form of all essays: ‘The essay is the only literary form which confesses, in its very name, that the rash act known as writing is really a leap in the dark… an essay, by its very name as well as its very nature, really is a try-on and really is an experiment’ (Chesterton 2012, 57). 19. The character of Ulrich in Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities (1930) is defined in terms of his intentionally unmethodical orientation to life: ‘There was something in Ulrich’s nature that in a haphazard, paralysing, disarming way resisted all logical systematizing… [and this was] connected with his chosen term, “essayism”…’ (Musil 2012, 55). 20. Fernand Ouellette celebrates the poetic nature of the essay, insisting that this distinguishes it from criticism. He is clearly working with a different sense of the critical than our Germanic theorists. He writes: ‘the essay can only be work or, according to Valery’s expression, the state that results from a series of internal transformations. We are not far removed [here] from the situation of poetry… the essay, by definition, can only be flashes of lightning, fragments from a strange time, desperate leaps out of its own form’ (Ouellette 2012, 97). See Ozick (2012, 151) for a similarly poetic defence of the essay. 21. Bense would see this as the tension between reflective ‘inner communications’ and the ‘frightening density of [literally thoughtless] outward communications’ (Bense in Muller 1997, 83). 22. Luhmann (1990). 23. The overtly Western, white, and male nature of the essay is evident in the great majority of research papers on the essay. In his preface to the Encyclopedia of the Essay, Graham Good goes some way towards addressing this fact by acknowledging that the book ‘reflects the geographical and historical concentration of the essay form in the Euro-American world from Montaigne to the present’. Despite this, he claims, ‘The essay has become truly global as the

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conditions for it become more widespread: a sufficient number of suitable periodicals, a regime which tolerates criticism, an informed general readership, and writers who cultivate a distinctive, individual view of culture’ (Good 1997, xxi). In partial recognition of the fact that the essay form exists, nonetheless, in non-Euro-American social contexts, there are entries for Chinua Achebe, Chinese Essay, Cuadernos Americanos, Euclides da Cunha, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Kamo no Chōmei, Kenkō, Lu Xun, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Victoria Ocampo, Ouyang Xiu, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Sei Shōnagon, Su Shi, Yuan Hondao, Leopoldo Zea, Zhang Dai, and Zhou Zuoren. 24. Cynthia Ozick addresses the relation of women to the essay. She suggests that it is possibly an illusion that ‘men are essayists more often than women’, especially since women’s essays ‘have in the past frequently assumed the form of unpublished correspondence’ (Ozick 2012, 157). Where the essay possibly coincides with a feminine quality, for Ozick, it is in its focus on ‘inner space’ which is culturally overdetermined as ‘feminine’. Therefore, men occupy this feminine space when they write essays ‘since it is only inner space—interesting, active, significant—that can conceive and nourish the contemplative essay’ (157). 25. In their introduction to The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, RuthEllen Boetcher Jaeres and Elizabeth Mittman note the political tone of a great many essays by women and argue from this observation that the ‘feminine’ qualities of the essay may be recuperated for feminist projects. They contend that the essay is the ‘ideal form for the presentation of feminist ideas’ largely because its marginal form parallels women’s sense of marginality in patriarchal culture. However, by endowing the formless form of the essay with feminine qualities (despite their feminist protestations), they arguably risk reinscribing stereotypical patriarchal distinctions and hierarchies (Jaeres and Mittman 1993, 19–20). In addition, by privileging the essay as a solely feminine (or even feminist) space they risk excluding other marginal groups who find in the essay the means to explore their own cultural silencing. 26. This critical legibility of gender is arguably evident in the essays of Nancy Mairs where she ‘strives to break the phallologic boundaries between critical analysis, essay, fiction, and poetry’ (Mairs 2012, 142). Following Montaigne, she describes her essays as ‘tests, trials, tentative rather than contentious, opposed to nothing, conciliatory, reconciliatory, seeking a mutuality with the reader which will not sway her to a point of view but will incorporate her into their process, their informing movement associative and suggestive, not analytic and declarative’ (142–43). 27. ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ is Adorno’s (1931) inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt. Here he speaks out against conventional systematic philosophy, proposing in its place his own version of interpretation as an alternative philosophical style. He has much to say about the essay in this work (Adorno 2000a).

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28. Kauffmann argues that because of its inherently pluralist nature, the essay is the best form for interdisciplinary engagement: ‘With its avowed antinomian character—its mosaic form, its unmethodical method—is the essay not inherently a pluralistic and interdisciplinary genre? At once “writing” and “analysis”, literature and philosophy, imagination and reason, it remains the most propitious form for interdisciplinary inquiry in the human sciences. Its task is not to stay within the well-charted boundaries of the academic disciplines, nor to shuttle back and forth across those boundaries, but to reflect on them and challenge them’ (Kauffmann 1989, 238).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2000a. The Actuality of Philosophy. In The Adorno Reader, trans. Benjamin Snow and ed. Brian O’Connor, 23–38. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2000b. The Essay as Form. In The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor, 91–111. Oxford: Blackwell. First published in 1958. Atwan, Robert. 2012. Notes towards the Definition of an Essay. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H.  Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 194–201. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 14(1), 2012. Benjamin, Walter. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: New Left Books. First published 1928. ———. 1997. One-Way Street, and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso. Bense, Max. 1960. Descartes und die Folgen II: Ein Geräusch in der Strasse. Baden-­ Baden: Agis, Krefeld. ———. 2012. On the Essay and Its Prose. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, trans. Eugene Sampson and ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 71–74. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published as ‘Über den Essay und seine Prosa’, Merkur 1(3), 1947: 414–424. Bensmaïa, Réda. 1987. The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text. Translated by Pat Fedkiew. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boulous Walker, Michelle. 2013. Imagining Happiness: Literature and the Essay. Culture, Theory, Critique 54 (2): 194–208. ———. 2017. Reading Essayistically: Levinas and Adorno. In Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution, 55–73. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Butrym, Alexander J., ed. 1989. Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Chadbourne, Richard M. 1997. Montaigne, Michel de. In Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier, 568–571. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.

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Chesterton, G.K. 2012. The Essay. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H.  Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 57–60. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published in Come to Think of It, London: Methuen, 1930. Chevalier, Tracy, ed. 1997. Encyclopedia of the Essay. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Descartes, René. 1912. A Discourse on Method. Translated by John Veitch. London: J.M. Dent and Sons. First published in 1637. Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo. 2012. The Limits of the Essay. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H.  Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 99–100. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published as ‘Los límites del ensayo’, trans. David Hamilton, La Estafeta Literaria 582 (February 15, 1976). DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 1996. f-Words: An Essay on the Essay. American Literature 68 (1): 15–45. Fanon, Frantz. 1982. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York, NY: Grove Press. First published in 1967. Glissant, Edouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. First published in 1981. Good, Graham. 1997. Preface. In Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier, xix– xxi. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2003. The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hall, Michael L. 1989. The Emergence of the Essay and the Idea of Discovery. In Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J. Butrym, 73–91. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Hamburger, Michael. 2012. An Essay on the Essay. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 91–93. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published in Akzente 12, 1965. Hardison, O.B. 1989. Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay. In Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J. Butrym, 11–28. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Jaeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher, and Elizabeth Mittman, eds. 1993. The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kardarkay, Arpad. 1997. Lukáks, Georg. In Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier, 499–501. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Kauffmann, R. Lane. 1989. The Skewed Path: Essaying as Unmethodical Method. In Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J.  Butrym, 221–240. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Klaus, Carl H. 2012. Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H.  Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, xv–xxvii. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Klaus, Carl H., and Ned Stuckey-French, eds. 2012. Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. Iowa: University of Iowa Press.

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Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lukács, Georg. 1974. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press. First published in 1910. Mairs, Nancy. 2012. Essaying the Feminine. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 142–146. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published as ‘Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva’ in Voice Lessons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. McCarthy, John A. 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich. In Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier, 602–605. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Montaigne, Michel de. 2003. The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters. Translated by Donald M. Frame. London: Alfred A. Knopf. Müller, Agnes. 1997. Bense, Max. In Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier, 83–84. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Musil, Robert. 1990. On the Essay. In Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft, 48–51. Chicago: Chicago University Press. First Published in 1914. ———. 2012. The Man Without Qualities. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 55–56. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published as The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins, London: Knopf, 1995. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin. Ouellette, Fernand. 2012. Ramblings on the Essay. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 94–98. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published as ‘Divagations sur l’essai’ in Écrire en notre temps: essais, Montreal: Editions Hurtubise, 1979: 9–13. Ozick, Cynthia. 2012. She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H.  Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 151–158. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published in Quarrel & Quandary: Essays, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Pater, Walter. 2012. Dialectic. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 29–31. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published in Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures. London: Macmillan, 1893: 156–176. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles. 2007. Vol. 1. A-M, 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starobinski, Jean. 2012. Can One Define the Essay. In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, trans. Lindsey Scott and ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 110–115. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. First published as ‘Peut-on definer l’essai?’ in Cahiers Pour Un Temps. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985: 185–196. Wohlfarth, Irving. 1979. Hibernation: On the Tenth Anniversary of Adorno’s Death. MLN 94: 956–987.

4 Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary and Philosophical Narratives Niklas Forsberg

Introduction (Philosophy Claims, Literature Illustrates) A common way of thinking about the philosophical value of narrative literature, perhaps even the occasional necessity of turning to such texts in philosophy, is that they can put a philosophical view into context and let us see or experience the philosophical thought in action. Narrative literature breathes life to philosophical thought; it makes concrete what is abstract. As such, a literary text may function as an illustration of a philosophical theory: ‘This is what the theoretical thought really looks like!’ It may also function as a testing ground of philosophical theorizing: ‘This is what really would happen if people actually were to live by these idealizations!’ And it may perhaps also serve to complete the philosophical thought, make it full, as it were: ‘What a virtuous life is, cannot be understood until one has seen it mastered!’ In all these cases—which vary a great deal in both content and form—there is nevertheless one common denominator: The philosophical appropriation of narrative literature is guided by some particular philosophical view, theory, and account. There is a particular ‘x’ that narrative literature is supposed to illustrate, exemplify, test, elucidate, or complete. N. Forsberg (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_4

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I do not want to quarrel with these uses of narrative literature per se. Instead, I want to make room for a slightly different way of thinking about the philosophical value of turning one’s attention to narrative literature—one that is not guided by a preconceived idea of what the philosophical value of a particular literary text is (in the way one may want to explore virtue ethics by means of looking into one or two of Jane Austen’s novels or how one may explore utilitarian forms of reasoning by means of reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment). If one argues that a philosophical theory needs or requires a form of literary expression, one is almost forced to say something about the specificity of literary narratives and how they differ from philosophical ones. Thus, the idea that literature may be philosophically helpful, necessary even, often comes together with a theory about the specificity of two distinct forms of narrative discourse. The natural continuation of this line of philosophizing is to theorize about the differences between philosophical narratives and literary ones and to show how literature may have philosophical (cognitive) value with bearing on our real world despite the fact that it is made up. And so philosophical reflections on the concept of narrativity are often conducted to find ways to bridge the supposed gap between fictional or dramatic narratives and factual or argumentative ones. Dwelling on parts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Iris Murdoch’s philosophies, I aim to show that the line of reasoning described above is problematic. Both Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch give us reasons to think that the whole idea of a gap to be bridged is spurious. Attention to narrative literature can bring into view a form of conceptual elasticity that is part of all language— even if much philosophy quite often (and with good reason at times) has strived hard to eradicate it.

F ictional Narratives Have Dramatic Structures, Philosophical One’s Argumentative One peculiarity with views that hold that some philosophical thoughts require literary expression to become fully expressed or examined is that such a claim entails a conception which presents the philosophical and the literary as clearly defined and distinct. There’s A and there’s B, and occasionally we need B to see what A really is. This way of thinking about narrative literature’s philosophical value is, at bottom, a variation of the persistent lore that philosophy’s space is the space of reason(s) whereas literature’s space is a place where we create worlds and where thinking is not bound by demands of, say,

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logic and correctness. Philosophy is disciplined reasoning about true facts— aiming at the truth. Narrative literature is creative play with imaginary things and not bound by either logic or reference—truth is not its business (but play, or entertainment, or fantasy, is). John Gibson formulates a variation of this standard view clearly (which Gibson then goes on to criticize) when he says that ‘Literature standardly constructs fictional narratives that have dramatic structures; works of enquiry standardly attempt to construct factual narratives that have argumentative or (evidentiary) structures.’1 This is a view one may hold even if one grants that most (if not all) sciences are ‘irreducibly narratological’—it’s just that the sciences ‘weave their narratives in ways very unlike works of literary fiction.’2 An assumption that tends to guide views and positions that endorse these and similar theories about the differences between philosophy and narrative literature, between the fictional and the factual, the dramatic and the argumentative, is that truth depends on reference or ‘is evidentiary’; and narrative literature does not refer to our world, is not about the real world, in the way truth requires. If one endorses this view of truth and meaning as ultimately tied to reference in this rather straightforward and simplistic way, then one needs to hold a rather strange view of narrative literature if one is to maintain that narrative literature refers to our world in exactly the same way as factual sentences do.3 And, of course, it’s true that factual statements differ from fictional ones in this specific respect: Statements of fact about me and my cottage differ from statement of facts about Uncle Tom and his cabin; and it may make sense to say that one way in which they differ can be discerned if one thinks about how one would go about in ‘verifying’ these different kinds of sentences. One of the differences is, of course, that the very idea of verifying statements of a novel often appears thoroughly confused, whereas the idea that one may verify a statement about, say, how many square meters my cottage is is not empty. (It should perhaps also be mentioned that this claim does not entail that I think that either meaning or truth hinges on verification—it just means that verification can come into play as a relevant factor with regard to factual things such as the size of my cottage, which it does not do with regard to many things from the world of fiction.) So, it is quite clear that the idea that philosophy is about our world and literature is about its own (made-up) world is rooted in something. If one inflates what’s true about each of these ‘intuitions’ (as they are called in philosophical jargon), then there seems to be a gulf between philosophical (or truth-oriented narratives) and literary narratives. One words our world. The other one creates its own. And if one then admits that both philosophy and literature must rely on narratives in some way, and wants to argue that we may

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nevertheless have something to learn from reading fiction, then the question about narrative transforms itself into a question about fictionality. How can we learn something real by means of pondering something made up? This is exactly the kind of question Gibson is responding to: If one endorses (what he calls) ‘the humanist intuition’—the idea that literature has cognitive value and ‘offers us a window on our world’4—and if one also endorses the ‘intuition’ that fiction is not about our word (since only sentences that refer to it can be about it), then the challenge becomes one of showing ‘that literary works can have a claim to cognitive value in the absence of those features of writing commonly taken to be the stuff of the pursuit of knowledge.’5 It seems clear to me that much of this debate about the cognitive value of narrative literature depends on the setup of the debate: There are two distinct discourses, with different rules of engagement. What the fictional is, what dramatic means, what counts as an argument, and what ‘factual’ means do not really seem to be questions to be discussed. It is almost by definition that fictional narratives cannot be argumentative, and it is almost by definition that ‘cognitive value’ is the result of features that belong to factual forms of argumentation. Philosophical ‘narratives’ are argumentative. Fictional narratives are dramatic. So if a text is dramatic, it is not philosophical. And if it is argumentative, it is not fictional. These are the conditions which create the gap that we, in the company of Gibson and others, are encouraged to bridge (if possible). These are the assumptions one must endorse in order to make the task of showing that literature can be of cognitive value in absence of the stuff that cognitions are (taken to be) made of. But is this a reasonable starting position? What if there’s drama in philosophical narratives too? And what if there are real arguments in fictional forms of writing (even though they may not come in the exact same shape)? What if we do not command a clear overview of all the senses of words such as argument, fiction, drama, cognitive, knowledge, and so on? What if the senses of these terms are up for grabs too? Is the gap then still real? Does it still need to be bridged?

 hilosophical Language, Literary Language, P Ordinary Language The idea that philosophical argumentative narratives are argumentative and about our world in a more or less direct way may also seem to make that kind of discourse more ‘objective,’ whereas the image of dramatic narratives as being dramatic because they are not anchored in our world may appear to

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make them more ‘subjective,’ and as such a matter of interpretation, not possible to lock to one meaning. So, one may think that an argumentative narrative employs normal literal language and a dramatic narrative includes a more imaginative language where metaphors and play take on important roles. Even though one can see why somebody may be inclined to think along these lines, these conceptions of two kinds of language, as well as the auxiliary view about two modes of discourse, are fundamentally confused. A more nuanced and balanced view of what a narrative is and what role narratives play in our lives may help us see why the idea of two languages is confused. In making my line of thinking clearer here, I will pick up thrust from Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch. This is not the place to give a comprehensive overview of Merleau-Ponty’s view(s) of language. I only wish to highlight and borrow a couple of his thoughts that will help us question the idea that there is a genuine gulf to be bridged between philosophical and literary language; or between ordinary and literary language; or between the argumentative narratives and dramatic ones. What I want to show is not that the solidity people have idealized and sought to ground by means of idealizations of scientific language are to be abandoned in favor of something more dramatic—as if imaginative free play is all there is. In a sense, the point I wish to convey is the reverse: Dramatic narratives and the kind of vulnerability we are exposed to in ordinary language contain all the solidity we need. Of course, that kind of solidity is very remote to the kind of algorithmic ideals that Merleau-Ponty combats, and it is also very far from the view of argumentative narratives that Gibson presented. But, showing that there’s no gap to be bridged between two kinds of narratives does not amount to showing that the one is better than the other, but that the opposition itself was a false beginning. The opening lines of Merleau-Ponty’s The Prose of the World reads: Men have been talking for a long time on earth, and yet three-quarters of what they say goes unnoticed. A rose, it is raining, it is fine, man is mortal. These are paradigms of expression for us. We believe expression is most complete when it points unequivocally to events, to states of objects, to ideas or relations, for, in these instances, expression leaves nothing more to be desired, contains nothing which it does not reveal, and thus sweeps us toward the object which it designates. In dialogue, narrative, plays on words, trust, promise, prayer, eloquence, literature, we possess a second-order language in which we do not speak of objects and ideas except to reach some person. Words respond to words in this language, which bears away within itself and builds up beyond nature a humming, busy world of its own. Yet we still insist on treating this language as simply a variant of the economical forms of making statements about some thing.6

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Merleau-Ponty notices that when one reflects on the functioning of language, one often turns to forms of expressions that point ‘unequivocally to events, to states of objects, to ideas or relations’ and uses these as paradigm cases of what language, in toto, is. And this turns ‘dialogue, narrative, plays on words, trust, promise, prayer, eloquence, literature,’ into something of ‘a second-order language.’ This dichotomy between two kinds of language is pretty much the same as the one Gibson also (more than three decades later) claims to be common and ‘intuitive’—even though Gibson himself struggles to bridge the gulf between these two kinds of languages. One needs to take this so-called ‘intuitive’ idea very seriously—even if one wants to unsettle it. For it is not simply untrue that statements that describe a single and simple fact about our world refer to the world and may be said to be true or false in an ‘objective’ sense. One may, for example, claim that the sentence ‘Mount Kilimanjaro is 4.003 meters high’ is bipolar (true or false), and we decide what it is by means of disclosing the features of the world it describes. If the mountain is 4.003 meters high, it is true, if not, not. What is not unproblematic though, and what I can see no reason for calling intuitive, is the idea that these forms of sentences should be seen as exemplary—as if this is language at its best. And it is also not evident that what makes a particular piece of language—say a sentence of this typical form: ‘x is y’—factual and argumentative (in contrast to a dramatic and non-factual one) is a feature of the form of the sentence. As if it is the mere grammatical form of the statement (x is y) that makes it (1) a sentence that refers to something and (2) therefore a primary form of language. One thing that obviously is missing here is an understanding of significant contexts of use. A very simple statement like ‘That car is fast’ may be a description, or a warning, or a way for a seller to convince me that I (should) want it, or an ironic rant.7 Which one it is is not determined by the grammatical form of the statement. To give ‘the statement’ this kind of priority, however, is not a simple error. It is not, as it were, that we lack the right kind of evidence that should make us hesitant toward holding and endorsing such a primitive view of language. Indeed, one may perhaps say that it is precisely a sort of tacit, or latent, or hidden, form of knowledge about the very many ways a sentence may be put to use that nudges us, in our theoretical forms of reflections, toward searching for a primary source of sense (which makes all the other uses derivative and secondary). For one of the more striking aspects of language as lived and used and multifarious is that sense does not exist apart from human ­interaction. That we reach each other is not merely a result of us sharing a language (in the reduced sense of sharing a lexicon and rules for how to combine these words properly). Since we can make use of linguistic elasticity, there is a sense in

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which we are at the mercy of each other.8 One may even say that Merleau-­ Ponty suggests that it is precisely because of this fact that philosophers (and perhaps also other intellectuals reflecting on language) become motivated to make the statement and the referent into the primary locus of truth and sense. ‘We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.’9 To be delivered from language would mean to be relieved from the personal responsibility to mean—to hand over the responsibility to mean to an external authority. What is remarkable with Merleau-Ponty’s diagnosis here is not only that he acknowledges the kind of temptation that may lead to a privileging of regions of language that we can adequately describe with the words ‘statement’ and ‘reference,’ and not only that he makes clear how such a privileging may lead one to assume that dramatic and literary forms of discourse are secondary and/or derivative. Merleau-Ponty also opens up for a way of thinking that shows that the whole idea of a gulf to be bridged is confused. At first sight, it might seem as if Merleau-Ponty simply reverses the hierarchical order of the same old dichotomy; for he begins by showing the deficiencies of what he describes as the ‘algorithmic’ conception of language, which he describes as ‘an attempt to construct language according to the standard of truth, to redefine it to match the divine mind, and to return to the very origin of the history of speech or, rather, to tear speech out of history.’10 Thereafter, he employs a notion of literary language as a contrast, arguing that literary language reveals something more fundamental about language. But Merleau-Ponty does not simply aim to make a reversal of the hierarchical order. Strictly thought through, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections should lead us to overcome the idea that there is a gap that needs to be bridged in the first place. (I’ll come back to this.) Merleau-Ponty’s notion of an ‘algorithm’ is his name for the familiar notion of an ideal language, in which one attempts to mimic certain linguistic gestures common to the sciences where one attempts to attach ‘clear and precise significations to fixed signs.’11 The ideal one aims for (in the sciences and in the disciplines attempting to mimic the sciences) is, of course, the idea of a stable language that would protect us ‘from the shifts in meaning which create error.’12 And so the ideal is an attempt to avoid linguistic fluctuation, interpersonal commitments, and personal idiosyncrasies. But ideal model is then taken to be a representation of what language really is, as it is, when it is working the way it is supposed to. This is ‘a revolt against language in its existing state and a refusal to depend upon the confusions of everyday language.’13 However, a fear of linguistic diversity thus leads intellectuals to model their conceptions of language on reductive images in a way that fundamentally

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misrepresents the reality of our (ordinary, everyday) language. Of course, a fear of something is also an acknowledgment of the reality of, or the possibility of, that something which it fears. But, according to Merleau-Ponty, the image of language as ideally and centrally an algorithm does not only misrepresent it—it is an image of language that aims to efface language itself.14 Communication may (ideally) be a simple and meager exchange of symbols with unambiguous meaning. But human expression would become impossible. No form of expression would be expressive of me, and no particular ‘way of putting it’ would be able to reach your heart in a more precise and striking way than any other. As an analogy to this image of meaning, as secured externally in language in the algorithmic sense—where grammar (or language itself ) takes over the responsibility to mean, and persons have no responsibility for the meaning of utterances beyond choosing the right words—one may try to picture a love relationship where one’s exposure to the other is cancelled out, so that there’s no logical possibility of a doubt in the other person’s feelings. This would be to think about love as an object, and not as a human relation where intimacy with the other is secured externally. If I can hold up a thing in front of you, let you touch it even, then our intercourse no longer relies on trust alone. This is the image of love as being less real when a loving couple depends on reliance, trust, and intimate understanding of one another, and the image of love as being more real if that understanding is accompanied by a PET-scan image: ‘I can prove to you that I love you! Look! See how red this area of my brain is when I think of you.’ (Of course, it’s quite likely that the only response a jealous lover could come up with in such a case would be: ‘And how do I know you were thinking about me?’) This may be a tragicomic image of human relations, and ultimately it fundamentally misconstrues them, but one should nevertheless acknowledge the pressure that the idea of external evidence for inner emotional life may lay on our struggles to avoid tragedy. The same thing is true about language—the idea of a firmly established sense, removed from all human relations, is fundamentally confused, but one must nevertheless understand that there can be such a thing as a desire to cancel the possibility of linguistic elasticity and to thereby put an end to our linguistic vulnerability. It is as a response to this ideal image of language as an algorithm, and the inherent impossibility of the realization of the ideal, that Merleau-Ponty now turns to literature. Above I mentioned that this is no simple reversal of the hierarchical order. Merleau-Ponty’s view is rather that a study of literary expressions reveals something fundamental about all forms of language, which means that he does not aim to give literary language a priority over and about

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scientific, algorithmic, language, but to mark out important features of language quite generally (that, as it happens, are most clearly discernable if one studies literary narratives). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, ‘the phenomenon of expression, as it appears in literary speech, is no curiosity or introspective fantasy marginal to the philosophy or science of language.’15 Rather, a study of literary expression is also a study of scientific language, to some extent for ‘these two studies overlap.’16 The thoughts I wish to borrow from Merleau-Ponty are expressed in a condensed way in the following two sentences: 1. ‘In its live and creative state, language is the gesture of renewal and recovery which unites me with myself and others.’17 2. ‘He who speaks enters into a system of relations which presuppose his presence and at the same time make him open and vulnerable.’18 The idea that creative language ‘is the gesture of renewal and recovery’ originates in the rather straightforward observation that I am speaking a language which was there long before I was. So in an important sense, I speak a language which has a history which is not mine, and learning to speak is thus also an inheritance of an already established meaning. This fact needs to be understood in relation to another fact about language: Meaning is not static. Thus, language must always consist of an inheritance of an already established sense that comes together with the possibility of gradual alterations of meaning by means of novel use.19 One of the features of lived language that Merleau-Ponty thus brings into view is the fact that ‘speech must, in its normal functioning, be of such a nature that disorders in it are always possible.’20 The idea here is simply that all forms of speech must relate to a language inherited and that the inherited sense is something one must relate to and may be wrong about. But the idea of ‘disorder’ should not merely be understood as faulty applications of an already established meaning. This view of ‘disorder’ entails an idea that all our concepts are open for revision, can be renegotiated, and are so historically, continuously. And that is true about scientific language as well, even though the languages of the sciences are (and perhaps must be) struggling to attain, and hold on to, a fixed vocabulary. One may say that the possibility of disorder suggested by Merleau-Ponty resembles the kind of disorder that Thomas Kuhn sought to describe in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.21 A crisis is something that depends, one might say, on the appearance of a conceptual disorder. Normal science has a form of conceptual harmony as one of its

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defining characteristics. ‘Only when all the relevant conceptual categories are prepared in advance, in which case the phenomenon would not be of a new sort, can discovering that and discovering what occur effortlessly, together, and in an instant.’22 One central feature of a scientific crisis (that may lead to a change of paradigm) is that there is no effortless harmony between the discovery of that and the discovery of what. And this also means, if we are to translate this back to Merleau-Ponty’s terminology, that even if an algorithmic conception of language may be said to be ideal, one must nevertheless admit that creative disorder is a prerequisite for everyday, gradual, and hardly discernable conceptual elasticity as well as for true fundamental changes in the sciences. Speaking to one’s other in an expressive way, moving him or her with one’s words, thus involves at least a slight twist, or turn, of our shared concepts, inviting him or her to ponder this new inflection of concepts as a genuine use of the word/concept. (Are you, like me, prepared to call this …?) So the beginning is an inheritance. ‘Sedimented language is the language the reader brings with him, the stock of accepted relations between signs and familiar significations without which he could never have begun to read. It constitutes the language and the literature of the language.’23 This is not only a matter of us having to rely on a sense already handed to us, but it is also, one may say, a necessary condition for how we may meet each other. ‘The author has come to dwell in my world. Then, imperceptibly, he varies the ordinary meaning of the signs, and like a whirlwind they sweep me along toward the other meaning with which I am going to connect.’24 The moment when one is moved to think new and different thoughts, to expand one’s language, is clearly discernable in literature, but it is also something that is true about all forms of language: What is hazardous in literary communication, or ambiguous and irreducible to a single theme in all the great works of art, is not a provisional weakness of literature which we could hope to overcome. It is the price we must pay to have a conquering language which, instead of limiting itself to pronouncing what we already know, introduces us to new experiences and to perspectives that can never be ours, so that in the end language destroys our prejudices. We would never see any new landscape if our eyes did not give us the means of catching, questioning, and shaping patterns of space and color hitherto unseen.25

This means also that linguistic communication cannot be reduced to a static exchange between fully stable significations: ‘the idea of a finished expression is chimerical.’26 This is also why communication involves a kind of personal

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vulnerability: Communication may not succeed, I may not understand you. Some may perhaps think of this as frightening. I think that we need to see this as a condition of the existence of morality überhaupt. If concepts were not negotiable, and if the expression ‘A penny for your thought’ was completely empty, there would be no room left for a personal relation to the world and to one’s others.

The Unnaturalness of Philosophy My discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on language aims to make clear that we should be very cautious to countersign the claim (expressed but not necessarily fully endorsed by Gibson) that the sciences ‘weave their narratives in ways very unlike works of literary fiction.’27 We should also be very hesitant to say that literature can have ‘a claim to cognitive value in the absence of those features of writing commonly taken to be the stuff of the pursuit of knowledge.’28 The problem with this formulation is not so much the ‘cognitive value’ part. The problem is rather the ‘in the absence of.’ From Merleau-­ Ponty’s perspective, literature is not characterized by a fundamental cognitive lack, but shows rather, more clearly than many other forms of writing, the kind of creative openness and linguistic elasticity that is the condition of all kinds of knowledge. So the idea should not be to bridge a gap, but to show that it does not really exist. Finally, these observations also make manifest how deeply problematic it is to rely on an idealized image of static meaning—the image of the statement (x is y) whose truth value must be referentially explicable—as explicating the primary form of language. So the question about narrativity, and of narrative literature, is not so much a question of fictionality from this perspective, as it a question about testing the elasticity of our concepts and a community’s willingness to stretch a particular concept in this or that direction. That a story holds together—that is, if we read it, follow it, turn the page, think that we can keep company with and understand a character as developing in tune with the general story—may itself be a signal that the ways our concepts are stretched in this work, be it ever so little, are new displays of elasticity that we countersign. And we do so, when we do so, naturally, without much thought. And we can also see that a narrative sometimes breaks down, or becomes dubious and problematic, because it demands a kind of conceptual renegotiation that we are not ready, or willing, or able, to make. All these points can be said to be on a par with Murdoch’s philosophy. Murdoch, not unlike Merleau-Ponty, argues that ‘we cannot, consider language as a set of

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grooves into which we slip. Here language cannot be considered as saying itself; it is not “p” that says p, but I who say “p” meaning p.’29 At the very least, this means that sense is not given—it is not a feature of the sentence (understood as a grammatically correct combination of words with already established sense). Meaning is a question of persons, meaning to mean, in different contexts. (Who said what to whom when?—and why?) The meaning of utterances depends on how we inflect our concepts, make them mean, twist them, question them, bend them, change them, and fail to mean by bending them too far, or not succeeding in making one’s peer see what you saw (or thought you saw or could see) by means of turning our concepts differently. As Plato observes at the end of Phaedrus, words themselves do not contain wisdom. Words said to particular individuals at particular times may occasion wisdom. Words, moreover, have both Spatiotemporal and conceptual contexts. We learn through attending to contexts, vocabulary develop through close attention to objects, and we can only understand others if we can to some extent share their contexts. (Often we cannot.)30

Notice how Murdoch here claims that contextual sensitivity (as we might call it) is something very natural to us—we all learn to speak, live, and breathe and become numb, dumb, and silenced by means of projecting our words to ‘particular individuals at particular times.’ So there is a sense in which our natural linguistic habitat is something very remote to the philosophical ideal of an algorithmic expressionless language. One reason why Murdoch becomes increasingly relevant to philosophy today is because she managed to show how a faulty (idealized) conception of language leads to (or may if we let it), or enables, fundamental misunderstandings of our lives—for example, in how we understand what morality is (like). For if one simply accepts that ‘the statement’ is the primary form of language use, and if one thinks of reference (as direct link to an objective empirical world), then ethics is reduced to a form of disciplined reflection upon a limited set of judgments that contain moral concepts: ‘A moral concept … will be an objective definition of a certain area of activity plus a recommendation or a prohibition.’31 The point here is not, and it cannot be, that it is wrong to talk about moral concepts in these terms at times—but this conception of language also delimits what moral philosophy is and is about. Thus ‘the material which the philosopher is supposed to work with is simply (under the heading of behaviour) acts and choices, and (under the heading of language) choice-guiding words together with arguments which describe then meaning of these words.’32 What is confused is the thought that this is what

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morality is and that there are no other regions of our lives that we may need to reflect upon in order to become clear about our moral register. Murdoch now means to show, again on a par with Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, that language and morality are intertwined in far more complex ways than this image suggests. The strategic move of the philosopher who wants to examine and perhaps even challenge the kinds of conceptions that Murdoch here talks about is to make manifest that our everyday language and morality are not captured, cannot be captured, in these theoretical frameworks. So it is not that the study of moral judgments is to be expelled from the philosophical curriculum; it’s just that explicit moral judgments employing obviously moral words are just a small segment of our moral world. In reality, when we meet, and think about and relate to, other persons ‘we do not consider only their solutions to specifiable practical problems, we consider something more elusive which may be called their total vision of life, as shown in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think is funny.’33 We may say that according to Murdoch, our relationships to others take the shape of a narrative rather than the shape of a judge’s verdict or a statesman’s executive orders (these are metaphors, of course). It’s true that sentences like, say, ‘I think eating meat it morally wrong’ or ‘I do not think that your pansexual way of living is morally healthy’ may play important roles in such narratives. But so does the continuous renegotiation of concepts such as murder, food, animal, morally, love, relationship, sex, and so on. And we do not only do these forms of renegotiations by means of sitting around tables in seminar rooms weighing pros and cons (although we probably can do that too). So we may say, first, that the kind of testing of linguistic elasticity that is discernable in much literature is something that always goes on in almost every minute of our days.34 And we can also see that in the context of these elastic narratives, what makes an utterance a warning, a rebuke, a statement, an expression of admiration is not something we can boil down to features of the sentence alone. This means that much of the materials that philosophers discuss are abstractions. What makes moral language moral is not a feature of the language, it cannot be reduced to a set of moral sentences. In reality valuations come into play in a great variety of ways and so values form a part of most of our uses of language. ‘It is with great difficulty, for artificial purposes, scientific or legal, for instance, that we may expel value from ordinary language.’35 So we cannot, in advance, decide what is and what is not part of moral language.

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In language lived (and not merely approach as a dead object of study) the dramatic story form is our natural habitat. ‘Literary modes are very natural to us, very close to ordinary life and to the ways we live as reflective beings.’36 Narrative literature tests and examines our concepts and our conceptual belonging, and that makes it clear that literature is also, in a certain sense, always a ‘truth-seeking activity.’ To say, however, that we are always exploring and testing our concepts (and thereby, also, our communality), and that everyday language use always involves a form a literary imagination and innovation, is not to say that these are tasks we have assigned to ourselves. When conceptual renegotiations and examinations become tasks in that sense, they do, I take it, become ‘philosophy’—an ‘academic’ matter. And it becomes so, precisely because we tend to remove the narrative drama and try to look at the thing (the word, the concept, the entity) on its own, in isolation. That is why, in Murdoch’s terms, ‘Philosophy is to some extent a foreign tongue.’37 And it is worth remembering that everyday language is not, just as literature is not, a foreign tongue: ‘we are all to some extent literary artists in our daily life. Here one might say that it is the directness of philosophy which strikes us as unnatural, the indirectness of the story as natural.’38 Murdoch, like Merleau-Ponty, forces us to ask whether or not the partial selection of language that forms the philosophical ideal of what language ultimately is is more than a partial simplification (albeit studied in detailed) made for a particular purpose and that philosophical deflections may not only be simplifications but distortions. Murdoch, like Merleau-Ponty, should make us think seriously about whether or not the features of language that often are held to be the hallmarks of literary, ‘secondary,’ language—like drama, and elasticity, and the creative examination of conceptual communality—actually may form an integral part of all forms of language use. Murdoch, like Merleau-­ Ponty, should make us ask ourselves if we really know what is meant when somebody says that the sciences ‘weave their narratives in ways very unlike works of literary fiction.’39

 eturning Philosophy Home: Narrative R Surroundings Both Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch suggest, in various ways, that we speak and move in a stream of words where more intimacy may be said to be measured by an increased amount of tacit forms of understanding. Both of them think that a philosophical focus on ‘statements’ and ‘judgments,’ or on a limited number of concepts that taken together is supposed to delimit a field of

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its own called morality, is way too simplistic a picture to be of much help. But neither of them ground these arguments by means of attempting to show that literary, dramatic narratives make up a different second-order language that now should be moved up in the hierarchy. Rather, their (semi-)joint argument is more of a negative one: The kinds of traits and features of lived language that philosophers often strive fairly hard to remove in order to attain a clear sense of (what they take to be) language at its best are present in, and equally important to factual, or argumentative, narratives. So the question about a fundamental gap that needs to be bridged (between fictional drama and argumentative narratives) is itself something of a fiction. Thus, the question about what literature can teach us should not be seen as possible to answer only on the condition that we first show that literary narratives can have cognitive powers while lacking the stuff that cognitions are thought to be made of— instead, the reflections on narrative literature discussed in this text aim to unsettle precisely that philosophical conviction. Of course, this text is also—like many other texts about the philosophical merits of thinking about narratives—a plea for richer, fuller, and more detailed and nuanced depictions of our lives in language. But this does not (merely) mean that we philosophers should become more attentive and emotionally sensitive to other forms of writing than theoretical philosophical theories. The turn to literature includes a reconsideration of the whole field under investigation. It is an invitation to reconsider what philosophy’s field is.40 I have not exactly been contesting the validity of the arguments of alternative theories. Rather, literature here comes in as a reminder of what our linguistic world is like. It helps to bring into view how complex the world we share through language is, and that many theories go wrong, not because their arguments are unsound, but because they rely on a reductive picture of what this world of ours is like and of what counts as rational and what count as arguments. Attention to narrative literature in philosophy is often a fruitful endeavor that can test, or illustrate, or vindicate, or challenge a particular theory. But in this text, I have not marked out specific works of literature that have p ­ articular philosophical importance. Instead, I have wanted to show how works of narrative literature can be seen as instances of conceptual renegotiations and places where we test our concepts. The way we have reached that position is by making clear the very idea that literary narratives are formed out of a fundamental lack—as if literary narratives become literary narratives in virtue of lacking the stuff that real cognitions are made of. One way to put this is to say that literature is ordinary language philosophy, because it highlights essentials of language that exist in all language, and that philosophical language is (often) reductive (yielding reductive forms of understanding) precisely because

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it seeks to omit the complexity and elasticity of everyday language. Some narratives do conceptual investigations in this sense quite explicitly, consciously, others don’t. But, at the end of the day, whether or not a text or an author does this deliberately does not matter much. What matters is that our attention to narrative literature may induce the right kind of healthy uncertainty with regard to simplified philosophical images of language, and argumentation, and so of reason and morals.41

Notes 1. Gibson (2007, 4). 2. Gibson (2007, 3f ). 3. Of course, there are more fruitful ways of talking about literature as being ‘about our world,’ and Gibson may be said to offer such an alternative view himself. ‘If literature does not represent reality, I argue that it plays a crucial role in the construction of those narratives in virtue of which we give sense to our characteristically human practices and experiences. Literature is in effect an archive of these narratives, a storehouse of the various ways we have developed for giving expression to the way our world is and our particular ways of finding ourselves within it’ (Gibson 2007, 10). 4. Gibson (2007, 2). 5. Gibson (2007, 4). 6. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 3). 7. For more illustrative discussions along these lines, see, for example, Cavell (1994, 131), Travis (1989, 18f ), and Forsberg (2013, 129). 8. This is why somebody like Stanley Cavell wants to say, and emphasize, that ‘Intimate understanding is understanding which is implicit. … We are, therefore, exactly as responsible for the specific implications of our utterances as we are for their explicit factual claims.’ Cavell (1976, 12). 9. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 4). 10. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 5). 11. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 4). 12. Merleau-Ponty (1973). 13. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 5). 14. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 8). 15. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 15). 16. Merleau-Ponty (1973). 17. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 17). 18. Merleau-Ponty (1973). 19. Ibid., p. 11. The right way to think about Merleau-Ponty’s thought here is not that it is a peculiar empirical hypothesis. Rather, the argument is more of a Kantian kind, as a form of explication of the conditions of possibility of genu-

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ine expression (a form of speech that is personal and not just a static transferal of dead symbols). It is an answer to the question: Given that we do have personal and authentic forms of expression, what must lived, authentic, language be like, harbor, and make possible? 20. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 17). 21. Kuhn (1996). 22. Kuhn (1996, 55). 23. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 12f ). 24. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 11f ). 25. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 90). 26. Merleau-Ponty (1973, 28). 27. Gibson (2007, 4). 28. Gibson (2007). 29. Murdoch (1999a, 35). 30. Murdoch (1999b, 324f ). 31. Murdoch (1999c, 77). 32. Murdoch (1999c, 79). 33. Murdoch (1999c, 80–81). 34. Murdoch says, for example, that: ‘… When we return home and “tell our day”, we are artfully shaping material into story form. So in a way as wordusers we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we live and breathe literature, we are all literary artists, we are constantly employing language to make interesting forms out of experience which perhaps originally seemed dull or i­ ncoherent. How far reshaping involves offences against truth is a problem any artist must face’ (Murdoch 1999d, 6f ). 35. Murdoch (2003, 252–56). 36. Murdoch (1999d, 6). 37. Murdoch (2003, 192). 38. Murdoch (1999d, 12). 39. Gibson (2007, 3f ). 40. For a good discussion of this way of thinking about the philosophical value of turning to narrative literature, see Hämäläinen (2015). 41. My thanks to Nora Hämäläinen for valuable comments to an earlier version of this text. This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, registration No. CZ.02.1.01/ 0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

Bibliography Cavell, S. 1976. Must We Mean What We Say? In Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1994. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Forsberg, N. 2013. Language Lost and Found: On Iris and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Gibson, J. 2007. Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hämäläinen, N. 2015. Literature and Moral Theory. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Kuhn, T. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1973. The Prose of the World. Evanston: Northwestern. Murdoch, I. 1999a. Thinking and Language. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner. New York, NY: Penguin. ———. 1999b. The Idea of Perfection. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner. New York, NY: Penguin. ———. 1999c. Vision and Choice in Morality. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner. New York, NY: Penguin. ———. 1999d. Literature and Philosophy. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner. New York, NY: Penguin. ———. 2003. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Vintage. Travis, C. 1989. The Uses of Sense: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

5 On Philosophy and Poetry Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

At the heart of philosophical discussions of poetry is its relation to truth. Advocates and serious readers of poetry may be struck by what they regard as the poem’s inherent truth, even where a poem expresses little that corresponds to any given reality and where its content is resistant to paraphrase. The discovery of likenesses among ostensibly dissimilar things, as expressed in metaphor and simile, the rendering of distinctive and profound thought, the evocation of experiences that are at once novel and deeply familiar, the giving of voice to genuine and theretofore unarticulated emotion, may play their role in the experience of poetry as a conveyance of truth. Yet philosophers have been divided about poetry from Plato to the present: some have associated poetry and literature more broadly1 with illusion, lies, or falsity,2 while others have affirmed poetry’s truth-value.3 At issue, however, is not whether poetry can relay some truth—for even its harshest critics admit that it can—but rather whether truthfulness is intrinsic to successful poetry, and whether there is a mode of truthfulness that is distinctly poetic, manifest through poetic language in distinction from other modes of language. The predominant argument for a distinctively poetic truth is that poetry enacts a form of revealing, a disclosure of the world, a capacity enabled by, among other things, poetry’s productive

J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei (*) The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_5

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defamiliarization of language.4 In this view, the disclosive nature of poetry consists in its making appear, or opening a view onto, the world or our experience of it in ways inaccessible by ordinary language, with its epistemic habits, cognitive shortcuts, and inherited conventions. The very strangeness of language promoted by poetic form—including not only rhyme and meter as used in formal genres, but other sonic features of language, metaphor, and imagery—enables an idiosyncratic cognitive and emotive orientation toward a poem’s given subject-­matter that reveals it in a novel way. Poetry may thus give rise to thought that could not be similarly evoked by practical or scientific uses of language, with their attending cognitive assumptions, yet which may genuinely impact poets’ and readers’ views of the world or of their own place in it. In order to address the full scope of poetry’s relation to truth, the assumptions and limits of this notion of poetic revealing need to be considered. For the notion of revealing may inadvertently harbor a form of realism that suggests a relationship of precedence: that reality, as it is, is first of all accessible to linguistic exposure. But poetry also changes and transforms, and calls into question, our experience of things, our relation to them. While some poems or elements thereof may be said to reveal the world or some part of it, others may also generate new thoughts and ways of thinking that add to or contest the world creatively. Poetry’s defamiliarizing strategies may not serve solely to unveil, but alternatively manipulate, the ways we have theretofore understood or engaged the world. Moreover, what Adorno considered the illusory nature of poetry, rather than disqualifying its relation to truth, may be intrinsic to its own generated ‘truth content’ irreducible to the world it in some ways reflects.5 At the same time, the generative, imaginative, and linguistically divergent nature of poetry may create poetic alternatives that have implications for the real, by their very difference and multiplicity. The imaginative need not be dismissed as merely illusory if it responds to, and to some extent relativizes, what Wallace Stevens  in his defense of imagination called the ‘pressure of reality.’6 This chapter will elaborate a philosophical examination of poetry in two parts. The first part traces poetry’s contested relation to truth in the philosophical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche. The second part, describes  the phenomenological notion of poetic revealing as conceiving a distinctly poetic mode of truth and demonstrates the merits of this view in interpreting several poetic works. It will be then considered how poetic language, and some particular works of poetry, may resist or exceed this interpretive approach, challenging the presumptions or exhaustiveness of the  phenomenological and hermeneutic model through the generative imagination.

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F rom the ‘Ancient Quarrel’ to Philosophical Affirmations of Poetry The diverging views of Plato and Aristotle on the subject of poetry set the terms for defenses of poetry throughout the tradition and still echo in contemporary debates.7 Although early modern philosophers give poetry some consideration, it is not until Kant, and the Romantic valorization of poetry in his wake, that the question again emerges of the potential truth-value of poetry and its subordination to philosophy by Plato is fully challenged. This section will set the historical context for the discussion in the second part of this chapter of the relationship between poetry and truth as a tension between poetic revealing and poetic generation. Elaborating upon what he refers to as poetry’s ‘ancient quarrel’ with philosophy, Plato establishes central tenets of poetic theory for much of the tradition to come (Republic, 607b5–6). The Republic offers a critique of poetry, which comprises epic, tragic, comic, and lyric poetry, among other kinds of verse. Plato’s proposal for the censorship of poets in the education of his ideal polis concerns both the content of poetry and its style of expression; no poetic utterances should be allowed that ‘are neither holy, nor advantageous for us, nor in harmony with one another’ (Republic, 380c). Plato is especially critical of tragedy as overstimulating emotion, promoting lamentation over and fear of catastrophe and death. Homer’s epic poetry is also frequently criticized in Plato’s discussion, not only in Republic—where Homer is accused of misrepresenting the gods—but also in Ion, where Homer’s exponent and, by implication, the poet himself, are shown to lack knowledge of the matters depicted in his poetry. It is concluded there that truth that happens to be conveyed by the poet arises ‘not from art, but as inspired’ (Ion, 533e). Since both philosophy and poetry use the medium of language and may express ideas about the same subjects, Plato distinguishes and even opposes them in metaphysical and epistemological terms. The truth at which philosophy is to arrive will not be merely inspired, for philosophy involves dialogical argumentation and definition, and  aims at a discernment of essences, the articulation of which should withstand refutation. In contrast, poetry—which remains for the ancient Greek context associated with rhythm and music, but is also frequently discussed in terms of images—is defined in Republic according to the principle of mimesis, representation, or imitation. For Aristotle, too, poetry is ‘the representation of action, and of life.’ This definition of poetry as mimesis persists in views of literature through the end of the twentieth century, with Erich Auerbach’s monumental treatment of literature as

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‘the representation of reality’ and Kendall Walton’s treatment of ‘make-believe’ as the foundation of literature and all ‘representational arts.’8 John Searle’s description of fiction as comprised of pretended assertions identifies a similar principle at the level of the statement.9 More recently it has been argued, and reductively so, that the discovery of the neurological basis of imitation in mirror neurons reveals the origin of literature.10 Yet it is precisely on the mimetic nature of poetry which Plato’s metaphysical and epistemological critique pivots and on which it has been challenged. For Plato mimesis has the connotation of imitation, whether in the sense of copying, in literary or poetic images, or of impersonation, where a poet or actor speaks in the voice of another as if he or she were that character.11 The derivative nature of these activities brings poetry into conflict with truth, for they give no guarantee of true likeness to the subject-matter represented. Plato repeatedly draws the analogy of literary language with images made by an artist or painter: both deal, and only derivatively, with the appearances of things as perceived by the senses, rather than with their essence as known by reason. Just as a picture can look like its object with greater or lesser fidelity to its appearance, what is represented in words can be appropriately presented or distorted. But even the visual image of significant likeness is unlike its model in a profound way: it lacks three-dimensionality, it cannot be seen from various perspectives, and the literary image shares these disadvantages among others. Moreover, any image is inherently distortive because it is merely the representation of an appearance, ‘not the imitation of reality as it is’ but of ‘appearance as it appears’ (Republic, 603b, 598b). Poetic representations, equivalently distortive and derivative, are likened to lies, and insidiously so, since such mimesis through language and rhythm is held to reach the inward places of the soul. A tension can be identified between this derivative nature of poetic mimesis and Plato’s emphasis on its productivity. For poiesis involves performing or making, related to the verb poiein, to perform or to make; poets and artists are said to ‘produce appearances’ (Republic, 599a2–3). Socrates criticizes those skilled at making (tous poietikous), such as poets, as ‘imitators of phantoms of virtue and of the other subjects of their making’ (Republic, 600e4–6). The poet is a ‘producer of a product three removes from nature’ (Republic, 597e). Poetry, says Socrates in the Symposium, means ‘creating something out of nothing’ (Symposium, 205b8–c2). While the poet creates with language, the philosopher uses language to discover and uncover, to arrive at, by dialogical questioning and argumentation, the truth of things that cannot be known through the senses. For the philosopher, language is not, as it is for the poet, material for production of images in the realm of becoming, but an ­instrument

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of thought that reveals the essence of what is. Twentieth-century phenomenologists will reverse that assignation: while traditional philosophy has constructed or produced abstractions that obscure ‘things themselves,’ poetry (along with phenomenology and visual art) will be held up as a mode of revealing things originally, ‘as that meaning comes into being.’12 In the Poetics, Aristotle is more generous to poetry, and allows for a more nuanced concept of mimesis as its first principle. Like Plato, Aristotle categorizes poetry according to the medium, style, and objects that are represented or imitated (Poetics, 1447a15; Republic, 393c–394d and 395c). However, Aristotle’s treatment differs from that of Plato in two ways. Firstly, Aristotle regards mimesis as a foundational fact of human life and learning. Imitation is innate or, as Aristotle puts it, ‘rooted in nature’ (Poetics IV, 1–3). Aristotle argues that we enjoy mimesis for its cognitive stimulation, noting elsewhere that human beings enjoy the exercise of our natural cognitive capacities (Poetics IV, 4–5; Nicomachean Ethics, 7.12.1153a10; 10.4.1174b23–33). We enjoy the referential nature of images and like to compare the representation with the object it is meant to represent; we enjoy the likeness. Yet even in the case of mimesis of an object of which we have no model—for example, of which we ‘happen not to have seen the original’—we enjoy this too, Aristotle says, for its skill of execution (Poetics IV, 5). Thus it is not likeness alone which we value, but the production of the representation itself. Aristotle’s account goes further than a mere revaluation of mimesis by recognizing, secondly, the dimension of possibility within that which can be represented. Aristotle points out that poetry does not merely represent or reflect actual things and events, but also possible ones—those that could happen or be, or ought to happen or be. For such representations, of course, likeness can no longer be the evaluating criterion. Rather, such representations should conform to the expectation of probability and convey a sense of necessity. Where Plato allows only for proper or distorting representations, Aristotle considers poetic mimesis a medium of thought about the possible and its presentation. This can be seen in  Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy, in which Aristotle restores the social and psychological value of poetry. In contrast to Plato, who radically criticized tragic poets for their depictions of suffering, Aristotle argued that tragedy can have social and psychological benefits. The presentation of a tragic situation, where the tragic hero, though good, errs in such a way as to contribute to his or her downfall, should arouse both pity and fear and thus provoke a catharsis or release of negative emotions. Our ability to enjoy such emotions, as described by Aristotle, was taken up again by David Hume and remains a contemporary problem in the philosophy of literature.13

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The cathartic effect, of course, derives from the mimetic nature of the presentation: we enjoy spectacles of tragic catastrophes because they are (merely) representations of possibility. It is important to note that Aristotle did not simply affirm any representation of catastrophe as beneficial, for his attention to the outline, scale, unity, completeness, and necessity of the plot of tragic poetry, and to the intrinsic structure of its events, highlights the importance of poetic thinking and craft in the achievement of a cathartic result. In this context, Aristotle points out that poetry does not merely retell actual past actions or events. The historian may represent particulars—this and that occurrence that has happened in reference to specific persons—while the poet will represent universals, the kinds of things that could happen to human beings in general. Thus Aristotle claims that poetry is more philosophical than history, in some measure offering a rapprochement between philosophy and poetry. Aristotle’s poetics sets the tone for later defenses of poetry’s epistemic value. Horace offered that poetry should please and instruct—referring students of poetry, however, to the ‘Socratic writings’ to support the sound understanding poetic activity should reflect.14 Sir Philip Sydney defended poetry from puritanical moral and philosophical critique.15 Hobbes valued poetry’s capacity to illustrate thought grounded in a philosophical foundation.16 Of course critics well into the eighteenth century continued to denigrate poetry in variations upon Plato’s objections.17 Yet with the rise of aesthetics in the later eighteenth century, and Kant’s suggestion that poetry is able to express aesthetic ideas, poetry becomes a candidate for truth in its own right. Romantic thinkers in Kant’s wake are responsible for validating poetry not only on par with, but as superior to, philosophy. The experience of the beautiful in art, or aesthetic judgment, is the focus of much of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and forms the background for his comments on poetry.18 Aesthetic judgment according to Kant does not identify beauty within the object itself, but refers to the ‘free play’ between the faculties, imagination, and understanding, which its perception provokes. By enabling a kind of intuition of the supersensible in this free play, aesthetic judgment bridges the two otherwise incompatible worlds according to which in Kant’s system the human being must be conceived: as a free, autonomous being in the moral realm and as a being subject to nature’s laws in the physical realm. The experience of beauty, moreover, confirms our universal humanity, since although aesthetic judgments are subjective, they are also experienced as universal. Artistic genius, guided by nature, allows for the expression of free purposivity, or of a purposiveness of the object without, however, determining the latter according to a given purpose. The impact of Kant’s Critique of

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Judgment on aesthetics was profound, provoking the first claims for the autonomy of art.19 It is in this context that Kant affirms poetry as the ‘highest of the arts’ because it is capable of expressing aesthetic ideas. Yet by privileging poetry, Kant seems to introduce an apparent paradox, since: By an aesthetic idea I understand that representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without any definite thought, i.e. any concept, being capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be compassed and made intelligible by language.20

Poetry’s very medium is language; it is the highest of the arts for its expression of aesthetic ideas; yet aesthetic ideas are said to be resistant to expression in language, at least as conceptual expression. Yet if we consider poetry to involve a different use of language than ordinary language, Kant’s paradox dissolves. Kant allows for the suggestion that poetic language may present aesthetic ideas while not conceptually determining, or as Kant would put it, legislating, the thought it occasions. Words in poems of course must mean what they do in ordinary usage, and thus take the form of  conceptually-grounded denotation; however, these meanings need not be fixed exclusively to this meaning, for poetry may operate ‘by producing an excess of supplementary representation.’21 Kant claims, of aesthetic ideas, that they arouse ‘more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.’22 This leads us to consider poetry as a use of language that diverges in some way from ordinary conceptualization: poetic language of course relies on conceptual generalizations, but also exceeds them through connotation and resonance, and frustrates those generalizations by restoring the specificity and irreducibility to experiences of things. The image that gives sensibility to an idea becomes ‘inexhaustibly significant and evocative.’23 Along with Coleridge, the German Romantics are, of course, inheritors of this affirmation of poetry. While Coleridge makes claims from the side of poetic practice—for example, that there were no great poets who were not also profound philosophers24—the German Romantics aim to identify poetry directly with philosophy itself. Novalis (Freiherr von Hardenberg) claims that ‘Poetry is the true and absolute reality. This is the heart of my philosophy,’ a view shared by Friedrich Schlegel, who produced essays and aphorisms defending the primacy of art.25 A text attributed at once to  Hölderlin, Schelling, and the young Hegel announces the possibility that poetry should supersede philosophy, suggesting that without developed aesthetic sense, the true nature of reality cannot be comprehended. In a text found in Hegel’s

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notebooks (and handwriting), it is declared that philosophers must become aesthetically endowed, must become, in essence, poets. Poetry thereby obtains a higher dignity; it becomes again in the end what it was in the beginning—teacher of… the human race because there is no longer any philosophy, any history; poetic art alone will outlive all the rest of the sciences and arts.26

For later Hegel, of course, art, though deserving of his substantial analysis in the Ästhetik lectures,  will take its place behind religion and philosophy as manifestations of Geist. Not so for Schelling, whose dialectical account places art at the pinnacle of spirit. Later in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, though rejecting nearly everything about Kant’s account of the aesthetic, amplifies the impact of the aesthetic ideas. Nietzsche describes art and aesthetic experience—tragic poetry in particular—as the highest task  of human existence, and, despite art’s association with illusion, as  a deeper expression  of reality than the metaphysical tradition had ever grasped. Nietzsche’s affirmation of the poetic involves rejection of ordinary assumptions about truth, as he articulates in  his essay ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense.’ There he describes how the expression of truth as we ordinarily conceive it relies upon conventional linguistic designation and the intellectual practices of conceptualization which give rise to it. Concepts, Nietzsche argues, originate from metaphorical transfers of cognition, as repeated stimuli of the nerves yield images, which are then linked repeatedly to attending signifiers. Such signifiers then become matters of convention, concepts that are taken to refer unproblematically to knowledge of reality. However, in forming concepts, the generalization of the word, he argues, denies ‘the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth.…We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual’ in experience.27 Poetry, by breaking ordinary expectations of language, using expressive metaphor and imagery that restore specificity to experiences they describe, may allow for the expression of thoughts that interrupt the cognitive habits of sedimented language. Poetry can also destabilize the presumptions supported by grammar. To Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum,’ for example, Nietzsche argues in Beyond Good and Evil that this subject of thinking and of transparent self-reflection is a fiction supported by the grammatical fact of  verbal conjugation.28 Grammar encourages the idea of the subject, the ego cogito, as the agent of thinking; yet the assumptions we tend to make about such cognitive agency may be based in illusion. Poetic language, in contrast, can expose  such convention through playful

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non-­compliance. ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,’ suggests D.H. Lawrence in Nietzschean fashion.29 In contra-grammatical deference to the experience of alterity, Rimbaud writes: ‘Je est un autre.’30

 oetry as Revealing or Founding of Truth P and the Generative Poetic Imagination The distinction between poetic language—imagery-rich, metaphorical, phonically sensitive, and grammatically divergent—and ordinary language becomes central to philosophical accounts of poetry in the phenomenological tradition. While traditional philosophy is criticized by phenomenologists from Husserl onward for its abstract constructions which can tend to distance thought from its original subject-matter  (or sedimented thought from the original experience of cognition which gave rise to it), poetry comes to be affirmed in post-Husserlian phenomenology as a deeper or more original expression of being, through the notions of revealing and founding truth. It is held that, in addressing reality, philosophy relies on intellectual abstractions concerning both the subject and the object of its analysis or the language in which these are represented. In contrast, poetry evokes an experience of reality that may enable us to grasp both world and language in a more primal way. Metaphor, for example, at once disables our usual classifications and, by novel renderings of likeness, may restore a sense of wholeness and world-belonging to things. In light of metaphoric meaning, the poet Richard Wilbur claims that ‘it is a fundamental impulse of poetry to refresh the aspect of things.’31 In this context, truth may be conceived not as adequacy between an idea and its referent, but as an original event of revealing, which Heidegger describes as unconcealment, or bringing to appearance from a former state of hiddenness. Forms of art, especially poetry, which are held to engage such revealing are regarded as affording a more original access to things. This notion of revealing appears in Sartre’s political affirmation of literature as holding up a mirror to reality, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics, in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and it is affirmed even in some contemporary philosophical approaches to poetry. Of course poetic revealing may not necessarily expose the world naively or objectively, without reference to human concerns. While Heidegger sometimes treats the poet as a vessel of being who avoids an anthropocentric point of view, much of the poetry Heidegger interprets— from Hölderlin’s river poetry to Rilke’s elegies—ponders precisely the human relationship to nature or to the divine. It may be reality as valued through human consciousness which poetry most successfully reveals.

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In his essay ‘On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,’ Gadamer largely adopts Heidegger’s notion of poetry as revelatory truth, set within a hermeneutic account of language as a form of dialogue. Poetic language, in addressing things of the world, forms a kind of answer to the implicit question of their familiarity. Language makes a world familiar to us, makes us at home in it. While in ordinary experience and its expression we do not reflect on the proximity of things, a successful poem brings its subject-matter near to the reader; it allows the transient nearness of things a stay in our consideration, in our memory; it renders presence to fleetingness. The strangeness of language in poetry makes us aware of this nearness, and thereby ‘bears witness to our own being.’32 This idea is echoed in Roger Scruton’s recent affirmation, along Heideggerian lines, of the notion of revealing. But while Heidegger and Gadamer think that it is the world or being which is revealed, Scruton identifies the object of revelation to be human consciousness itself. ‘The truths hidden by religion, and revealed by art, are truths about us, about the archaeology of consciousness.’33 Whatever truth Scruton admits more for poetry beyond this subjective insight, it is truth that comes to inhere in things themselves, endowed to them, through the poetic act. This is the view, drawn from Rilke, that ‘the meaning of things is bestowed on them by poetry, through the act of saying them.’34 Poetic revealing can be illustrated with reference to particular works of poetry. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The Moose,’35 the speaker recounts a bus journey toward Boston through rural Nova Scotia, here described in the light of the setting sun: …where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins the flats’ lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets; on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, ridged as clamshells, past twin silver birches…

This lush, rhythmic description of the landscape, largely recalled by the speaker over several stanzas, follows the light of the setting sun as it moves

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over the horizon and casts its red glow on things. The reverie is eventually interrupted as we are brought to the present perception: The bus starts. The light grows richer; the fog, shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in.

With this stanza the tone shifts. As the bus sets out for the journey, the ‘richer’ light introduces an endowed perception, as fog envelopes the scene and induces a heightened awareness of nature’s proximity. The speaker describes the fog settling on the flowers and fences, details the stops along the way, fields, animals, and the rural inhabitants of the countryside as seen from the window, while intimate conversations in the bus are overheard. A lulling daydream is evoked by the flow of contemplation over many stanzas from one object of thought to another. Then the bus stops suddenly, for: A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus’s hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses)…

The sighting of the moose provokes wonder, a brief suspension of ordinary experience, giving the passengers all ‘this sweet/sensation of joy.’ The central object of the poem—what it reveals—is not the animal per se, but a momentary contact between human beings, in their modern, mechanical transport and the remote and wild, ‘impenetrable’ nature they traverse. The animal is rendered in human scale: it is immense, and yet identified metaphorically (first through the verb ‘towering’) with architectural structures, compared to a church and to a house and its safe shelter. Not through any literal description, but through this metaphorical likening, the moose is familiarized for the humans who encounter it; moreover, the image and its particular metaphorical rendering evoke a rare moment of union between the divine and domestic, the strange and the familiar.

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The final olfactory image of the lingering ‘smell of moose, an acrid/smell of gasoline’ returns the speaker to earthy materiality, but leaves the reader to question whether any transcendence sensed in the encounter can be wholly rooted in this world. The overall effect of the poem is felt as this lingering, and unresolved, question. While this effect can be indicated in concepts, as just attempted here, the effect remains more particular than the description; to paraphrase Kant, the poem provokes more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by (ordinary) words. The value of the human encounter with the wild moose is established in ways that evoke both human values and their relation to transcendence, but any conclusion to be drawn from it is left implicit and thus open to interpretation. Poetry’s revelatory truth-value thus does not afford clear determinations of the nature of reality, and poetry offers little by way of an unambiguous analysis of human consciousness. Instead what may be exposed is the difficulty for human perception, thought, or language, to grasp reality as it is—a difficulty that is overlooked by the habitual pragmatism of everyday experience and the methodological assumptions of scientific thought. Consider, for example, Frost’s poem ‘For Once, Then, Something.’ Here the subject-matter of the poem is ostensibly an object of perception, glimpsed at the bottom of a well, but the very unclarity of the perception and the uncertain identity of  the object—for ‘water came to rebuke the too clear water’—generates other thoughts. The speaker describes having peered into a well, and instead of lingering over his own reflection as usual, he notices something else, and his perspective is shifted: Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.36

The speaker is clear that what is at stake is not merely the surety of perception but a possible truth discerned for a moment ‘beyond the picture.’ If this ‘picture’ stands for the way the world looks to us, then to see beyond and through it is to have an insight beyond what ordinary perception typically allows. But it is important that at a literal level, the picture beyond which the speaker momentarily sees is a picture of himself reflected in the water. This literal

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reflection of the self can stand for a habitual way of regarding reality through the lens of self-orientation. Only when the speaker gets beyond seeing his own reflection in things, it is implied, does he encounter something, uncertain as it is, that is ‘more of the depths.’ The poem then poses two alternatives—that that something glimpsed may have been truth—something immaterial—or just the physical effect of a pebble lying at the bottom of the well. The final phrase ‘for once, then, something’ settles on neither option, allowing the reader to linger in the question and the wonder it provokes. The reader is exposed to the consideration of a truth that lies beyond and behind appearances, yet with no reassurances of its status. Frost’s poem does not involve truth as assertion, but as an event of genuine questioning; any knowledge involved in such poetry is a matter not of possession, but of seeking. The ambiguity, uncertainty, or provisionality of poetic revealing, however, may be at odds with some aspects of Heidegger’s theory of poetry. For in ‘Origin of the Work of Art,’ poetic revealing is not merely receptive, linguistic exposure of beings or being itself. There Heidegger makes the further claim that poetic revealing yields the founding or instituting of truth, which Heidegger explains by reference to several art forms. Heidegger describes the Greek temple, for example, as a work of art that sets up earth or the stone out of which it is made and, by constructing a space for the meaningful contemplation of the gods, sets forth the world of the divine for those who enter it. The temple both reveals the divine and establishes the human relation to it. While Heidegger draws on various arts to illustrate this revealing-founding process, they are all, he argues, grounded in the structure of language as naming and thus bringing to appearance (or revealing) beings. Just as the ancient Greeks engaged poetry to narrate or dramatize stories of the gods—and thus to establish the human relationship to the divine—we would say on this view that modern poetry too establishes, by making a stay in language, our otherwise fleeting intuitions of transcendence, or the engraving of ideas upon history. Thus for Heidegger, poetry is the preeminent or most original form of this kind of establishment of truth. ‘The nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, then, is the founding of truth.’37 There are problems with this aspect of Heidegger’s poetic theory, quite apart from whether the privilege he. like Kant, grants to linguistic over other arts is justified. Heidegger renders poetic language as the expression of being itself, rejecting the view of poetry as derivative of reality, as Plato had espoused, and overlooking poetry’s relation to imagined possibility as emphasized by Aristotle. Not a mere projection of imagination, but an ontological event, a grounding of ‘world,’ poetic founding is equated by Heidegger with political and historical founding, an equation problematically entangled in the

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­ istorical context of German nationalism.38 In this context Hölderlin is mish represented as the poet of a particularly German destiny, confounding the poet’s late eighteenth-century writing on German landscape with early twentieth-­century politics. Against Heidegger, Adorno points out that what a given poem says in a literal sense is often contradicted by its other moments and by its formal disjointures; the truth content emerges not as the founding of world by the poem, but as the result of the totality of moments in the poem itself which, unlike philosophical systems, refuse synthesis or finalization. While Heidegger tends to collapse the distinction between poetry and the reality it could be said to found, Adorno insists on the aesthetic quality of the work of art, by which he means that it is a semblance. ‘Every interpretation of poetry that formulates it as Aussage [message or statement] violates poetry’s mode of truth by violating its illusory character.’39 In Adorno’s view the alignment of poetry with founding (at least a cultural) reality, as Heidegger aims to do, neutralizes the critical capacity of poetry to expose reality by its very difference from it, to present the possible over and against the actual. In this inversion of Plato’s assessment, the very ‘truth’ of poetry is not denied, but affirmed, by its illusory character. Yet Adorno’s solution, to place the critical value of poetry primarily in its illusory character, or indeed to characterize poetry principally as illusory, may be an unsatisfying one, if poetry’s yield for the reader emerges through the tensions between revealing and invention, exposure and creation, and if what poetry reveals has real  implications for human life and self-understanding. Consider these lines from Robert Frost’s poem ‘After Apple-Picking,’ which describe the speaker’s estranged perception of the world as seen through a sheet of ice. The perceptual defamiliarization the speaker describes could reflect worldly experience, but also gives way to poetic perception or imagining, captured in the notion of a ‘form’ of dreaming: I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take.40

Here the speaker describes a present disorientation attributed to having gazed at the world through a sheet of ice that formed on the water in the drinking

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trough. The speaker designates the ice ‘a pane of glass’ that induced a strange perception of the surrounding field, the metaphor likening the natural phenomenon to a human-made object and highlighting the problem of human perception. ‘It melted, and I let it fall and break,’ ought to have signaled the end of the effect of that induced perception. But the next lines, in abrupt rhythmic alteration between truncated lines and full iambic pentameter, introduce the ‘dreaming’ induced by that defamiliarization. The speaker claims knowledge of the ‘form’ of that dreaming, the imaginative generation that gives rise not only to the dreams of sleeping, but to poetry. The strangeness of alternative seeing lasts long beyond the perceptual provocation, and here the poet does not merely linger over it but productively describes images of apples ‘magnified,’ that ‘appear and disappear,’ and reflects on the trouble of the apples’ not falling, lest they, in touching the ground, become ‘of no worth.’ Indeed the speaker’s ‘heaven-bound’ ladder is said, at the poem’s outset, to be still pointing upward as it rests against the tree, while at the poem’s end, the speaker’s concern is earthly, considering whether the sleep coming on will be like the impending winter sleep of a groundhog hibernating or a human sleep. The whole metaphoric situation of the poem, then, does not only reveal, but constructs a world, one which the speaker’s consciousness somewhat precariously suspends between the poles of heaven and earth, ripening and falling, wakefulness and dream. The effort of the apple harvest, unfinished and now implicitly questioned by the speaker— ‘overtired/of the great harvest I myself desired’—may stand for human toil and striving as such. Thus while the world of the poem, as a poetic construction, could be said to be illusory, its truth content involves, in its resounding implication, the reality of human endeavor. In this poetry, revealing is tentative and evocative, rather than founding and determining, and may generate critical and exploratory reflection on reality and the human place in it. Such generative revealing will not result from poetry that relies on sentimentality, on received ideas, or on staid metaphors that fail to reorient our cognitive attention. Poetry must make new connections that prompt thought and feeling in new directions and may be related to truth insofar as it opens up consideration of our lives in new and genuine ways. But revealing alone may be insufficient to account for the variability and scope of poetry’s relationship to truth. Apart from the provisionality and ambiguity of poetic revealing, mentioned above, we might also consider the imaginative content of poetry and its various ways of generating meaning. It has been argued that metaphor, for example, can generate new meaning that is irreducible to the meanings of the terms it compares.41 Through such means poetry describes, but also invents; poetry

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elaborates and furthers experiences not only of observation but of imagination. Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘When I most wink, then do mine eyes best see,’ describes the speaker’s relation to his beloved through dream. But the sonnet also implicitly articulates the poet’s (and reader’s) relation to the content of poetry through imagining, via consciousness that is not, like mundane everyday perception, ‘unrespected.’ Not only in sleep, but in poetry, imagination, diverging from present perception and in its illusory character, allows human thoughts to be ‘bright in dark directed.’ As this imaginative propulsion of thought, poetry does not only reveal but create experiences. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ undertakes an imagined journey to the thirteenth-century Mongolian emperor’s summer palace— A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted…42

—which neither the poet nor any reader could experience in reality. More locally, but equally generative, Rilke offers these lines as an Orphic invitation to imagining: Singe die Gärten, mein Herz, die du nicht kennst; wie in Glas eingegossene Gärten, klar, unerreichbar. [Sing the gardens, my heart, that you do not know; like gardens poured in glass, clear, unreachable.]43

These gardens poured in glass are not reflections or imitations or even revelations of any world we could experience in actuality, but produce an imagining that expands experience beyond reality’s bounds, reachable only in poetic invention. The tension between revelation and invention of world is thematically and formally explored in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Stevens renders both explicit and ambiguous the problem of reality or the relationship between poetic language and the reality it would represent or describe. In ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight,’ the reader’s consideration of a perceptual  experience  is invited by the speaker: Say that it is a crude effect, black reds, Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are To be anything else in the sunlight of the room, Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor, Too actual, things that in being real Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

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The speaker addresses how real things may seem to be ‘too much as they are… too actual’ to be susceptible to change by metaphor and imagination. In the next breath, however, that reliable actuality is itself challenged: And yet this effect is a consequence of the way We feel and, therefore, is not real, except In our sense of it….44

In other poems Stevens explores the power of imagination to create new objects of thought. His poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ offers multiple renderings of an object of thought as transformed by metaphor, in the poet’s presentation of thirteen different scenes anchored by the image of a blackbird. Here poetry undoes what Nietzsche described as the conventional fixation of language in its habitual association of an image with a given signification. Considering a few of these ‘ways of looking,’ we may think of poetry as the promotion of multiplicity and even inexhaustibility in our interpretations not only of linguistic images but of the world from which they are drawn. In one presentation of the blackbird, the world is seen as artful: The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.

In another of the passages, it is not the blackbird itself, but merely its shadow, that provokes ponderous thought, the provocation of which cannot be deciphered: Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.

The blackbird’s possible perspective on the world, of course, may also be conjectured, as in this rendering: The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

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In another scene the blackbird then also signals ambiguity. For the presence of the blackbird, with its darkness against the snow in the cedar tree, makes afternoon seem like evening, and the moment laden with what is to come: It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.45

The ways of looking playfully promoted by Stevens’s poem seem to resist any overarching conceptual assimilation. If there is any truth to be revealed, it concerns language as play, and the forms of response, at once affective, cognitive, or perceptual, that may be generated thereby. Such poetry unsettles our linguistic uniformities—not to undo them, but to reveal them for what they are and to refresh our attention to alternatives. As Simon Blackburn suggests ‘a poetic sensitivity to those uniformities, or even the ability to bend and transcend them, is unquestionably our best guide to who we are, and even to where we ought to be heading.’ The dialogue between philosophy and poetry continues to centre on the problem of truth, which, where it does arise  in poetry, may involve novel revelations of reality, including that underlying our own forms of experience, or  generative creation, which may illuminate by contrast.  The play between revealing and invention, furthermore,  may cast light on the limits of reality as we know it, or of our conventional conceptions thereof.

Notes 1. What is meant by ‘poetry’ here may depend on context: poetry can refer to the epic, dramatic, or lyric works of ancient Greece; while the German Dichtung may refer to poetic forms as well as literary prose, such as the novel or other fictional narrative; while in a modern context poems, whether formal or not, are usually distinguished from literary prose. While the first half of this chapter deals with historical accounts of poetry, and thus with the wider senses of the term, the second half deals with poetry or poems as distinct from prose. 2. Historical critiques of poetry will be discussed in the first part of the chapter. For more recent criticism: Gregory Currie, in his somewhat misleadingly titled essay ‘Creativity and the Insight Literature Brings,’ denies that literature should be associated with truth or other epistemic value (Paul and Kaufman 2014, 39–61).

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3. Historical affirmations of poetry will be discussed in the first part of the chapter. Twentieth- and twenty-­first century affirmations include Ralph Barton Perry, in ‘Poetry and Philosophy,’ (Perry 1902) who allows for some poets to achieve philosophical truth by way of local understanding of detail within an overarching world-view. Martin Heidegger offers the notion of poetic truth as a form of revealing, in Poetry, Language, and Thought (Heidegger 1971). Hans-Georg Gadamer articulates a hermeneutic variation on this position in ‘On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,’ (Gadamer 1986). Several essays in a recent volume, The Philosophy of Poetry (Gibson 2015), affirm in some measure poetry’s relation to truth: Roger Scruton accepts, with some qualification, Heidegger’s notion of poetic revealing in ‘Poetry and Truth’ in Gibson (2015, 149–61); Simon Blackburn, in ‘Can an Analytic Philosopher Read Poetry?’ (111–26), affirms some poetry’s ‘truth to feeling [which] gives the poet a toehold on truth’ (113); Angela Leighton, in ‘Poetry’s Knowing’ (162–80), suggests that poetry like philosophy can undertake ‘an examination of the very nature of knowing’ (177). 4. Heidegger (1971). 5. Theodor Adorno, ‘Parataxis: on Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,’ in Adorno (1992), 109–49. Here 112. 6. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (1997), 665. 7. Plato, Republic (1937). Plato, Ion (1983). Aristotle, Poetics (1995). Some translations from these texts have been altered. For an example of a contemporary manifestation of this debate: while Martha Nussbaum, following in the tradition of Aristotle, grants poetry moral and philosophical relevance, Greg Currie denounces literature, and such accounts as Nussbaum’s, on moral and epistemological grounds, demanding empirical justification from the social sciences of any claims for literature’s merits. See Nussbaum (1990, 1997) and Currie (1995, 2013, 2016). 8. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (2003). Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990). For a contemporary discussion of literary mimesis, see Jennifer Gosetti-­Ferencei, ‘The Mimetic Dimension: Literature Between Neuroscience and Phenomenology’ (2014). 9. John R. Searle, ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ (1975). 10. Gerhard Lauer, ‘Going Empirical: Why We Need Cognitive Literary Studies,’ Journal of Literary Theory, 3/1 (2009), 145–54. A critical response is offered in Gosetti-Ferencei (2014). 11. Plato’s ‘highly flexible’ use of the concept of mimesis is discussed by Penelope Murray in her introduction to Plato on Poetry (1997), here p. 3. 12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (2002), xxiv. 13. David Hume, ‘On Tragedy,’ in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (2006). Susan L. Feagin takes up Hume’s essay directly in ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy,’ (1983); as does Flint Shier, in ‘Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment’ (1983).

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14. Horace (1965). 15. Sir Philip Sydney, An Apology for Poetry, or in Defense of Poesy (2002). 16. See Timothy Raylor, ‘Hobbes on the Nature and Scope of Poetry’ (2016). 17. Nineteenth-century examples include Thomas Babington Macaulay, who associated poetry with deception and fiction and opposed it to reality, philosophy, and any discernment of truth (Macaulay 1892, 8). Thomas Love Peacock rejected poetry as ‘the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment’ (1875, 335). 18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1987). 19. ‘Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is the site where art irrupts into European philosophy with the force of trauma,’ writes Nick Land in ‘Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche’ (1991, 240). Kai Hammerstein writes: ‘No art was ever considered autonomous before Kant,’ in The German Aesthetic Tradition (2002, ix). 20. Kant (1987, 190). 21. Gasché (1991, xxv). 22. Kant (1987, 183). 23. Raymond Kenneth Elliott, Aesthetics, Imagination and the Unity of Experience, ed. Paul Crowther (Hampshire, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 8. 24. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria part II (1983), 25–26. 25. Novalis, Philosophical Writings (1997), 117. 26. First published as ‘Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus: Ein handschriftlicher Fund,’ Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historisch Klasse, 5 (Hölderlin 1917). Quoted here from Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory (1988), 154–55, here p. 155. The document found in 1914 by Franz Rosenzweig in Hegel’s notebooks and titled as such by Rosenzweig. Although in Hegel’s handwriting, it was first thought to reflect the thought of Schelling or Hölderlin, as all three studied together at the Tübingen Stift, and the essay remains published in the collected works of all three thinkers. Otto Pöggeler claimed that the document should be restored to the oeuvre of Hegel, as discussed by Benjamin Pollock, ‘Franz Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program,”’ (2010), who sides somewhat with Rosenzweig’s attribution to Schelling. A compelling case for Hölderlin is offered by Eckhart Förster, ‘To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again: Hölderlin and the Oldest Sy’ (2015), especially 776–78. 27. Nietzsche, ‘Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (1954), 46. 28. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1966), 24. 29. D.H. Lawrence, ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’ (2002), 195. 30. Arthur Rimbaud, Letter of 15 May 1871 (1975). 31. Richard Wilbur, The Catbird’s Song (1997), 139. For a discussion of metaphor and truth in Wilbur see William Tate, ‘Something in Us Like the Catbird’s Song: Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur on the Truth of Poetry’ (2010).

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32. Gadamer (1986, 115). 33. Scruton, ‘Poetry and Truth,’ in Gibson (2015, 150). 34. Scruton, ‘Poetry and Truth,’ in Gibson (2015, 160). 35. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (1983). 36. Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost (1979). 37. Heidegger (1971, 75). 38. In this vein, Heidegger writes: ‘Whenever art happens—that is, whenever there is a beginning—a thrust enters history, history either beings or starts over again. History means here not a sequence in time of events… [but] the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment.’ (1971, 77). For my critique of Heidegger’s politicization of poetic founding see Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (Gosetti-Ferencei 2004) and ‘The Poetics of Thinking’ (2006). 39. ‘Parataxis’ (in Adorno 1992), 114. 40. Frost (1979). 41. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’ (1978). Max Black, ‘More about metaphor’ (1979). 42. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan,’ in The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1997), 249. 43. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (1942), 102–03. 44. Wallace Stevens, ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’ (1997), 370. 45. Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (1997), 74.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 1992. Notes to Literature, Vol. II. Edited by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Aristotle. 1995. Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Auerbach, Erich. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bishop, Elizabeth. 1983. The Complete Poems 1927–1979. New  York, NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Black, Max. 1979. More about Metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1983. Biographia Literaria Part II. Edited by W. J. Bate and James Engell. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1997. The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by William Keach. London: Penguin. Currie, Gregory. 1995. The Moral Psychology of Fiction. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (2): 250–259.

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———. 2013. Does Fiction Civilize Us? New York Times, Sunday Review, June 2. ———. 2016. Literature and Theory of Mind. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, ed. Noel Carroll and John Gibson. London: Routledge. Elliott, Raymond Kenneth. 2006. Aesthetics, Imagination and the Unity of Experience. Edited by Paul Crowther. Hampshire, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Feagin, Susan L. 1983. The Pleasures of Tragedy. American Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1): 95–104. Frost, Robert. 1979. The Poetry of Robert Frost, Complete and Unabridged. Edited by Edward Connery Latham. New York, NY: Henry Holt. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1986. On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth. In The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 105–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1991. Foreword. In Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, John, ed. 2015. The Philosophy of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer. 2004. Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. ———. 2006. The Poetics of Thinking. In Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates, ed. David Rudrum. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. The Mimetic Dimension: Literature Between Neuroscience and Phenomenology. British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (4): 425–448. Hammerstein, Kai. 2002. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, and Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1917. Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus: Ein handschriftlicher Fund. Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. ———. 1988. Essays and Letters on Theory. Translated and edited by Thomas Pfau. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Horace. 1965. The Art of Poetry. In Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Hume, David. 2006. On Tragedy. In Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 221–230. New York, NY: Cosimo. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated Werner S.  Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Land, Nick. 1991. Art as Insurrection: The Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson. London: Routledge. Lauer, Gerald. 2009. Going Empirical: Why We Need Cognitive Literary Studies. Journal of Literary Theory 3 (1): 145–154. Lawrence, D.H. 2002. Song of a Man Who Has Come Through. In The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.

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Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1892. Select Essays of Macaulay: Milton, Bunyan, Johnson, Goldsmith, Madame D’Arblay. Edited by Samuel Thurber. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Murray, Penelope, ed. 1997. Plato on Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. ‘Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’. In The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Viking Press. ———. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Vintage. Novalis. 1997. Philosophical Writings. Translated by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Paul, Samuel Elliott, and Scott Barry Kaufman, eds. 2014. The Philosophy of Creativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacock, Thomas Love. 1875. The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, Including His Novels, Poems, Fugitive Pieces, Criticisms, Etc. Edited by Henry Cole. London: R. Bentley & Son. Perry, Ralph Barton. 1902. Poetry and Philosophy. The Philosophical Review 11 (6): 576–591. Plato. 1937. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1983. Two Comic Dialogues: Ion and Hippias Major. Translated by Paul Woodruff. New York, NY: Hackett. Pollock, Benjamin. 2010. Franz Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program”. New German Critique 111: 59–95. Raylor, Timothy. 2016. Hobbes on the Nature and Scope of Poetry. In The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. Al P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra, 603–623. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling. In On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks, 141–157. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1942. Sonnets to Orpheus (bilingual edition). Translated by M.D. Herter Norton. New York, NY and London: W. W. Norton. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1975. Letter of 15 May 1871. In Lettres du voyant, ed. Gérald Schaeffer. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Searle, John R. 1975. The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse. New Literary History 6 (2, Winter): 319–332.

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Shier, Flint. 1983. Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment. In Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics, ed. Peter Lamarque, 73–92. Aberdeen University Press. Stevens, Wallace. 1997. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York, NY: Library of America. Sydney, Sir Philip. 2002. An Apology for Poetry, or in Defense of Poesy. Edited and translated by R.W. Maslen. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tate, William. 2010. Something in Us Like the Catbird’s Song: Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur on the Truth of Poetry. Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 13 (3): 105–123. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilbur, Richard. 1997. The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces 1963–1995. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.

6 ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography, and Autobiography Christopher Hamilton

How are we to understand the kind of truth telling that is peculiar to autobiographical and biographical writing? We know, of course, that there are plenty of autobiographies and biographies whose aim is not to tell the truth, but, rather, to present a self morally better, more interesting or eccentric, of greater sensitivity and intelligence, more roguish or whatever than is or was the case in reality. But there is no doubt that Genevieve Lloyd is right in remarking that what we usually imagine is that an ‘[a]utobiography purports to present the truth of a self as grasped by itself. It tries to present the self as an object grasped from its own perspective, thus achieving a coincidence between subjective and objective in the putative unity of the narrator and the protagonist’ (Lloyd 1986, 170). The same may be said, mutatis mutandis, of a biography, insofar as we imagine that the subject of the biography, when presented with the work, will see a truthful account of himself or herself in the work. But what is that truth, what is a truthful presentation of the self in an autobiography or biography? It is this question with which I shall be concerned in this chapter. There has been an enormous amount of work on the theory of autobiography—and to a lesser extent biography—since the publication in 1956 of Georges Gusdorf ’s Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie, available in English since 1980 (Gusdorf 1980). The modern autobiography is often supposed to have arisen, in particular, with Rousseau’s Confessions, although there is a general C. Hamilton (*) King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_6

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agreement that the autobiography can be traced back as far at least as Augustine’s Confessions and the biography to Plutarch’s Lives. The terrain is by now well tilled, with, for example, feminist approaches suggesting (amongst other things) that the identity of female autobiographers (and, by implication, of women as subjects of biography) is and ought to be understood in relational terms, the identity in question not being that of an autonomous individualistic selfhood, the self, as one might suppose, of Enlightenment individualism and typical of the ‘male’ (auto)biographical approach—a point to which I shall return later in a somewhat different form as applying to both men and women. The distinction in question is surely too sharply drawn, as Paul John Eakin has pointed out (Eakin 1999, 50ff.), but there can be no doubt that the field has been invigorated by the discussions in question. Then there are complex issues concerning what kind of text is autobiographical anyway: as James Olney says, there are cases such as that of Tolstoy where A Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilyich present themselves as virtually the same work—metaphoric representations of one and the same experience and consequent vision—while bearing titles that would identify one as an autobiography, the other as a piece of fiction and a work of art. (Olney 1980, 9)

There is also Nietzsche’s well-known related claim that ‘every great philosophy hitherto…[has been] the confession on the part of its originator and a type of unintended and unnoticed memoir’ (Nietzsche 1988 [1886], §6). Yet, even if Nietzsche is right, it can hardly be denied that philosophical texts (usually; often) look non-autobiographical, just as, of the two texts mentioned by Tolstoy, one looks fictional, the other not. However, despite the high theoretical and psychological interest of such issues, generally speaking, as Christopher Cowley, the editor of a recent collection on The Philosophy of Autobiography, has noted (Cowley 2014), philosophers have been less interested in autobiography and a fortiori the question of truth in (auto)biography than one might have supposed. Theoretical reflection has often been left to those approaching the issues concerned from a background in literary studies. That is, there has been surprisingly little direct, systematic interest from philosophers in (auto)biography. Philosophical interest in such matters has normally been indirect, through, for example, the investigation of such issues as the narrative nature of the self, self-deception, and the like. And this is so despite the fact that there are a number of outstanding biographies written by philosophers, such as Augustine’s Confessions or Mill’s Autobiography.

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It is, indeed, with respect to Mill’s Autobiography that Martin Warner— who is one of those philosophers who are interested in the question of truth in the context of autobiographical works—has indicated one major problem that such a type of writing might have for delivering the truth. He argues that the autobiographical self might accept, and write in the light of, a theory about how to arrive at the truth, which theory might seem to us, the readers, to have the opposite effect, that is, to block access to the truth about the life being explored. Warner suggests, as I have intimated, that we see this in the case of Mill’s Autobiography. As is well known, Mill sought in that work to show that his early intense cultivation of intellectual concerns, which left his emotional life desiccated, could be rectified, indeed in his case was rectified, by showing how, in the human mind, ‘one form of “cultivation” can be “joined to” and “balanced by” others, which thereby provide “complements and correctives”, and by such additions enable the mind to press forward through “successive phases”’ (Warner 2016, 115). Warner argues, amongst other things, that what Mill’s autobiographical writing shows is that he remained emotionally immature and that he was himself unable to see this, in part on account of the ‘empiricist, associationist and developmental theory of mind’ (Warner 2016, 110) to which he was committed. Warner makes clear that this does not show the model to be false. ‘But’, he goes on: Mill’s apparent lack of self-awareness prevents his Autobiography from adding any plausibility to that model, and the way his theory seems to help him hide from himself his own deficiencies encourages thoughtful readers to ask, reflexively, how far they could use such a model in telling the truth about their own lives. (Warner 2016, 116)

Warner’s point is well taken and provides a general warning against too ready an embrace of a theory of the mind in the pursuit of what is surely one of the central aims of autobiography, namely, self-knowledge. But there are other problems for truth in (auto)biographical writing that have been noted by philosophers. One issue is put in very stark terms by Francis Stuart, whose own writing is often deeply autobiographical whilst being presented in the form of novels: ‘What I find is that if I write about certain memories and then try and recall them later, what I remember is what I’ve written about them’ (Stuart 2014). In part, what is in question here is that the self that narrates relates from the perspective of the moment of narration, and that means, obviously enough, that what it claims about the past can only ever be the-past-from-the-present-point-of-view. That certainly does not condemn the narration to falsity in any straightforward sense, but it complicates

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the notion of truth: since the narrating self has been shaped by the events it is exploring, it is necessarily in a crucial sense different from the self that ­underwent those events and will bring however subtly different a sense of what they were to the narration from the sense that the self undergoing them, at the moment of doing so, could have had of them. Our subjection to time is, from that point of view, the blessing and the curse of the autobiographer, since without time there would be no self to relate, and with time the narration must necessarily appear frustratingly elusive, at least to some extent or in some respects. Augustine may have been especially assailed by such frustration, as Lloyd points out (Lloyd 1986, 171ff.), since he compared his own temporality to the eternal stillness of God where truth was to be found, but the problem clearly applies in a secular context as well. This problem is well documented in the literature. For example, at the outset of his book Hermann Hesse’s Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and the Confessional Imagination, Eugene Stelzig reports the view of Georg Misch that in an autobiography ‘the contents of consciousness are not reproduced mechanically, but re-experienced, reshaped according to conditions of the present state of mind’, so that an autobiography ‘can only express the author’s present understanding of life’ (Stelzig 1988, 6). Again, Stelzig quotes Gusdorf ’s claim, originally derived from a comment of Jules Lequier’s, that the writing of an autobiography is a matter of faire et en faisant se faire—making, and in making, making oneself (Stelzig 1988, 7), which, Gusdorf says, ‘ought to be the motto of autobiography’ (Gusdorf 1980 [1956], 44). The issue here is not one of deliberate falsification or of mendacity concerning the facts of a life. It is related, rather, to Kierkegaard’s well-known comment that we live forwards but understand our lives backwards. This fact means that looking back across a life, as in an (auto)biography, is bound to involve misrepresentation in one way or another because earlier events come to have a certain meaning in the light of later ones, a meaning that they could not have had at the time. Consider in this context a striking comment made by Kafka in his diary on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war in Russia.—Afternoon, swimming lessons’. Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer comment on this as follows: This is simply an especially striking example of the way in which events that the world has later learnt to evaluate as historical only seldom were seen in this way at the first time of their arising and origin. If they are even noticed, then they are so as part of everyday life in which infinitely more is perceived and demands attention. (Neitzel and Welzer 2011, 27)

What Neitzel and Welzer say here concerning historical events clearly also applies to the events of an individual life. From the later vantage point of the

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(auto)biographer, some event may seem replete with meaning when, at the time it occurred, there was little to remark in it, and its selection and exploration in an (auto)biography will reflect this later understanding. And even if it is true, as it no doubt is, that there are events in a person’s life that at the time of their occurrence strike him or her as significant or replete with meaning in some way, what that meaning is will seem now subtly, now radically, different from the vantage point of the later (auto)biographer, since it will have worked its way out across a life in ways that could not, or could barely, be seen or anticipated at the time of its occurrence. Consider in this context a moment from Rousseau’s Confessions. In Book Seven, there is a moment about which Rousseau says that ‘[i]f there is one incident in my life that portrays my nature in its true colours, it is the one I am about to relate…Whoever you are, who aspire to know a fellow-man, read, if you dare, the two or three pages that follow; you are about to know in full J-J.  Rousseau’ (Rousseau 2008 [1789], 311). Rousseau relates how he entered the rooms of a courtesan, Zulietta, whom he describes in such terms as to leave the reader in no doubt that he finds her overwhelmingly appealing, so beautiful does she appear in his eyes: he is filled with longing for her. However, as he rushes to consummate his desire, he is suddenly struck, he tells us, ‘by a mortal chill’, so great as to reduce him to tears and make his legs give way. ‘I sat down and wept like a child’. What, he asks, could be the reason of this reaction? He is sure it is not that she carries a disease, but his sudden sense of her as a cheap whore, available to anyone, must be provoked by something. Continuing his intimacies with her, he discovers the cause: she has a blind or inverted nipple (un téton borgne). ‘I suddenly saw, as clear as day’, he reports, ‘that instead of the most charming woman I could possibly imagine, what I was holding in in my arms was a sort of monster, a reject of nature, of men, and of love’ (Rousseau 2008, 312). Now, whatever else we say about Rousseau’s reaction, what is surely clear is that it could not have had the significance for him when it occurred that it had later. The reason for this is that, however devastating he found the experience at the time, it could only be the incident in his life that he thought able to reveal his true nature fully in the light of the fact that later in his life this sense was not given to him by some other incident. In other words, even if, as is surely doubtful anyway, that the significance of the encounter with Zulietta struck him at the time as being the most revelatory event of his life concerning his character, that event could only retain that meaning for him because it was supplanted by nothing in his later life that was able to be revelatory in this way. And that means that its meaning when Rousseau writes about it could not be the meaning it had at the time of its occurrence: its being placed in the

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context of the later events of his life casts those events in a certain light as they must cast the encounter with Zulietta in a certain light. Moreover, in any case, as I have already intimated, it stretches credibility to suppose that Rousseau experienced the encounter with Zulietta in the terms proffered in the autobiography. His later sense of it as so revelatory is surely a later interpretation as he mulls over what it could all have meant. None of this is to claim, of course, that what Rousseau says is in any straightforward sense false. No doubt he really did think the incident with Zulietta significant in the way he describes. We can, in any case, give him the benefit of the doubt. It is rather that, in seeing it this way, he is, to use the formulation mentioned earlier, reshaping it according to the exigencies of his state of mind as he writes his autobiography, reflecting not simply on this incident but all of those of his life that strike him as significant in one way or another. A related phenomenon is often to be found in biographical writing where what is made of the subject’s life reflects in part a sense of what is important in the life of the biographer. One clear example of this is Samuel Johnson’s magnificent The Life of Richard Savage in which Johnson’s own tragic sense of life and immense pity for human beings in all their pains achieve expression in his comment that ‘whatever faults may be imputed to him [Savage], the virtue of suffering well cannot be denied him’ (Johnson 1831 [1779/81], 266). Again, the point is not that what Johnson says is false; it is rather that the truth it expresses hovers uneasily somewhere between Johnson and Savage, as is confirmed in Richard Holmes’s of the biography, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (2005), which explores Johnson’s emotional investment in the case of Savage. We might add to these difficulties the notorious fallibility of memory, so movingly explored by Primo Levi in his final autobiographical assault on trying to understand the meaning of the Holocaust: ‘even under normal conditions’, he writes, seeking to draw a general lesson from his experiences in the highly particular conditions of Auschwitz, ‘a slow degradation [of memories] is at work, an obfuscation of the outlines, a physiological oblivion, so to speak, which few memories resist’ (Levi 2007 [1986], 14). Even with a genuine desire to record the past as it was in an autobiography, one is assailed by the unreliability of memories, the human memory of each of us resembling, as Stuart Hampshire has suggested, a compost heap, in which ‘all the organic elements, one after another as they are added, interpenetrate each other and help to form a mixture in which the original ingredients are scarcely distinguishable, each ingredient being at least modified, even transformed, by later ingredients’ (Hampshire 1989, 121).

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In addition to these problems, there is the fact that an (auto)biography will recast the life of the subject in something of the model of a literary figure, but that, as Peter Lamarque (2007) has argued, our lives are significantly different from those of characters in a literary fiction, at least that kind of fiction that Lamarque seems to have uppermost in his mind, that is, the type exemplified by the classical realist nineteenth-century novel, such as those by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Lamarque’s argument for this claim is fairly long and complicated, but, roughly speaking, he argues that a piece of literature is created by its author with aesthetic and moral concerns in mind, and the elements of the work are structured and organised in such a way as to subserve this aesthetic and moral design. Nothing is out of place or accidental. In our lives, however, there is no such organisation and much that is random or a matter of chance, having no purpose, let alone one that works in the service of an overall pattern or organisation. Moreover, although we each have a personality, as does a fictional character, in the latter case the aesthetic form of presentation is part of what our attention is drawn to in the text, and this is clearly unlike the nature of personality in the real world. It is worth pausing a moment over this. Apart from the fact that we forget a great deal of what happens to us and what we do, that our existence is in this sense, as Peter Goldie has said, ‘massively “gappy”’ (Goldie 2014, 164), our lives are also punctuated by inconsequentialities and boredom, banalities and empty moments. Further, our projects in general are fulfilled only partially: our conception of the finality at which we aim is always more than we achieve, in that our understanding of what might be possible outstrips the reality of what emerges—a book, a marriage, a friendship, a career always promises more than it can give. From the inside perspective, our lives are much more chaotic, less ordered, and much more confused than they ever appear in a telling or retelling. As Virginia Woolf puts it: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. (Woolf 2008 [1919], 9)

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It is no doubt for such reasons that, in a review of Oliver Sacks’s autobiography, On the Move, Will Self quotes Sacks’s claim that ‘Each of us…constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative’ and then comments: ‘[P]ersonally I think it’s only the social being that is narrated—to ourselves we are always “such stuff as dreams are made of ”’ (Self 2015). There is clearly much truth in what Self says: the narrative of a life offered in an (auto)biography cannot but smooth out or ignore much of the emptiness, confusion, and banality of a life. This is not, or need not be, for reasons of mendacity, but simply because it would be impossibly stifling, indeed impossible, to capture all this in a telling of the life. A told life will always be more coherent than the life itself is. One very striking example of this is Sartre’s autobiography of his first ten years, Les Mots (Words). At one point he speaks of one M. Simonnot, a friend of his grandfather’s, with whom the young Sartre lived, who took lunch with the family each Thursday. Sartre reports that when M. Simonnot was asked about his preferences, ‘he took his time to reflect and turned his inner attention to the granite-like mass of his tastes [le massif granitique de ses goûts]’ (Sartre 2012 [1964] 75). Sartre reports how great an impression this made on him, giving him a sense of the immense being of the man, like the stones or the chestnut trees of the Luxembourg gardens. Sartre himself, he reports, was ‘nothing: an indelible transparency’ (Sartre 2012, 76). One day, there was a party at the Institute of Modern Languages. M. Simonnot was not there; he was ‘absent as flesh and bone. This prodigious absence transfigured him. There were many who were not present: certain pupils were ill, some others had sent their apologies; but these were chance and negligible facts. Only M. Simonnot was missing [manquait]’ (Sartre 2012, 77). Here we see just the kind of stylisation that recreates the subject of the autobiography as a literary character, one, indeed, of the kind that we encounter in Sartre’s novels: characters exercised by their ontological condition in a way that strikes us in the case of the young Sartre as at once wholly plausible—children are, after all, very often in the questions they pose born metaphysicians—and wholly incredible, the latter impression depending in part on the fact that it is clear that Sartre is stylising this incident from his childhood along the lines of his famous discussion in Being and Nothingness of his arrival in the café to find that Pierre is missing. It is no doubt for these reasons that Paul John Eakin comments that it is ‘beyond dispute that The Words gives us…the existential ontology of Sartre’s Existentialism. It is just as easy, however, to read the autobiography as tracing the sources of his philosophical thought to the circumstances of his childhood’ (Eakin 1988, 167).

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So far, then, we have strong reasons for finding (auto)biographical writing problematic with respect to the truth we expect it to be aiming to tell. Nonetheless, all the reasons offered thus far for supposing this leave intact the notion of agency. That is, the problem attends the recording of the life, not anything internal to the agent’s own life. Even the degradation of memories of which Levi speaks does not affect that, unless that degradation becomes something we think of as a fit subject for medical intervention or the like, as in the degeneration of memories associated with such illnesses as Alzheimer’s disease. In other words, the problem here concerns the capacity of a person to tell his or her story or the capacity of one person to tell someone else’s story. It is not one that concerns the authorship of the life itself. On the view in question, I am the author of my life as I live it, even if, when I turn to seek to become the author in the sense of attempting in an autobiography to recount the truth of my life, I cannot but come up short. But Hannah Arendt suggests that I am not the author of my life as I live it. She writes: The disclosure of… ‘who’ [one is] through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always falls into an already existing web… Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact. It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, that action almost never achieves its purpose… Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of speech and action, reveal an agent, but this agent is not the author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author. (Arendt 1958, 184)

Arendt has in mind here what one might call a decentred conception of agency. Acting on and through each of us, expressed by us without our knowing it at any given time, are historical, political, social, and cultural forces whose nature we do not understand and which we can barely influence. As I write this piece of work here and now, I am the product of a world that has made such writing possible, a world in which I have benefited from a particular education system, from political and social stability, from material comforts, from systems of healthcare, from the availability of books and enough time in which to read them, and from much else whose nature and history I hardly grasp and over which I have nothing worth thinking of as influence, so small am I in the totality of the political and social movements that make up

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the time and place in which I live. Further, the nature of these monumental forces themselves and how to understand them is elusive: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis give competing and often incompatible accounts of them. From the inside, it is true, things do not seem like this. As I write this chapter, it seems from my inner perspective that my agency is, so to speak, much more circumscribed than this, that things depend more directly on me than on the surrounding world. But I am suggesting that this perspective is in tension with that from which I am clearly a product of the peculiar social and cultural conditions obtaining at the time of my birth and prevailing during my life. The point is made movingly by John Berger in reflecting in his biography of the medical doctor John Sassall on the uneducated people amongst whom Sassall lived and whom he treated. Seeking to undermine a certain kind of snobbery about such people, Berger writes that it is easy to suppose that his interpretation of them as individuals with a sensibility of high complexity is mistaken precisely because they cannot express themselves. We are, he says, subject to accepting the false view that what people cannot express is always simple because they are simple. We like to retain such a view because it confirms our own bogus sense of articulate individuality, and because it saves us from thinking about the extraordinarily complex convergence of philosophical traditions, feelings, half-­ realized ideas, atavistic instincts, imaginative intimations, which lie behind the simplest hope or disappointment of the simplest person. (Berger 2016 [1967], 112)

Or again, Berger later asks, trying to get at the root causes of Sassall’s depression and seeking to draw a lesson from elsewhere: ‘[D]o we appreciate, for example, how much Van Gogh’s inner conflicts reflected the moral contradictions of the late nineteenth century? Vulnerability may have its own private causes, but it often reveals concisely what is wounding and damaging on a much wider scale’ (Berger 2016, 146) Michel Serres has said that the human body is a kind of knot in the material world, a point at which the world meets itself and through which it runs (Serres 1985). Whatever we make of that, the point I am making, drawing on Arendt, might be expressed by saying that the individual human mind is a point at which the prevailing social, cultural, political, religious, and so on forces meet and through which they run. This does not mean at all that individual agency is an illusion, for as those forces meet in, and run through, any given individual, they take on particular form or shape in that individual. But it means that such agency is, as I said earlier, decentred and needs to be

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­ nderstood as it expresses the forces by which it is surrounded in its own paru ticular way. I am not the author of my life; I am only its co-author. What this suggests is that (auto)biographical writing will tend to unrealistic conceptions of agency insofar as it omits or unacceptably downplays the decentred nature of the individual. How or when that happens will be a different matter in each individual instance and needs to be judged on a case-by-­ case basis. Nonetheless, I think it true that, in general, (auto)biographical writing tends by and large to miss this conception of agency, and, to that extent, feeds an at best misleading conception of the human agent. It is no doubt for some such reason that Paul John Eakin calls for ‘a notion of autobiography in which the focus is, paradoxically, on someone else’s story’ (Eakin 1999, 56). I would say that someone else might also be the social, political, and cultural world in which the subject of the autobiography exists. In fact, it is likely to be easier to seek to capture the decentred conception of agency in a biography than an autobiography where, for example, chronological or cultural distance makes it easier to see the self as exposed to the forces that impinge on it. In any case, it seems to underlie in many ways at least part of the biographical practice of Stefan Zweig. This is so, for example, in his biography of Casanova, in which we learn surprisingly little about the facts of Casanova’s life—the method here is not one of painstaking attention to documentary detail to support the claims made—and the writing is impressionistic in the best sense of the term. We learn more much about Casanova’s quality of spirit rather than the specific details of his life. Still, autobiographical practice can also seek to respond to a sense of the exposure of agency to forces beyond it of the kind I have indicated. Perhaps this, or something like this, is seen, for example, in Rousseau. In a discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions, William C. Spengemann has this to say: Rousseau locates his true origin in what he calls ‘Nature’—that absolute, noumenal reality which occupies the place of God in the Enlightenment cosmos and manifests itself in whatever material or psychological phenomenon (mountains, feelings) may be supposed to have escaped the corrupting touch of unnatural human society. [He is thus i]mpelled in one direction by his historical intention to trace through the succession of his experiences the evolution of his socially unique character, and in an exactly opposite direction by his philosophical desire to discover in the same experiences evidence of his transcendent ‘Natural’ soul. (Spengemann 1980, 63)

We may or may not agree with Rousseau’s understanding of nature as its being some ‘absolute, noumenal reality’, but he has, I think, correctly seen that any

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telling of the self must take account of the external forces that shape it, forces that may well be recoverable for inspection from the inner perspective as partly constituting that perspective only with great difficulty or perhaps not at all. Or again, we might think of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which is an autobiography in part about someone other than the writer, the son, namely, the father, and, moreover, one that seeks strenuously to grasp the subject’s, the son’s, identity by seeing it as profoundly shaped by a cultural force working through the father, that is, his peculiar brand of puritan Christianity: He had nothing in common with this age. He was a Covenanter come into the world a couple of centuries after his time, to find society grown too soft for his scruples and too ingenious for his severe simplicity. He could never learn to speak the ethical language of the nineteenth century; he was seventeenth century in spirit and manner to the last. (Gosse 2004, 202S)

Gosse displaces, in part, his father’s identity, and therefore his own, into a particular social and cultural moment, or movement, finding in it a life that encompasses that of his father and his own, in both cases, in different ways, at loggerheads with the social and religious forces of the nineteenth century, never alive in him in the case of the father, more so in the case of the son. But perhaps one of the best examples of autobiography that displays a decentred conception of agency is Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900), though one might also mention Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes in this context. Benjamin’s account of his childhood in Berlin is constituted by a series of sketches of certain moments, places, or objects of his childhood: ‘Telephone’, ‘Butterfly Hunt’, ‘Fever’, ‘Tiergarten’, and so on. Little is said by the narrator of himself, and what sense we have of him is largely mediated by the objects, places, and so on he describes: his reactions to them give us a sense of who he is but also of how they made him who he is. As Brian Dillon says, the book imagines the city as a series of resonant nooks and crannies, suffused with an adult’s longing that is never merely individual but which reconstructs a whole historical era in the sound of a carpet being beaten in a courtyard or the ‘giant bloom of plush’ that was his grandmother’s apartment. (Dillon 2003)

So, if no one is the author of his life, what this means is that we have to think of individual agency as displaced or dispersed into the social world in which it exists and reflect on what that displaced agency is in any given case. This is one reason—in addition to those rehearsed earlier concerning stylisation and

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the like—why there will always be (in principle) unlimited retellings of the life that seek to get clear on its truth, its meaning, everything depending here on the teller’s sense of what to select, emphasise, disregard in the immense multiplicity of factors social, cultural, political, religious, and so on that converged on making the life what it was. It is not least for this reason that the same life can be told, and often is told, in different biographies, and that what emerges is different—sometimes subtly so, sometimes radically so—in each case, and yet, in each case, compellingly plausible. There is a further aspect here: the fact of human mortality and what that implies for the authorship of a life and the relating of a life. The most helpful way in which this expressed that I know is put by Berger in his biography of Sassall. Berger draws an analogy between a painting and a person’s life. A painting, he says, that you saw last week when the artist was alive is not the same painting as that that you see this week when he is dead (although it is the same canvas). Berger writes: While the artist is alive we see the painting, although it is clearly finished, as part of a work in progress. We see it as part of an unfinished process. We can apply epithets to it such as: promising, disappointing, unexpected. When the artist is dead, the painting becomes part of a definitive body of work. The artist made it. We are left with it. What we can think or say about it changes. It can no longer be addressed to the artist…The subject for discussion is no longer his unknown intentions, his possible confusions, his hopes, his ability to be persuaded, his capacity for change: the subject now is what use we have for the work left us. (Berger 2016 [1967]), 160–61)

Berger points out that this is the same with a life. The biographer can write before or after the subject’s death, but what that life is is different depending on whether the subject is dead or not. The text becomes something different once the subject is dead. If the biographer writes the story of someone’s life and finishes it the day before the subject dies, the meaning of the life, and the meaning of the text, changes from one day to the next: now the subject can do nothing, say nothing, and nothing can happen to him that is not what we make happen to him in telling the story of his life. That means that our sense of what his life amounts to, of what we read in the text, is changed irrevocably by the finality reached in death. As Berger puts it: And so, if Sassall were dead, I would have written an essay that risked far less speculation…[W]hen writing about him I would not have been aware…of the

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process of his life continuing—unfixed, mysterious, only half conscious of its own ends. If he were dead, I would conclude this essay as death concluded his life. (Berger 2016, 161).

So much for biography. An autobiography, of course, is necessarily a piece of writing completed before the death of its author. That means that that death cannot be contained in the autobiography. But the death of the writer makes of the written text something other than it was when the author was alive, in a way parallel to the way in which this is true of biography. We can put the point this way. Walter Benjamin, commenting on the claim made by Moritz Heimann that ‘a man who dies at the age of thirty-five is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five’, says: Nothing is more dubious than this sentence—but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. (Benjamin 1999 [1968], 99)

Once dead, a person is always someone who died at that moment, in that way, in this kind of manner or spirit, and so on. That necessarily makes of his or her life something other than it could ever have been for him or her. The manner in which death concludes a life and the fact that that must escape the subject as the finality it is, casts the life in a light for us that it could not have for him or her. In this sense, then, too, authorship of the life escapes the person living it. The point I am making here is somewhat different from, though complemented by, a similar point made by Stephen Mulhall. Drawing on the work of Heidegger, Mulhall explores the idea that my death is not an event in my life: My mortality is not a matter of my life’s necessarily having one and only one ending; it is a matter of every moment of my existence possibly being the last such moment, and of my being unable to grasp what that might mean—at least, in the sense in which I can grasp (can understand or imaginatively inhabit) the realization of any other existential possibility or narrative event in my life (such as getting married, or winning the Booker Prize, or mowing the lawn). I cannot grasp it from the inside, as it were (as something that will happen to me), and yet it (what?) looms over and constitutively defines the character of every moment of the life that I do inhabit from the inside, the life that is mine to own or to disown. (Mulhall 2013, 189)

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What this means is that any autobiography comes up against a kind of absence in which the self confronts something that it cannot fully grasp about itself even as it cannot say what it is that it cannot grasp. But neither can any biography grasp that, since it can only relate the death as someone else’s, not as the death it is from the inside, for the person whose death it is. Mulhall’s point is certainly highly plausible, but, as I said, not quite the same as that which I have made. Mine concerns the peculiar kind of finality and meaning for a life that a person’s death has for those left behind; his concerns inability of the self to grasp its own mortality. They are, perhaps, different ways of seeking to grasp the same mystery that is human mortality. If what I have argued so far is correct, it seems clear that the problems attendant upon (auto)biographies in terms of telling the truth about a life are multiple and deep. It may be for this reason that Sartre says with respect to an incident he relates in the autobiography: What I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false, as is so with all that one writes about madmen, about men. I have related the facts with as much exactitude as my memory allows. But to what extent did I believe in my excitement? That is the fundamental question and nevertheless I cannot arrive at an answer. (Sartre 2012 [1967], 59)

Biographical and autobiographical writing, it seems, forever fails to make good on its claim to be able to tell the truth, at least in any straightforward sense. It is no doubt for this reason that Roy Pascal made this claim: The value of an autobiography depends ultimately on the quality of spirit of the writer. I do not mean, in a simple sense, the quality of truthfulness, about which much more has to be said, and I do not mean the same quality in all. I mean a capacity which differs according to the nature of the personality and life, and which succeeds in creating in us the consciousness of the driving force of this life, what Montaigne calls a man’s ‘master form’. (Pascal 2015, 19)

Warner quotes this and more from Pascal and then writes: But this will hardly do as it stands. A propensity to deceive oneself or lie to others bears directly on a person’s ‘quality of spirit’, and historical facts may be of decisive importance here. Further, if one has no concern with the accuracy of autobiographies ‘as historical documents’ it is unclear how one is to distinguish between the projection of a ‘real self ’ and that of an idealized self upon the world. (Warner 2016, 96)

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Nonetheless, Warner agrees, for the kinds of reasons already explored, that in autobiography ‘design and truth may be in significant tension’ (ibid., 97), even if, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he adds a caveat to the effect that this is so in the case of ‘the philosophical autobiography’: there seems no evident reason for the qualification. It seems to me, indeed, that Warner is right: in (auto)biographies, stylisation; a responsiveness to the demands of quality of writing, or presumed audience; the will, conscious or unconscious as the case may be, to exonerate or justify, alternatively, to condemn or chastise; the unreliability of memory and the shifting sense of the meaning of a person’s past; the problems attendant on the notion of agency—all this will be in significant tension with the imperative to tell the truth about the life. What conclusions should we draw? Is it that there is no hope for an (auto)biography to tell the truth about a life? Does (auto)biography collapse into a form of fiction? I think that that conclusion would be too precipitate. The correct one should be, I think, that the truth about a life that any autobiography or biography seeks to tell will always be essentially contested. There may well be tellings, recountings, of a life that are plainly false, but nothing can count as the truth of the life. There is, I am arguing, something deeply aporetic in the (auto)biographical project, that is, a commitment to displaying and exploring the truth of a life, since the proffered truth can never be more than one contested interpretation thereof, and there is nothing that can be the (auto)biography of a life that reveals its truth in some such way as to be stable. Moreover, on the view I am offering, there is no reason to suppose that the conception I offer of my own life, even if I strive strenuously to tell the truth about it, is necessarily more reliable than that offered by someone else. The way in which such proposed truth is contested will differ, however, between autobiography and biography. In the case of the former, we have to acknowledge, I think, the truth of Orwell’s claim, made in the context of a review of Salvador Dalí’s autobiography, that ‘any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats’ (Orwell 1984 [1970], 254). Gusdorf similarly says that ‘every life, even in spite of the most brilliant successes, knows itself inwardly botched’ (Gusdorf 1980 [1956], 39). For this reason Orwell says that one should distrust any autobiography that gives a good account of the subject. But I do not think the point is that, as a matter of fact, every life knows itself to be botched or a series of defeats, as if, at least in principle, there could be something that is recognisably a human life and free from such. The point is, rather, that there is something about the human condition such that any life could not but be inadequate to itself. That is partly what I meant by speaking of the aporetic nature of the project of (auto)biography: that truth

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must escape the teller of the story of the life in the sense that there is nothing that could count as settling the issue is itself an expression of an insufficiency of each human life to itself, of any life’s eccentricity to its own putative centre—of its thrown contingency, to use a Heideggerian idiom. It should thus be obvious, I think, why Orwell misses the point when he says that ‘[a]utobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful’ (Orwell 1984 [1970], 254). Nothing of that nature could remove the insufficiency of a human life to itself. In seeking to fix the life in the structure of the autobiography, however that may be in any specific case, such insufficiency cannot but be betrayed, which is why so many autobiographies turn out to bear all the hallmarks of an attempt at self-justification. None of this is to deny, of course, that there can be in this area betrayals of varying depth or significance, so to speak, but that does not mean that there can be anything that counts as total fidelity. It hardly needs to be said that we have arrived at a view that is deeply unsettling, drawing our attention to a maddening elusiveness in the recounting of a human life. Most of our naïve assumptions and hopes about the (auto)biographical project—that with the will to honesty and moral attention we might tell the truth about a life—turn out to be shattered. But it is the struggle for truth about a life, a truth that necessarily cannot be achieved but cannot simply be abandoned either as a goal, that remains in (auto)biographical writing. If what I have argued is correct, it turns out, then, that Pascal was more nearly right than Warner supposed in saying that what we are after in (auto) biographical writing is a sense of the spirit of the person in question, what Gusdorf calls the ‘expression of inmost being’ (Gusdorf 1980 [1956], 44) and Montaigne a person’s ‘master form’. But it is a mistake to think that this licenses deliberate falsification or the like. Nor does it mean that the historical record of a person’s life, such as we have it, becomes irrelevant. What it does mean is that, when we read a biography or autobiography, we have to bring as much as we can to it if we wish to judge of its truth: our knowledge of human psychology in general; what we know already about the subject in question, including the facts of his or her life; our knowledge of other texts, philosophical, literary, and so on; our knowledge of the subject’s historical and cultural epoch; our feeling for the style of the text; and so on. This, indeed, seems to me what we do anyway, and we do so, if we wish to know the person in question, in search of the spirit that animated his or her life, where the impact of any omission or distortions of facts will be just one of the things to which we need to be attentive in our reading. As Pascal said, the ‘value of an autobiography depends ultimately on the quality of spirit of the writer’—but ­‘depending

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ultimately’ in this way does not mean ‘depending only’, and neither, as I have said, does it mean that the historical record is irrelevant. I think that this has another implication: if it is true that, ultimately, what interests us in biography and autobiography is the spirit of the person in question, the ‘master form’, then it is indeed true that texts that we otherwise or normally classify as being something other than autobiography might, nonetheless, be credibly and sensibly thought of as autobiographical after all. This need not mean that they are only autobiographical, that this is all they are, but, if one thinks of, say, Spinoza’s ethics or Kant’s moral philosophy, there can be no doubt that they express a certain human spirit, different in each case, a spirit that can, I believe, reasonably form part of what we may count as an autobiography of these individuals. Like all such judgements as to what that spirit is, it can only be tentative; but the same is true of such a judgement that we make based on a text more traditionally or usually thought of as autobiographical, as I have sought to show. To that extent, Paul Valéry’s well-­ known comment finds support: ‘En vérité, il n’est pas de théorie qui ne soit un fragment, soigneusement préparé, de quelque autobiographie’ (‘In truth, there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography’). Philosophy can be autobiography. For sure, it is certainly true that the mainstream of the subject is very far from acknowledging that, even from taking it seriously. Indeed, it is deeply invested in its denial. Is the philosopher fearful of looking within?

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1968]. The Storyteller. In Illuminations, ed. Harry Zorn and intro. Hannah Arendt. London: Pimlico. Berger, John. 2016 [1967]. A Fortunate Man: the Story of a Country Doctor. Edinburgh: Canongate. Cowley, Christopher. 2014. The Philosophy of Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Dillon, Brian. 2003. Accessed December 20, 2016. http://www.irishtimes.com/ news/shadowed-by-misfortune-1.351481. Eakin, Paul John. 1988. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Goldie, Peter. 2014. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gosse, Edmund. 2004 [1907]. Father and Son. Edited by Michael Newton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gusdorf, Georges. 1980. Conditions and Limits of Autobiography. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hampshire, Stuart. 1989. Innocence and Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holmes, Richard, ed. 2005. Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. London: Harper Perennial. Johnson, Samuel. 1831 [1779/81]. The Lives of the English Poets. London: John Sharpe. Lamarque, Peter. 2007. On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, ed. Daniel Hutto, vol. 60, 117–132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levi, Primo. 2007 [1986]. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1986. The Self as Fiction: Philosophy and Autobiography. Philosophy and Literature 10 (2): 168–185. Mulhall, Stephen. 2013. Autobiography and Biography. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Thomas Eldridge. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Neitzel, Sönke, and Harald Welzer. 2011. Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988 [1886]. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. In Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Band 5. Berlin: De Gruyter. Olney, James. 1980. Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical and Bibliographical Introduction. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Orwell, George. 1984 [1970]. ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’. In The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pascal, Roy. 2015. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2008 [1789]. Confessions. Edited by Patrick Coleman and translated by Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2012 [1964]. Les mots. Paris: Gallimard. Self, Will. 2015. Accessed December 20, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/may/08/on-the-move-a-life-oliver-sacks-review-autobiography-neurologist. Serres, Michel. 1985. Les cinq sens. Paris: Grasset. Spengemann, William C. 1980. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

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Stelzig, Eugene L. 1988. Hermann Hesse’s Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and the Confessional Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stuart, Francis. 2014. Accessed December 15, 2016. https://quartetbooks.wordpress. com/2014/03/28/francis-stuart/. Warner, Martin. 2016. The Aesthetics of Argument. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 2008. Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 Aphorisms and Fragments Guy Elgat

Introduction In a sense, philosophy’s relation to the literary form of the fragment or the aphorism should be seen as natural. After all, at least from a historical perspective, philosophy in the West starts with the fragment or the aphorism—those of the pre-Socratics, who, in the fragments we have remaining of their works, expressed in an oracular fashion their insights about the cosmos and human life that opened the space for all subsequent philosophical thought.1 Towering figures such as Francis Bacon, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Pascal, Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche followed this stylistic path and frequently opted to express themselves by means of the aphorism or the fragment. Nevertheless, philosophy, as it has been practiced in the West for quite a while, especially within an academic setting, has for the most part refrained from adopting this literary form as its proper medium and preferred the treatise or the essay instead. This chapter’s aim is to explore various views on the relation of the aphoristic and fragmentary form to philosophy: what philosophical purpose does this form serve? What is the philosophy behind the use of the aphoristic form (what specific content about the world, human psychology, and so on is communicated implicitly by the use of this form)? What is the meta-philosophy

G. Elgat (*) School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_7

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behind its use (what view about philosophy specifically informs the use of the aphoristic form)? Can aphorisms or fragments be organized to form an integrated whole? Throughout this chapter, I will contrast the aphoristic and fragmentary form of writing with what I will refer to as the “traditional” way of philosophical writing—a form of writing which consists in the composition of treatises that focus on a specific issue or closely related set of issues and offer, on the basis of various definitions and distinctions, chains of arguments in support of various philosophical conclusions. In its consummated form— attained by philosophers such as Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel—this discursive type of doing and writing philosophy amounts to a philosophical system, which, starting from a set of self-evident propositions, offers argumentatively interconnected views on all or most of the central themes of philosophy such as ontology, religion, morality, knowledge, and art. One final introductory remark: since, as Ben Grant justifiably claims, ‘[n]o name is associated more closely with the aphorism than that of the nineteenth-­ century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’ (Grant 2016, 26), in my discussion below I will mostly focus—though not exclusively—on his work and his views on the aphoristic form.

The Question of Classification Though it is the relation of the aphorism or fragment to philosophy that is at issue here, the question of how to classify these literary forms has to be addressed first. Now, as can be appreciated when one considers the various attempts that have been made to define the aphorism—‘the most paradoxical of genres’ (Stern 1959, 216)—and its close relatives, the fragment, the maxim, the proverb, and so on, no consensus has been attained. As Gary Saul Morson in his recent book on the short literary form writes: ‘there is no agreed upon definition’ of these terms (Morson 2012, 4), to such an extent that ‘[I]f one struggles to arrive at the true meaning of these terms, one will surely be lost in an endless labyrinth’ (ibid.). Morson therefore turns to ‘classify the works themselves and then, merely for the sake of consistent usage, apply a term to each class, with the understanding that a different term could have been chosen’ (ibid.). He uses the term “aphorism” to refer to the entire family of the various brief literary forms, and classifies the various short genres ‘according to their worldviews, the distinct sense of human experience that each conveys’ (ibid., 5). Thus, for example, the “apothegm” for Morson pictures the world ‘as fundamentally mysterious’ (ibid., 6), the “maxim” ‘unmask[s] vanity, self-­ deception, and egoism disguised as virtue’ (ibid., 7), and the “thought” ‘offers

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a private meditation, still incomplete and tentative, as it first occurred to the author’ (ibid., 8). A different, perhaps more traditional way to define the aphorism and distinguish it from other related terms is offered by R.J. Hollingdale: In its pure and perfect form the aphorism is distinguished by four qualities occurring together: it is brief, it is isolated, it is witty, and it is “philosophical”. This last quality marks it off from the epigram, which is essentially no more than a witty observation; the third, which it shares with the epigram, marks it off from the proverb or maxim: its point, though intended seriously, is supposed to strike the reader, not with the blunt obviousness of a palpable truth…but rather in the way the point of a good joke should strike him…In this pure form the aphorism disdains all giving of reasons and presents only a conclusion, so that it is often plainly intended to provoke instant contradiction in the sense that the payoff line of a joke is intended to provoke instant laughter. (Introduction to Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, 1990, x–xi)

This might be true of what Hollingdale defines as the aphorism in its “pure” form, but many of Pascal’s and Nietzsche’s writings, for example, while conforming to some of the traits Hollingdale mentions, fail to attain the purity that is found to a much greater extent in a paradigmatic case such as that of La Rochefoucauld. Thus, most of the sections in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, for example, are longer than one or two sentences, and some of them are even quite long, thus threatening to escape the category of the aphorism altogether. This may be one reason why Nietzsche himself sometimes refers to his brief writings as “aphorisms’ (GM P 8)2—as has become customary recently to refer to his writings in general in the secondary literature (Marsden 2006, 23)—but sometimes as “sections” (ibid.). Hollingdale, of course, admits this and allows the aphorism to expand ‘into a miniature essay’ (ibid.)—at which point, we can say, the aphorism becomes a fragment (or a ‘fragmentary reflection’—see Stern 1959, 216 and Moore 1969, 84), though, we can assume, no sharp boundaries in terms of length, or any other determinant, can be drawn between the two. In addition, the fragmentary reflection can at times contain maxims or aphorisms that can be distilled from it upon further re-working of the text (see the example of La Rochefoucauld in Moore 1969, 85). But there is no reason to insist, it seems to me, that the fragment is “essentially incomprehensible” given that the fragment is by “definition” a part of something and given that ‘we can only understand something if we can see it in its entirety’ (Grant 2016, 19). Indeed, some of the sections in Pascal’s Pensées (which Grant himself gives as an example (ibid., 20))—such as the section on diversions—is comprehensible even in

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abstraction from the larger (planned, but never accomplished) whole of which it was to be a part. Hollingdale, however, insists that even in the case of the expanded aphorism the feeling of a punchline is one of the aphorism’s ‘defining characteristics’ (p. xii). This quality of the aphorism is related to its power to shock and unsettle (Moore 1969, 5). But clearly many aphorisms—whether long or short—are neither witty nor take the form of a joke. This is the case, for example, with Pascal’s famous ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (Pascal 1973, section 201) where no punch line is to be found. In general, though, we can say that the longer the aphorism is and the more it becomes a fragment or a “section”, the more its pun-like or surprising nature tends to dissolve. Moreover, it isn’t obvious that the maxim or proverb—in contrast to the aphorism—lacks the wittiness Hollingdale ascribes to the pure aphorism. It might be true that a maxim, understood, say, in the Kantian sense as referring to a practical rule of thumb—and the ethical aphoristic writings of Epictetus, for example, belong in this tradition—would lack the sting of a clever turn of phrase, but La Rochefoucauld regularly used the term “maxim” to refer to the content of his Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales, where dry rules of thumb are rarely encountered and where one continuously finds entries that approximate or meet the criteria of Hollingdale’s pure aphorism.3 Further, proverbs often possess a witty bite as well: ‘Wise people hide their wisdom’ (Proverbs 10:14) would not shame either a La Rochefoucauld or a Nietzsche. Further and relatedly, arguments and justification are far from being completely absent from our authors’ writings, a feature which brings them closer to philosophy in its more discursive format. It is what Hollingdale calls the “philosophical” nature of the aphorism, indeed, which is of central importance here. Hollingdale does not explain what exactly he has in mind here, but seems to mean, first, that an aphorism is philosophical if it can be seen to operate within a recognizable philosophical context: either as instituting one, or responding to already extant philosophers or philosophical issues. Second, an aphorism is philosophical, we might say, when it aims to present us with a general, “deep” truth about mankind or the world. As an example we can look at Lichtenberg, who operated within the orbit of Enlightenment thought and who, in a famous aphorism, expressed critical views about the validity of the Cogito, to mention one instance (Hollingdale, K 18).4 Further, as philosophical, aphorisms formulate general thoughts: they are, as Cioran—himself an aphoristic philosopher—put it, ‘instantaneous generalizations’ (Cioran 1995, 1736): they are not merely a recording of an author’s private and subjective

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thoughts as in a diary, but make a general, objective, claim. The same applies to the philosophical fragment. Though we can maintain that the aphorism is philosophical in its aspiration to convey some deep truth, the question remains whether the aphorism is ever true in the same way as commonplace true statements of facts (e.g. “the cat is on the mat”). Joseph Stern, in his discussion of the aphorism in his book on Lichtenberg, denies this and asserts that the aphorism ‘aspires to another, less stable kind of truth..: the truth of a suggestion or illumination’ (Stern 1959, 217). Nevertheless, he agrees that after the initial blinding experience of the aphorism, it can become a ‘stable and lucid insight’ or merely revealed to be a ‘chimera’ (ibid.). This seems to mean that subsequent to the initial surprising effect of the aphorism it can indeed be evaluated properly as either true or false in the plain sense of these words. Curiously, Stern adds that even when an aphorism is revealed as false ‘it shows us as it were the negative outlines of a region which we recognize as belonging to the world’ (ibid.). But this seems to be a feature of any false statement: realizing that the cat is not on the mat also has the result of drawing my attention to a ‘region’ which I recognize as belonging to the world. Moore too, in his analysis of the maxim in La Rochefoucauld, addresses its relation to truth and asserts that the ‘mark of the Maxime [sic.] is form’ and that ‘it is a mistake to judges Maximes by their truth’ (Moore 1969, 84). ‘Whoever said’, he continues, ‘that the Maxime should express a statement with which we must all agree? This if logically applied would turn Maximes into truisms’ (ibid.).5 He nevertheless immediately explains that the maxim ‘is specifically directed to truths that we are prevented from seeing because of our involvement in them’ (Moore 1969, 85)—it provides access to these truths by way of a ‘revelation’ (ibid.) communicated by a ‘grave and pregnant statement which…does not appear immediately as the truth’ (ibid.). This is reminiscent of Stern’s “suggestion or illumination”, and here too the conclusion Moore seems to draw is that though delivered in a highly compact, poeticized form, the maxim (or aphorism) nevertheless does attempt to deliver a truth, and it certainly seems that while a well-phrased maxim can continue to entertain even after its content is discarded upon scrutiny, its philosophical value lies not in its form as such, but in its truth-value. Indeed, the more thought-­provoking truth-apt content it manages to compress, the greatest its philosophical interest. It is this, not the specific form of the aphorism or maxim, that Nietzsche had in mind when he claimed that ‘A good maxim is too hard for the teeth of time and whole millennia cannot consume it, even though it serves to nourish every age…’ (AOM, 168).

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Let us now turn to the second trait on Hollingdale’s list: the aphorism (and we can also add, the fragment) is isolated from other aphorisms (and fragments): this is the aphorism’s discontinuous form.6 This of course does not mean that consecutive aphorisms or fragments cannot be found to deal with the same topic or question. Thus, in La Rochefoucauld, one can find, for example, a series of successive reflections on love (La Rochefoucauld 2007, v: 68–v: 78), though he clearly expresses his wariness of organizing his thoughts in this manner for fear of ‘boring the reader’ (in ‘The Publisher to the Reader’, p. 3). The aphorism’s isolated nature lies rather in its being typically discursively cut off from those that precede or follow it: the aphorism ends, and a new one begins which, even if it addresses the same topic, approaches it afresh, as if from scratch, without drawing any explicit conceptual or justificatory links to the content of the other aphorisms. In this way, the ‘truth and validity’ of the aphorism or fragment ‘is to be weighed individually’ (introduction to La Rochefoucauld 2007, xxviii). This means, of course, that one can understand it without drawing on the ideas of the surrounding aphorisms—it is ‘self-contained’ (Stern 1959, 194). And this in turn implies that typically one can dip into a book of aphorisms at any point without suffering any deficit in understanding the author’s thoughts: one can read the aphorisms in whatever order one wishes.7 But we have to be careful here: the fact that in some cases one can peruse through an author’s aphorisms in no particular order does not necessarily mean that the author’s ideas cannot be stitched together to form a coherent and well-ordered set of ideas or world view. We will come back to this question below—the question whether fragmented form necessarily implies fragmented thought. In his analysis of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, Stern offers another criterion for the identity of the aphorism: a particular fusion of content and language where ‘the means are themselves almost undetachable and uniquely involved in the theme’ (Stern 1959, 193)—so much so, that there occurs in the aphorism a unique reversal (ibid., 194) of form and content so that what appears at first sight to be the subject matter of the aphorism turns on a second glance to be the husk or form of a second subject matter. Stern thus argues that all aphorisms share the trait of having such a second subject matter which divulges itself when we turn to take a ‘second look’ at a ‘word or group of words’ that make up the aphorism—specifically, ‘at a particular area of language which is adumbrated in the first subject matter’ (Stern 1959, 195–96). The example Stern gives is the following by Lichtenberg: I would give a great deal to know exactly for whom those deeds were done for which it is publicly said that they were done for king and country.8

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While on first sight the aphorism seems to be making an argument against the pointlessness of war, on second glance, according to Stern, we see that the aphorism draws our attention to language and its use. It thus makes an indictment of ‘speaking and thinking in clichés’ (ibid., 195), but it makes this point by means of the first subject matter, which now becomes the form for conveying the second meaning. While Stern holds that this feature of double glance is a defining trait of the aphorism, it seems far too exclusive insofar as many texts which we would be otherwise inclined to count as paradigmatic aphorisms fail to meet this criterion. Finally, we can briefly consider the suggestion that the aphorism is in the business of offering something like a definition (Grant 2016, 32). This idea derives its justification from the Greek aphorismos which gave us “aphorism” and originally meant “definition” (Marsden 2006, 22; Grant 2016, 6). While this is certainly true in some instances—‘Man is a cause-seeking creature’ (Lichtenberg, Hollingdale, J 257)—it is, however, not invariably so: ‘that something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it’ (HH 515) provides a definition neither of irrationality nor of existence. We can now better understand Morson’s reluctance at providing a definition of the aphorism and its closely related short literary forms. This perhaps should not surprise us, given that, as Nietzsche says in aphoristic style, ‘only that which has no history is definable’ (GM II 13), and given the complex and rich history of the aphoristic literary form and the manner in which it crisscrosses and grows out of the history of the other related literary forms such as the epigram or the proverb (see Moore 1969, 80–83 for the case of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim and Grant 2016, 6–37 more generally). Nevertheless, we have managed to provide a general profile of the philosophical aphorism or fragment: it is relatively short, offers a general truth, and is isolated or discontinuous.

The Philosophy of the Aphorism Under the heading “philosophy of the aphorism”, it is possible to distinguish between, on the one hand, a particular philosophical view that is communicated by means of the use of the aphoristic or fragmentary medium and, on the other hand, a meta-philosophy that the medium expresses commitment to. Thus, a philosopher might adopt the aphoristic or fragmentary form because he or she thinks that this form is uniquely suited to attain either the one or the other, or both. I will now turn to consider each in turn.

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 he Aphoristic/Fragmentary Form as a Means to Convey T Philosophical Views As we saw above, particular fragments or aphorisms make a claim or sometimes even an argument about some specific issue or question. In this they do not differ from the philosophical treatise. But the aphoristic or fragmentary form can in itself convey a certain specific philosophical truth that the more traditional form of the treatise is less adept at communicating. This truth is not necessarily presented to the reader in an explicit fashion but can be interpreted to lie behind or even motivate the philosopher’s choice of format. For example, the aphoristic form, in its disconnectedness, can serve to express the view that the general subject matter of the aphorism, whether the human being or the world, is fragmentary, disjointed, or even self-­contradictory in nature, lacking any inherent coherence to be revealed and conceptualized by more traditional ways of writing philosophy. Thus, in a debate concerning the interpretation of La Rochefoucauld’s work, one view holds that his book is inconsistent and self-contradictory and that the maxims’ ‘deliberate disorder, their aristocratic refusal to organize themselves into a coherent system, form an apt transcription of the inner discontinuity of man’.9 The aphoristic form in this case is intentionally adopted as the most appropriate to reflect a psychological truth: the human person is a discontinuous jumble of passions, desires, and beliefs. Similarly, the aphoristic and fragmentary nature of Nietzsche’s writings could be seen as reflecting Nietzsche’s view, in itself expressed in some of his central aphorisms, that reality as such is not a fixed entity that enjoys some solid state of being but is rather one of becoming, of continuous flow, of incessant movement, in virtue of its underlying nature which Nietzsche names with the expression ‘the will to power’. Thus Nietzsche writes in a fragment from The Gay Science entitled “Will and Wave”: How greedily this wave approaches, as if it were after something! How it crawls with terrifying haste into the inmost nooks of this labyrinthine cliff! It seems that it is trying to anticipate someone; it seems that something of value, high value, must be hidden there—and now it comes back, a little more slowly but still quite white with excitement; is it disappointed? Has it found what it looked for? Does it pretend to be disappointed?—But already another wave is approaching, still more greedily and savagely than the first…Thus live waves—thus live we who will…. (GS 310)

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The format of the aphorism could be read as an attempt to imitate this metaphysics in concepts: new aphorisms are written in a process which strikes the reader as seemingly unending, in a manner which conforms to the dynamism of reality itself. In Nietzsche’s case this can be argued to be related to his thoughts about perspectivism and the perspectival nature of reality (e.g. GS 374): since no comprehensive interconnected overview is possible given its disjointed and ever-changing movement, what remains are the perspectives that the philosopher can take on this reality of becoming—perspectives the most perfect medium for the expression of which is the aphorism, in its snap-­ shot, disjointed, character. Arguably, this philosophical view about the discontinuous or ever-­changing nature of reality arises on the background of a specifically ‘modern consciousness’, as Stern explains: The romantic stress on individual experience, the atomization of thought and feelings, the absence of commonly accepted religious beliefs, metaphysical presuppositions and moral standards, and the disintegration of modern culture— all these represent a mode of thought and feeling explored in many books and essays in the wake of Friedrich Schlegel, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The parallel between this modern consciousness and the aphorism is striking. In both cases fragments are endowed with values once resident in the whole… (Stern 1959, 221)

With Nietzsche the aphorism could be seen as implicitly expressive of another one of his substantial philosophical views. As we saw, one of the aphorism’s characteristic features is that it often provides very little if at all by way of justification. While this could be at times frustrating for the more traditionally minded philosopher-reader, it fits Nietzsche’s philosophical sentiments perfectly insofar as he tends to think that offering justifications and reasons for one’s position is a symptom of weakness or reactivity: as he puts it in section 5 of the “Case of Socrates” in Twilight of the Idols, ‘honourable things, like honourable people, do not go around with their reasons in their hand…Nothing with real value needs to be proved first’. To offer reasons—dialectics—is in ‘bad manners’ (ibid.). In contrast, to express one’s views in a decisive, authoritative manner, is a sign of the active, artistic spirit, the spirit that asserts, that commands. In Nietzsche’s view, the aphorism is thus a more noble form of writing.10 In preferring this mode of expression, Nietzsche can thus be interpreted as practicing what he preaches.

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 he Aphoristic/Fragmentary Form as a Means to Convey T Meta-philosophical Views Aphorisms/fragments could also be wielded in order to communicate views about the nature of philosophy or philosophical practice as such. In other words, they could be used as a means to express various meta-philosophical views. First, while throughout most of the history of Western philosophy the more traditional way of doing philosophy was typically practiced in the meta-­ philosophical belief that philosophy, since derived logically from solid foundations, can provide final and ultimate answers to philosophy’s central questions, the aphoristic and fragmentary approach is often based on a different assumption. Here the thought is that philosophy is or should be experimental and provisional since it cannot provide or presume to provide any final, ultimate answers. To philosophize in the experimental mood is to formulate ideas not on the basis of any prior conviction that these make up the final truth. Accordingly, one does not derive them from what one takes to be certain axioms. Rather, one acts in the spirit of trial and error: one expresses an idea that strikes one as true or worth pondering, and examines—or lets the reader examine—its ramifications, consequences, or connections with other similarly tentatively expressed thoughts. As can be readily seen, the aphoristic and fragmentary form is especially amenable to this form of philosophizing: aphorisms or fragments are not presented as following logically from various basic and certain assumptions, and the relatively relaxed logical connections that obtain between them allows one to dispose of some while retaining others. In contrast, the more traditional philosophical form allows for much less leeway in this regard: once one rejects one of the central argumentative building blocks of the theory or system (e.g. Spinoza’s definitions, axioms, or propositions), the whole structure threatens to collapse. In its general, authoritative tone,11 which provides, to use Cioran’s word, a “verdict” on a certain topic (Cioran 1995, 1736), the aphorism engages the critical capacities of the reader. It provokes the reader to reflect on the question by him or herself, thus subjecting the aphorism to experimental scrutiny, in the attempt to validate or disprove its content. If the thought “pans out”, that is, if it sounds plausible, if it promises further novel reflections, or if it can be linked up with other such thoughts, then it can be said to pass the experimental test, at least for now. If it does not, it can be put aside and the reader can move on to another idea and subject it to the same tests.

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Aphoristic experimentation can be said to be mirrored in the specific tension that according to Gerhard Neumann lies at the heart of aphoristic ­writing: the tension between the particular voice of the author and the universal content of the aphorism he or she produces. This tension is re-enacted by the reader upon testing the aphorism deductively or inductively: ‘either by “supplying” a given general sentence with individual experience or inversely by “extrapolating in thought” from a detailed observation that is recorded in the aphorism’.12 Famously, Nietzsche occasionally expresses sympathies to the experimental mode of philosophizing: ‘I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: “Let us try it!”, but I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions which do not permit any experiment’ (GS 51, see also GS 110). From this perspective, it is no surprise that he calls the philosophers of the future “attempters” or “experimenters” (e.g. BGE 42).13 Not perceiving a sharp break between one’s life and one’s philosophy, Nietzsche even often advocates seeing life itself as an experiment (GS 319, 324).14 But Nietzsche was not the first in conceiving of his thoughts as experiments. Francis Bacon before him was one of the first to draw a connection between the aphorism and the experiment-based inductive method: ‘For him, the aphorism is the genre in which this induction can most effectively be practiced because, as a brief and self-contained assertion, it proceeds directly from experience and observation, rather than being systematically derived from already established truths’ (Grant 2016, 15). Lichtenberg, who perhaps influenced Nietzsche here and was an experimental scientist in profession, wrote down his thoughts in a similar spirit so that ‘his aphoristic style carried the experimental method into philosophy’ (Nordmann 2005, 25). Lichtenberg expresses the view that just like in Chemistry we should separate the ‘individual parts’ and ‘deliberately bring things into contact with each other’. He concludes: ‘we must experiment with ideas’.15 The aphorisms are the individual parts that one examines, and putting them side by side according to the order in which one chooses to read them generates the “chemical reactions” that enables the reader to experiment with them. The disconnectedness of the aphorism or fragment can enable the philosopher to express another important meta-philosophical claim. According to Stern’s analysis of the aphorism, aphorisms ‘give an insight and divulge something of the way the insight has been attained’ (Stern 1959, 210)—for example, they might begin with “I can see that…” thus uncovering their origin in sense-experience (ibid., 209). This is one reason why, in Stern’s view, the aphorism ‘is the most self-conscious of all literary genres’ (ibid., 214). But a more

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general point could be made here about the implicit claims the aphoristic form itself makes regarding philosophical thinking as such. While the more traditional way of writing philosophy might give the impression that philosophical thinking—the actual process of thought the philosopher undergoes—consists of logically ordered propositions in support of some conclusion, and that the essay or treatise has emerged from the philosopher’s mind more-or-less fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, the very form of the aphorism/fragment gives the lie to this conception and discloses the true nature of philosophical thought. Thus, Nietzsche protests the manner in which Kant, for example, falsified the ‘thoughts at which he has arrived in another way by imposing on them a false arrangement of deduction and dialectic’ (WP 424, KSA 1885, 35 [31]). Philosophers, Nietzsche complains, ‘are not honest enough in their work’ (BGE 5): ‘One should not conceal and corrupt the fact of how our thoughts have come to us’ (WP 424, KSA 1885, 35 [31])—namely, individually, in a more or less disconnected manner. Further, they typically arrive to us in an unexpected manner, since a thought, Nietzsche observes, ‘comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish’ (BGE 17). The discreteness of philosophical thoughts, the experience of their eruption and the desire to maintain honesty about their nature is part of the rationale behind Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. As he put it in a letter to his prospective publisher, Wittgenstein took the worthiest books to be those ‘that are written honestly through and through’ (Nordmann 2005, 97), by which he meant books that provide ‘a record of separate mental events’ (Nordmann 2005, 97)—episodes that Wittgenstein himself had to wait for to appear, in order to write them down in his notebooks. As Wittgenstein put it in his letter, in his book he has only ‘recorded… what—and how it has—really occurred to [him]’(ibid.). For Nietzsche, what explains the eruption of a thought are the philosopher’s “drives” or “instincts” and their various evaluations which have ‘long lain below the surface; [such that] what comes out is effect’ (KSA 1885, 35 [31]), for ‘every drive wants to be master—and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit’ (BGE 6). It is precisely this desire to philosophize that offers explanation for why the particular—a philosopher’s subjective drives or instincts—takes the form of the general in the aphorism. These reflections on the nature of philosophical thought have for Nietzsche another important implication, namely, that all philosophy is inescapably personal, since it is guided by and is an expression of one’s personal psychology. As he puts it: ‘Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary memoir’ (BGE 6). The aphorism

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or fragment is a thus a more transparent form of the personal confession that is philosophy since it expresses the philosopher’s individuality more directly than the rationally ordered and impersonal treatise or discourse.

 an Aphorisms/Fragments Be Organized C into a System? The above discussion was premised on a distinction between the aphorism/ fragment on the one hand and the philosophical system on the other. This tension between the aphorism/fragment and the system was remarked upon by Mill when he claimed that ‘to be unsystematic is the essence of all truths which rest on specific experiments’ such as the aphorism (quoted in Grant 2016, 27). The question I turn to now is whether the aphorisms or fragments of a philosopher, their discontinuous nature notwithstanding, can nevertheless be organized into a system in a more relaxed sense of “system”. While aphoristic writing does not aim to show ‘how the entire body of knowledge can be derived from a small set of fundamental self-evident propositions’ (Reginster 2006, 3), it is perhaps possible in some cases to show that a philosopher’s  aphoristic thoughts can be ‘organized and logically ordered, and [are] not a haphazard assemblage of brilliant but disconnected ideas’ (ibid.). Whether this is indeed possible, whether one can find in an author’s aphorisms or fragments some principle of organization, depends of course on the specific aphorisms at issue. Thus, Hollingdale claims that Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s thinking is ‘only expressed in fragmentary form whereas Lichtenberg’s really is fragmentary’ (Hollingdale, xiii). Stern argues for a similar view in his study of Lichtenberg, but nevertheless attributes to Lichtenberg what he calls a ‘doctrine of scattered occasions’, where each aphorism arises out of an attempt to be faithful to the occasion which gave rise to it—an occasion unique and singular, which cannot be abstracted form or generalized, since ‘each occasion speaks its own language’ (Stern 1959, 244).16 The ‘central principle’—Stern adds—of this “system of opinions” is ‘“absolute” relativism’ (ibid., 274). The principle of organization here is extremely minimal, namely, the resistance to any organization. According to this interpretation, then, Lichtenberg’s aphorisms provide another instance of how the adoption of the aphorism form can serve to convey a philosophical view: here the view that every experience is individual and that any attempt to philosophize its individuality away is faulty and dishonest.

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The case of Nietzsche poses different questions. Here we have, on the one hand, scholars who seek systematicity (in the weaker sense) in Nietzsche, either by focusing on one of Nietzsche’s doctrines (perspectivism, will to power), or by putting at the center of their analysis a specific ‘problem or crisis’ which Nietzsche’s philosophy systematically responds to (Reginster 2006, 4–5). On the other hand, there are those who refuse to attribute any system in whatever sense to Nietzsche. Cioran is representative of this latter approach when he judges that: Nothing is more irritating than those works which “coordinate” the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system. What is the use of giving a so-called coherence to Nietzsche’s ideas, for example, on the pretext that they revolve around a central motif? Nietzsche is a sum of attitudes, and it only diminishes him to comb his work for a will to order, a thirst for unity. A captive of his moods, he has recorded their variations. His philosophy, a meditation on his whims, is mistakenly searched by the scholars for the constants it rejects. (Cioran 1970, 151)

The argument here seems to be that since Nietzsche’s aphorisms and fragments are a record of his “moods” or “whims” they cannot amount to a system—such an attempt would, first, be “mistaken” and, secondly, “diminish” Nietzsche’s thought, by forcing upon it that which he rejects. The first point is seemingly supported by Nietzsche’s own words when he writes: ‘I distrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity’ (TI, Maxims and Arrows, 26). But the point Nietzsche makes here can be read differently: presenting one’s thoughts as a system lacks honesty about the personal nature of those thoughts and how one arrived at them. The will to a system thus betrays lack of integrity about the activity of philosophizing and its deep root in one’s subjectivity. Crucially, Nietzsche arguably would nevertheless insist that a philosophy, even an aphoristic one, could express a person’s specific physio-psychological profile, a single “taste”, and could thus amount, not to a system in the strong sense, but to a more or less coherent world view. As he puts a similar idea elsewhere in interrogative form: ‘Do you think that this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments [Stücken]?’ (AOM 128)—where the expected response of the reader should obviously be “No”. So perhaps Cioran was wrong when he said that Nietzsche’s aphorisms are the sum of his attitudes and that it is therefore a mistake to look for something like a system in Nietzsche. The “therefore” here is where the fallacy lies: different moods could

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still be expressive of a single person and could have coherence to the extent that the person herself has a more or less coherent personality and is not merely a heap of valuations and opinions. As Nietzsche puts it: ‘For assuming that one is a person, one necessarily also has the philosophy that belongs to that person’ (GS P 2).

The Philosophical Value of the Aphorism So far I haven’t directly examined the question of the specific philosophical value of the aphorism. This should be distinguished from its aesthetic or rhetorical value: the aphorism (or fragment) in its conciseness and authoritative conclusiveness might have a pleasant and powerful persuasive effect that the more verbose treatise or essay often lack. But what can the aphorism achieve philosophically that more traditional ways of philosophical writing cannot? Where lies the aphorism’s distinctive philosophical capacity? In “Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism”, Jill Marsden offers the view that the aphorism consists in the ‘provocation to think’ (Marsden 2006, 25). It does so through its surprising and precise use of language (ibid., 28), which has the effect of breaking commonsensical thoughts and preconceptions in the attentive reader, engaging their sensibility and their body, thus rousing him or her out of their passivity and spurs them to actively think in a new way (ibid.). This is plausible enough, but it seems that all innovative and ground-­ breaking philosophy achieves these effects.17 But the aphorism, according to Marsden, achieves its provocation to thinking in a more specific way: insofar as it typically does not offer any elaborate justification or evidence, it inspires the reader to come up with the thoughts that led the author to phrase the aphorism. Marsden (ibid., 31) quotes Nietzsche as saying that ‘the maxim is a link in a chain of thoughts: it requires the reader to restore this chain out of his own resources’ (KSA 8, 20[3], see also AOM 127). Cioran effectively says the same thing when he says that ‘My aphorisms are not really aphorisms… I let everything drop and merely give the conclusion…without the continuity of thought, simply the result’ (Cioran 1995, 1736). Thus, the reader can be moved to check the validity of the aphorism against his or her own experiences (as we saw above), or to supply the chain of claims the aphorism is meant to be a conclusion to. In this way it forces the attentive and inquisitive reader to actively do some thinking on his or her own, which is different from other forms of philosophical writing where the argument is usually supplied.

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Nietzsche himself provides another answer to our question. In one of the final sections of The Gay Science, he comments that the liveliness of his style— his aphoristic or fragmentary mode of writing—‘compels’ him to tackle a matter swiftly to tackle it at all. For I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not go to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water…And to ask this incidentally: does a matter necessarily remain ununderstood and unfathomed merely because it has been touched only in flight, glanced at, in a flash?…At least there are truths that are singularly shy and ticklish and cannot be caught except suddenly—that must be surprised or left alone. (GS 381)

But what are these truths that must be “surprised or left alone”? Following the work of La Rochefoucauld, by whom he was greatly influenced,18 Nietzsche seems to believe that the aphoristic form is especially suited to investigations in the field of psychological observation. Thus, in the opening sections of the second chapter of Human, All Too Human, sections which were originally planned to be the opening sections of the book (Faber 1984, xvii– xix), Nietzsche claims that though the aphorism19 has fallen out of favor, it is important for the attempt to gain ‘knowledge of the truth’ (HH 36)—especially in the field of psychological observation which he also calls ‘moral observation’ (HH 37). This is because aphorisms are ‘like accurately aimed arrows, which hit the mark again and again, the black mark of man’s nature’ (HH 36). Nietzsche claims that even if such penetrating aphorisms, aphorisms that typically uncover some inconvenient truth about human psychology, can spoil one’s view of mankind and can make people more distrustful of each other (HH 36), they could nevertheless be helpful insofar as false moral psychologies have given rise to false ethics (HH 37)20 and even insidiously infiltrated into physics and ‘the entire contemplation of the world’ (ibid.). Nietzsche, however, is ultimately not interested in the question of the harmful or beneficial consequences of science and claims that however we decide on that issue, moral observation is necessary ‘for science cannot do without it’ (HH 38). But what makes the aphorism so useful a tool to analyze the human soul? Nietzsche does not explicitly answer this question, but one possible answer can be culled from Nietzsche’s The Wanderer and His Shadow 316, where he claims that He who wants to see himself as he is must understand how to surprise himself, torch in hand. For it is with the spiritual as it is with the bodily: he who is accustomed to looking at himself in a mirror always forgets how ugly he is…This

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happens in accordance with the universal law that man cannot endure the unchangingly ugly; or if he can, it is only for a moment: in every case he forgets or denies that it is ugly. It is upon this moment that moralists have to count if they are to display their truths.

Nietzsche’s view thus seems to be that the aphorism, in its eruptive, unexpected nature, being the more or less direct expression of one’s drives (as we saw above), can catch oneself unprepared, thus surprise oneself and throw light on the ugly truth, before one’s rationalizations start to efface its ­penetrating insights and cover them over with definitions, distinctions, qualifications, and argumentations. If Nietzsche is indeed right that the aphorism has this unique capacity to conceptualize a content that would otherwise remain inaccessible to more discursive thought, then the aphorism turns out to be an indispensable tool in the philosopher’s toolkit.

Notes 1. See Grant (2016, 6–9) for the connection between the aphorism and the oracular. 2. I use the standard abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works, a glossary of which can be found in the References. 3. See Moore (1969, 80–93) for a discussion of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim. See the Introduction to La Rochefoucauld’s Collected Maxims for a discussion of La Rochefoucauld’s terminology and his indebtedness to the biblical tradition. 4. See Zöeller (1992) for an analysis of Lichtenberg’s relation to Kant that focuses on this aphorism. 5. Compare with Jefferson Humphries’s view of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims as ‘original commonplaces’ that create a ‘sense in the reader of having always be true’ (quoted in Grant 2016, 17). 6. Cioran: ‘Aphorisms…[belong] to discontinues thought’ (Cioran 1995, 1736). 7. There are, of course, exceptions: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, though composed of what can be called extended, aphorisms (Nietzsche himself seems to refer to the sections comprising the Genealogy “aphorisms”, see GM P 8), follows a certain logical, if complex, order. The various aphorisms of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus lack justification too, in the sense that Wittgenstein does not offer arguments in their favor, though arguably the work as a whole could be read as one long reduction argument (see Nordmann for this interpretation). Further, though they could perhaps be read in a different order in which they were published, Wittgenstein marked the relative importance of the aphorisms by assigning numbers to them. As he

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puts it: ‘The decimal figures as numbers of the separate propositions indicate the logical importance of the propositions, the emphasis laid upon them in my exposition. The propositions n.1, n.2, n.3. etc., are comments on proposition No. n…’ (Wittgenstein 1990, footnote to first proposition). 8. Quoted in Stern (1959, 194). 9. Jean Starobinski, quoted in the Introduction to La Rochefoucauld (2007, xxvii). 10. Compare W.H Auden and Louis Kronenberger (quoted in Grant 2016, 23): ‘Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts…’. 11. See Grant (2016, esp. p. 10) on the relation between the history of the aphorism and the notion of authority. 12. Quoted in Nordmann (2005, 102). 13. The German word Nietzsche uses is Versucher, which is ambiguous between “attempters” and “seducers” or “tempters”. 14. But see, on the other hand, Nietzsche’s wariness that an extreme adoption of the experimental mode where everyone becomes an “actor” is potentially harmful for the growth and sustenance of the future (GS 356). 15. Quoted in Nordmann (2005, 26). 16. The aphorism, on this view, cannot but fail, for its attempt to be true to the singular experience always crashes against the inevitable gap that time and language introduce between the experience itself and its recording in the aphorism. The aphorism always is ‘an eloquent emblem’ (Stern 1959, 218) of what the experience once was. 17. Since I am not sure I understand Marsden’s claim regarding the aphorism’s effect on the “body” and its “organs” (Marsden 2006, 36), I cannot confidently assert that all innovative philosophy has these similar consequences. 18. See Marion Faber’s discussion in her introduction to her translation of Human, All Too Human where she claims that Nietzsche is indebted not only to Lichtenberg but more centrally to La Rochefoucauld, though Nietzsche’s aphorisms differ from the latter’s in that they are for the most part less polished, longer, broader in scope in terms both of content and point of view (La Rochefoucauld focuses on contemporary ethics, but Nietzsche offers genealogies) and in that Nietzsche’s aphorisms, in contrast to the Frenchman’s, often also provide arguments. For a more comprehensive treatment of Nietzsche’s indebtedness to French literature and philosophy, see Williams (1952). 19. Nietzsche uses the word Sentenz which could mean either maxim or aphorism. 20. Nietzsche gives the specific example of the belief in ‘so-called selfless behavior’ as one such error in moral psychology. Here he probably has Schopenhauer’s belief in the possibility of pure altruism in mind (see Schopenhauer 1995). For some discussion of Nietzsche’s argument against pure altruism, see Elgat (2015).

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References Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966a. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by W.  Kaufmann. New York, NY: Vintage. [BGE] ———. 1966b. The Wanderer and His Shadow. In Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [WS] ———. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals. In On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Vintage. [GM] ———. 1968. The Will to Power. Translated by W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Vintage. [WP] ———. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York, NY: Vintage. [GS] ———. 1984. Human, All Too Human. Translated by M. Faber. London: Penguin Books. [HH] ———. 1999. Kritische Studienausgabe. Compiled under the general editorship of G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin and New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. [KSA] ———. 2005. Twilight of the Idols. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. J.  Norman and A.  Ridley and ed. J.  Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [TI]

Works by Others Cioran, Emil M. 1970. The Temptation to Exist. Translated by H. Richard. Chicago: Quadrangle. ———. 1995. Oeuvres. Paris: Quarto Gallimard. Elgat, Guy. 2015. Nietzsche’s Critique of Pure Altruism—Developing an Argument from Human, All Too Human. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (3): 308–326. Faber, Marion. 1984. Introduction to Human, All Too Human. In Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber. London: Penguin Books. Grant, Ben. 2016. The Aphorism and Other Short Forms. London: Routledge. La Rochefoucauld, François. 2007. Collected Maxims and Other Reflections. Translated and introduction by E.H. Blackmore, A.M. Blackmore, and F. Giguère. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lichtenberg, Georg C. 1990. The Waste Books. Translated and introduction by R.J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: New York Review Books. Marsden, Jill. 2006. Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism. In A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. K. Ansell Pearson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Moore, Will G. 1969. La Rochefoucauld: His Mind and Art. Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press. Morson, Gary S. 2012. The Long and the Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Nordmann, Alfred. 2005. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, Blaise. 1973. Pensées. Translated and introduction by A.J.  Krailsheimer. London: Penguin Classics. Reginster, Bernard. 2006. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on the Overcoming of Nihilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1995. On the Basis of Morality. Translated by E.F.J Payne. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Starobinski, Jean. 1966. La Rochefoucauld et les Morales Substitutives. Nouvelle Revue Française 28 (16–33): 211–229. Stern, Joseph P. 1959. Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions—Reconstructed from his Aphorisms and Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Williams, W.D. 1952. Nietzsche and the French. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1990. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York, NY: Dover Publications. Zöeller, Günter. 1992. Lichtenberg and Kant on the Subject of Thinking. Journal of the History of Philosophy 30 (3): 417–442.

For Further Reading Cooper, Neil. 1995. Aphorisms in Philosophical Thinking. Bradley Studies 5 (2): 162–166. Faber, Marion. 1986. The Metamorphosis of the French Aphorism: La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche. Comparative Literature Studies 23 (3): 205–217. Marton, Scarlett. 2011. Afternoon Thoughts. Nietzsche and the Dogmatism of Philosophical Writing. In Nietzsche on Instinct and Language, ed. J. Constâncio and M.J.M. Branco. Berlin: de Gruyter. Morson, Gary S. 2003. The Aphorism: Fragments from the Breakdown of Reason. New Literary History 34 (3): 409–429. Shapiro, Gary. 1984. Nietzschean Aphorism as Art and Act. Man and World 17 (3): 399–429. Westerdale, Joel. 2013. Nietzsche’s Aphoristic Challenge. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Part II Philosophy of Literature

8 Myth Tudor Balinisteanu

Myth, philosophy, and literature have grown together since ancient times, as if branches of the same tree sharing its vital sap. According to Bruce Lincoln, Hesiod in his Theogony and Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey privileged mythos at the expense of logos, regarding the former as discourse of truth, and the latter as discourse of deception (Lincoln 1999, 3–23). With Socrates and especially Plato’s Republic, myth was revalorized by being disconnected from truth and treated as state propaganda, while logos became “the discourse and practice of the ruling elite, within an emergent regime of truth that called (and calls) itself ‘philosophy”’1,2 (Lincoln 1999, 42). The opposition between myth and truth lasted, with myths ascribed to the periphery of serious culture. Mythology came back to prominence through biblical studies such as the three-volume A New System, or, an Analysis of Ancient Mythology by Jacob Bryant (1715–1804), wherein, as the title page indicates, “an attempt is made to divest tradition of fable; and to reduce the truth to its original purity” (Bryant 1776). As Lincoln’s genealogical schema shows (Lincoln 1999, 144), this led to the coming into prominence of the linguistic approach based in Indo-European studies, marked by the “Third Anniversary Discourse” delivered on February 2, 1786, by Sir William Jones (1746–1794) at the Asiatic Society, which he had founded in 1784 in Calcutta (Jones 1807, 24–46).

T. Balinisteanu (*) University of Suceava, Suceava, Romania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_8

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In time, the linguistic approach led to the structuralist approaches of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), the sociological approach of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the comparative philologist approach of Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), and the folkloric-­ evolutionist approaches of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), leading to the work of James Frazer (1854–1941) which inspired the functionalist approach of Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) and the ritualist approach of Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), culminating in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (Saussure 1983; Jakobson 1985; Durkheim 2001; Dumézil 1980; Lang 1969; Smith 2002; Frazer 1894; Malinowski 2002; Harrison 1991; Lévi-Strauss 1963). Lincoln traces a second major genealogical line in the evolution of concepts of myth proceeding from Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) through Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and the Romantic philological-nationalist approach of the Grimm Brothers, the orientalist approaches of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and Ludwig Von Feuerbach (1804–1872), and the nature allegorical approaches of Adalbert Kuhn (1812–1881) and Max Müller (1823–1900), leading to the theosophy of Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), the seminal philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the psychoanalytic perspectives of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), and the esotericist approach of René Guénon (1886–1951), culminating in the work of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) (Lincoln 1999, 144; Vico 1984; Herder 1988, 71–76; Schlegel 1849, 425–95; Schopenhauer 1969; Feuerbach 1854; Max Müller 1892; Nietzsche 1999; Freud 1998; Jung 2000; Guénon 2009; Eliade 1959). Lincoln begins his examination of the prehistory of mythos and logos from the words in which the Muses address the poet of Hesiod’s Theogony: We know how to recount many falsehoods like real things, and We know how to proclaim truths when we wish. (Lincoln 1999, 3; West 1966, ll. 27–28)

In Lincoln’s analysis, the first line refers to logos, and the second to myth. The analysis is further developed in reference to the Homeric hymns and epics to argue that in archaic Greece “logos denoted … speech acts … of seduction, beguilement, and deception” rather than rational argumentation (Lincoln 1999, x). Lincoln argues that logos was the speech of “structural inferiors” who by using it “outwitted those who held power over them” while mythos “was the speech of the preeminent, above all poets and kings, a genre (like them) possessed of high authority, having the capacity to advance powerful truth claims, and backed by physical force” (Lincoln 1999, x). Thus, the

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terms logos and mythos refer to different registers of discourse which we might ascribe, in the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia and monoglossia, to prose (logos) and poetry (mythos). In this view, the language of a poetic work, like mythos, “realizes itself as something about which there can be no doubt, something that cannot be disputed, something all-encompassing” (Bakhtin 1981, 286). By contrast, the language of prose, like logos, is a language of negotiation of different perspectives in dialogic discourse conveying a sense of historical and social concreteness, relativity of point of view, and a feeling of “participation in historical becoming and in social struggle” (Bakhtin 1981, 331). One might say, then, that myth is essentially a poetic literary style, a mode of representing reality that aims to engender belief. In that, it can be harnessed by an ideology, a notion introduced through the conception of false consciousness developed in the “line of thought that proceeds from Hegel to Marx” (Von Hendy 2002, 49). However, connecting myth and ideology is eventually problematic. Etymologically, the term “ideology,” coined by the French thinker Destutt de Tracy in the late eighteenth century, comes from the Greek idea and logos. Logos is now understood in the Aristotelian sense of “reasoned discourse.” For Aristotle, poetry retains the privilege of an intimate connection to truth, but myth is seen as a discourse of persuasion rather than as a discourse of truth, a position which remained dominant for centuries. Thus, in 1880, Matthew Arnold in The Study of Poetry aligns the “superior character of truth and seriousness” with “the matter and substance of the best poetry” (Arnold 1973c, 171). The features of discourse conveying truth and seriousness, which were connected with myth before Aristotle and the Golden Age of Greece, are now connected with poetry. And poetry “thinks emotionally”, whereas science and, we might add, ideology, understood by de Tracy as the science of ideas (Barth 1976, 2), do not: in 1879, in “On Poetry,” a preface to a volume introducing, among others, Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander, Lucretius, and Vergil, Arnold distinguishes science, which “adds thought to thought, accumulates the elements of a synthesis,” from the idea of poetry nested in a world of religiously experienced “divine illusion” (Arnold 1973a, 62–63). Ideology and myth do not sit well together, but myth and poetry do, even though they are separated by the transfer of the characteristic of truth from the former to the latter. Thus, in the years which separate Hesiod’s culture from Aristotle’s, and up to the present day, the discourse of seduction, beguilement, and deception, all of which indicate the features of an attitude of negotiation, gradually became a discourse of logic, a dialogic discourse of propositional negotiation

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of what counts as rational truth and wisdom, the pre-condition of modern civic liberalism in politics and of modern science in liberal capitalism. Authors like Henry Fielding could confidently argue in 1749 that writers should keep “within the bounds of possibility” and remember that “what it is not possible for man to perform, it is scarce possible for man to believe he did perform” (Fielding 1825, 332). However, Fielding also argues that poetry, like myth, is enabled by, and in turn engenders, conviction and faith. Thus, man’s conviction, perhaps, gave birth to many stories of the ancient Heathen deities (for most of them are of poetical original). The poet, being desirous to indulge a wanton and extravagant imagination took refuge in that power …. This hath been strongly urged in defence of Homer’s miracles: and it is perhaps a defence; not as Mr. [Alexander] Pope would have it, because Ulysses told a set of foolish lies to the Phæacians, … but because the poet himself wrote to Heathens, to whom poetical fables were articles of faith. (Fielding 1825, 332–33)

Fielding’s story of Tom Jones, from which the above passages are quoted, is dialogic and prosaic rather than poetic, and in its heteroglossia it promotes a literary ethos consistent with civic liberalism. This reflects the dominant mode of engagement with myth in the philosophy and art of the time. As Andrew Von Hendy points out, “fable” was used to refer to what we now term “myth” until the 1760s, and fable could be related to myth in the science of allegorical reading (what ‘mythology’ signified at the time), while at the same time it could be perceived as merely an idle, imaginative tale (Von Hendy 2002, 2). The recuperation of the power of myth within a civic liberal ethos was fully achieved only with James Joyce’s modernist reappraisal of myth. Hence, the conflation of ideology and myth in literary criticism has a shifting foundation. Today, ideology is often understood as myth in the service of state propaganda. The speech of ideology thus understood and the speech of mythos may share the requirement of belief, but it was the speech of logos, not that of mythos, which in archaic times was used to obtain consent surreptitiously, through beguilement and deception, features which are often ­attributed today to myth as ideology. The modern concept of ideology as a science of ideas also evokes the notion that conviction is derived from debate and rational argumentation, and thus, originally, from the ethos of the speech of logos, not from that of mythos. By contrast, in myth and poetry truth is a matter of feeling that is not subject to doubt or dialogic disputation, although a case can be made in favour of a notion of “poetic ideologies,” especially in totalitarian regimes of truth.

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The understanding of myth as means of engendering belief based on feeling calls for a focus on Romanticism. Von Hendy summarizes the Romantic approach to myth in the following words: The romantic inventors of ‘myth’, theorists and poets alike, consciously construct it as a privileged site in the modern agon between belief and disbelief. And the history of the new concept remains during the nineteenth century largely the record of an intensifying struggle between what Schlegel called ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘irony’. (Von Hendy 2002, 49)

For Friedrich Schlegel, enthusiasm and irony are simultaneously present in Romantic wit (Miller 2000, 68). This could mean that a Schlegelian Romantic artist is aware of the constructed nature of the poetic worldview through which s/he seeks to engender enthusiasm in readers/audiences. In being thus aware, s/he also supports every individual’s right to construct an infinite plurality of alternative poetic worldviews as a Universal right. Instead of the Universality of one given poetic worldview, wit, in its ironic dimension, promotes the Universality of the right to invest belief in any poetic worldview. Romantic literature reflects this attitude in defining characters who reject the power of a socially established myth and celebrate the creative power of the individual placed as a demiurge at the centre of his/her own Universe (i.e. his/ her own worldview). In a Bakhtinian frame of mind, one could say that a Romantic ironist adopts a prosaic dialogic attitude towards the world based on the ethos of the speech of logos, of a discourse of seduction employed to outwit a more powerful opponent. The opponent is the philistine aristocrat and bourgeois (while the aristocrat is also an enemy of the bourgeois). Even in the undercurrents of the Romantic poetic speech aiming to engender enthusiasm, akin to the speech of mythos, can be detected the ethos of logos, of philosophy as science of ideas, but an ethos still connected to the ancient speech of logos as a speech of seduction. In its cultural, if not stylistic, heteroglossia, the Romantic discourse is arguably a reflection of the ideology of liberal capitalist individualism, for it proclaims the Universal right of every individual to create his/her own world of imagination, and thus worldviews, and thus cultural value. The British Romantic poets would have undoubtedly disagreed. William Wordsworth condemned industrialization and, as Matthew Arnold showed in his 1881 preface to his anthology of George Gordon Byron’s poems, this poet was “roused … to irreconcilable revolt and battle” by the “falsehood, cynicism, insolence, misgovernment, oppression, with their consequent unfailing crop of human misery” which he saw as characteristic of the middle and upper

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classes of the time (Arnold 1973d, 232). However, in claiming the right to individualistic poetic self-recreation, Romantic philosophies promote at a collective level a heteroglossia characteristic of logos, employing literary devices of seduction, if not beguilement, even though, at an individual scale, within one’s poetic worldview, the messianic attitude of the poet is consistent with the ethos of archaic mythos. The blood power of the Furies is transformed into the kindly power of the Eumenides. Discussing the German idealists, the French revolutionaries, and the Romantic poets, Richard Rorty argues: What was glimpsed at the end of the eighteenth century was that anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being re-described. … What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. (Rorty 1989, 7)

Thus, when Romantic art creates its own language of myth, whether or not inspired by traditional myths, it begins to resemble what Lincoln (1999, x) identified in archaic Greek culture as the speech of preeminent poets claiming high authority and enlightened possession of ultimate truths, with the problematic corollary that Romantic discourse echoes the ethos of logos, of seduction aiming to outwit those who held power over them (the philistine aristocrats and bourgeoisie). Myth in the service of logos is myth in the service of civic liberalism, its power claimed both by the captains of industry and the alienated artists. However, there is a telling distinction between Romantic liberalism and the liberalism of the middle classes. As Arnold points out, quoting an appraisal by A.  C. Swinburne, Lord Byron’s success was largely due to ‘the excellence of sincerity and strength’ evinced by the poet’s personality reflected in his work (Arnold 1973d, 234, original italics). In the Romantic perception the bourgeois middle class lacked these qualities. One could say that the presence of these qualities aligned the liberalism of the Romantic poets (their logos) to a poetic discourse resembling mythos, while the absence of these qualities aligned the liberalism of the middle class to ideology. As Arnold argues in “The Future of Liberalism,” the power of poetry to engender sincerity and strength, to foster the development of these qualities among the middle class, would transform the “Liberals of the present” into the “Liberals of the future” (Arnold 1973b, 141); indeed, Arnold’s own liberal discourse, in mobilizing poetry to such a purpose, comes close to fulfilling the function of mythos:

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phrases like “beauty and manners,” “true and noble science” of politics and economics, and “the reign of the Liberal saints”, prominent in Arnold’s discourse, suggest a mythic ethos based on sincerity and strength, advancing the truth claims of preeminent men of culture, with poets given pride of place (Arnold 1973b, 159–60). For Von Hendy, a line of thought germinated in the Romantic matrix eventually led to envisioning myth as a constitutive “pragmatically necessary fiction” (with Nietzsche’s philosophy an illustrative example), another to envisioning myth as false consciousness (Hegel to Marx), and a third to anthropological studies of myth (Von Hendy 2002, 49). The first genealogical line is of particular interest for examining myth in relation to literature, and my arguments so far suggest that it is in fact a defining feature of myth that may be said to characterize, in different ways, the other two as well. Envisioning myth as constitutive pragmatically necessary fiction in terms of the Romantic impulse foregrounds the relation between myth and Utopia. Utopia, as an idealistic projection of possible futures, is formed in a discourse of logos, of argumentation and seduction. Socialist Utopian thought such as that of George Russell in Ireland, Edward Carpenter in England, Prince Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin in Russia, William Lane in Australia, or H. D. Thoreau and Benjamin Tucker in the US builds on the Romantic poetic impulse to envision utopian forms of social organization but at the same time preserves the power of poetry to engender faith and belief. To the extent that this politically engaged poetic discourse achieves consent and enthusiasm for an envisioned social future, it can be said to function in the literary style of myth. “Utopian myth,” whether or not adapting and transforming myths of the ancient world to a modern political purpose, engenders belief, giving precision and rigidity to a system of ideas, with myth safeguarding the Utopia or ideology necessary for that system to be translated into social praxis. As Georges Sorel argued, referring to the French Democracy after the Revolution: “With these Utopias were mixed up the myths which represented the struggle against the ancient regime; so long as the myths survived, all the refutations of liberal Utopias could produce no result; the myth safeguarded the Utopia with which it was mixed” (Sorel 2004, 51). Less involved in practical politics than progressive Utopian thinkers are the poets who make the turn to ancient traditions for truth and enlightenment a central part of their poetic manifestoes and programmes. For them, poetry both functions in the literary style of myth, engendering belief, and serves to restyle traditional myth narratives. The poetry of W. B. Yeats is an illustrative example. For poets like Yeats, the turn to myth is an attempt to recuperate communal values through recuperating a shared sense of faith, belief, and

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enthusiasm. However, the communal values are not those of ancient Celtic society, as Yeats often professed. They are the values of modern society, in Yeats’s case, those shared by German Romanticism transposed in nationalist ideology, defined against the values of the liberal state and its industrial imperialist-­capitalist base. In the specific historical contexts of Yeats’s time, this conflict of values emerged from, and in turn intensified, the political conflict between Ireland and Britain. As Michael North argued, “Ireland’s partition came about in part because of an inability on the part of its politicians to resolve the difference between cultural nationalism and the liberal state. On a much smaller scale, the conflict replicated itself within the mind and life of Yeats” (North 1991, 27). The right to individual myth-making, such as Yeats’s, is one guaranteed by the very principles of liberalism against which the speech of mythos counterpoises faith and belief, a contradiction from which Yeats could only extricate himself by finding in the aristocracy the model for a community of enlightened poets, whose inspiration sprung from the masses, but who have transcended the realm of necessity (North 1991, 35). In the name of the masses, an aristocratic group of preeminent poets, claiming the power of myth, defends itself against inferiors (defined as such by the poets, but who in fact withhold the reins of power politically and militarily) who seek to outwit the poet through beguilement and deception. Once again mythos is poised against logos. To synthesize the perspectives outlined so far, one might say that the discourse of myth is a literary poetic style which has the power to engender faith and belief, being distinct from ideological discourse, which is the liberal polity discourse of negotiation and seduction, a predominantly prosaic discourse. However, the discourse of myth can be hijacked by ideological discourse. This position suggests that when speaking of modern myth in literature, in addition to focusing on the use of traditional mythological motifs and patterns in literary narrative, we should also be concerned with the extent to which a narrative fulfils the same function that ancient myth fulfilled in societies of long ago, as well as being concerned with the extent to which this function is used to safeguard an ideology. In this view, the question arises of how myth is different from poetry if one of its defining characteristics is that it is a poetic literary style. And also, if myth is defined as a poetic literary style, how should we regard anthropological studies of myth? Anthropological studies of myth were often studies of poetry employing the methodologies of linguistics and philology, as with the highly influential Cambridge myth and ritual school. In the arts, with the advent of modernism, this in turn facilitated an awareness of the structural functions of myth. If myth is a necessary fiction, this could mean that it fulfils

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a central role in human cognition. Thus, if in relation to Romanticism we may speak of myth as literary style with socially constitutive functions, a necessary fiction, in relation to modernism we must speak of myth as literary structure with cognitive functions. In the literary arts, style and structure cannot be separated, but one may become privileged at the expense of the other. If the central question of the Romantic uses of myth can be formulated as “How can I use myth to engender faith, belief, and enthusiasm?” the central question in modernist and subsequent uses of myth can be formulated as “How is myth fundamentally a form of human cognition?” To develop this point it is necessary to ask what kind of cognition myth, as poïetic work, might enable. To answer, we might start by tackling the root of this question in Romantic preoccupations with the nature of the poetic creative process. In her analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Barbara Johnson highlights Poe’s claim that “the poem was written backwards (commencing with its effect),” with the process of composition beginning with the letters “o” and “r,” from which “a pure signifier, empty of human intentionality, a pure poetic cliché” was born: the word “nevermore” (Johnson 1987, 98, original italics). Johnson interprets the poem as a story of what happens when the signifier encounters a reader: she regards the single word “nevermore” as a poem within a poem, with the implication that the “larger” poem is the métarécit of an encounter between a reader and poetry. In relation to myth, we might extend Johnson’s argument to examine what happens when signifiers initially empty of human intentionality, referencing the nonhuman nature, or the “voice” of one’s physiological, as opposed to the acculturated, body, encounter human consciousness. The analogy works to an extent because, in Poe’s poem, “nevermore” is the speech of a bird, both myth and poetry index a certain kind of nevermore, and both myth and poetry rely on given rhetoric formulae. Johnson argues that the protagonist (“the reader”) in Poe’s poem arrives at the answer that the raven brings a message of forgetfulness, helping him to overcome the trauma caused by the death of his beloved Lenore, with the poem communicating “something fundamental about the poetic function as a correlative, precisely, of loss” (Johnson 1987, 98–99). But although the poem individualizes the experience by giving specific details, such as the name of the beloved, we soon realize that this kind of loss is a human universal. Lenore can become a signifier for the loss of a first innocent love, implying the loss of youth, of an Eden of “forever young,” the loss of Eve, perhaps, or the loss of the mother, even perhaps the archaic mother defined in psychoanalysis, or, why not, the loss of the goddess of spring with the arrival of barren, dark, and dreary winter.

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As Johnson argues, in Poe’s text: “nevermore” comes as a ferociously desired and feared answer. The reader … writes his own story around the signifier … until, finally, it utterly incorporates him: And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore. … The poem has sealed, without healing, the trauma of loss. What began as a signifier empty of subjectivity has become a container for the whole of the reader’s soul. … Repetition engenders its own compulsion-to-sense. (Johnson 1987, 99, original italics)

The act of beginning the poem from the letters “o” and “r” and then seeking a word which incorporates and embodies the effect of those sounds on the human psyche is similar to the acts performed in the birth of myth from articulations of sound effects in ancient magic and ritual. But although myth may have begun with the discovery of the stylistic effects of human sounds, empty of sense and therefore empty of subjectivity (while certainly not soulless), the syncretism of voice and act, and, in addition, music, demanded rhythm and eventually pattern. The repetition of such patterns engenders compulsion-tosense and eventually leads to a story, and stories which share a narrative pattern constitute the structure of a myth. If we regard the poetic creative process described by Johnson based on Poe’s poem as paradigmatic in relation to myth, then we could argue that myth becomes the container of one’s soul, poised against the grief caused by the void of loss. In depth psychology of Jungian inspiration as developed by L. H. Stewart, for the primordial ancient man the stimulus of loss evoked the image of the void, triggering the effect of grief, manifested on a bodily level in noetic apperception in the expressive dynamism of rhythm, and on the cultural level in aesthetic attitude (Chodorow 1991, 95; Stewart 1987, 142). In this view, myth seals, but does not heal, an essential sense of loss, quelling, or suppressing, a human need to understand the relation between death and life. Myth is both literary style and a means to test the limits of human cognition, and also itself a means of cognition through the emotions it mobilizes. The reader of a poetic text, or a participant in myth, partakes of Orpheus’ power to bring the dead back to the realm of the living, only to lose them again, in a psychological struggle to overcome nevermore. This struggle always has a relational base: every person has his or her Eurydice. This struggle may indeed be a universal feature of human existence, derived, in psychoanalytic perspective, from the prenatal experience of the matrixial as

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understood by Bracha Ettinger. Ettinger offers an alternative model to Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, arguing that traces of psychic life at the prenatal stage survive in one’s postnatal and adult life in side of the Symbolic. She does not deny the power of the Symbolic to provide identity within the realm of reason into which we are ushered through the irreversible separation from the mother’s returning gaze, forever destined to search for it but never being able to find it except in the projections of our own imaginations alighting on an object of desire. However, Ettinger argues that such loss, although irreversible, is mitigated by a sensibility gained from the prenatal experience of co-emergence in severality. Such an experience is enabled in aesthetic perception, when we sense that a sharing space between viewers, readers, dancers, and so forth, including the author of the art text, has become accessible. A sensibility of wholesomeness is thus regained, if not its reasoned-­ out sense. Furthermore, according to Ettinger: The archaic, foreclosed m/Other, which is the source of desire, the gaze, and the screen [a mental space on which we project substitutive images in our search of the mother’s returning gaze], is woman plus the sexual act of reproduction. To this ‘union’ mythology attributes the trait of the originary One: the fusion of a couple in One flesh. (Ettinger 2006, 132)

Myth may be a form of human cognition involving experiences that are not accessible to human individual subjects (i.e. to the ego), with the implication that myth always evokes an originary One who is no one else but the mother, engaging the experience of the loss of the mother at a visceral level, and foregrounding unanswerable questions regarding love, birth, and motherhood. In a psychoanalytic context, logos may be related to the Symbolic and myth to the Orphic realm with its dynamic of faith and belief mobilized through art, deriving from a longed for but never regained relation to the “archaic, foreclosed m/Other,” “the originary One” (Ettinger 2006, 132). Myth draws its power to mobilize consent from “a dimension from which we are cleft, an impossible point of emergence, a mythical origin” which is not subject to discursive interpellation in the Symbolic where intersubjective relations are determined by “the absence [of the originary m/Other] indexed by the gaze” (Ettinger 2006, 134). Thus, appraising Ettinger’s work in the Foreword to The Matrixial Borderspace, Judith Butler comments that [i]f one is to see Eurydice, one must ask about the site of not-knowing that … conditions the possibility of her beauty. This is a fragmented landscape but one where the bits and pieces of inherited experience signify loss and tonality at once, are at once traumatic and beautiful. (Butler 2006, xi)

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The site of not-knowing, of the matrixial existing in side of logos and the Symbolic, is a site of longing which requires a leap of faith which would not negate logos and the Symbolic, but would rather confirm the existence of a state of wholesomeness, experienced in the beginning of beginnings: in the mother’s womb. In this perspective myth can be defined as being born from a longing for a somatic, pre-cultural sense of being. Myth can exist as faith and belief because in its narrative (Symbolic) expression it can only seal, without healing, that trauma of loss. Lenore is another incarnation of Eurydice. In Ettinger’s perspective as explained by Butler: “The psychoanalytic law of foreclosure did not work, and the archaic scene of a nonunified psyche emerges visually through layers that cover and disclose a past that continues to haunt the life of the supposedly individuated adult” (Butler 2006, xi). Literary texts function like myth when they require faith and belief that cannot be explained through appeal to the logos. When we use logos to explain faith and belief we are no longer experiencing myth, but idea-logos, that is, ideology. From the originary experience of the One we inherit a sense of loss, but also an ability to retrace and reregister “traces of the other” (Butler 2006, xi) in art and literature. The loss is not absolute, for it enables the experience of return. This experience “is concerned with rhythm before vision,” with faith and belief experienced viscerally, as Brian Massumi explains in reference to Ettinger’s series of artworks entitled Eurydice: In the myth, Eurydice’s music [not her voice, but her manifestation in the modulations and the transformative emotional intensity of Orpheus’ voice] has the power to play registers of feeling so directly and intensely that her listeners are powerless to exert deliberate control over their response. They are captivated, directly, intensely, bodily, by its rhythm. They cannot but follow it. (Massumi 2006, 207)

Ettinger’s perspective allows us to connect the speech of the preeminent poets to an intensity which comes not from their individual self, but from a memory of co-emergence with another, a memory felt but irreproducible in discourse at the level of the Symbolic, being only reproducible at a level of tonality in a web of bodily intensities. And these experiences are above all somatic. An enriched definition of myth would state that it is a literary style which engenders faith and belief experienced somatically, because what is experienced is a memory of co-emergence with another (the [M]other) which cannot be expressed symbolically. This experience is connected to appearing and disappearing in the sense expressed by the myth of Eurydice. Perhaps the rhythm of this returning and

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loss is the rhythm of myth providing a measure for the somatic memory of the prenatal. The experience of the sacred in faith and belief is rooted in a space void of time, the space of the womb where the foetus, who is not yet a subject, cannot experience time, only the rhythm of co-emergence with the m/Other. The moment of birth is the moment when time is born, and it is reconstituted again and again in myth as rebirth, ensuring that, in the realm of the profane, the realm of necessity, “Time is in continuance. What is it if not the endless rhythm of things appearing and disappearing?” (Massumi 2006, 204). Orpheus’ song is myth as literary style, the song of a preeminent poet, establishing truth by engendering faith and belief, but these experiences can be engendered because of a concrete experience determined by the nature of the human species, distinct from the experience of the fictional and the fabulous (of poetical fables): the experience of prenatal life, a somatic memory which inflects, modulates, and gives intensity to the myth expressed in the voice of “the Artist-Genius,” “born from no womb” but from “the idea of a god transferred to man, now self-creating and holding the power of creation” (Ettinger 2006, 175). Drawing attention to Otto Rank’s observation that in the myth of the birth of the hero the mother is not only relegated to the background but is also often represented by an animal, Ettinger argues that [T]he mother is either an attractive object of father-son rivalry [as in the terms of the Oedipus complex] or a nursing object: either a copulating animal or a nourishing animal. In either of these roles a woman can also reappear as a Muse, the source of inspiration. But between copulating and nursing it seems that there is a void. … The lacking possibility is the gestating and birth-giving mother, the begetting mother, or what I have called the archaic m/Other and analysed as poietic Event and Encounter. (Ettinger 2006, 173; Rank 2004, 69)

The male-defined Muses of Hesiod’s Theogony, the muse of logos and the muse of mythos, are rather like the mother relegated to the background while the power of the male poet is foregrounded. The figure of Eurydice suggests a possibility of conceiving the gestating and birth-giving mother as another kind of Muse of myth whose presence/absence prefigures the dynamic of appearing/ disappearing and generates a fundamental rhythm of human experience, the rhythm of loss and return, death and (re)generation. In this view, and in relation to literature, myth is the domain of metaphor within the Symbolic, always featuring a character kindred with Eurydice, or Lenore, or a spring goddess. Johnson argues that all figures of discourse are “figures of the failure of the figure ‘to kill Time.’ For what is time but a figure for our own deaths, that unfigurable source of all figure?” (Johnson 1987,

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110). But Eurydice, a figure of Orpheus’ song, measuring time in appearing/ disappearing at the threshold between life and death, like the m/Other, or Lenore, the lost ideal lover, or the goddess of the regeneration motif, and so forth, can never arrive, or can only arrive with death, which closes the circle of life. In this closing and unification one’s life is completed in an ultimate finished and achieved art text, as unreadable to the subject as the experience, in illo tempore, of the life lived in the mother’s womb. If death is defined as incomprehensibility of the individual subjective, it is present before birth, but the loss, either of co-emergence or by death, is made good in the return to co-emergence, that is, to an all-encompassing mother, and thus to life beyond the material realm of the Symbolic: regeneration is conceived as possible in terms of potential new life. This potential (or power) experienced psychologically is determined by an empirical fact: women’s fertility is a biological given of the human species. Perhaps we may find in this fact a biological base for myth understood as literary style connected to faith and belief, with faith and belief manifested as poetic power in the Symbolic, but derived from a realm beyond the Symbolic, a realm of borderlinking. We might say that both the poetic power manifested through the Symbolic and the possibility of borderlinking are features of myth as literary style. According to Mircea Eliade: By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality … the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. … The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. (Eliade 1959, 12–13, original italics)

The reality of the sacred as understood by Eliade may well be the Real of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the domain of the “archaic, foreclosed m/Other, which is the source of desire” (Ettinger 2006, 132). While in Lacanian perspectives this realm can never be accessed, Ettinger and Eliade have argued that it constitutes a dimension of subjective experience which is not amenable to the logic of the Symbolic, and therefore not amenable to analysis. However, their arguments suggest that the experience of the sacred is an empirical experience as a form of human cognition. But what kind of empirical evidence may one find in favour of such a theory?

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Neuroscience research on religion has begun to sketch venues of investigation which might lead to answers, but much remains unknown (Hick 2006; Bulkeley 2005; Seybold 2007). With current technology it is not possible to determine whether prenatal memories are stored, or, if so, whether they are connected to faith and belief or to a sense of another realm or heaven. If such could be proven, we might have empirical evidence of the experience of transcendence (though, clearly, not of transcendence itself ). However, two theories from neuroscience and neurophysiology seem to me to be relevant in discussing myth and literature. At an individual scale, neuroscience and neurophysiology connect love to a fundamental mechanism of motivation and reward in the human brain (e.g. Aron et al. 2005). Love, a fundamental human emotion, is a central focus in most myths. For example, anthropologists have highlighted the importance of the regeneration pattern in myths. Its basic scheme involves a champion who holds the queen, a challenger who wins the queen from the champion, and the queen who qualifies the champion by being by his side. And we very often find myth patterns involving love in literary narratives of any period where love, as in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, or in Poe’s “The Raven,” is expressed through a dynamic of loss and return. It is worth asking whether this pattern can be an expression, in the realm of the Symbolic, of physiological mechanisms of motivation and reward. Another theory supported by neuroscience research suggests that neurophysiological mechanisms of empathy ensure solidarity within a group, which, from an evolutionary perspective, increases our chances of survival as we fare better in groups (for a summary of research in this field see Zaki and Ochsner 2012). Is it possible to connect Ettinger’s notion of borderlinking with empathy as understood in neuroscience? The relation between prenatal neurophysiologic life and empathy has been tentatively established (e.g. Chapman et al. 2006). If future research will show that empathy is rooted in the foetus’ neurophysiological and mental life, we might obtain empirical evidence in favour of the argument that the role of myth in establishing a social community is traceable to an “archaic” mother, that is, the m/Other as the primordial source of an individual’s emotional life. To sum up, if we were looking for hard science empirical evidence regarding the specificity of the experience of myth, a possible hypothesis would be that myth reflects the physiology of motivation and reward (which would explain the presence of the themes of challenge and love in patterns of loss and return) or empathy (which would explain the communal values conveyed in the literary expression of myths). In this view, archaic myth would be a primordial form in which human consciousness reflected fundamental somatic experiences. But it would be premature to be overly enthusiastic about such venues of research.

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It would be presumptuous to advance a unifying theory of myth and literature which integrates the diversity of theories of myth. But it would be reasonable to say that, generally speaking, myth is a poetic literary style the specificity of which lies in engendering faith, belief, and enthusiasm that are shared by a community of readers/audiences, enlisting an individual’s consent for certain sets of communal values. For these reasons, the experience of myth can be hijacked by ideology. A distinction between myth and ideology could be made based on the cultural purpose served by a myth narrative: if it is tributary to a discourse of seduction, beguilement, and deception, myth functions as ideology. In addition, there may be a specifically masculine mode of myth (using its poetic power to advance truth claims) and a specifically feminine mode (geared towards borderlinking in communities). Nonideologic myths express questions of being and nonbeing, life and death, birth and rebirth (whether imagined on the plane of individual life or in transcendental terms, on a higher plane beyond the material world). These foci suggest that myth is a form of human cognition which has served to test and determine the limits of our knowledge. Perhaps we have now evolved beyond the need for such a cognitive tool. However, perhaps myth can still offer focus points in our search for the meaning of life with an awareness of the limits of our knowledge as determined by the biological specificities of the human mind and body.

Notes 1. I am italicizing logos when the term includes its archaic meaning (e.g. speech as means of seduction); “logos” is not italicized when it refers to modern understandings of the term, but sometimes I use the term with the understanding that the speech of logos is still underpinned by its archaic meaning. 2. This work was supported by a mobility grant from the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS  - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-­ 1.1-MC-2018-3109, within PNCDI III”.

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9 Epic Michael Weinman

This chapter hopes simultaneously to meet two central aims. First, to introduce the rivalry between philosophy and epic, beginning from “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” reported by Plato in Republic 10 and continuing right until today. Second, to argue that epic remains relevant for philosophy for essential, not merely accidental or historical, reasons; chief among these, we will see, is one Plato identifies: the peculiar power of imitative poetry in which the poet’s voice is hidden directly in one or more speaking characters within the literary work.1 I proceed in three movements. The first and longest section focuses on Plato and his reception of Homer in order to lay bare the roots of the epic’s place in the history of philosophy and how we can see those roots at work right down until the most recent points of contact between philosophy and literature. The second looks at how Dante stands as a fulcrum of the relation between philosophy and epic in its ancient and modern manifestations, focusing on how his reworking of classical themes in political philosophy played a role in the transition from medieval scholasticism to the modern “rebellion” against the Ancients. The closing section gestures toward significant strands in the intertwinement of epic form and philosophical practice from Goethe (1997, 2014) until today, culminating with a reflection on philosophical engagements with Coetzee’s work. I hope to show that philosophy and epic have always been, and shall continue to remain, in contest because while the philosophers are M. Weinman (*) Bard College Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_9

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right to worry that the poets do not know what they are talking about, the poets are right to worry that philosophers dare not talk about that which they do not know. As it is by no means clear which of these two sins is greater, we have reason to suspect that the quarrel will continue for some time.

 lato and the Other Poets: The Roots P of the Uneasy Entwinement of Philosophy and Epic Any discussion of philosophy’s engagement with epic cannot ignore the “Plato and the poets” controversy and Plato’s own treatment of this issue in Book 10 of the Republic. Recalling the terms of that discussion and the Myth of Er, with which the dialogue ends and which is offered in epic form itself, and even includes a line in tragic metre,2 I hope to show against prevailing wisdom that Plato (2013, English 1991) is not so much hoping to end the contest between philosophy and poetry with a “win” for philosophy over poetry but rather to point out how philosophy’s truest ends cannot be met without poetry. In order to meet the demands of this argument, I must first justify the premise that muthos as form of discourse is not only not excluded from the realm of truth-disclosing discourse for Plato, but is actually an integral part of Plato’s philosophical project, contrary to what might appear from Republic’s infamous putative hostility to irrational (poetic, figurative, imagistic) discourse tout court and most of all in Republic 10. To this end, I offer and endorse a recent critical reconstruction of and response to two intimately related, but all-too-often independently propagated bodies of interpretive literature on Plato’s dialogues. Avgousti (2012, 22–27) calls these two literatures “poetry literature” and “myth literature,”3 and I wholly join Avgousti (2012, 22n6, 22n9) in lamenting “the way these literatures are divided,” and the frequent “impression” of the dichotomy between myth and poetry for Plato is that “myth is acceptable, whereas poetry is not.” In fact, as the contributors to Collobert et al. (2012) and Destrée and Herrmann (2011) show, poetry (and epic especially) hold their place of honour as an anti-hero for Plato precisely because it is how one can unite the picture thinking of myth and the affective production of beautiful speech. Having said this much about the overarching interpretive concern about the role of myth in Plato’s philosophical dialogues at large, it is necessary to say something about the presence of Er as a concluding myth in Republic in particular. Gonzalez (2012, 259) argues forcefully that the encounter with Er

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at the very end of Republic must present a genuine enigma that is not to be resolved by simply flattening the dramatic tension to suggest that Er either is a “lame and messy ending,” as Annas (1981, 353) states, or else Thayer (1988, 380) would have it. Instead, with Gonzalez (2012, 269), we must accept that the myth shows the choice of lives to be “a pitiful, funny, and surpassingly strange sight” that provides an essential, and not accidental or incidental, challenge to many of the agreements about choice and justice that Socrates has extracted from Glaucon and Adeimantus earlier.4 Here I follow Baracchi (2002), whose monograph on myth, life, and war in Republic focuses as much on the manners of expression (muthos and logos) we encounter in Republic as on the muthos of Er as the irresistible centre of our attention if we want to understand Plato’s practice as a poet, as a creator of written discourse. In what she calls an “unending” conclusion, Baracchi (2002, 219) is centrally concerned with why it is that insofar as the “saving of a muthos concludes the dialogue,” the work of Republic “both is and is not concluded”: it is concluded, she holds, in that “thanks to [Er’s] contemplation of the whole, the dialogue would find rest,” but it is not insofar as “the final discourse, precisely as myth, tends obliquely to evade the demands that only the logic of system would have fulfilled.” Facing this, many of the standard interpretations of Plato’s dialogues, especially in English-language philosophy of the twentieth century, have either suppressed or tried to rationalize both this myth and muthos altogether; they have endeavoured to understand Plato as arguing that the conflict between muthos and logos can be resolved by subverting the former to the latter. Baracchi (2002, 6), responding to one of the more influential instantiations of this tradition of interpretation, that of Annas (1981, 349–53),5 also calls attention to how Annas displays “a quite remarkable reluctance to acknowledge the irreducible opacity, questionability, and manifoldness of language” to which Plato himself expressly calls attention by offering myths at critical junctures of his philosophical dialogues. She and I understand that for Plato “far from having an arbitrary, accessory or even unnecessary character,” myths actually “disclose language as intrinsically and essentially imaginal.” In this light, we can see that making sense of the myth of Er as a “fitting” conclusion in this way requires attention to two features of Republic 10. First, we must attend to the two different versions of the three kinds of skeuē6 analysis (made at 597b–e and 601d–602b, respectively). Then, we must turn to the “old quarrel between poetry and philosophy” itself (607b–c). We begin, then, with the famous “three kinds of couches” analysis. As this is passage is quite familiar, let us summarize it most schematically: it introduces a pair of triads that correspond with one another. Namely, we have the

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triad of “makers” and then corresponding triad of “things made by art (skeuē).” One the one side, we have the divine demiurge, the human demiurge, and the imitator; on the other, we have the form of the couch, the couch, and the image of the couch. The correspondence is assured by the activity of imitation: beginning from the “least” real of the three couches, the idea is that the imitator produces the image of a couch by imitating the actual couch that was produced by a human demiurge (a carpenter) by means of imitating the form of the couch that was produced by a divine demiurge. This is well known and not especially surprising. But what is striking and telling about this moment, however, is that this “three kinds of couches” analysis, famous as it is, is not the definitive version of the three kinds of skeuē analysis that Plato has Socrates provide in Book 10. For, while this first version helps us to see how the same signifier, like “couch” of course, but also “soul” or “human being” functions in multiple ways, it gives the false impression that being is a copy. Insofar as the “imitation of an imitation” analysis implies that the actual artefact (human being as well as couch) is itself a mere copy, in the service of the argument that the image of the couch is just a copy of a copy, the “three kinds of couches” version actually points away from the presence of the ideal in physical reality. To correct this, Plato has Socrates offer a second and improved version of three kinds of skeuē analysis at 601d–602b. In this second analysis, Socrates corrects what is misleading in the first version by showing that the diminishing return of truth does not rest in whether the skeuos in question is the form (made by the divine demiurge), the actual artefact (made by a human artisan), or an image (made by an imitative painter or poet). The emphasis is rather placed on the relationship between production and consumption. The three-­ tiered analysis remains, as does the underlying condemnation of imitation as having little or nothing of being, but we now find the difference that makes a difference between the tiers of reality to rest not in the object itself as a product of one or another kind of production, but rather in the epistemic relationship that the producer or user of the artefact bears to the artefact. Socrates describes this with reference to a different skeuos, a flute: it is possible to have the epistemic relation of the imitator, who—having neither produced a flute nor used a flute, but merely having made an image of a flute—has neither knowledge nor right opinion about the flute, and thus can only charm or deceive us when it comes to the flute and its use (602a–b). Here we have the same “bottom tier” assignment to imitation, but on very different grounds: the problem is not that the imitator’s flute itself is an imitation of an imitation, it is rather that the imitator’s relationship to the flute he produces is predicated on ignorance, on the absence of either truth or right opinion. This is

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compared with the condition of the user and the maker of a real flute, where the former—whose orientation is based on “trust” (the epistemic condition of the second part of the “divided line” in Book 6 [509d–511b])—possesses a right opinion of the flute, while the flute-player, because of her actual use of the flute has “knowledge” (601e–602a). We are left with a clear hierarchy of three terms, with the imitator as the third and worst, and then two increasingly preferred terms. But notice that this time, while the imitator remains worst, and the human tekton remains second, the “best” term has shifted from the divine demiurge to the human who uses rather than produces the skeuos. Notice as well that while the image based on imitation of an artefact remains the least real (or true) of the three kinds of skeuos, and the actual artefact as an object of production remains second, these two are now contrasted not with the divine-created idea of the artefact, but rather with the actual artefact as an object of use. The “old quarrel” passage responds to this shift between the first and second versions of the “three kinds” analysis. Plato here reaffirms Book 3’s rejection of imitative poetry on grounds that are ultimately ethical, while also epistemological and ontological, but with an innovation: he states the condition under which imitative poetry can pass ethical muster. As Baracchi (2002, 121) notes, the second expulsion of imitation “should be viewed in the context of the Socratic pronouncements against” the voices of the poets like Homer, who mimic and thus pretend to share in exactly the voices they announce. It is precisely in not lying in this way, while still practicing mimesis, that the myth of Er, a piece of Socratic poetry, can disclose how “poetry directed to pleasure and imitation” could “have any argument to give showing that they should be in a city with good laws” (607c). More pointedly, Socrates demands (607d) that imitative poetry should be prepared to present an apologia that “it’s not only pleasant but also beneficial to regimes and human life,” which Baracchi (2002, 124) argues, means that “properly speaking, the problem was never the lie of mimēsis, but the comportment to it—the ēthos.” We ought to understand the composition of the myth of Er, and its placement at the end of the dialogue, as Plato’s attempt to reconcile speech to itself. Through the lexis of mimēsis, two dominant modes of linguistic expression alive to the dialogue, its author and its readers are rejoined after having been torn asunder: muthos and logos. Let us recall that this apology of philosophy before poetry ends with the conviction that “it isn’t holy to betray what seems to us to be the truth” (607c) and, acknowledging that we cannot here fully take up Er’s tale as the apology Socrates names it to be (614b), let us further attend to the moment immediately preceding the presentation of Er’s tale (612c–e). Here Socrates

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demands that the brothers “give back to me what you borrowed in the argument,” namely, “the just man’s seeming to be unjust and the unjust man just.” More can, and really must, be said by way of a detailed reading of the myth of Er itself in order to fully appreciate the reconciliation of muthos and logos it enacts on this argument, and I have elsewhere attempted to do so. With respect to our aims at present, however, my specific suggestion is that by yoking our position of vision and our epistemological horizon to that of Er, Plato’s Socrates has “saved a tale” that might not only save us but actually “save” the practice of mythopoetic speech as well. Read this way, both the unity of the myth as a whole—as a comment on the impossibility of immediate knowledge and the resulting justice to be found in embracing the mediation—and its place within the drama of the Republic come into focus. This reading, refusing to understand his tale as a rhetorical strategy or a “dumbing down” of the arguments offered earlier in Republic, and obviously least of all as a “lame and messy ending,” brings us closer to a resolution of the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” along the lines that Plato might, after all, have wished to resolve that quarrel. By appreciating the myth of Er as an integral part of Plato’s project in Republic, and thus appreciating the epic form that this myth clearly embraces and imitates while working as dialectic, we find that epic, on Plato’s most proper view as exemplified by his own literary practice, has a constitutive role to play in a life that longs for the good, even the life of one who knows dialectic and its virtues.

 ante and the Ancients: Formal Experimentation D and Doctrinal Deviance As we turn to now to Dante7—for whom the reception of Aristotle, in all likelihood predominantly if not exclusively through Averroes and Christian Scholastic commentators,8 is integral to his own poetic expression as a response to the classical tradition—we should bear in mind that Aristotle, too, engages directly with Homer and epic, though perhaps because of the influence of his extended discussion of tragedy, this has gone relatively little discussed. Specifically, we will be well served to note that a fuller understanding of the place of the irrational within the best life according to Aristotle in his response to Plato involves an attentive reading of Aristotle’s own reception of the mythopoetic tradition and in particular Homer (1975, 1998). As I have tried to establish elsewhere, we can first of all see this legacy in Aristotle’s (1957, English 1999) positive inclusion of

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views “handed down in the form of a myth” (an obvious gesture to poetic creation) directly in the middle of the account of the “unmoved mover” that is both the active intellect and “god” in Metaphysics Lam, 1074b1–3.9 Drawing on the work of Vigo (2013) on first philosophy, and responding to Naas (1995) on the philosophical significance of Iliad, I have pointed to another telling instance of Aristotle’s engagement. Namely, the very closing sentence of Metaphysics Lam, which is an unattributed citation of Iliad, 2.204: “‘A divided lordship is no good thing; [let there be] one lord” (1076a4). We cannot belabour our reading of Aristotle’s response to Homer long here, but let us note most briefly that Aristotle has “masked” Homer’s presence by speaking both as himself and as Homer in saying these words. This seems especially pertinent in terms of the emphasis that we have seen Plato’s Socrates place on whether poetic imitation is done with the poet speaking directly as the character speaking or else remaining at a remove from the words and deeds in question. In Weinman (2014, 70–75), I point to all the features of the Homeric episode in question that make Aristotle’s decision to end his discussion of the active intellect and the best life this conclusion surprising or downright worrisome, most pertinently, perhaps the fact that in Homer, the words are spoken by Odysseus while he is holding the sceptre that actually belongs to Agamemnon. As Hammer (2002) also asks, referring to details in the source passage, what kind of evidence for the superiority of monarchy is it that we have a usurper holding the ultimate symbol of monarchic rule as underwritten by divine fiat as he makes the relevant claim, which is then supporting by using the sceptre itself to bludgeon the recalcitrant rank and file? We come now to Dante’s own reception of Aristotle, against this backdrop of Aristotle’s own reception of Homer, indeed his identification with Homer—more precisely, given Homer’s practice of what Plato holds to be the most promiscuous form of poetic imitation, if we trust his report while apparently practicing it, with Homer’s Odysseus. Here I follow Macfarland (2014, 78) who aims to answer the question: “how far can one proceed in understanding Dante’s thought as resulting precisely from his reverence for Aristotle and his fidelity to the core of Aristotle’s thinking on the relationship between philosophy, politics, and religion?” In asking this question, Macfarland hopes to take on board elements of each of two opposed views. The first view, as Macfarland (2014, 77) articulates it, holds that “Monarchia is the first act of rebellion against scholastic transcendence.” The second, advanced by Etienne Gilson (1963 [1949], 179, quoted in Macfarland, 78), holds that Dante’s view of “monarchy is inextricably tied to the church.” Before following Macfarland (2014) in taking a middle path between these views, let us first take the stock of two radically different extant views on the

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overall interpretation of Dante’s project as an epic poet and (perhaps?) a philosopher in his own right, against which this narrower question of his reception of Aristotle’s views on the intertwinement of kingship and cosmology proceeds. Namely, Gilson was in a dialogue with the then premier Italian Dantista, Bruno Nardi who is more scholarly and erudite than Gilson, but remains hardly available in English. Nardi, in turn, was trying to free Dante from the grip of the Thomists, in which respect Gilson and he agreed. While Nardi was successful in Italy, he had little influence in the US, where things were ­dominated by Singleton (1977) and Freccero (1988), who together with Mazzotta (1979)10 have proven the most influential advocates of the mainstream view. This mainstream view, as summarized by one of its main antagonists, Berg (2008, 124), holds that Dante was a “poet shaped by and celebrative of medieval Christianity and its theology,” specifically in its Augustinian spirit and doctrines, and thus no original philosopher or transgressive artist. The contrasting view, first suggested by Gilson but pressed significantly further by Fortin (2002) and then further still by Berg (2008, 124) holds that “Dante not only belongs, as he himself insists, in the company of the poets of antiquity, but stands as well in the camp of those “modern” authors whose most famous representative is Averroes.” If the mainstream view is right, then Dante’s genius rests in his poetic gift, by which he was able to express and preserve a tradition that is more or less representative of established Papacy-centred views, drawn from Augustine. If the heretics are right, then Dante’s genius has largely been missed by the literature on him, as we have not yet attended to his novelty in philosophy, which was part and parcel of his poetic invention. Without necessarily following his conclusions on the relative stress we give to Dante’s reception of Averroes and other scholastic Aristotelians or the degree to which Dante differed from the general intellectual sympathies of his time, there is no reason not to follow Berg (2008, 123) in asserting that “Dante single-handedly revived the tradition of epic poetry that had lain dormant for more than a thousand years and did so by an appeal to and incorporation of precisely that which seemed to render such a revival out of the question: Holy Scripture or revelation.” That is, neither a reader who is agnostic about the degree to which Dante is an innovator in the worldview that emerges from his deployment of the epic form nor a reader that is convinced that this deployment is best understood as advancing the conventional Augustinian view of his time can deny that his deployment of epic, and his placement of his own poetic persona as the fulcrum of the drama, is tremendously innovative in terms of its reliance on both forms and themes from classical, that is, pagan mythic literature.

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If this is so, then one must acknowledge Dante’s self-awareness as propagating non-hegemonic and unconventional views in cosmology, theology and politics in order to appreciate his turn to the epic form and his deployment thereof. Macfarland (2014, 87), reading Inferno 4.34–42 together with Monarchia 1.1.5, 2.5, and 2.9, shows that: “For Dante, as opposed to Augustine, true virtue and temporal happiness are attainable without Christian piety; the effects of the sin of Adam, though perhaps rendering man infirm, were not so great as to prevent humans from attaining moral and intellectual virtues without grace.” The ultimate significance of this fact, however, can be brought to bear either for the more “extreme” conclusion that Dante is ultimately with Averroes and other “moderns” or the milder view that while he has rejected Augustine in some important way, he remains a rather orthodox figure for his time. As Macfarland (2014, 88) concludes, it “remains a question, therefore, whether Dante follows Aristotle and the classical tradition in the decisive respect: Aristotle’s total kingship stands above all law, and so equally above the priesthood and religion as products of law. Does Dante’s expansion of total kingship imply a correlative superiority of philosophy to religion in guiding human affairs?” The interpretive openness of the question implies that an answer, however tentative, will likely come from how we understand Dante’s attitude toward pagan philosophy. In this light it seems relevant that, as Pihas (2003) has argued with respect to the encounter between the poet and Ulysses in Inferno 26, the rehabilitation of the pagans in Inferno 4 that Macfarland (2014) discusses provides strong reasons to believe that Dante is at least entertaining tremendously controversial ideas about the independent powers of reason and the perfectibility of human beings absent the gift of grace. Such views could only be made public with the deployment of that feature identified by Plato as integral to epic’s power and its dangers: the poet has hidden himself in the narrative, allowing the potentially vicious to speak for itself through his person and his speech. With Dante’s status as an innovator in mind, let us return our attention to the manner of imitation peculiar to epic, in which we have found ourselves drawn into a consideration of the transformation of the classics played in the medieval tradition to the one they play for Renaissance humanism. Dante’s work as an epic poet, then, is interwoven with his work as a political philosopher, and both shed unique light on the career of epic in its entanglement with the philosophical tradition, mediated by the figure of Aristotle who, as we have just seen in attending to the approving reference to myth during the depiction of the active intellect and even in more so with merging his own voice with Homer’s in articulating the ultimate transcendence of the singular

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ruler for humans and the cosmos, is himself implicated in philosophy’s reception of epic in a very deep way, both more and differently so than is generally acknowledged. Reflecting on Dante shows that the return to and rehabilitation of the classical form of epic has proven productive even, or perhaps especially, for those who are trying to press beyond the express content of classical wisdom, as conventionally received. This, as Pöhlmann (2016, 403) shows in his recent discussion of the contemporary salience of Romanticism and the Romantics, is very much also the case for Goethe, who turned to the classical form of epic, believing that “the classics were health, while romanticism is a sickness”— even as he himself was a Romantic who more or less laid the path for Romanticism, an irony not lost on Pöhlmann.11 For reasons of time and space, it is not possible here to discuss Faust and its role in redefining once more the role that epic can play in dialogue with revolutions within philosophical doctrines and modes of expression at any length. But we can at least take notice of Safranski (2014), who provides a discussion of the cultural and political sources and resonances of the early Romantics that is both encyclopaedic and enlightening. His first chapter offers a compelling contextualization discussion of the contemporary intellectual influences on Goethe’s reconstruction of the Faustus narrative, especially that of Herder, from which the volume continues to chart the progress and decline of Romanticism as a movement in literature, in music, and in politics. This intertwinement of finding oneself both in debt to and in dissonance with the classical tradition not only pervades Romanticism and its formal experiments but also continues through the practice of Modernist experimentation, undertaken in conversation with the birth and development of the phenomenological movement in philosophy. To cite one illustrative instance, Kumar (1963, 69) argues that Woolf ’s “various literary experiments are, in fact, directed towards finding a suitable medium which could render most appropriately this elusive ‘sense of duration’” that Bergson’s philosophy of time is meant to make manifest. Understanding the nature of Woolf ’s experiment as a response to Bergson, Kumar (1963, 70) argues, entails reflecting on how Woolf ’s metaphors “do not suggest a process of quantitative assemblage,” as classical metaphysics would have it, but, “like Bergson’s, present duration as a ceaseless succession of qualitative changes.”12 This same nexus of debates with the classical philosophical tradition taken together with experimentation with classical narrative forms carries down to the site of the liveliest eruption of the quarrel in recent days, with which our journey through the philosophical reception of epic and the literary reception of philosophy will close: the work of novelist and philosopher J.M.  Coetzee and its reception in philosophical discourse.

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 he “Ancient Quarrel” Today: What’s at Stake T in the Philosophical Reception of J.M. Coetzee In this concluding section, I will take up our central theme of the continuing quarrel between the poets and the philosophers with respect to the rich debate surrounding the material that Coetzee delivered at the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Princeton in October 1997.13 These lectures were published as Coetzee et al. (2001), putatively a work of moral philosophy as the Tanner Lectures themselves are usually received, but with the complication that as Coetzee gave those remarks in Princeton, he was speaking as his fictional creation, Elizabeth Costello.14 I place this work in conversation principally with Mulhall’s (2009) book-length reflection on Coetzee’s work. That said, while I and the others cited below owe a great deal to Mulhall’s attention to Coetzee’s work, I believe that Mulhall’s work most merits consideration as an expression of a certain blindness that even he shows, despite his sympathy to the philosophical prowess of literature. Namely, Mulhall seems mostly to miss the power of poetry to reproduce an ethically salient character or behaviour, a power that (according to Plato’s analysis of imitation) belongs especially to the epic and its successor genres that make use of the technique where the poet is speaking directly as the character they purport to represent. In this response, I join Read (2011, 555) who notes that “Mulhall’s haute-intellectual way of investigating the Costello– Coetzee nexus leaves out the most obvious possible explanation available of why Coetzee chooses to investigate his topic in The Lives of Animals at, we might say, one remove: namely, because doing otherwise would be just too painful. Mulhall somehow never quite considers that perhaps the wounded, naked animal here is Coetzee himself.” Read is right, I believe, to understand the self-distancing conceit of The Lives of Animals as a way for Coetzee to make it possible to give articulate reasoned voice to an otherwise unspeakable pain. He is also and more importantly correct that Mulhall’s failure to acknowledge this despite having written a powerful and important book-­ length treatment of the philosophical salience of Coetzee’s oeuvre is striking. Mulhall (2009, 2–3) expressly frames his engagement with Coetzee’s work on ethics and animals within the framework of Plato’s presentation (in Republic 10) of the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy with which we began. Mulhall (2009, 3), reading the expulsion of the poets and the critique of imitation in especially epic poetry conventionally, argues that in order to be true to Plato’s view of philosophy we would have to say that the questions Coetzee raises in The Lives of Animals “are at once internal and external to its domain,” while “we might be better served by thinking more in

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terms of a dialogue, in which philosophy and literature participate as each other’s other—as autonomous but internally related.” As my central purpose is to show that the quarrel of which Mulhall is speaking is productive both for philosophy and poetry, I am very much in sympathy with the view that we ought to re-stage the encounter as one of dialogue rather than exclusion. When Mulhall (2009, 3) continues that he is “not suggesting that philosophy can or should become literature, or literature philosophy,” but rather that “for each properly to acknowledge the other would require both to confront the challenge of reconceiving their self-images, and so their defining aspirations,” however, he presents a shadow of the view he advances concerning Plato’s practice of philosophy as radically exclusionary of poetry. He does so, notwithstanding his sensitive awareness of Plato’s own promiscuity with the boundaries of discourse, principally having written dialogues and more so in his self-conscious use of the sort of images that the epistemology of Republic 10 at least appears to outlaw. This matters, especially in response to Costello/Coetzee and the lives of the animals, because the way in which we read Plato’s rapprochement with imitative art or lack thereof has everything to do with what we take philosophy to be and what we take the purpose of meaningfully composed language as such. I would hope that our juxtaposition of epic poetry and philosophical reflection from Plato’s response to Homer in Republic 10 through to this encounter between Coetzee and Mulhall (and other philosophers) has taught us one thing. If the lesson that philosophers take upon themselves to learn in responding to the challenges that Coetzee poses both in terms of the form of ethical reflection and its content limits itself to what can be assessed “dispassionately,” then we philosophers simply have not yet understood what the quarrel is about. No true dialogue between philosophy and poetry is even possible, that is, until philosophers sufficiently hear and heed the challenge of the imitative poets to our characteristic mode of discourse. Read (2011, 557) points to the same misgiving with Mulhall (2009) as a companion to Coetzee’s work when he conjectures that “Mulhall thinks, as he appears at times to imply in his discussions of philosophy in relation to literature in this book, that such passion is possibly only for literature, not for philosophy,” and responds that if this is so, “I think he is simply mistaken, and that Cavell and indeed Wittgenstein (not to mention Nietzsche) would think so too.” This is a mistake, then not only or so much about works of poetic imitation and how they are best welcomed by philosophers in a dialogue; it is more fundamentally a mistake about what philosophy is, or can be, as a practice that addresses lived reality.

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As such, it amounts to a refusal to take up Coetzee’s challenge as Wilm (2016, 228) presents it: readers should be “made skeptical of philosophizing” as it is often done so as to engage “with a fundamental philosophical problem, namely the place of philosophy in the text and of philosophy and literature in the world.” This twofold multi-direction focus on the place (1) of philosophy in literary texts and of literature in philosophical and (2) of philosophy and literature in lived reality that Crary (2016, 210) places at the centre of a thoroughgoing discussion of what rationality, the most important determinant of one’s understanding of what determines philosophical practice and its norms, one that also responds to Mulhall’s (2009) point that “it would be intellectually irresponsible to accept without argument or discussion either the more widely accepted understanding of rationality that informs O’Neill’s version of the standard view or the alternative understanding to which Diamond lays claim.” Crary (2016, 210, 225), “opting for the philosophically more heretical” account of Diamond, explicitly connects siding with Diamond with Coetzee’s works, which “unfold narratively in ways that largely eliminate traces of an authorial standpoint, inviting reader to view their (often violent and disturbing) fictional worlds from the perspectives of morally compromised characters.”15 Notice that we are here returned precisely to the element of epic that most disturbed Plato’s Socrates in Republic 3: Coetzee, like Homer, hides himself in his work, and thus his voice blends with the voice of his “morally compromised characters” in such a way that our engagement with the world takes on the aspect of the world as it appears to these perhaps vicious, certainly not simply virtuous, persons. The possible perniciousness of this practice—of the poet (like Coetzee) bringing us into contact with the world through direct (if partial) identification with morally suspect eyes—can be seen in the way Crary (2016, 226–27) reads our encounter with David Laurie, the protagonist/anti-hero of Disgrace, noting that “David’s insistence on being guided by desire saves him from being judgmental without deepening his insight into his own character or personal circumstances.” It is precisely in David’s falling short and in other like instances in the work of Coetzee and others, Crary (2016, 254) argues, that our own moral discomfort as readers whom the narrative’s structure demands identify with David and his worldview is brought to bear so that “generally neglected forms of moral thought about human beings and animals” come to light. For this reason, for Crary and on her reading for Coetzee himself, it is precisely the viciousness, or at least the “benightedness,” of David that makes our (partial) identification with him through the craft of Coetzee’s poetry full of potential for a kind of ethical involvement in the world informed

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by a more expansive notion of rationality that is suitable for the sort of ethical reflection worthy to the demands of real life. In this way, in a work of moral philosophy that places questions about non-­ human animals and their significance for both the content of arguments philosophers make in the spotlight but also challenges us to reformulate our understanding of rationality and the manner in which philosophers can or should make arguments, Crary relates the essential character of what Coetzee is doing for the practice of philosophy as a response to lived reality. While she does not expressly tie her more sensitive and more compelling response to Coetzee’s practice to a challenge to Mulhall’s (2009, 2–3, 7) reading of Plato’s “republic of philosophy,” I believe we can. Namely, her reading of David Lurie points directly to the reasons why, following Baracchi (2002), we ought to understand Plato’s critique of epic’s characteristic feature of “forced perspectival identification” as addressed to the comportment (the ēthos) with which we attend to the imitation of vicious actions and not the fact of imitation itself. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals and its philosophical reception return us, fittingly for a discussion of epic, to where we began: the theme of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry and its unresolved status. Our central discovery, if my account has proven successful, is that this quarrel continues and will continue without definitive resolution because, while philosophers are justified in calling into question the imitative aspect of poetry, especially in its epic form, poets (and their philosophical allies) are justified in calling into question philosophy’s refusal and/or inability to engage with those themes that are integral to human life but also defy rational explication. Among such themes that our journey has explored are: the source of being; the animating principle (if any) belonging to each human being before and after life on earth; humanity and the moral status of humans in a cosmos also populated with non-human animals and other forms of life; and the nature of the best regime and the possibility of enacting it. These themes, despite the ostensible foci of the relevant texts and the modes of discourse employed, cut right across the obvious distances of the source material discussed here, both in terms of space and time but also genre and purpose. With Coetzee and his philosophical interlocutors, as much as for Goethe in his engagement with the natural philosophy of his time, or for Dante engaging with Aristotle and the scholastic tradition, we find ourselves ever again facing the same intractable challenges that motivated Homer’s work and Plato’s reply to it, and that we face human beings as we confront lived reality in the middle of events. This squarely facing the deepest of questions and most intractable of problems precisely from the place where we stand “in the thick of things” (what

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Plato called the metaxu) is what epic does best. And it is to this power of epic, especially when amplified through its comportment toward imitation, that Plato’s dialectic felt especially called to respond. It is thus no surprise that these same themes not only connect works as different as Homer’s Iliad, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, and Coetzee’s Lives of Animals but also form the heart of Republic 10. Read as I have proposed, the conclusion of Plato’s masterpiece suggests that philosophy’s debt to poetry remains unpaid. Returning again to Er’s tale and its manner being retold to attempt a new dialogue between dialectical thinking and imitative poetry could thus help us to recover a more positive reading of the entanglement between the two forms of speech right through its long history and to uncover that “complement” to Mulhall (2009) that “would be a better compliment to Coetzee’s writings” for which Read (2011, 557) is still searching.

Notes 1. Republic 3, 393d–394c. 2. 621b2:eis tēn genesin hattontas hȏsper asteras. 3. See Avgousti (2012, 22n6) for a list of recent seminal works in these two literatures. See also Avgousti (2012, 22n10) for a reference to a bibliography on “Plato and Myth” up until that time. 4. German (2012, 56–57), following Roochnik (2003), also holds our feet to the coals, showing just how crucial the choice of tyranny by the one who has been virtuous by habit is and how deeply it troubles the “main” argument in defence of living a just life that Socrates reasserts just before beginning the retelling of Er’s tale. 5. See also on this point Annas (1982) and the critical response to same in German (2012, 44n11, and 59). 6. The term is introduced at 596b and is hard to translate; Bloom (1991), usually so scrupulous about consistently rendering a noun with the same word in English, renders it as “furnishing,” “implement,” and “artefact” variously. It is an unusual term to describe “stuff we make,” and prior to Book 10 has appeared only eight times in the dialogue and just twice since Book 4, while a cognate (skeuēston) has only been used once earlier in the dialogue (albeit at a very dramatic place—in the “divided line” passage at 510b) to describe material objects of the kind that the discussion seems to be concerned with here, such as couches, tables, and flutes. 7. As will become clear, my discussion of Dante is greatly indebted to Joseph Macfarland. Beyond his published work on this matter, however, I am relying on his deep knowledge and broad interests in Dante studies and medieval thought, political theology especially. I, of course, alone am responsible for any errors that remain.

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8. Macfarland (2014, 79n.7) summarizes how the scholarly consensus treats the issue of how well Dante knew either Ethics or Politics directly and to what extent he was indebted to commentaries and summaries with respect to each treatise. I thank Claudia Baracchi for insisting on this point. 9. Weinman (2014, 76). 10. See also Mazzotta (2014), a popularization of his earlier work for the “Open Yale Courses” series. 11. “Klassisch ist das Gesunde, romantisch das Kranke, meinte Goethe, obwohl er selber auch ein Romantiker war, der die Romantik grundlegend geprägt hat.” 12. I present a more extensive treatment of this in Weinman (2012, 53–61). 13. I will, though, say notably little about the immediate philosophical reception of the Tanner Lectures. The reason being that I share the view of Read (2011, 555) that “the best-known of this commentary is just not very good (notably, most of that in Amy Gutmann’s (1999) edition of the book, which comes replete with four sets of ‘Reflections’ by critics including Peter Singer plus an introduction by Gutmann herself ),” and also that this is the case because these “commentators, revealingly, have been fooled by Coetzee’s/Costello’s lecturely style in much of The Lives of Animals into thinking that this work can be treated as if it were just like any other set of Tanner or Dewey (etc.) lectures.” 14. That the material is then reproduced again as part of Elizabeth Costello, less genre-defying as a work of fiction focused on a novelist of the novel’s name is a matter of interest to which I won’t attend here. 15. As instances of this “basic narrative strategy,” Crary (2016, 225n.40) notes Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron, Disgrace, and Slow Man.

References Annas, Jullia. 1981. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Annas, Julia. 1982. Plato’s Myths of Judgment. Phronesis 27 (2): 119–143. Aristotle (W. Jaeger, ed.). 1957. Metaphysica. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avgousti, Andreas. 2012. By Uniting It Stands: Poetry and Myth in Plato’s Republic. Polis 29 (1): 21–41. Baracchi, Claudia. 2002. Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Berg, Steven. 2008. An Introduction to the Reading of Dante: Inferno, Cantos I– VII. Interpretation 35 (2): 123–151. Coetzee, J.M., et al. (A. Gutmann, ed.). 2001. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collobert, Catherine, Pierre Destrée, and Francisco J. Gonzalez, eds. 2012. Plato and Myth. Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

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Crary, Alice. 2016. Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Destrée, Pierre, and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann, eds. 2011. Plato and the Poets. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Fortin, Ernest. 2002. Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Dante and His Precursors. Translated by M. LePain. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Freccero, John. 1988. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Edited by R. Jacoff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. German, Andy. 2012. Tyrant and Philosopher: Two Fundamental Lives in Plato’s Myth of Er. Polis 29 (1): 42–61. Gilson, Etienne. 1963. Dante and Philosophy. Translated by D. Moore. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1997. Faust: Eine Tragödie (Erster und zweiter Teil). Edited by S. Demmer. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. ———. (1992, 1998) 2014. Faust: A Tragedy Parts 1 and 2. Translated by M. Greenberg. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gonzalez, Francisco J.  2012. Combating Oblivion: The Myth of Er as both Philosophy’s Challenge and Inspiration. In Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths, ed. C. Collobert, P. Destrée, and F.J. Gonzalez, 259–277. Brill. Hammer, Dean. 2002. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Homer. (R. Fitzgerald, tr.). 1975. The Iliad. Garden City: Basic Books. Homer. (M. L. West, ed.). 1998. Ilias. Stuttgart and Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Kumar, Shiv. 1963. Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel. New York, NY: New York University Press. Macfarland, Joseph C. 2014. Dante’s Temporal Monarchy as the Philosophers’ Counter-Coup d’État. Kronos 3: 77–95. Mazzotta, Guiseppe. 1979. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2014. Reading Dante: Open Yale Courses Series. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mulhall, Stephen. 2009. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Naas, Michael. 1995. Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy: A Reading of Homer’s Iliad. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Pihas, Gabriel. 2003. Dante’s Ulysses: Stoic and Scholastic Models of the Literary Reader’s Curiosity and Inferno 26. Dante Studies 121: 1–24. Plato (A. Bloom, tr.). (1968) 1991. Republic. New York, NY: Basic Books. Plato (C. Emlyn-Jones and W. Preddy, eds.). 2013. Republic (Loeb Classical Library). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pöhlmann, Horst Georg. 2016. Die Romantik und Wir. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 58 (3): 402–415.

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Read, Rupert. 2011. Review of Mulhall 2009. Mind 120: 552–557. Roochnik, David. 2003. Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Safranski, Rüdiger. 2014. Romanticism: A German Affair. Translated by R.E. Goodwin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Singleton, Charles. 1977. Dante’s Commedia: Elements of Structure. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thayer, H.S. 1988. The Myth of Er. History of Philosophy Quarterly 5 (4): 369–384. Vigo, Alejandro. 2013. First Philosophy. In ed. C. Baracchi, Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle. London: Bloomsbury Books, pp. 147–172. Weinman, Michael. 2012. Language, Time, and Identity in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2014. Metaphysics, Lam and the Echo of Homer: First Philosophy as a Way of Life. Philosophical Papers 43 (1): 67–88. Wilm, Jan. 2016. The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee. London: Bloomsbury.

10 Philosophy and Drama Lior Levy

Introduction: What Is Drama? In a well-known passage in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt turns to drama, praising it as the most suitable art form for “reifying”—that is, representing and objectifying—“the specific revelatory quality of action and speech,” due to its indissoluble ties to “the living flux of acting and speaking” (Arendt 1958, 187). According to Arendt, speech and action are activities by which humans disclose their humanity to others. Theater, like other art forms, mimics or represents human action, which she understands as the capacity for new beginnings and for introducing change into the world by making oneself known to others as an agent and speaker through words and deeds. However, Arendt qualifies that although action can be represented by “all arts,” such representation is “actually appropriate only to the drama, whose very name (from the Greek verb dran, ‘to act’) indicates that playacting actually is an imitation of acting” (Arendt 1958, 187). In other words, theater is the most suitable art form for the depiction of action since it represents action through action, through playacting. Yet, she continues, the ability to thus imitate action lies not only in the practice of acting, but—first and foremost, and even prior to that—“in the making or writing of the play, at least to the extent that the drama comes fully to life only when it is enacted in the theater” (Arendt 1958, 187). Dramatic plots represent those modes by which “we insert ourselves into the human world” (Arendt 1958, 176); these plots give L. Levy (*) University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_10

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form to the words and deeds by which we become who we are as human beings. But life stories recounted by drama only come fully to life—that is, materialize in their true form—when they are represented by a second-order action, when they are enacted in the theater. Arendt positions drama between human action and its theatrical enactment. On the one hand, drama articulates or discloses a life story, which appears “so clearly and unmistakably to others,” but “remains hidden from the person himself ” (Arendt 1958, 179). Dramatic plots structure lives into stories that present a unified action with a beginning, middle, and end. Thus, drama gives form to a unity (who one is, one’s life story) that remains concealed from the individual or is scattered throughout her life while she is living. On the other hand, dramatic unity itself lacks “the living flux” that is the essence of action and speech. Drama reifies, fixes, and stabilizes human action, which is at heart dynamic and temporal. What animates the drama, turns it from a dead text into an authentic manifestation of action, is the performance, the physical, live enactment of the play. That is to say, the actions and speech acts that actors perform transform the unified action delivered by the plot into both a representation of live action and, through the actors’ physicality, into authentic embodied action.1 Curiously, although she refers to dramatic literature as the artistic form par excellence for representing action, and although she presents playacting as dependent upon unified dramatic plots (actors can only enact actions after plots have given shape to them), her first use of the term drama is made in relation to playacting, rather than playwriting. Even more oddly, she identifies drama with playacting while building on an etymology that Aristotle provides in the Poetics, a text that deals first and foremost with “the canons of plot construction needed for poetic excellence” (Aristotle 1995,  1447a10), and where drama is classified as a species of poetry—that is, a kind of textual composition. Let us look more closely at what Arendt says: …the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and the speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and ‘reified’ only through a kind of repetition, the imitation or mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate only to the drama, whose very name (from the Greek verb dran, ‘to act’) indicates that playacting actually is an imitation of acting. But the imitative element lies not only in the art of the actor, but, as Aristotle rightly claims, in the making or writing of the play, at least to the extent that the drama comes fully to life only when it is enacted in the theater.” (Arendt 1958, 187; original emphases)

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Only the second reference to Aristotle calls to mind that the standard for a good drama in the Poetics is not its suitability for performance, but the ability of the literary qualities of the text to arouse a particular pleasure (in the case of tragedy, e.g., “the aim of the superior poet” should be to craft a plot that “even without seeing it performed, the person who hears the events that occur experiences horror and pity at what comes about” [Aristotle 1995, 1453b5]). The etymology that Arendt mentions is evoked in the Poetics not in relation to playacting, but in relation to the classification of drama as a genre of poetry (“Hence the assertion that some people make, that dramas are so called because they represent people in action” [Aristotle 1995, 1448a28]). What enables the good playwright to produce a well-made play (which provokes the desired effects in readers and spectators alike) are his or her writing skills, skills that are essential to the craft of writing, which is separate and distinct from the craft of acting (Gould 1990, 275). Aristotle is clear on this point when he says, for instance, that “…the plot should be so structured that, even without seeing it performed, the person who hears the events…experiences horror and pity…To create this effect through spectacle has little to do with the poet’s art” (Aristotle 1995, 1453b5–9). In the Poetics, Aristotle defines the generic features that distinguish drama from other texts, such as epic and lyric poetry. In the section to which Arendt refers, the specific aspect of drama that Aristotle discusses deals with drama’s mode of imitation. Tragedy, which is a species of dramatic poetry, does not differ from epic poetry with respect to its objects; both imitate and represent heroic characters and actions: “…in one respect Sophocles could be classed as the same kind of mimetic artist as Homer, since both represent elevated characters” (Aristotle 1995, 1448a25). What distinguishes the two is the manner or mode in which they imitate these objects. Diverse plays such as Aristophanes’ comedies and Sophocles’ tragedies fall under the dramatic mode “…since both represent people in direct action” (Aristotle 1995, 1448a27). Whereas the action is narrated in epic poetry, in drama it is performed by the characters themselves. Yet the mode of representation is insufficient for distinguishing drama from the literary genre of the dialog.2 In philosophical or didactic dialogs, the content is also delivered by characters conversing in the first person and, at times, acting as well. Take, for example, Plato’s Symposium, where although the different characters engage mostly in speech, some of them also perform meaningful actions, such as the action performed by Alcibiades, who places a crown of garlands on Socrates’ head.3 What distinguishes dialogs from drama or plays then is the fact that the latter are written with the intention of being physically and vocally enacted, whereas the former are not. We can now think again about Arendt’s reappraisal of drama and its juxtaposition with both playacting and playwriting. Approaching playwriting

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through playacting, she captures drama’s peculiar nature as a literary genre lying at the intersection of two artistic forms: the textual and the performative. Yet, if what distinguishes drama as an art is the fact that it is written for presentation in a different medium, then perhaps drama is not so peculiar after all. Rather, it seems similar in this regard to other scripts written for a different form of presentation, such as television and film. Touching upon the differences between theater and film, Alain Badiou recently said that “one characteristic of cinema is that it doesn’t need anybody: once the film is made, it becomes totally indifferent (except financially…) to the existence of a public” (Badiou 2015, 49). Films are mechanically reproduced and are in this respect indifferent to their spectators (not just to their reactions, but, as Badiou notes, even to their presence). A film can be projected before an empty house; a theatrical performance cannot take place without an audience. Unlike other scripts, plays are written for live audiences and in their textual forms they are already aware of and address their public. A crucial difference between play-texts and other scripts, then, is that the ­former are written for live performances where actors and audiences meet, and this meeting, as we shall see, is central to the very constitution of the text. Yet, what exactly does “writing for performance” mean? How do performances, which are particular, live, varied, and unstable, influence or shape drama as a text? Conversely, if we think of the text-performance relationship in Arendt’s terms, we are led to wonder: What is brought to life in drama’s enactment, and in what sense does the text “come fully to life only when enacted”? How are we to understand the relationship between the text and the performances that it intends to generate? In the next section, I turn to the testimonies of a few playwrights, some of whom have written in other genres too, such as the novel and the short story, in order to consider the first two questions. The comments and reflections that playwrights offer on writing drama allow us to articulate what writing for performance means, what considerations guide or influence the composition of such texts, and how such considerations influence the character of drama. In “Recipes and Song Lyrics as Models for Drama’s Authority,” I examine the question of the authority that the text has over performance, focusing on two particular analogies from contemporary philosophical debates, those of song lyrics and recipes. Rather than providing a definite answer to the question of the text’s authority, I look at how the choice of analogy itself shapes our way of thinking about possible relationships between texts and their implementation in performances. Written for performances, drama is a text that is intended to be seen by audiences. The final section of this chapter discusses drama as a practice of writing for audiences. What, I ask, does this kind of writing imply? Are

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a­ udiences simply a plurality of readers? The different historical situations of writers, performers, and spectators make it difficult to arrive at theoretical generalizations concerning the forms and possibilities of communications between playwrights and audiences. However, by thinking about the specific activity involved in writing for an audience, and in turn by considering plays as artifacts invested with such intentions, we can begin to understand the kind of activity that drama performs as it addresses its audiences.

Writing for Performance Written for the purpose of being performed, plays are texts that both refer to and take into consideration extra-textual realities. For this reason, both the composition and evaluation of drama seem to be shaped by a host of factors that do not affect those literary texts that do not seek to accommodate other means of presentation or generate extra-textual events. Numerous playwrights have addressed the relationship between the play and the potential performances for which it is written, reflecting on their own work or on the work of others. Consider, for example, the comments Anton Chekhov made in 1900 after reading a play written by his friend, A. S. Souvorin. Chekhov wrote to Souvorin: “…on the stage a young man preparing for the priesthood will simply be received without sympathy by the public, and in his activities and chastity they will see something of the Skoptsi [an ascetic religious Russian sect]. And, indeed, the actor will not play the part well” (Friedland 1964, 176). Given that Chekhov himself was both a novelist and a playwright, his evaluation of drama is particularly illuminating. He measures Souvorin’s choices in relation to their ability to materialize in performance and in terms of probable audience reaction. Here, the test for the value of drama as a text lies primarily in its ability to lend itself to performance, not in its literary qualities or the cohesion of the fictional space that it creates. A character that looks good on paper—one that is well-written, consistent, and possesses psychological depth—might nevertheless fail on the stage. Clearly, such lack of success in transferring the text to the stage could be the result of the actors’ work, but Chekhov’s point is that dramatic texts themselves, if they do not take cognizance of the dynamics of theater, can contribute or even lead to failures in performances. Good plays need characters that can be materialized by the living bodies, emotional ranges, and potential actions of actual actors (or else “the actor will not play this part well”). This interpretation might seem excessive: After all, playwrights clearly cannot take into account and accommodate the many different living bodies,

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voices, and gestures of potential actors. Yet this line of thinking seems less implausible if we keep in mind the fact that plays were not always written as unsolicited manuscripts, but were often commissioned, requiring playwrights to take specific account of the materiality of actors. Renaissance playwrights, for instance, frequently wrote for particular companies and tailored the roles for specific actors (Lennard and Luckhurst 2002, 158). Today, this practice continues with writer-in-residence programs (Lennard and Luckhurst 2002, 160). But even when they are not commissioned to write for specific companies and actors, playwrights can have specific actors and circumstances in mind when they compose their plays. August Strindberg wrote roles that were intended for his wives (Törnqvist and Steene 2007, 21). Bertolt Brecht first cast Helene Weigel and Carola Neher in roles for his adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and only later wrote the play for Threepenny Opera (Fuegi 1994, 198). Likewise, Jean-Paul Sartre describes what he terms an “accidental cause” in the composition of his play No Exit: “I had three friends and I wanted them to perform a play, a play of mine…” (Sartre 1976, 198). At the same time, Sartre’s remark calls attention to the difference between accidental causes and what he refers to as “primary concerns” in writing plays. The particularity of the actors for which a play is written or for whom certain roles are intended is accidental, in the sense that a good play must be able to be performed by other actors in consequent productions (in Sartre’s case, the three friends did not perform the play in the end). Perhaps, then, when Chekhov warns his friend that “an actor will not play the part well,” he advises him against creating characters that are too restrictive or limiting for enactment (like the young priest who will be perceived as too much of a zealot, too dogmatic to be portrayed on stage). Drama takes the specificity of the actor’s presence into account not just, perhaps not mainly, in shaping roles that accommodate the actor’s sensibilities and potential to realize the living presence of the character, but also in creating a malleable and sufficiently open text. The malleability of plays encourages or solicits different forms of enactment; it requires the action performed onstage to infiltrate and impregnate the text. The writer, in this view, crafts plays as texts that invite actors to be playful with them, to animate them in various ways that cannot be determined by the author in advance. Several features of drama make it hospitable to such malleability and openness. First is the fact that plays are devoid of a totalizing perspective from which an ultimate interpretation for the actions and speech of each character and its relationship to others can be organized. In drama, each character speaks in her own voice; this voice gives rise to a perspective that has a particular and permanent presence, which is connected to the fact that it can only

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appear in the present. In novels, narrators can recount past deeds; in drama, the characters’ relationship to their past and future appears only in the present and has to be experienced “now.” Even a narrator (think, e.g., of the stage director in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town) appears only in the present. She can narrate, recount, anticipate, or comment only in a present that is shared by the other characters present on the scene. The fact that each character speaks and acts in this “now” precludes the emergence of a focus beyond that of the present. Because there is no external voice mediating or synthesizing the different perspectives, plays grant actors (and readers and spectators) a freedom that is unique to drama. This freedom vis-à-vis the play enables actors to explore and shape the characters through their actions and speech. Not unrelated to this is the fact that the verbal units of which the dialogs in plays consist are frequently non-specific with respect to their non-verbal aspects. Does Antigone wear a wedding gown when she sings of going “to espouse the bridegroom, Death” (Sophocles 1998, 29)? Does she hold her head up high or cast her eyes down toward the ground where she is to be buried alive? The play itself offers little by way of answers to these questions. Hence, it leaves actors and directors free to confront these questions through physical acting choices. Furthermore, even the nature of the verbal unit itself remains mostly unspecific. For example, when, in the first scene of A Doll’s House, Nora objects to Helmer’s demand to be frugal, saying “Pooh! We can always borrow in the meantime” (Ibsen 2008, 2), the text itself does not indicate whether Nora shouts or speaks flippantly, whether she says what she says haughtily or states it as a matter of fact. It is true that Ibsen and others who are considered realistic playwrights, such as Anton Chekhov and later Eugene O’Neill (whose Long Day’s Journey into Night opens with over three pages of stage directions) or Arthur Miller (whose Death of a Salesman opens with “only” one and a half pages of directions), provide more of such information in their stage directions. These directions contain information regarding the characters’ appearance (Hedda Gabler’s hair “is an attractive medium brown in color, but not particularly ample” [Ibsen 2008, 175]); how they sound and behave (Nora is “shrieking” [Ibsen 2008, 3]; later she “hums and smiles quietly and happily” [4]); and even direct descriptions or indications of characters’ personality type or psyche (Mrs. Elvsted is “scared” and “anxious” [185]). But it is indicative that the stage directions in play-texts are conventionally separated from the dialog by parentheses and are printed in italics. Graphically then, the stage directions do not blend seamlessly into the text. The setting of stage directions apart from the dialog reminds actors and readers alike that the directions advise, rather than command; they provide one possible suggestion for the enactment of the text.

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 ecipes and Song Lyrics as Models for Drama’s R Authority Chekhov’s brief comment illustrates that the process that governs the composition of drama entails a unique set of considerations on the part of the writer who conceives of the text that she writes as a composition intended for performance. Yet, regardless of the intention of its author, we may still wonder about the kind of authority that the dramatic text possesses over its potential performance, over its materializations on stage. To shed light on this question, philosophers have used various metaphors and analogies that aim to articulate and clarify the nature of the relationship between plays and performances.4 I examine two recent examples, one that uses the analogy of recipes (Carroll 2001) and the other that offers the analogy of song lyrics (Feagin 2016). I will use them to reflect on the ways that we address the relationship between text and performance and the implications these analogies have for how we think of the kind of work that a play-text performs. A play can be considered as “a set of instructions” (Carroll 2001, 315) on how to bring something else—a theatrical performance—into existence. In this respect, it functions as a recipe that, when executed properly, facilitates the creation of the desired dish. Plays include dialogs as well as stage directions that can also be “followed,” in the sense of having actors execute them. The execution of plays results in the creation of a theatrical performance. The recipe-play analogy presents the play as means for the creation of theatrical performance. Like the recipe, the play itself is inconsequential in the sense that it does not take itself to be the essential objective, but only a necessary condition for the materialization of the performance, which is itself the substantial objective. On the other hand, although the recipe (and according to this analogy, the play) is inconsequential, it is only by following it meticulously that the dish (or performance) can come to fruition. In this sense, it functions in an authoritative manner, guiding users in potential “do’s” and “don’ts” (e.g., avoid over-stirring; substitute oil for eggs to create a vegan option). An important distinction between the instructions in the recipe and those in the play is that whereas the recipe’s instructions indicate what we ought to actually do in our kitchens, the play’s stage directions only provide information on what occurs in the fictional space of the play, rather than in the actual space on the stage. In Hedda Gabler, for example, Ibsen specifies that “Hedda enters the rear room from the left, and comes into the drawing room” (Ibsen 1961, 162); in the opening scene of The Tempest the text specifies: “Enter Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Ferdinand, Gonzalo, and others”

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(Shakespeare 2012, 109). In other words, the text does not determine the actions of the actors who perform the role, but only the characters’ actions. Unlike recipes, plays provide no information on or instructions for the actual world outside the play; they are silent with regard to the choices that actors, stage designers, and directors have to make.5 Furthermore, as we have already seen, the convention for formatting stage directions sets them apart from the verbal units in the text, indicating that such instructions are of a different order. No such distinction exists in recipes. The song lyrics analogy provides a different perspective on the relationship between plays and performances. Like plays, song lyrics are “written for another form of presentation” (Feagin 2016, 107). But unlike recipes, the lyrics themselves are not authoritative with regard to their execution. Lyrics do not contain instructions for their composition and for their eventual performance, such as the instructions provided by recipes. In fact, their performance depends on the additional interpretative step of composition. Yet the lyrics themselves don’t specify which composition they should be given, which type of presentation they will receive. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me” and “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” include identical verses sung to two different melodies. Although the lyrics might affect the vocal presentation through their rhymes and meter, they do not necessarily play a part in the process of composition itself. Hence, the lyricist (and the lyrics themselves) holds limited power in the final execution. The questions that then arise are: Do plays determine, or hold the basis for a determination of, their execution? And, again, what kind of authority do they possess over their execution? These questions are central to what has become known as the “text-performance debate” in performance and theater studies. The debate takes place between competing views of theatrical performance, views to which James Hamilton recently gave the name of “literary theater” and “the minority theatrical tradition” (Hamilton 2009, 615). Broadly construed, the literary tradition sees performance as a text-based practice, one which is dependent on the meaning and intention that reside in the play. Underlying this tradition is an understanding of dramatic texts as complete and as containing all that ought to be transmitted in performance. When the play is conceived as a self-enclosed unit of meaning, performance is relegated to a mere illustration or translation of the text.6 This view, which was once central to performance as a practice, led many experimental artists and theorists to reject traditional drama and with it the model of text-based ­theater, “to which performance can add nothing significant” (Carlson 1985, 7). On the opposite side, that of “theatrical tradition,” even a performance Hamlet is not conceived as a performance of the text, but as “an act of iteration, an

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utterance, a surrogate standing in that positions, uses, signifies the text within the citational practices of performance…” (Worthen 1998, 1102). In other words, performances do not illustrate, translate, or even interpret pre-given textual meanings. Instead, the text comes to possess the meaning it has because of the performance, which transforms it altogether—from a text into an event. As Hamilton notes, philosophers have been late to enter the debate and, for the most part, have continued thinking of performances as dependent on play-texts (e.g., Nannicelli 2011; Thom 2009). Hamilton, who thinks of theatrical performance as entirely independent of dramatic literature (Hamilton 2007), takes this as an indication of failure on the part of philosophers (Hamilton 2009, 615). Rather than seeking to ascertain whether plays possess the ultimate authority over performances—a question that perhaps cannot be answered without a consideration of the varied historic and cultural norms that govern productions and performances—I want to examine how the metaphors and analogies themselves determine the ways in which we understand what drama does, the ways it determines, influences, or governs performances. How, in other words, do these analogies shape the ways in which we think about plays? By approaching the text/performance debate from the perspective of drama, rather than from that of performance, it is perhaps easier to acknowledge the fact that actors in text-based theater are always also readers—at least minimally, in the sense that they must read plays and memorize their lines, if not more elaborately, in the sense of re-reading the text through performance. The choice of analogy clearly has implications for how we think of what drama does and specifically for how we understand what type of authority the play has over the performance for the sake of which it was written. Whereas “good lyrics”—ones that fit perfectly with a tune, that sound wonderful when sung—can be written by lyricists who know nothing of musical compositions and who might, in fact, possess no musical talent, or who do not themselves sing, “good recipes” are those that have been tried and tested, are written by cooking experts who know how to execute the recipe, and who consequently know how to devise a good recipe from something that has already been made in practice. Recipe writers and lyricists have different degrees of expertise about the process of implementing what they write and therefore can claim different degrees of authority over potential executions. Analogically, we might compare this to the authority accorded to plays, across a spectrum that is defined by the degree of expertise that we understand playwrights to have. The work of some playwrights, such as Brecht, enables us to think of the dramatic text as actively involved in the determination of performances.

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Brecht’s vision of epic theater as a practice wherein spectators reflect on their experience and assume a critical stance toward dramatic action, rather than identify with it, demanded a new dramatic form. His notion of what performance should be led him to create plays that in turn facilitated the creation of such performances. For example, his plays include songs that interrupt the plot and prevent the creation of an undisturbed narrative; such songs also often provide commentary on the plot (Willett 1977, 109–10). In addition, his use of verses to declare the action that is about to occur in the scene that follows releases the audience from concentrating on what happen (the plot); it enables them instead to focus on why it happens or how it could be avoided, thus adopting an inquiring or critical stance toward the events in the plot or the characters’ decisions and actions. Brecht’s plays, therefore, are impregnated with his theatrical or performative vision. Like the recipe writer whose expertise in cooking positions her as an authority on how to execute the recipe, Brecht’s expertise as a director, directly involved in productions and performances, was not external or merely accidental to his textual compositions, but rather infiltrated his writing and determined the nature of the plays themselves. With Brecht in mind, it is easy to think of plays indeed as recipes that contain instructions for executions. Such plays contain devices that require (or, one could say, demand) a specific form of presentation. Thus, the text appears to be authoritative with regard to its execution. In this case, the dramatic text’s “demand” goes beyond providing information through stage directions that instruct or guide directors and actors about anything from how characters should look and sound to how the space should be organized. As we saw, such directions are separated from the text itself and leave actors and directors free, for the most part, to reinterpret or simply ignore them. Brecht’s work demands a certain execution because the organization of the plot and the verbal units themselves place constraints on potential performances. Yet Brecht himself understood the text’s authority over performances in an entirely different manner. In fact, he went so far as to argue that “…no play can be finished before it has been tested on stage” (Hasche  and Von Zitzewitz 1999, 187). The “test” does not amount to seeing whether or not a performance “obeys,” conforms, or shares the writer’s vision. Neither does it amount to seeing whether the performance executes a well-established meaning that is wholly contained in the text. According to Brecht’s view (and documentation of his work in the theater confirms this fact), authors lack authority. Instead, authorship is a collaborative endeavor; it involves a joint effort on the part of dramatists, actors, directors, as well as composers, set designers, and costumiers.

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To conclude this point, it seems to me that there is no decisive answer to the type and degree of authority that texts possess over performance. Writers differ widely in their understanding of the relationship of the text they produce to potential performances. And besides, performers are always free to ignore or ridicule even the most meticulous instructions that playwrights provide. Perhaps it is better to suspend the final judgment and be attentive to the different moods and modes in which playwrights approach their work. Thus, August Strindberg, for example, who is not a prototype of a collaborative author, says of his plays that he has not “written out the monologues in detail but simply suggested them” (Törnqvist and Steene 2007, 69) because actors must have room to improvise. According to Strindberg, actors are better suited to create the monologues than the author, “who cannot calculate in advance just how much needs to be said, or for how long” (ibid.).

Writing for an Audience The word “theater” is derived from the Greek noun Theatron, which means “a seeing-place.” Theatron comes from the verb theaomai, “to view as spectators.” The root of the words in spectacle and spectatorship suggests that these elements are constitutive of the theater. If, as I have argued, plays are texts written for theatrical performance, then they are written to be seen. As such, they are intended for spectators. Spectators are not merely readers who substitute a performance for a text, and writing for audiences involves different considerations from writing for readers. First, readers possess certain liberties with respect to the manner in which they read: They can return to parts of the text, skip other parts, or read two different texts simultaneously and in relation to one another. Audiences lack such freedom. Trapped in their seats for the duration of the entire play, they cannot revisit certain scenes, fast-forward, or skip others. They can boo, shout, or leave the auditorium and this will affect the performance, which is never indifferent to the audience’s reactions as the text on the page is to the responses of its readers. The situation of the audience in the theater directly affects the play as text. Already in the Poetics, we find a list of formal conditions that should pertain in drama, if play-texts are to be “properly” received by audiences. Tragic plots must be of a “length that can be coherently remembered” (Aristotle 1995, 1451a5). Plays ought to possess a magnitude that will allow them to be perceived by spectators as a unified whole. This is due to the fact that unlike readers, they are unable to freely omit or return to specific passages in the play.7 Drama needs

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to be written in a language that is similar to ordinary spoken language, in sentences that can be grasped as a spoken unit, so that they can be easily followed when heard (Aristotle, e.g., praises the discovery of the appropriate meter in tragedy, one that has “the rhythm of speech…” [Aristotle 1995, 1449a25]). Today, we speak of the pace that drama needs to keep and recognize that the different parts of the plot need to knit together. Clearly, the test for drama’s success in fulfilling these conditions is performative. Thus, Chekhov suggests that a friend who is writing a play visits the theater in order to learn his craft: “…go to the theater now and then and watch the stage. Compare—that is important. The first act may last as long as a whole hour, but the rest should not be more than twenty minutes each. The crux of the play is the third act, but it must not be so strong a climax as to kill the last act” (Cole 1960, 24). Furthermore, readers are alone with the texts that they are reading; their relationship to the text is solitary and one-to-one. This grants them certain imaginative freedoms (that literature itself cultivates): Readers may supplement the narrative with information, lend the characters their voices, and, most crucially, participate in the constitution of the text’s meaning by synthesizing the different sections that they are reading into a meaningful whole (as they imagine it while reading or when they recount the story to others). Although spectators also actively interpret what they see, the play-text is delivered to them already mediated through the imagination of others (directors and actors). Audiences cannot access the text beyond the factual and material presence of living actors, who have particular faces, voices, and bodies and who have already made particular choices regarding the meaning of the text. As we saw in the first section, the elasticity of drama allows it to be presented in infinite ways in the theater. This enables plays to survive the historical and cultural specificity that governed their creation and that determined, at least in part, their initial execution on stage. Yet playwrights often refer to drama, and consequently to the theater, as an art form that is wholly devoted to the present, not just in the sense that it is situated and realized through performances in the present, but in the sense that playwrights write it for their times, for contemporaneous audiences. In closing, I want to turn to this alleged tension between the openness and malleability of drama, on the one hand, and its relationship to the present, to the historical specificity in which it is created, performed, and perceived, on the other hand. This tension is related to the seeming opposition between the freedom that I have connected to the lack of a totalizing perspective in dramatic texts and the seemingly limited interpretative freedom that audiences possess vis-à-vis the text as enacted, which I discussed above.

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For many playwrights, writing for audiences implies confronting the concrete realities shared by writer, performers, and spectators. In this vein, Federico Garcia Lorca says in 1934, a time of political unrest in Spain, that “…the theater that does not feel the social pulse, the historical pulse, the drama of its people, and catch the genuine color of its landscape and of its spirit, with laugher or with tears, has no right to call itself theater” (Cole 1960, 59). More than ten years later, and after the Second World War, Sartre writes of the playwright’s duty to “fuse all the disparate elements in the auditorium into a single unity by awakening in the recesses of their spirits the things which all men of a given epoch and community care about” (Sartre 1976, 39). For Sartre, Lorca, and other playwrights, the force of drama lies in its ability to address the actual lives—conceived as the totality of social, political, economic, and existential realities—of their audiences. The conditions that the dramatist must address are also the conditions that govern her own life. Drama, in this sense, is a form of writing that lacks an external perspective.8 The writer is in the same position as her audience, for she or he is also living and writing in this “now” for which they address their work or which they think it must confront. As we saw, drama (and consequently theater) makes its relation to its time explicit in that it occurs entirely in the present. In writing for an audience, that is, in writing for performances, dramatists address the concrete conditions that shape the interpretative possibilities available to spectators. This is necessary because the imaginative and affective responses of audiences to drama are directly related to the fact that they experience it as witnesses to a live event. Recall Chekhov’s warning to Souvorin: “…on the stage a young man preparing for the priesthood will be received without sympathy by the public…” (Friedland 1964, 176). On the page, this same young man might be received with sympathy. The problem is not with an inherent inability to image such a person but rather with the fact that the actuality of such a persona—for Souvorin’s young man is present in person on the stage— implies certain things. A physically present young man preparing for priesthood on the stage will appear to be a religious zealot rather than a passionate or idealistic person. When spectators hear the text spoken in person, emerging from the mouth of the actor’s living body, the text is invested with the material qualities of a speaking voice, with its tone, infliction, and diction, all produced by a real person. Because such actions, such speech, are contemporaneous with that of spectators and share the spectators’ space and time, these actions are measured against, or related to the circumstances of, the audience. All these aspects—the actors’ live embodiment of the characters, mutual interaction between stage and auditorium, the actor-audiences’ shared space

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and time—lead the spectators to become at least minimally aware of the relationship between what is happening in the theater and what is happening in the world outside. At the same time, spectators in the theater are also aware of the fact that they are watching something fictional, that actors are enacting a drama. In every performance, the audience witness drama’s ability to bring imagination into action. Put differently, the audience sees imagination in action. Thus, drama, which is written for performance and needs to accommodate the particularity of actors and audiences alike, allows spectators to confront, or at least to become aware of, the very conditions that make such imaginative action possible. Returning to Arendt, with whom we began our analysis of drama as an art form situated between text and performance, we can now reconsider her claim that drama best represents “the specific revelatory quality of action and speech” (Arendt 1958, 187). By probing the relationship between imagination and action, dramatic texts, through the relationship to live performances, invite us to reflect on the ways in which our own actions— which introduce new beginnings and inaugurate change—are suffused with imagination.

Notes 1. An explication of the grounds for this claim requires an analysis of Arendt’s theory of action, theatrical and ordinary, which cannot be undertaken here. Halpern (2011) presents a lucid and critical account of Arendt’s conception of theater, which draws attention to what he understands as her anti-theatrical agenda—the fact that drama only mimics or represents action and is thus entirely derivative and secondary to ordinary action. Thinking of her account more favorably, we can briefly consider here two reasons that support her view of theatrical action as particularly suitable for the representation of human action: First, according to Arendt, non-theatrical action “…is never possible in isolation” (Arendt 1958, 188). Action is done in public and becomes meaningful only in the presence of others, for whom it is done, or before whom it is carried out. Theatrical action also never occurs in isolation. Beyond the fact that acting implies shared conventions, language, and interpretative skills, it requires a gathering of actors and audiences. Theater builds on the public nature of action and, consequently, it can draw our attention to the shared, social, and political dimensions of action. Second, the actor’s choices constitute an image of “who” the character is, rather than “what” it is, and so expose how our own actions in the world at large constitute “the real story in which we are engaged” (Arendt 1958, 186). For an account of the manner in which acting

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constitutes an image of the character’s project, see my analysis of Sartre’s theory of acting in (Levy 2017). 2. In the Poetics, Aristotle analyzes the poetic genres of tragedy and the epic and promises to follow with an analysis of comedy, which is not provided (or perhaps is no longer extant). Although the definition of tragedy allows us to distinguish it from the literary or philosophical dialogs (as the former included catharsis of emotions through pity and fear, whereas the latter do not), it does not necessarily follow from the definition that dramatic poetry in general (which includes poetry too, where catharsis might not play a part and which certainly does not include pity and fear) can be distinguished from dialogs. 3. For an alternative reading that highlights dramatic and performative modes of writing in Plato’s Symposium, see Rokem (2010). 4. For an elaborate and illuminating discussion of other metaphors, such as the score, the blueprint, and the software that are also used to think about the nature of plays as texts and their relation to performances, see Worthen (2010). 5. Certainly, recipes can omit information too or be indecisive regarding the action to be performed. How much exactly is a “pinch”? Should we chop or mash the avocado? In those cases, when the dish goes wrong, we can blame the recipe. We cannot similarly hold lack of information or ambiguity against the play in the case of failed performances. Saltz (2001) provides a different perspective on the play/recipe analogy and its implications for the text/performance relationship. 6. Gerald Rabkin (1985) discusses two controversial cases of treating the text as the ultimate authority regarding potential performances: lawsuits filed by Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett against theater companies that, they claimed, were not authorized to execute their work or created a distorted production of it. 7. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht must be responding, tongue in cheek, to Aristotle’s analysis of the proper length of drama. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a long play, which is often not produced in its entirety. At the beginning of the play, the expert asks Arkadi, the singer, who is about to tell two stories that are a couple of hours long, “Couldn’t you shorten it?” to which the singer replies: “No” (Brecht 1999, 12). 8. In this context Jacques Rancière’s call for the emancipation of the spectator naturally comes to mind. Rancière challenges the opposition between passive audiences and active performers and writers who attempt to educate them. The interaction between spectators and performers, he argues, is not captured by the paradigm of “uniform transmission” (Rancière 2009, 14). According to him, playwrights and spectators have the “power of the equality of intelligence” (17). The playwrights do not impart knowledge or educate the latter, and, ideally, they understand that their cognitive, social, and political situations as equal to those of the spectators.

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Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1995. Poetics. Edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2015. In Praise of Theater. Translated by Andrew Bielski. Cambridge: Polity. Brecht, Bertolt. 1999. The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Translated by Eric Bentley. University of Minnesota Press. Carlson, Marvin. 1985. Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment or Supplement? Theatre Journal 37 (1): 5–11. Carroll, Noel. 2001. Interpretation, Theatrical Performance, and Ontology. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (3): 313–316. Cole, Toby, ed. 1960. Playwrights on Playwriting. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Feagin, Susan L. 2016. Reading Plays as Literature. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, edited by Noell Carroll and John Gibson, 185–197. New York, NY: Routledge. Friedland, Louis S. 1964. Chekhov Letters on the Short Story the Drama and Other Literary Topics. London: Vision. Fuegi, John. 1994. The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Gould, Thomas. 1990. The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Halpern, Richard. 2011. Theater and Democratic Thought: Arendt to Rancière. Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 545–572. Hamilton, James R. 2007. The Art of Theater. Oxford: Blackwell. Hamilton, James R. 2009. The Text-Performance Relation in Theater. Philosophy Compass 4 (4): 614–629. Hasche, Christa, and Jutta Von Zitzewitz. 1999. Through the Minefield of Ideologies: Brecht and the Staging of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. Modern Drama 42 (2): 185–197. Ibsen, Henrik. 1961. Hedda Gabler. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Ibsen, Henrik. 2008. Four Major Plays. Translated by James McFarlane and Jens Arup. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lennard, John, and Mary Luckhurst. 2002. The Drama Handbook. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Levy, Lior. 2017. The Image and the Act—Sartre on Dramatic Theater. In The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting, edited by Tom Stern. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 89–108. Nannicelli, Ted. 2011. Instruction and Artworks: Musical Scores, Theatrical Scripts, Architectural Plans, and Screenplays. British Journal of Aesthetics 51 (4): 399–414.

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Rabkin, Gerald. 1985. Is There a Text on This Stage? Performing Arts Journal 9 (2/3): 142–159. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York, NY: Verso. Rokem, Freddie. 2010. Philosophers and Thespians. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Saltz, David Z. 2001. What Theatrical Performance Is (Not): The Interpretation Fallacy. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (3): 299–306. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1976. Sartre on Theater. Edited by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka. New York, NY: Random House. Shakespeare, William. 2012. The Tempest. Edited by David Lindley. Cambridge University Press. Sophocles. 1998. Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra. Translated by H.D.F. Kitto and edited by Edith Hall. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Thom, Paul. 2009. Works, Pieces, and Objects Performed. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43 (3): 67–79. Törnqvist, Egil, and Steene, Birgitta (eds. and trans.). 2007. Strindberg on Drama and Theatre. Amsterdam University Press. Willett, John. 1977. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen. Worthen, William B. 1998. Drama, Performativity, and Performance. PMLA 113 (5): 1093–1107. ———. 2010. Drama: Between Poetry and Performance. London: Blackwell-Wiley.

11 Lyric Poetry Mathew Abbott

My major goal in this chapter is to characterise an aspect of the relationship between philosophy and lyric poetry. More specifically, it is to give an account of the conditions of the possibility of poetic thought: a mode of thinking in which philosophical contributions are made poetically, and so a mode of thinking in which separating the contents of thoughts from their forms of expression presents difficulties. This provides a way of distinguishing traditional philosophical and poetic thinking: when one encounters the latter, it will be harder to detach what has been said from how it has been said; hence poetic thought will be resistant to paraphrase in a way that traditional philosophy typically isn’t. Yet as I shall argue, this raises problems that will remain intractable unless we reconsider what it can mean to think philosophically. I start with an imaginative device designed to bring out a relevant difference between poetic and philosophical expression, which pertains in particular to my claim about paraphrase. This allows me to contrast the claim with the stronger version of it that influenced the New Critics and place it in the context of recent debates in analytic philosophy of literature regarding poetry and paraphrase. This sets up the problem that concerns me in the second section of the chapter, where I clarify the grounds of two possibilities, which—or so I argue—do not stand in a symmetrical relationship: that poems can make philosophical contributions and that philosophy can go on poetically.

M. Abbott (*) Federation University Australia, Ballarat, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_11

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I close by turning to Martin Heidegger, whose notion of poetry as the speaking of language I use as a foil for my conclusion. Taking poetic thought as I recommend means we can insist on its cognitive dimension, but without eliding the constitutive role in it of feeling and embodiment. This allows me to resist Heidegger’s mystification of poetry while accepting aspects of his critique of philosophy as metaphysics, which I refigure in terms of philosophers’ attempts at carrying out a kind of disembodied thinking.

Poetry and Paraphrase Imagine two people get stuck in an elevator and are confined together for hours. They get to talking and early in the piece discuss what they do for a living. One reveals she is a student of literature and modernist poetry in particular; the other reveals he is a painter and a lover of poetry, but has always been hesitant about the modern stuff. He politely admits, however, that he has barely looked into it, and has no robust position to defend on the quality of modern poems. The conversation continues amicably, with the student explaining aspects of what first drew her to the study of modernist poets: the risks they took and discoveries they made; the strange, virtuosic language of their poetry, and how for her the shock of encountering it eventually gave way to something deeper; their commitment to the autonomy of literary works, which led poets like Wallace Stevens to write with a careful kind of disregard for the reader—a disregard that can be mistaken for disdain. ‘Alright then,’ the painter says. ‘Give me one of his poems.’ The student has never been one for memorising poems, and cannot bring up a text on her phone because there is no signal in the lift, so she tells the painter she is unable to recite or produce a poem for him. In their remaining time together, she tries to give him an idea of Steven’s key concerns, including his notions of imagination and abstraction. Consider now a similar scenario but with a student of philosophy and of modern European thought in particular. This time the painter reveals he has a passion for Plato, Aristotle, and other classical thinkers, but has always been hesitant about the modern stuff. He politely admits, however, that he has barely looked into it, and has no robust position to defend on the quality of modern philosophy. The conversation continues amicably, with the student explaining aspects of what first drew her to the study of modern thinkers: their refusal to take the alleged results of their predecessors for granted; their

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respect for natural science and attempts at securing for philosophy scientific grounding; their simultaneous sense—perhaps clearest in Immanuel Kant— that space in (or out of ) nature must be found for human reason and freedom if we are to hold on to the possibility of a meaningful life. ‘Alright then,’ the painter says. ‘What were Kant’s main ideas?’ In their remaining time together, she tries to explain the results of Kant’s attempt to find the limits of human reason and his discovery of the synthetic a priori. Let’s assume the student turns out to be a talented teacher and the painter a good student. In the second scenario, I suspect we would say that the painter could come away having had an encounter with Kant’s philosophy. In the first scenario, on the other hand, perhaps the painter could come away having learned about Stevens, but he will have to find and read a poem before we could rightly say he has encountered his poetry. In the first scenario, the student was not able to remember or present Stevens’s poetry, but in the second she was able to remember and present Kant’s philosophy, even though (naturally enough) she has never learned any of his texts by rote. Indeed, given enough time and the right teacher, it is possible to imagine someone developing quite a deep acquaintance with Kant without ever reading his words directly (and of course, this often happens if we regard reading a text in translation as distinct from reading the words of its author). But try to imagine someone developing a genuine acquaintance with Stevens without reading him. This indicates a difference between poetry and (typical) philosophy. Though both go on in language, the language of the former is crucial to what it has to say, such that presenting a poem ‘in different words’ is in fact not to present it. This does not entail that poems cannot be satisfactorily interpreted because they have no meaning beyond their own material facticity. It is not that poems cannot be interpreted or described or even summarised; it is that presenting an interpretation, description, or summary of a poem is not to present the poem itself. But it might suffice to present a philosophy. My claim about poetry, then, is not as strong as the kinds of claims made by predecessors of the New Critics, and which proved influential on them. It is not as strong, for example, as the claim from I.A. Richards that ‘it is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is’ (1970, 33). Nor is it equivalent to T.S. Eliot’s response to being asked to supply the meaning of his line ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree/In the cool of the day’ (‘It means,’ Eliot is purported to have said, ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree/In the cool of the day’ (see Lepore 2009, 177–8)). The distinction I am drawing should not trouble the idea that good critics (or perhaps co-operative poets) can bring out the meanings of poems. It is just that encountering a poem means

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e­ ncountering its words, while one can encounter a philosophy in different words. And that is because the form of a poem, its particular way of expressing what it has to say, is not distinct from its content, from what it does say. In ‘The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,’ Peter Lamarque provides a useful account of this feature of poetry. Lamarque bills it as a reformulation of A.C. Bradley’s claim that ‘identity of content and form… is no accident; it is of the essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry’ (2009, quoted 407). After raising this thesis, Lamarque distinguishes the version of it he wants to defend from another, less plausible version which entails that it is impossible ever to distinguish content and form (such that, as Eliot wryly and perhaps facetiously indicated, the only possible response to the question ‘what does that line mean?’ would be to repeat the line again). Content is what is expressed; form is the way in which content is expressed; a poem, on this account, is a ‘formcontent unity’ (407), but this unity should not be conceived so crudely that it entails it must be impossible to point to content or form independently of one another. After all, a critic may draw our attention to elements of a poem’s form or elements of its content, isolating, for example, the poet’s use of metre or rhyme for analysis and evaluation, or bringing out what a poem has to say about its subject, whatever it is about: ‘those stories, ideas or themes that the poem shares, at least potentially, with other poems or other works’ (406). Content, on Lamarque’s Bradley-inspired account, is ‘the-subject-as-realisedin-the-poem’—or as I would put it, whatever the poem has to say about its subject—while form is ‘the-mode-of-realisation-of-the-subject-in-the-poem’ (406–7): the particular ways in which whatever the poem says about its subject is said. Form and content, in other words, are not two separate entities but two separable aspects of the poem. As aspects, they can be viewed independently, discussed in some degree of isolation from each other; but a critic who focuses on one at the total expense of the other is unlikely to be able to illuminate much about it. Though he appears to want to resist the idea that in poetry form and content are identical, Lamarque makes a point worth elaborating further when he invokes the inseparability of form and content by bringing up Superman and Clark Kent, a useful and somewhat beguiling example common in logic textbooks. Superman and Clark Kent are numerically identical: they are two names for the same person. To think (as Lois Lane does for a time) that ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent’ pick out different entities is to be mistaken about the reference of the terms (as Lane eventually learns). Of course, it is possible and meaningful to bring out the differences between Superman and Clark Kent: to focus on the latter’s work as a journalist or the former’s exceptional actions as a superhero, even to contrast the former’s courageousness with the

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latter’s timidity or to highlight the difference in dress sense between the two. But to someone who really understands the situation, these will be manners of speaking of a sort, perhaps a kind of shorthand: different ways of ­highlighting aspects of a single entity (an entity who, while going under the name ‘Clark Kent,’ behaves and dresses differently from when he goes under his other name). So it is with form and content in poetry: we can separate the two for analysis, but when we do so (if we are good critics), we will do it in the knowledge that we are really talking about two aspects of a unity. It may pay to separate them out, but only up to a certain point; beyond that point (wherever it is), separating them will reveal our ignorance of what we are describing. This is to say that I am supporting a slightly stronger version of Lamarque’s ‘second line’ of defence against Peter Kivy’s criticism of Bradley in Philosophies of Arts (1997).1 On this account of form-content unity, we do not run into the problem that Kivy claims is entailed by Bradley’s idea. Kivy calls this the ‘ineffability thesis’ (91). It is the view I have already tried to distance myself from: the notion that, because form and content are unified in poems, it is impossible to say anything about what they say. On that interpretation of formcontent unity, endorsing it looks rather like an attempt to ‘regain for poetry its ancient epistemic status, lost in the wake of the scientific revolution’ (90). Kivy goes on: If the content of the poem could be paraphrased, then that paraphrase would inevitably fall into one of the categories of human knowledge populated by resident authorities who perforce would outrank the poet in expertise. (That, after all, is the substance of Plato’s argument against the poets)… The ineffability thesis assures the poet his expertise. The poem just is its subject matter, and there can be no expert on the poem, no creator of that poem, no discoverer of that subject matter other than the poet. He cannot be outranked. (91)

I will return to this at the end of this chapter. Here I want to say more about why endorsing a strict form-content unity thesis—perhaps even endorsing the claim that form and content are numerically identical—will not necessarily commit us to the ineffability thesis. Here I differ from Lamarque, who claims at one stage that Bradley can only be defended if we weaken his thesis, speaking not of identity but instead of ‘unity,’ ‘indivisibility,’ or ‘mutual dependence’ (2009, 409). But as Lamarque does not tell us how these things are to be distinguished from identity, this looks a bit like playing with words. I would go further than Lamarque, then, and say that there may be no problem with Bradley’s apparent endorsement of the ‘strict’ (408) thesis that form

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and content in poems are identical. As with the Clark Kent/Superman case, we might say that form and content in poems have a somewhat unusual and rather interesting type of numerical identity, such that it can be illuminating to consider them in aspectival isolation from each other (in other words, we might say that they are numerically identical but qualitatively distinct in a loose sense). It is just that when we do, we really are just talking about aspects, analytically separating what are in fact two views of the same thing. The point is that to understand what a poem says, we have to understand how it says it—that if the poem said what it said ‘in a different way,’ it wouldn’t really be saying the same thing (and so that it could not say what it says in a different way).2 Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ takes sexuality and death as part of its subject. But it says what it says about sexuality and death in virtue of how it says it: for instance, by describing as ‘concupiscent’ the curds the roller of big cigars is to whip in the kitchen cups. Separating its content from its form, we can try to paraphrase what the poem says about its subject—claiming, for instance, that it says that sexuality and death are comingled in human life in a way that is both tragic and comic—yet that is but a rough approximation of what it really says: one of very limited value on its own, which fails to get at everything poetic about the poem. If we really want to understand what it says, we will have to pay close attention to how it says it. If how it says what it says were to be changed—if, for example, we replaced the word ‘concupiscent’ with a synonym like ‘sensual’ or ‘desirous’—we would obviously be undermining part of its formal achievement, including the assonance and mannered alliteration that make the line sparkle so ironically. But this irony is part of what it has to say about the tragicomedy of sexuality and death. To try and change how it says what it says would be to change what it says. The poem’s form, then, is part of what it says, an aspect of its content. Further, it is part of what makes what it says compelling: on its own, a bare claim about the tragicomic intimacy of sexuality and death is not convincing, but presented as it is in this poem, I think it is quite convincing. As Lamarque writes in ‘Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value’: ‘The idea that there might be some other way of saying precisely what the poem says contradicts the very nature of poetry, which is to draw attention to, give salience to, its modes of expression’ (2015, 27). This does not entail that the poem is ineffable, just that critics have a difficult job. And that is not usually to paraphrase roughly in prose the alleged ‘content’ of a poem in abstraction from its form, but to do a range of much more useful things, including to give accounts of what it says that are attentive to how it says it. That is part of how critics can help us read and appreciate poems. In the hands of a good critic, then, the assumption that poems have form-content unity does the opposite of render-

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ing them ineffable. Indeed, it is a crucial part of what makes them intelligible (by which I mean, intelligible as poems). As this indicates, the claim from Lamarque I am endorsing and extending is not an empirical claim about poems. Nor I am making a prescriptive aesthetic assertion, such as the vulgar claim that all poets have the task of unifying form and content. Instead it should be viewed as Lamarque recommends: as a logical thesis about what it is to take something as a poem.3 When reading something as a poem, we do not discover (or fail to discover) but assume form-­ content unity; this is part (a crucial part) of what it means to take something as a poem. It is an essentialist claim of a sort, but not of a metaphysical sort, because it refers not to some condition that will be necessarily true of all poems for all time, but a human convention, in fact a set of conventions about what it is for things to be poems. Specifically, I would claim they are ‘deep’ conventions in Wittgenstein’s sense (1978, 65): so deep that it is hard for us to imagine a form of life in which they do not hold (in which good critics read and interpret poems without paying any attention to their form). But this is not to say that they will persist forever, because (in principle at least) what poems are could change. The logical thesis is also an historical one. So I do not think that Owen Hulatt has the right idea when he works to show that Lamarque’s Bradleyian ideas about form-content unity are challenged by modernist poems which foreground their formal features in deliberately jarring or estranging ways, such that they stick out and trouble our attempts to engage with their contents, frustrating our expectation of form-­ content unity (2016). Modernist poems—and I regard ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ as such a poem—often foreground their formal features in jarring or estranging ways (as ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ does with its ironically mannered alliteration), but that too is part of their content: part of what they have to say.4 Though I will not pursue this further, one important characteristic of modernist poems, which Hulatt may be getting at when he makes his claims about form, might be that they tend to take themselves—specifically themselves as poems—as part of their subjects. In other words, they are reflexive.5 Just as with non-modernist poems, however, their ways of saying are an aspect of what they have to say.

Poetic Thinking The above account of form-content unity and the nature of poetry’s resistance to paraphrase can help clarify the distinction I tried to bring out with the imaginative device I used at the beginning of this chapter. Because we assume form-content unity when engaging with poems as poems, our s­ tudent

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who had not memorised any of Stevens had no way of presenting his poetry to the painter in the elevator. She could have offered a rough prose paraphrase of what, for example, ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ has to say about its subject (perhaps by stating that she interprets the poem as saying that sexuality and death are comingled in human life in a tragicomic way). That may or may not pique the painter’s interest, but he will be right to feel that in encountering this statement, he is a long way from encountering the poem and what it really has to say. And it is unlikely to convince him of what the student claims it says. But none of this need be true in the philosophy student version of the scenario. We could observe that the student knows and can remember her Kant even if she does not know or remember the wording of the Critique of Pure Reason, or any passage or even sentence of it, and she may be able to convey important parts of Kant’s philosophy to the painter in the elevator, who may in turn be convinced by it. That is because we do not assume form-content unity when we engage with works of philosophy. Prose paraphrase can be quite satisfactory in such cases (indeed we might even say that being able to provide good paraphrases of the content of a philosophical work is necessary for rightly being able to say one understands it). The question motivating the second part of this chapter is this. If it is true that there is such a thing as poetic thinking—such things as poems which make genuine philosophical contributions of some sort or other, or such things as works of philosophy which make genuine contributions poetically— then what does this fact about paraphrase indicate about such modes of thinking? We can get at this question by starting with another: what is a philosophical poem, if philosophy is typically paraphrasable, while poems stop being themselves in paraphrase? Because it insists on the essential role of form-content unity in poetry, the above account might incline us to conceive of any philosophical contribution a poem might make as somehow distinct from the poem itself, or at least from its genuinely poetic elements. Perhaps the poetic elements of the poem resist paraphrase, but if the poem is doing philosophical thinking, then it seems that the philosophical elements must not. The poetic elements of the poem will thus appear to come apart from any philosophical contribution it might be making, perhaps as the merely ‘aesthetic’ form of it: linguistic music, rhythm, image, metaphor, pleasing or striking turns of phrase, and so on. The philosophical elements of the poem—the bits we should be able to paraphrase without losing or diminishing in the process—will now emerge as making a contribution distinct from its form: as intellectual or rational content, no different in kind from the ideas of Kant our student conveyed in her own words

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to our painter. But if the point is to get across a set of philosophical ideas, then why try to get them across poetically? Why give them a poetic form at all, when they could have been conveyed in prose and without the difficulties that come along with interpreting poems? Say we have a poem that presents as a candidate for making a philosophical contribution (‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ might qualify, of course). If it is making such a contribution, then how do we (as philosophers) get at it? If the philosophical contribution is genuinely poetic, then—as a form-content unity—it will resist our attempts at paraphrasing it, at pulling its content out of its form, and so resist our attempts at formulating it in philosophical terms, discussing it philosophically and setting it to work. Further, if I am to claim that a poem is participating in philosophical thinking, then how could I support that claim? Pointing back to the self-contained poem itself won’t do, because why should you believe someone’s claim that there is philosophy in it if that is all they have to offer? The philosophy will seem trapped in the poem (if it is in there at all). And if we somehow found we were able to get the philosophical content out of the poem, there is a sense in which we would be revealing the poem as something other than a poem, if poems are conceived as form-content unities (perhaps we would be revealing it as a work of philosophy that had been hiding in the guise of a poem). We might have the philosophy in hand, but we would no longer be looking at an example of genuinely poetic thinking. In his book on Wordsworth, Simon Jarvis undertakes to defend him from the now quite common accusation that his philosophical ambitions hurt his poetry. He responds in particular to the argument from David Bromwich that Wordsworth’s yearnings towards ‘some philosophic Song’ (2006, 1) were in fact a kind of ‘alien growth’ (2) implanted in him by Coleridge, and which led him astray. He quotes Bromwich: ‘When you have disposed of the philosophy of The Prelude, you have not disposed of Wordsworth but only of a notion someone once had of him, which he unfortunately came to share’ (1–2). Jarvis argues that the critique relies on a specious conception of what it means to write philosophical poetry. Bromwich distinguishes ‘between the interesting accidents and the tedious generalities’ (quoted 3) of Wordsworth’s writing, contrasting his poetic attention to particularity with his unfortunate philosophical penchant—aroused in him by his friend—for empty universalising. But Jarvis argues that Wordsworth’s philosophical aspirations were animated not by a desire to express philosophical ideas in the form of verse—with all the problems such a conception entails—but rather to find ways of thinking philosophically that could take place only in and as verse. If this is correct, then

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[i]t might mean, not that philosophy gets fitted into a song—where all the thinking is done by philosophy and only the handiwork by verse—but that the song itself, as song, is philosophic. It might mean that a different kind of thinking happens in verse—that instead of being a sort of thoughtless ornament or reliquary for thinking, verse is itself a kind of cognition, with its own resistances and difficulties. (3–4)

Note the metaphors Jarvis is trying to head off here. If there is such a thing as poetic thought, then poetry cannot be a mere ornamentation of philosophical content or a kind of container to be discarded once we have gotten at the content. If song is philosophic as song, then song must be more than the form philosophical content has contingently taken on; after all, if we read a poem philosophically without giving up on reading it as a poem, then the philosophical content must be expressed in the poem’s form. If Wordsworth made philosophical contributions in his poems, and made them in a genuinely poetic way, he must have made them not in spite but because of the fact that he did not use poetry as a mere ornament or medium for philosophical ideas that would themselves be paraphrasable in prose. There must be something about song that is or can be philosophic, something that allows it to contribute to philosophy as song: which is to say, in its own characteristic fashion, in virtue of its own powers.6 I want to turn now to one of Jarvis’s descriptions of Wordsworth’s poetic thinking. It comes when he discusses the roles of emphasis and significance in it. He writes of how Wordsworth’s verse is ‘able to hear as emphatic, as bearing a weight of significance which needs to be patiently uncovered, what are thought of as the most straightforward and transparent and empty building blocks of our experience…’ (29). Jarvis is referring here to Wordsworth’s use of words like ‘being,’ ‘is,’ and ‘was.’ Thanks to Quine (1961) and others we may have come to think that there is something philosophically confused about the very idea that such words can bear a weight of significance: if to be is merely to be the value of a bound variable, then words like ‘is’ add no semantic content of their own to whatever objects they attach to (or in Kant’s terms, ‘being’ is not a real predicate (1998) (see A598; 504e)). From this perspective it is hard to see what Wordsworth might be saying when he writes in The Prelude of feeling a ‘sentiment of being/O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still.’ Perhaps that is why most critics have assumed that Wordsworth must be emphasising all here, as a way of expressing some vaguely pantheistic and perhaps regrettably ‘philosophical’ sentiment about the oneness of things. Instead, Jarvis wants us to hear an emphasis on being and all the strangeness that entails. For this emphasis cannot quite be semantic, if that is taken to

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mean the kind of thing that could be expressed in a proposition (and which we could therefore express or indeed paraphrase without loss in prose). The temptation that arises, then, is to dismiss whatever ‘significance’ it is alleged to bear as mere feeling: a kind of semantically, hence cognitively, empty ­afflatus, perhaps a mere marker of poetic enthusiasm. Taking seriously the idea that the feeling Wordsworth expresses is genuinely significant means taking seriously the idea that there are forms of significance that are not reducible to propositions, forms of significance that might look semantically empty from a certain philosophical perspective, but which are nevertheless properly cognitive, in the sense of contributing genuinely to our understanding. It is the kind of significance I tried to bring out in the brief account I presented above of Stevens’s use of ‘concupiscence’ in ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream.’ With its assonant and alliterative effects, the word gives the line a mannered quality, a stylistic feature that makes ironic comment on its subject matter: an emphasis that deepens what the poem has to say about the tragicomic intimacy of sexuality and death. It adds something to the feel of the line and so to the feel of the poem. So it adds something genuinely significant—something that contributes to our understanding—that is nevertheless a kind of feeling (one that expands our sense of what the poem has to say). If this is right, it means we need to take seriously something that modern philosophy has consistently precluded, as it has in thinkers as apparently diverse as René Descartes, David Hume, and Kant: that feeling might participate irreducibly in cognition. How far we are from the splitting of poetic form and philosophical content that seemed so inevitable in the above. It is not that the task of the poetic thinker is somehow to fit philosophical ideas into the form of verse, with the poetic and philosophical problems that entails. Rather, thinking poetically involves giving poetic emphasis to, hence revealing a weight of significance in, aspects of our language and experience that we may have been inclined to pass over, perhaps on the assumption they were cognitively empty. If there is such a thing as poetic thinking, then it must be possible for emphasis to be something more than an inarticulate insistence on something, more than a feeling secondarily attached to a content that would be primarily cognitive.7 As emphatic, this is a function of the sung features of poetry, its lyrical aspects: What we are partly discovering here is the difference which philosophic song’s being song makes. It is characteristic of Wordsworth’s verse to sound apparently sheerly descriptive or constative fundamental words in a way which shows that they are irresolvably emphatic… which makes of them more than can be exhausted in adequation to a state of affairs. (Jarvis 2006, 31)

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Wordsworth’s lines have significance that resists the propositional. If ‘descriptive’ is equated with the value-neutral reporting of mind-independent states of affairs, that makes them more than descriptive. This is not a sign of their ultimate intractability, or imply that what they say is ineffable; rather, describing what they say would mean uncovering the particular ways in which the poet has used language in them, exploiting its sonic and material powers.8 Clarifying this in prose requires nothing more or less than philosophically attentive critical interpretation: uncovering the myriad ways in which how a poet writes functions as an extension of what she has to say. This means not paraphrasing a poem’s philosophical content but attending to how form as form expresses that content. Which is to say that it requires nothing all that different from the sort of critical interpretation I described earlier when I treated the problem of paraphrase. The difference is simply that, when a critic (or perhaps philosopher-critic) tries to bring out the philosophical thinking at work in a poem, she will be attending to it in a particular way, looking for particular kinds of features. And of course, there is no problem with asserting that certain poems are particularly amenable to philosophically attentive criticism. In the above I have focussed on what it would be for poems to make philosophical contributions, but the account should also make it possible to clarify what it would be for works of philosophy to make contributions poetically. As we have seen, poetic thought is a kind of exception to the rule I brought out of my imaginative device: it is a type of philosophical thinking that, as poetic, is resistant to prose paraphrase, troubling our attempts at putting it into different words. Taking this idea further, it may be possible to distinguish between the poetic aspects of different philosophical practices by inquiring into the ease with which they can be paraphrased. The case with philosophical poems is special, of course, because if poems are read as poems it must be under the assumption of form-content unity, and we do not assume this when reading works of philosophy. But some works of philosophy are more poetic than others. With its close attention to metaphor, image, and the workings of language more generally, for example, we might regard the work of the later Wittgenstein as poetic in a certain important sense; and of course later Heidegger acknowledges in many places that the thinking he is doing owes something to poetry. We do not read their works under the assumption of form-content unity, but they do pose special problems for their would-be paraphrasers (not to mention translators). As works of philosophy become more poetic, then, we find an increasingly tight relationship emerging between form and content; such works are not entirely resistant to paraphrase, but they are harder to paraphrase

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(especially by poor stylists). Though we will find no strict dichotomy here between paraphrasable and paraphrase-resistant thinking, we might posit a kind of continuum along which we could locate different philosophies depending on their affinity with poetic thought. Increasing difficulty of paraphrase

Non-poetic thought

Poetic thought

Later Heidegger

Nietzsche Later Kierkegaard Wittgenstein

Plato

Aristotle Kant

Mainstream analytic philosophy Hume

On the poetic side of the continuum we would have later Heidegger (along with various post-Heideggerian thinkers). Later Wittgenstein might appear nearby, along no doubt with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in whose work tone and style are crucial. On the other side we would have mainstream analytic philosophy, with most of the works of David Hume and perhaps Aristotle appearing nearby. With his use of dialogue, allegory, and myth, Plato might be somewhere in the middle, perhaps near to Kant with his difficult style and idiosyncratic vocabulary.9 No doubt plenty would disagree with my decisions regarding placement; the important point is not where I have placed each thinker but that ease versus difficulty of paraphrase might give us an indication of the poetic elements in a thinker’s work.10 More interestingly, if this is right, it would also imply that poetic thinkers tend to be more open to the broad idea that philosophy cannot be conceived as a purely ‘intellectual’ exercise. So one way of characterising poetic philosophy is that it takes seriously the idea that there are kinds of conviction that go beyond those afforded by valid inferences from true premises11: kinds of conviction that, as conditioned by feeling, depend in important ways on the form of the philosophical content one encounters. Philosophers on the other side of the continuum will be likely to reject this notion of conviction, as they will not countenance the idea that feeling can make genuine contributions to our understanding. Of course, the poetic philosopher might reply by arguing that even the driest, most detached work of philosophy is poetic in a certain way, because the form of what it says can never be entirely separated from what it says; that try as he might, the non-poetic thinker can never totally banish the poetic from his thinking.

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Heidegger Heidegger granted poetry a privileged position in his later work. He did so in part because of his ideas about the deep structuring role that language plays in our experience (language as the ‘house of Being’ (Heidegger 1971, 135)) and in part because of his critique of philosophy as an expression of the violent, world-ordering rationalism at the heart of Western nihilism (‘technical-­ scientific calculation’ (91)). Rather like the account I have presented, Heidegger’s turns on the idea that what happens in philosophical poetry has to be understood as more than merely ornamental, because poems can achieve a type of thinking in their own right. Hence, for example, the highly characteristic pair of claims which make up the entirety of the fourth and final preface he wrote to Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry: ‘The present Elucidations do not claim to be contributions to research in the history of literature or to aesthetics. They spring from a necessity of thought’ (2000, 21). Hence too the question he asks in ‘Language,’ which is only apparently tautological: ‘In what way does language occur as language?’ (1975, 188) Heidegger’s idea is that language, in most everyday uses, as well as in scientific, philosophical, and indeed literary critical contexts, does not actually occur as language. It occurs instead as a means to the end of communication and specifically as a means of expressing propositions (see 190–91). In poetry, by contrast, ‘language itself brings itself to language’ (1971, 59), coming to speak itself by drawing attention to itself as material: its ‘physical element… its vocal and written character’ (98). As David Cerbone writes, poetry for Heidegger ‘directs our attention to the words themselves, rather than terms that act as mere containers… of their meaning’ (2012, 150). Like the account I am presenting, then, Heidegger worked to show that poetic language works by exceeding propositional description, revealing forms of significance that cannot be reduced to it. And of course, from a Heideggerian standpoint, much could be made of the role of ‘being’ in Jarvis’s Wordsworth. There are important differences between my account and Heidegger’s, however. They are demonstrated most clearly by his resistance to the term and indeed the entire conceptual field of ‘aesthetics.’ As we know, the word has its origins in the Ancient Greek verb aisthesthai, meaning ‘to perceive.’ Heidegger’s rejection of it and associated notions of sensation, feeling, and embodiment— all those aspects of our engagements with art that pertain to the lived experience [Erlebnis] of the human organism—were motivated not only by an effort to distinguish his thinking from Lebensphilosophie but also by a conviction that thinking art in these terms was to take for granted the founding gestures of Western metaphysics, and its subject/object dichotomy in particular. In

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‘The Age of the World Picture,’ for example, Heidegger lists ‘art’s moving into the purview of aesthetics’ as one of the five ‘essential phenomena of modernity’ (2002, 57), along with science, machine technology, culture, and the loss of the gods. When art becomes aesthetics, Heidegger claims, the artwork becomes ‘an object of experience and consequently is considered to be an expression of human life’. By setting up the artwork as an object to be appreciated, evaluated, and interpreted by a living and embodied subject, Heidegger thought, the aesthetic tradition had effectively undermined art’s ontological status as a privileged site for revealing the truth of being. Considered ­aesthetically, artworks might express human life (and perhaps enliven those who encounter them), but that can never take us beyond metaphysics.12 Unlike Heidegger, I have given an account of poetic thought that does not reject the idea of aesthetic experience. Hence the deepest difference between the accounts, which pertains to how they understand what happens to philosophy in modernity and the particular kind of riposte to modern rationality that poetic thought presents. On my account, thinking poems and poetic philosophies display something that, thanks to our notion of rationality, we have a habit of taking to be impossible: a kind of thinking that is co-extensive with feeling, in which affect makes contributions to our understanding. And when poetic thought challenges our historical inheritance in this way, it also pushes back against the mortification of experience characteristic of modernity, in which thinking and feeling are set in opposition. For Heidegger the case is different, and the burden placed on poetry even greater. For him the kind of thinking that goes on in and as poetry is precisely what philosophy has been emptied of in modernity, and what it needs if it is to resist nihilism, returning us to ‘the soundness of our roots’ (2002, 98–99). What poetry offers philosophy, then, is historical redemption: a way out of the modern and its rationalistic violence. So perhaps Heidegger is guilty of the charge Kivy makes against poets who support the ineffability thesis, seeking to ‘regain for poetry its ancient epistemic status, lost in the wake of the scientific revolution’ (1997, 90). That would be a way of explaining his belief that philosophy must return to the pre-Socratics, and his claim that ‘dissect[ing]’ the content of a poem will leave us ‘confined by the notion of language that has prevailed for thousands of years’ (1975, 194). On my account, poetic thought does indeed present a challenge to a certain notion of rationality, but does not necessarily call for a re-enchantment of human life. Poetic thought brings our attention to our status as living yet linguistic creatures: creatures whose rationality is always already shot through with affectivity (an affectivity that does not thereby compromise that rationality). So

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if Heidegger’s fixation on poetry stemmed from his belief that poetic thinking can unconceal truths that go beyond the rational, then my account is concerned to accommodate poetic thinking not by superseding or overcoming rationality but by expanding our notion of what may count as rational. As such, we can accept aspects of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, including the idea that privileging the cognitive contribution of the forms of song we find in lyric poetry can help us critique modern rationality. But what the later Heidegger called ‘metaphysics’ (1971, 58) might emerge in a different light: as conditioned not by a dichotomy of subject and object but by a no less beguiling dichotomy of thinking and feeling. If there is poetic thought, then the problem with traditional philosophy—and the reason why it cannot countenance it—is not that it is too rational but that it has disembodied rationality.

Notes 1. See ‘The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,’ 408. 2. As Lamarque indicates in ‘Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value’ (2015, 28), this may mean that the best way to capture the relationship between content and form in poems is with the concept of supervenience. For the purposes of my argument in this chapter, it doesn’t matter whether we conceive of content and form as numerically identical yet analytically separable or of content as supervening on form. 3. See ‘Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value,’ 2015, 28. 4. I am not denying that aspects of a poem’s form may seem to function in a kind of tension with its apparent content, as Christopher Ricks says takes place in A.E. Housman’s work (‘To me his poems are remarkable for the ways in which rhythm and style temper or mitigate or criticise what in bald paraphrase the poem would be saying’ (1964, 268)). Nor I am asserting that form necessarily does or should ‘echo’ content, as in the anapests of Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib,’ which mimic the galloping of the horses they describe. In such contexts ‘form’ and ‘content’ are actually being used in a different way. On my account, the tension between the bleak attitudes some of Houseman’s poems may appear to express and their jaunty rhythmic structures is part of what they have to say, hence part of their genuine and not merely apparent content. In my sense of the terms, the form of a Housman (or any other) poem could never be in tension with its content, though it may well appear to be in tension with the prose paraphrasable ‘content’ of a poem understood in a crude (or in Ricks’s word ‘bald’) sense. 5. In ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase,’ Lepore makes somewhat similar claims about poetry generally, arguing that part of what distinguishes a poem from other forms of expression is that a poem is ‘partly about its own articulation’ (2009,

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196). It is part of his attempt at solving the problems he claims are raised by the notion that poems cannot be paraphrased. Lepore thinks he has to provide his solution because he supports a number of claims about language that my account challenges, however, such as the Fregean principle that ‘[t]one makes no difference to the truth of the thought expressed by a given sentence’ (185). 6. This can be contrasted usefully with a point Lamarque and Kivy both make (see Lamarque, ‘The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,’ 2009, 400 and Kivy 1997, 88–89) about Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, when they acknowledge that the philosopher-poet stated that he expressed his philosophical system in verse only because it would make his ideas more palatable to his audience (as he put it, he wanted to ‘touch it with the Muses’ delicious honey’ (quoted Kivy 89)). When philosophers read De Rerum Natura, it is usually in this spirit (which is to say, in the spirit in which it was intended): as a text that propounds a philosophical system that happens to have been placed in the form of verse. That the philosophy is presented in verse, in other words, is a contingent fact about it, as its form is not crucial to what it has to say; thus Lucretius’s text is not an example of poetic thinking of the sort I am tracking. When philosophers read Lucretius’s work, they do not treat it as a poem in Lamarque’s sense, because they do it without assuming form-content unity (which is not to say it would be impossible to go against its spirit and read it as a poem rather than a philosophical treatise). 7. Nothing in the above commits me to endorsing affect theory, privileging the role in cognition of ‘nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning’ (Leys 2011, 437). Indeed I support Ruth Leys’s critique of affect theory as well as Linda Zerilli’s extension of her critique (see 2015, 269). However my account also supports Zerilli’s critique of the intellectualist brand of cognitivism on which Leys may be relying (see 2011, 270), rejecting an idea shared by both affect theorists and traditional cognitivists who insist on the propositionality of intentional and conceptual experience: that ‘what is conceptualist is by definition strictly intellectualist, i.e., fully detached from embodied affective propensities’ (272). Along with Zerilli, in other words, I am arguing that ‘[a]ffect and cognition are not two different systems but [are] radically entangled’ (282). Jarvis makes a similar point when he writes of the need for ‘a revised phenomenology of the body, one which could understand the body not as an originally insignificant and qualityless data set… but rather as always already cognitive’ (2006, 81). 8. In From Modernism to Postmodernism, Jennifer Ashton (2005) develops a fascinating and provocative account of the vicissitudes of ideas of textual autonomy, authorial intention, and meaning in twentieth-­century poetics. She also develops a theoretical argument that is relevant to my concerns in this chapter. She distinguishes modernist ideas of textual autonomy from postmodernist ideas of readerly participation in the construction of their meanings:

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Where the ‘closed text’ is imagined to have a meaning that exists independent of the interpretations of its readers and therefore remains unaffected by them, the open text is reconstituted every time it is read. And because it is reconstituted every time it is read, there is no prior meaning to be discovered through interpretation. (4) As Ashton demonstrates, postmodern ideas about textual indeterminacy have often been grounded in claims about the importance of the ‘physical features’ and ‘material constituents’ (5) of poems in the affective experiences of readers, which on many accounts effectively undermines the idea that poems could have inherent meanings at all. If my account in this paper is right, however, it may challenge the validity of precisely this inference from the material and affective aspects of our engagements with poems to the claim that meaning is always (and perhaps only) constructed by readers. Though my account stresses the role of embodied affect in reading, this should not trouble the notion that poems have meanings, nor that those meanings are their authors’; nor should it trouble the idea that a good interpretation is by definition an objectively accurate one. In other words, I am rejecting the idea that any aspect of the world which relies for its salience on a subjective affective propensity (for example, one’s sense of irony) can never count as an objective feature of it. In John McDowell’s (1998) terms, this means rejecting ‘the doctrine that the world is fully describable in terms of properties that can be understood without essential reference to their effects on sentient beings’ (114). Alice Crary (2012) develops a similar idea in relation to W.G. Sebald’s fine novel Austerlitz, giving a powerful account of how literary works can ‘contribute internally to genuine or rational understanding specifically as works of literature (i.e., specifically as works that tend to engage readers emotionally in various ways)’ (494). 9. I am of course not using ‘poetic’ in the sense of ‘graceful,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘aesthetically pleasing,’ and so on. 10. Difficulty of paraphrase might be necessary for poetic thinking but obviously it is not sufficient: after all, I can’t paraphrase what I simply can’t understand, and that does not imply it must be poetic. 11. See Diamond (1982). 12. Hence Heidegger remark on ‘the danger of understanding melody and rhythm… from the perspective of physiology and physics, that is, technologically, calculatingly…’ (1971, 98).

Bibliography Ashton, Jennifer. 2005. From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cerbone, David. 2012. Lost Belongings: Heidegger, Naturalism, and Natural Science. In Heidegger on Science, ed. Trish Glazebrook, 131–155. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Crary, Alice. 2012. W. G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative. Constellations 19 (3): 494–508. Diamond, Cora. 1982. Anything but Argument? Philosophical Investigations 5 (1): 23–41. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter Hertz. New York, NY: Harper & Row. ———. 1975. Language. In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, 185–208. New York, NY: HarperCollins. ———. 2000. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. New York, NY: Humanity Books. ———. 2002. The Age of the World Picture. In Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 57–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hulatt, Owen. 2016. The Problem of Modernism and Critical Refusal. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (1): 47–59. Jarvis, Simon. 2006. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. The Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1997. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamarque, Peter. 2009. The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning. Ratio 22: 398–420. ———. 2015. Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value. In The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson, 18–36. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lepore, Ernie. 2009. The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really Is the Message. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33: 177–197. Leys, Ruth. 2011. The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry 37: 434–472. McDowell, John. 1998. Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World. In Mind, Value, and Reality, 112–130. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1961. On What There Is. In From a Logical Point of View: 9 Logico-Philosophical Essays, 1–19. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Richards, I.A. 1970. Poetries and Sciences: A Reissue of Science and Poetry (1926, 1935) with Commentary. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Ricks, Christopher. 1964. The Nature of Housman’s Poetry. Essays in Criticism XIV (3): 268–284. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1978. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Edited by Rhees Wright and G.E.M.  Anscombe and translated by G.E.M.  Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zerilli, Linda. 2015. The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment. New Literary History 46: 261–286.

12 Philosophy of the Novel Barry Stocker

The philosophy of the novel has a pre-history in that its terms come from the philosophy of epic. The novel was not a major form in antiquity or at least was not treated as such in surviving discussion and only began to be taken up as a significant aesthetic form in the late eighteenth century. While the total of novels and romances was quite high even before the modern novel appeared, the philosophical discussion of long narrative forms in prose did not become a major area of philosophy of literature, aesthetics, and literary criticism until the twentieth century. The philosophy of the epic is itself spread over a long period. The original major work dealing with epic is Aristotle’s Poetics, though tragedy is the real focus. Other major discussions of epic took place after the development of the modern novel. Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1984) of 1725 and 1744 puts epic at the centre of understanding of the ‘heroic age’ that is the historical stage in which state and society are dominated by a military aristocracy, excluding other classes from legal rights. Vico takes Homeric epics as the model in depicting a heroic age, including the transition from divine age to heroic age and from heroic age to human age. That is the transitions from a world of god king patriarchs to military aristocracy and then from military aristocracy to equal rights under law. The divine and heroic ages are taken to be ages of myth and poetry, while the human age has more reason than poetry, as it has more law than violence, and more citizenship than division between aristocratic B. Stocker (*) Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_12

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privilege and common people close to the state of nature. The human age is thought of as one in which literature is not at the centre; however, there is recognition of prosaic literature as part of this world, which puts ordinary humans at the centre, or in the case of Aesop’s fables, ordinary humans presented as animal archetypes. The animal presentation itself contains traces of myth and the attitude of the heroes to the common people. Vico’s coverage of ancient literature is uneven; there is no mention of Greek novels or The Metamorphoses of Apuleius (Apuleius’s The Golden Ass). Mediaeval romance is only present as epic. For Vico, the Middle Ages is the repetition of the early stages of antiquity. He regards history as cyclical so that the first cycle of history finishes with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, with a return to the earliest divine stage of history in the chaos he connects with the imperial collapse. What this suggests is a highly fruitful framework for understanding the ‘rise of the novel’ (Watt 1972), that is, the growing tendency beginning in the sixteenth century to write long prose fiction narratives rather than epic and to deal with contemporary reality, of some kind, rather than romance. It is not a task undertaken by Vico, though his account is enormously suggestive for understanding the role of Don Quixote as a transition from the knightly romances it parodies to the novels set in a human world or even a fantastic world which lacks the mythical heroism of the romance, as in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. He does not follow up his own suggestive framework and has an Enlightenment version of the ‘death of art’ thesis. This has a long history going back to Plato’s criticisms of Homer and the art of his time. Of course the death of art thesis in its various forms has never claimed the end of all art. Plato advocated didactic forms of art. It is Hegel who is most associated with this thesis, and he suggested that art had given up philosophical and religious functions at the highest level, so was only ‘reflective’ in his time (Hegel 1975, 10). Friedrich Nietzsche sometimes explores the idea that science has become more significant as a form of imaginative creation in the modern world, reacting against an earlier tendency to follow a metaphysics of art inherited from Arthur Schopenhauer. He also recognised the psychological importance of the novels of Stendhal and Dostoevsky, so suggests at least two ways of assessing the role of the novel in the modern world (Stocker 2017, Chap. 5). The other famous ‘death of art’ thesis is in Adorno, usually associated with his suggestion in Prisms that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism (1981, 34). It is a more accurate representation of Adorno’s thought to say, as in Aesthetic Theory (2002), that he considered art in his time to rely more and more on a ‘tour de force’ because the world was becoming less open to

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beautiful representation. Art, including the novel, is more focused on limits, so death is the limit of the artwork taken up in art, rather than the death of all art. Disintegrative drives in capitalism, consumerist annihilation of culture, instrumentalist rationality, and identity thinking all make art more difficult, so that the greatest art portrays a good society in a negative way, through taking current evils to the extreme, so inviting negation. The Adorno view is the one most removed from Vico in the positions considered here, but has some echoes of Vico, in the belief that rational egalitarian law-governed societies are not well equipped to produce great art and are headed towards apocalypse of some kind. The society after the apocalypse will be a return to the natural world of some kind. Both put Homer at the centre of the study of antiquity and the rise of reason in a world which understands nature through myth (Adorno and Horkheimer 1986). There are certainly parallels here with Walter Benjamin, who like Adorno has significant things to say about the novel, though never devoting himself to a philosophy of the novel. What can be drawn from the above is the considerable shadow Vico casts over the aesthetics of the novel though he did not create a philosophy of the novel. Views of the novel in Erich Auerbach (1949), Edward Said (1985), and Hayden White (1978) have origins in encounters with Vico. Vico’s views are paralleled in Hegel, though no direct influence has ever been established. J.G. Hamann who was a major influence on Kierkegaard did read Vico. Georg Lukács briefly shows awareness in work which draws strongly on German Idealism. Views of history and philosophy of history in the nineteenth century were strongly influenced by Jules Michelet who translated Vico into French. Michelet’s influence in French culture went beyond professional historians and was pervasive enough that he was well known to major novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novels of James Joyce come in part out of encounters with Vico: the idea of Ulysses, a novel referring to the Odyssey, is very Viconian, while Finnegans Wake replaces Homer with Vico as the main organising reference. Vico is present in very significant ways in the novel as a form and in the philosophy of the novel without ever discussing the status of the novel. Aristotle’s view of epic in Poetics (in Aristotle 1984), the great pre-novelistic source of thought about the epic precursors of the novel, suggests it is inferior to tragedy but has an abundance and inclusiveness which raises it above tragedy. The superior aspect of tragedy is its unity of action. Epic consists of many actions which can be added in episodic ways. These actions themselves can be turned into the source of a tragedy. Aristotle makes epic greater than tragedy, while making tragedy greater than epic. The idealisation of tragedy does not disappear from later aesthetics, and since the writers on the novel have often written on tragedy, the interaction of an ideal of unity and an ideal of

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c­ ompleteness continues to structure philosophical understanding of the novel. This is particularly the case in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lukács, and Benjamin. In Benjamin’s case, writing on the novel occupies some scattered if significant essays (in Benjamin 1996, 2005a, b, 2006a, b), while tragedy is the centre of his most substantial work, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1985). Hegel himself has little to say about the novel and what he says relegates it to a lower status than epic, the status of reflective art. However, his thought on the topic is still significant and partly because his discussion of ancient and modern tragedy gives an orientation for thinking about the relation between ancient epic and the modern novel. The parallel is not a completely neat one because for Hegel the modern tragedy means Shakespeare, rather preceding the growth of the modern novel from a few seventeenth-century classics, through growth in the eighteenth century, dominance as a modern form of literature in the nineteenth century, and philosophical elevation in the twentieth century. We might however still think of the modern novel in parallel with modern tragedy. Shakespeare and other Elizabethan tragedians come only slightly after François Rabelais, one major starting point for the modern novel, and do overlap with Miguel de Cervantes, the other major starting point and the one generally more considered by philosophers of the novel. We can even put Rabelais together with a group of early sixteenth-century prose writers who feed into novelistic writing, such as Michel de Montaigne, Niccoló Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Desiderius Erasmus—writers who also had an effect on Shakespeare. This interweaving of genres is one of the characteristics of philosophical consideration of the novel. It is Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin who is most associated with the account of the mixing of voices and of styles in the novel, but there are precedents for it going back to Friedrich Nietzsche and then back to the beginning of philosophical reflection on the novel in Friedrich Schlegel. In Nietzsche, there is no extensive analysis of the novel, but in his core work on philosophy and literature, The Birth of Tragedy (in Nietzsche 2000), he suggests that the Platonic dialogue is a kind of rescue and gathering place for the genres of ancient literature, in which tragedy is both subordinated and subsumed. In this process, the dialogues of Plato are a forerunner of the novel (The Birth of Tragedy, section 14). This in some ways follows on from, but also modifies strongly, the account of the novel in Friedrich Schlegel. For Schlegel, the novel is a combination of poetry and philosophy which can look back to Plato, in the use of irony. So both Schlegel and Nietzsche agree that Plato leads the way to the novel. Vico is also pertinent here as is often in the philosophy of the novel, despite his apparent lack of concern with the form of the novel. For Vico, the ancient

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world moves from Heroic age to Human age in ancient Athens, when the philosophers emerge along with democracy. The transition from imaginative universals in Homeric epic to abstract universals in Plato is the death of the world of Achilles and Odysseus, which could be said to be the world of Oedipus, Orestes, and Hippolytus in tragedy. Vico is concerned with the death of epic, while Nietzsche is concerned with the death of tragedy. In Vico this works out as a series of deaths. The world of the Odyssey is already the death of the world of the Iliad. Prudent Odysseus represents a later more human stage of history than angry Achilles. Even the human world of the Odyssey, or in Vico’s conception a transition from heroic to human worlds, is one in which at least one trace can be found of the divine world in the Cyclops episode. Virgil’s Aeneid is recognised by Vico as the Roman equivalent and continuation of Homeric epic. It will not do though as a portrayal of the heroic world, because as Vico recognises, it contains less intensity of poetry and more elaboration of knowledge. It follows on from the peaks of both Greek and Roman philosophy, so it cannot have the pure popular pre-rational myth of Homeric epic. Dante represents a similar stage as Homeric epic in the second cycle of history. However, Dante follows the re-emergence of philosophy, so is closer to Virgil in Vico’s account of ancient epic. It is the anonymous chanson de geste, the Chanson de Roland, which looks closer to Homer’s place in Vico’s account of antiquity, and Vico does mention the writing down of it as the vital accompaniment to the growth of scholastic philosophy in mediaeval Paris. In this case Dante looks closer to Virgil, and Vico emphasises some continuity with regard to the portrayal of the underworld. Vico is concerned with epic not the novel, but his concern in all these discussions of epic in its historical place may have to do with the emergence of Don Quixote from Mediaeval romance in the background. Even if Vico was innocent of any such interest, we can certainly read New Science in this way. It is certain that the readings of both Dante and Cervantes, along with the whole development of the novel in Auerbach, do have Vico in the background. We can only completely understand Auerbach and those who come after him, particularly Said who explicitly picks up on this element in Auerbach, if we think about the ways in which Vico discusses epic and contributes, even if it is by accident, to the understanding of the novel. The Viconian insights into epic coincide with the growth of the novel as a genre and the growth of aesthetics as part of philosophy. Aristotle’s comments on tragedy epic along with Plato’s accounts of tragedy and poetry are a peak of philosophical aesthetics and commentary on literature which is not matched until the eighteenth century. Vico’s work on literature within the context of

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philosophy of history, and the formation of sciences of the human world as areas as well grounded as the physical sciences, something Vico claims to do on the foundations of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, also coincides with the rise of philosophical aesthetics. The beginnings can be seen in the seventeenth- and very early eighteenth-century discussions of a complexity of perceptual unity in John Locke and G.W. Leibniz. These discussions form the background for aesthetic philosophy in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury; British philosophy, in Locke’s case; and Alexander Baumgarten and German philosophy in the case of Leibniz. The philosophical account of the novel should allow for this philosophical growth accompanying the ‘rise of the novel’. Though the novel has a history going back to antiquity, emphasised by Bakhtin, we can just as well think of that history as the history of Romance. Bakhtin’s account of the Greek novel is very illuminating in relation to the more episodic and fantastic early modern novels. However, it should also be noted that the best connections are through authors like Alain-René Lesage, in fact his Gil Blas is the best example, though we might also add the picaresque element in Spanish literature. There is a line of episodic cumulative structure from the Greek novel of antiquity to early modern picaresque (adventures amongst the lower social strata), which itself has a place in Rabelais and Cervantes, that feeds into the novel and stimulates the earliest elements of the philosophy of the novel. The philosophy of the novel provides a clear example of philosophy and the form with which it is concerned interacting. There are other examples like the history of interaction between philosophy on one side and mathematics or physics on the other side. Vico himself picked out the interaction between the early modern development of law and the jurisprudence combined with political philosophy in Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and Samuel Pufendorf. The first notable really philosophically focused discussion of the novel comes in Friedrich Schlegel (1991), along with relevant remarks about literature and philosophy in the Athenäum group (Wheeler 1984) at the very end of the eighteenth century (Stocker 2017, Chap. 3). Here, the connection between the philosophy of the novel and literary activity comes as close as it ever has been. It is not until the rather different example of Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski in mid-century France that we can talk about such a close relation, and in the latter case, it tends towards disintegration of both philosophy and novel, rather than the kind of elevation to be found in the Jena Ironists or Romantic Ironists who contributed to the Athenäum journal.

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This group itself disintegrated quickly, which, along with subsequent events, rather suits the Hegelian idea of the novel and the aesthetics of irony. That is his understanding of them as disappearing into their own secondariness, compared with Hegel’s speculative philosophy, along with the great works of epic which preceded the triumph of speculative philosophy over the limits of literary representation. The group disintegrated and maybe the second most notable member of the group after Schlegel, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), died soon after. The interactions between members of the group feature in J.W. Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, a title which may have invited suspicions of triviality. Benjamin himself was to treat it as an example of novella, as something less serious than a novel. Schlegel later lectured on a historical approach to literature, lacking in the philosophical and poetic aspects of his Jena work, confirming the sense that the interactive work of the Athenäum group was fragile as well as highly significant. The story of Romantic Irony extends into a story of political philosophy when Carl Schmitt took Schlegel’s journey as an example of the weakness of liberalism in Political Romanticism (1986). During the Jena period, Schlegel related his ideas of the ironic instability and multiple perspectives of the novel to political republicanism. The later Schlegel was in Vienna during the arch-­ conservative period after Napoleon and had connections with Austrian Minister and architect of the conservative European order, Klemens von Metternich, who was the dedicatee of Schlegel’s History of Literature: Ancient and Modern (1876). For Schmitt, this was evidence that a liberal interest in a complex interplay of perspectives tends to become aestheticised and that aestheticism itself can only be satisfied by the more substantial kind of complex order of conservative thought. This conservative aspect of Romantic aesthetics had already appeared in Novalis’ essay Christendom or Europe (in Wheeler 1984), so we do not just have to think of it just as a line of disintegration of the original project. The important point for our purposes is that the philosophy of the novel is tied up with thoughts about politics and the state, at the time when the idea of the state as an autonomous mechanism or organism independent of rulers and people was taking hold. This is not the only way in which Schlegel’s thoughts about the novel (along with related ideas in other Jena Romantics) relate to other areas of thought. Chemistry, then a new science, appears as important in understanding the novel in contrast with other forms of writing. What excited Romantic interest in chemistry was the idea of combination and change in nature in contrast to the mechanical laws of physics. This is developed in detail in the late 1790s in F.W.J. Schelling’s Idealist philosophy of nature (1997), which itself has some precedents in Immanuel Kant’s 1790 account of nature in Critique of the

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Power of Judgment (2000). From Schlegel’s point of view, the combination and transformation of elements in nature as described, in chemistry, provided a model for interaction between shifting points of views in Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. Their lack of epic ‘seriousness’, that is a single unified elevated tone constructed through the formalities of regular verse patterns, now becomes part of the transformations of nature itself. One kind of seriousness is replaced by another which is both deeper and more allowing of surface impurities including triviality. Irony, a term familiar from Aristotle, who used it to refer to Socrates’ pretence of ignorance in Plato’s dialogues and then applied it to dramatic concealment, became expanded to refer to the interplay of relative subjective points of view in the novel. The irony is that any point of view in the novel, though in some immediate way it appears to be authoritative, is just one among many points of view. The only absolute is the infinity of this interplay. This first attempt at a philosophy of the novel is constrained by its own formulation which does not invite a discussion of genres, sub-genres, plot, character, narrative technique, and related concepts. There is no sense of the novel as an evolving form, as a historical institution or anything which may allow development of the philosophy of the novel, or a literary critical approach of any kind. Schlegel contributed to the philosophy of the novel and to the form itself and both aspects of his work are still discussed, so his contribution to the philosophy of the novel is not a lost gesture. It is also the case that it notably failed to inaugurate a tradition of work on the novel, not even obviously influencing himself in later years. Hegel regarded the novel as a secondary form of literature, belonging to an age in which the arts had subsided in importance compared with Idealist philosophy and Protestant religion (as understood in Enlightenment demythologised terms), at least according to Hegel. His view of the novel was influenced by Schlegel, in the sense that he found Schlegel’s approach to be evidence that the novel was entertainment lacking the substance of epic or romance. What Hegel also does is construct Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), in which his philosophical system first emerged, as the Bildung (formation, education) of spirit or consciousness. In this case, Hegel’s philosophy to some degree takes a model from Goethe’s Bildungsroman that is novel of formation or education—The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister. He does not directly state this is what he is doing, but Phenomenology, first published in 1807, is not a book that could have been written before 1796, when Goethe published the second part of Apprenticeship. Goethe’s Bildungsroman has a peculiar status as a model for the nineteenth-­ century novel, but does not have a large readership in the English-speaking

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world, and more the status of a worthy classic than a real favourite in Germany. Franco Moretti’s influential work on the Bildungsroman (2000) itself treats Goethe’s contributions as rather strained attempts at reconciliation of individual with the world. The philosophy of the novel is itself maybe delayed by the kinds of novel available in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though the genre was growing, and some lasting classics emerged, most of the more important work came later. Goethe himself wrote an epic verse drama Faust which has become a more obviously influential classic than the Wilhelm Meister novels and has played a part in the development of the novel, for there are echoes of it in Joyce’s Ulysses, particularly in Chap. 16, often known as ‘Circe’. The Hegelian approach to the novel is then tied up with a philosophical interaction with the form of the novel even as Hegel denies its importance. The next major step in the philosophy of the novel has not been widely noted, but is part of the work of a major philosopher, that is, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s work is very strongly conditioned by an encounter with Hegel, and Kierkegaard does not abandon all of Hegel’s attitudes towards the novel. It should also be noted that Kierkegaard engaged with something like the totality of German Idealist and Romantic philosophy, so we should not just see him as following from or reacting to Hegel, though there are some clarificatory benefits to presenting Kierkegaard in this way in some contexts. Kierkegaard also reacted to Jena Romanticism at some length in his thesis text, The Concept of Irony (1989). The approach is Hegelian in that Kierkegaard argues that irony becomes self-undermining so the Schlegel approach to irony and literary aesthetics cannot be sustained as it must be subject to its own irony. Kierkegaard does not just adopt a Hegelian framework here, he goes back to the role of irony in Socrates to explore the idea of irony as ethically committed, as upholding a substantive kind of subjectivity. Substantive subjectivity in Kierkegaard does not mean a fixed essence or a metaphysical self. Kierkegaard is concerned with how Socrates’ subjectivity is developed in encounters of the kind presented in Plato’s dialogues, rather than a Platonic theory of the soul, and later writings by Kierkegaard make his rejection of Platonic metaphysics clear. The basis of Kierkegaard’s novel (though it is better known to philosophers than readers of novels) Repetition (in Kierkegaard 1983) is the contrast between the ethics of a life lived forward, achieving transcendental status as repetition, that is as part of the religious sphere versus the metaphysics of recollection. The reference to Plato’s theory of forms can be taken as part of a critique of all metaphysics, including the metaphysical aspects of Hegel’s thought.

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A crude but useful assessment of Kierkegaard’s relations with Hegel might be Hegel transformed by Johann Georg Hamann’s more subjective and poetic approach to writing philosophy. The consequence in Kierkegaard’s treatment of Romantic Irony is that while Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel are criticised for relying on a self-undermining version of irony, K.W.F. Solger is elevated above the other Romantic Ironists, as someone using a form of irony which does not undermine the subjectivity at the origin of irony. One thing that also becomes clear here is that a full account of Kierkegaard’s thought takes us beyond texts well known in English, even unobtainable. Certainly any translations of Solger into English have been hidden from light. This continues an issue touched upon above in relation to Hegel, that the philosophy of the novel has to deal with texts that are not well known in the language of the philosopher concerned. This also applies to, and overlaps with, issues about writing the history of the genre. Even the most well-established works of philosophy refer to texts not so well known to the reader, which are even totally unaccessible. This issue is doubled when dealing with philosophy of the novel. This is an issue of philosophy in general and literary criticism in particular, but the attempts of philosophy of the novel to unify both a philosophical account and a historical account, while interacting with that genre, increase the intensity of the issue, in the interactions between universalist philosophising and cultural opacity. The result is there is no complete philosophy of the novel, not even a truly comprehensive philosophy. Philosophy has been conditioned by novelistic writing more strongly than any other literary genre and often overlaps with it. Kierkegaard provides a strong example as he contributed to the writing of the novel. The most widely read contribution is ‘Diary of a Seducer’ abstracted from Either/Or I (1987), which is a novel itself, an exploration of what happens when Romantic Irony is taken to the extreme as novel writing and essayistic or fragmentary philosophical writing. Either/Or I which is presented as the exploration of aesthetic life is most obviously tied to Romantic Irony, but the ethical and religious life in Either/Or II continues that exercise suggesting how Kierkegaard thought it is not possible to completely escape the ironic attitude. A real assessment of Kierkegaard’s thought on the novel requires a look at one of his less well-known texts, From the Papers of One Still Living (in 1990). Again, the discussion is of work little known in English, the novels of Hans Christian Anderson and Thomasine Gyllembourg. In Anderson’s case, it can at least be said that his children’s stories are well known, while Gyllembourg is untranslated and unknown to anyone other than readers of Danish literature, in the original, and in a second-hand way to readers of Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard’s analysis, the novel lacks substance, echoing Hegel, but it is a

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form in which we can become aware of the lack of substance in the modern world. In Kierkegaard’s view the novel is not just reflective, it can be aware of the substance it lacks and project the consciousness which looks for more. This early thought of Kierkegaard is continued later in Two Ages (1978), where he criticises a novel of Gyllembourg of that name, as a kind of novella of history and society. Though what Kierkegaard brings out is not just superficiality but the longing for more and what underlies the politics of the time. He should not be seen as engaged in withdrawal from the political and social world or identified as a political traditionalist (Stocker 2014). He recognised the power of both absolute monarchy and revolution in the human desire for something more than the fleeting every day and appreciated the necessity for reform if not of the most radical kind. He noted the relation of the novel as a form to the conflicts between monarchism and revolution, a major theme in the nineteenth-century novel, and leaving many traces since. While Kierkegaard does not give an elevated role to the novel, he does recognise it as a form drawing attention to central dilemmas of the time. It is the literary form which draws our attention to lack of substance. The lack of substance has two sides for Kierkegaard: the absence of pagan antique substance and the absence of Christian love. These are not complete absences. Kierkegaard refers to Copenhagen as something like an ancient Greek city state, where citizens know each other and there is some sense of joint enterprise along with deep attachment to community. As can be seen in his discussion of ancient and modern tragedy, one of the points at which he is most clearly reworking Hegel (Kierkegaard 1987), Kierkegaard sees antiquity as providing the security of community as opposed to the modernity associated with Christianity in which the individual is directly confronted with God as absolute. Christian love for the neighbour is what provides substance in contrast with the pagan love for the friend which is the substance of ancient community. Love for the neighbour is more than ethical requirement, it is an encounter with the uniqueness of the self and a willingness to show love to all members of humanity. The individual can evade this in an aesthetic attitude more apparent in modernity or an ethical attitude which has roots in ancient community. An awareness of the absolute always breaks through and this is how the novel is formed, in the restlessness of the subjective-aesthetic and the complacency of the universal-ethical confronting the issue of the absolute. Kierkegaard does not discuss novels of European reputation or try to establish a canon of great novels. He creates his own novels and at least in the case of ‘Diary of a Seducer’ has had an impact outside philosophical circles. His philosophical, theological, and literary work as a whole has had a major impact on literary writers. There are three clear candidates for the status of

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novel in Kierkegaard’s work: Repetition, Either/Or, and Stages on Life’s Way. Stages on Life’s Way (1988) is a sequel to Either/Or so we could take the second and third of these titles as one giant philosophical novel. The philosophy of the novel then has been deeply entwined with the form of the novel. This is not so much the case for the philosophy of the novel after Kierkegaard, but it still has some application for the cases of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in the twentieth century. These two lie behind a lot of the work in critical theory which became a major enterprise towards the end of the twentieth century and more directly the French work in philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiology, and criticism that influenced the critical theory boom. Critical theory has evolved and is a less unified field which has been downplayed to some degree as the dominating part of literary studies, but it still conditions literary criticism, along with allied areas, in a very strong way. The ways in which the French writing of desire and death was a condition for literary theory will be considered more fully after a discussion of the progress of the philosophy of the novel after Kierkegaard. Nietzsche provides some significant insights, some of which have been mentioned above, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an important successor to Kierkegaard’s philosophical novels, but the next really systematic and influential body of work on the philosophy of the novel came during World War One. Georg Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel (1971) published in 1916 is really the first systematic work on the philosophy of the novel to become an established text. The philosophy of the novel can therefore be said to be a laggard compared with the development of the novel. Gustave Flaubert’s publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 is often taken as the moment in which the novel becomes established as a high form of art on a level with the epics of the past, or any form of poetry, and is as good as any date in the inevitably arbitrary business of establishing historical moments. It precedes Lukács’ book by six decades. The Theory of the Novel is Hegelian in some respect, but clearly relies on developments after Hegel, particularly the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Hegel along with the sociology of Max Weber, as well as the development of the novel in ways which enable an investigation of its form through comparison of a greater number of different versions of the form. In the case of Lukács, a sense of decline of the form appears to be necessary in order to define it. This decline is close to the moment in which Flaubert might be said to have established the novel as a pure art form. For Lukács, the novel loses its optimistic capacities when Flaubert published Sentimental Education in 1869, or at least he finds it convenient to take that as the vital moment. An awareness of time and memory is at the basis of the decay, as the later Flaubert novel ends with a negative reaction to the ageing of a love object

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followed by a memory of adolescent erotic anticipation as the happiest moment of life. The role of desire is not Lukács’ focus, but he is perhaps unsettled by its place in Sentimental Education as something that does not fit neatly into ethical categories of romantic love, marriage, and family formation. From this point of view, the inversion of these categories in the erotic obsessions of the Marquis de Sade in the late eighteenth century, that is a negative attitude to love, marriage and family is what Lukács cannot absorb, setting him apart from some later views of the novel, as we shall see. That is, the association of desire with a more dissonant version of the novel leads in the direction of Bataille and what follows. The way Lukács sets up the decadence of the novel starts with the madness and lawlessness as the only place left for the hero in Don Quixote. This is in contrast with the purity of Homeric epic in which the hero experiences the world as a place that is a home, where there is nothing alien and there is certainly nothing alien in inner consciousness. Don Quixote marks the point where the novel succeeds the epic as the main long narrative form and where the individual is concerned with separation from the world and from reason. The epic had an objective world in terms of its unity and the external nature of time. In Don Quixote the hero has no recourse to an objective world since his subjective position is all there is for him. In this argument, Lukács makes use of the Romantic Ironists while distancing himself from them. They are right in his account to give so much importance to Don Quixote, but wrong to see it as an advance of any kind over the ‘naive’ phase of culture in Homeric epic. Even epic decays in its sense of immediate unity, as in the passage from Homer to Virgil. Don Quixote is a work of irony in which we always undermine the viewpoint of the hero. This is a world without objective structure, which means a world without God. Lukács does not assert the existence of God, he does assert that a world without God is daemonic, in that it is a world without transcendental hope. Despite this, some novels have a positive world view in which there is hope of integration. The model of Bildung in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels comes to the fore here, leaving Lukács in the position of appealing to work which has not lasted as the most admired of novels and is not even the peak of Goethe’s output in the view of most readers. In this he follows on from Hegel, though with Hegel as noted above the Goethe reference is more indirect or even possibly unintentional. Bildungsroman is pushed aside by the novel of memory and awareness of time, in which the hero cannot even act in the alien world. These concerns of Lukács were transformed in the 1930s when he turned his Marxist-Communist conversion in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 into new work on the philosophy of the novel. This led to several

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volumes and a great excess of writing over The Theory of the Novel, even if this is combined with the earlier related essays in Soul and Form (1974). It is the first of these books, The Historical Novel, which strikes most as the outstanding work of his later phase. It includes some strikingly intrusive gestures of fealty to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, but this at least reinforces a sense of the significance of the form of the novel, tied to questions of whether history has an emancipatory direction and purpose. The aesthetic turning point of the 1860s, which in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is tied to loss of revolutionary hopes after 1848, becomes understood through the failure of the European Springtime of the Peoples in 1848, which is a string of national and democratic uprisings of that year. For Lukács, this is to be understood as the political turning point in which the bourgeoisie works with the aristocracy instead of the working class and becomes a reactionary class. It supersedes the emergence of a very subjective form of novel in the 1860s as the turning point of the nineteenth century in Lukács’ course. In aesthetic terms, the novel moves from a form of democratic-national hope to a form of apolitical inwardness. This account adds something valuable to Lukács’ earlier work, as he discusses the relation of the novel to nationalist movements, which create a modern movement out of constructed memories of the past. This leads Lukács to take Walter Scott as a model, referring to novels which are not so suited to current tastes as the tastes of the time in which they were first published. This is of course a necessary task and also reminds us that we have to constantly adjust relation between the way novels are judged now and how they have been judged. Novels of the past were written in a context that has been least partly obscured, and tastes which elevated or degraded them have evolved. Defining the novel in terms of the literary history of a nation, or as a universal genre, means dealing with works with a relatively limited appeal outside a national or historical context. This is an issue common to philosophy of the novel, literary criticism, and history of the novel. One thing that distinguishes the philosophy of the novel is the degree of convergence between the form of the novel and the forms of philosophical writing. As mentioned above, this is an issue for understanding Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, but we can go back to the relation between Descartes and Cervantes. This does not appear to be a conscious interaction of either side, but Descartes does consider chivalric fantasies in Discourse on Method, a text which is part of the development of prose narrative. That is it can’t be separated from the history of the novel. The work of Schlegel and Nietzsche makes it difficult for us not to see the novel as related to Plato’s dialogue, suggesting that the relation between novel and philosophy can be

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retrospective and requires us to think both in terms of simultaneous relations between works of different periods and of sequential relations. Philosophy of the novel at its most complete is an encounter with the philosophy of history, as it is also the encounter between philosophical and novelistic forms. The exploration of novelistic forms in a historical context continues in the work of Bakhtin, overlapping with the work of Lukács in time and also in location in that the Hungarian spent time in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Bakhtin lived most of his life in post-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union. The nature of Bakhtin’s politics is rather obscured by the difficulties of expressing opinions other than those of the regime, but it looks like he was inclined towards a Slavic, Russian, and Orthodox Christian-centred form of populism, in which particular value is given to works where a carnivalesque folkloric culture, or everyday life in some form, challenges hierarchies and authority. The idea of the carnival is at the centre of Rabelais and His World (1984) which joins Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1968) in the group of major texts concerned with the philosophy of the novel that give a central role to François Rabelais. The question still arises of how far Bakhtin advocates an unrestrained carnival. He puts Rabelais in the context of mediaeval peasant festivals and Roman saturnalia. The themes of the carnivalesque are those of inversion of hierarchy and the cycle of life in which death is necessary for growth. This could be taken in a revolutionary direction, but Bakhtin’s own arguments are more suggestive of a humanist communalism in which religious-orientated ethics provide structure. He emphasises what he sees as the less hierarchical nature of Orthodox Christianity in comparison with Catholicism. What he refers to in particular is a linguistic issue, which is that the Catholic liturgy is in Latin (true until the 1960s), making it foreign to members of the church who are not educated as priests or in some other learned function. Orthodox Christianity has always used national languages since its beginnings, so has a kind of innate populism which can also be seen as a political theology rooted in the theological understanding of the Christian community. The basis of Latin Christianity is in law, lex, and the basis of Orthodox Christianity is the Greek word, logos. The permeation of the world with logos and wisdom (sophia) including the community of believers separates Orthodox Christianity from the more hierarchical formalism of law. This paragraph has just outlined issues not explicitly present in Bakhtin’s writing, but which are uncontroversially part of the religious tradition in Russia and touching on Bakhtin’s major themes. Bakhtin has other influences some rather formalist, as in his interest in Marburg neo-Kantianism, but the religious background is a good way into the ethical, sacral, and communal issues he brings into the study of the novel.

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Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984a) which comes from the same period as Rabelais’ book, but was published in its final version much later, expands on populism along with the separation of author from ideological views in the text. The suggestion is that we separate Dostoevsky from his famously conservative political views when considering the novels, because of the many contesting views that appear. It is not just a matter of politics, but also of religious and ethical debates, along with conflicts of character. The debates about belief in God and the status of Christianity in The Brothers Karamazov are the most famous expressions of this. The populism is now not the organic life of folk festivals, but the ways in which such an energy penetrates literary language so that it registers different styles, thoughts, and places in the social hierarchy, also registering shifts and conflicts. This approach is not just contained within Orthodox tradition, but connects with an ethical dimension to literary aesthetics emphasising interaction. The coming together of aesthetics, ethics, politics, and theology is part of the Orthodox sensibility. The novel of course emerges as a major form centuries after the formal separation of Latin and Greek Orthodox traditions, which always represented different aspects of Christianity. There is a populist aspect to Bakhtin’s literary philosophy, in which the ethical and Orthodox traditions may challenge the authority of the church and the state. Though some wish to emphasise this version of Bakhtin, there is more reason to see Bakhtin as following a populism in which state and church are part of the people, even if autocratic in nature, so that challenge to authority is more ethical confrontation than political overthrow. The point in Bakhtin is that the novel comprises what has been most difficult for the legal Roman formal hierarchical world to accommodate within the popular culture of the nations in which it has prevailed. Its Greek Orthodox rival rests more on the people and even on the folkish-pagan culture preceding the Christian church. Bakhtin, in a related way, challenges the tendency to root the modern novel in a high literary tradition going back to Homer, and no one has done more to question that kind of assumption of a self-enclosed authoritative tradition going back to the earliest Greek antiquity. It is Hellenism, later syncretic Greek antiquity, and Greek Christianity that Bakhtin admires, rather than the Homeric literature and classical world of Athenian culture emphasised by previous literary philosophers, going back to Aristotle himself. Bakhtin as we have seen draws attention to folkish influences on literature. He also goes back to the less canonised examples of the novel in Greek antiquity and the Hellenistic culture of the mediaeval continuation of the Roman Empire, ‘Byzantium’. His work on the novel places emphasis on the chronotope, that is the relation of time and space, which starts with analysis of the folk tale as

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an expression of timelessness and undefined space. The novel is distinguished by a more concrete chronotope. This analysis has some convergence with Lukács’ approach to time in the novel, while also avoiding tendencies towards assuming increasing decadence. Each novel and each literary period is given more opportunity to establish its own world, though there is also always an element in Bakhtin of comparing modern subjectivity with folkish and epic forms of monumentalism. Bakhtin’s work on moving the understanding of the novel away from a purely epic and highly elevated origin is to some degree confirmed by the work of Erich Auerbach, most famously in Mimesis (1968). Though Auerbach himself was a strong advocate of a form of a cross-European classicism, accompanied by a theme of decline, he does shift the novel away from a purely epic origin. He does write on Homer in Mimesis, but also on the Hebrew Bible, along with some other non-novelistic forms of prose writing in antiquity and the middle ages. Mimesis does not present itself as a philosophy or history of the novel, but it certainly has strong elements of this. Auerbach was very aware of Vico’s work and his account, presented as the development of realism in literature, uses Viconian ideas about the movement from the divine theocratic world to heroic aristocratic world and then to the legalistic human world. The separation of a high literary register from the world of plurality and disorder is eroded over history in Vico’s account. Full understanding of this does require the reading of Dante: Poet of the Secular World (2007), confirming one of the claims in the account of Vico above, that is, the necessity of discussing what precedes the novel to grasp what the novel is. Even when the non-epic roots of the novel are discussed, the novel still has an innate tendency to contrast demotic plurality with authoritative unity, that is, to contrast the novelistic with the epic within itself. Auerbach’s approach rooted in the highest levels of the German philological tradition had a strong impact on Marxist-oriented ways of approaching literature, particularly in Edward Said, Hayden White, and Auerbach’s own graduate student Fredric Jameson. In these cases, Auerbach’s influence has mingled with that of his German contemporaries, particularly Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, along with other aspects of literary theory, which are more French in origin. Benjamin’s approach to the novel has parallels with Bakhtin in that he analyses the movement from folk tale to novel. His major aesthetic work, as noted above, was on tragedy, so we need to put his comments on the form of the novel in the context of the transition from Greek tragedy to early modern tragedy. His focus is on the minor classics of the German baroque, but some acknowledgement is made of Shakespeare and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. His account of modern tragedy is of the

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foundationless nature of princely power in a world in which metaphysical, religious, and traditional sources of legitimacy are weakened. The baroque tragedy is focused on the fall of a prince, because there is no substantial reality to princely sovereignty. The emptiness of sovereignty is accompanied by a language of emblems, that is, of ornateness straining to connect with the natural world. The sense of shattered authority and language failing to connect with the world are clearly ways in which Benjamin’s view of early modern tragedy comes from his view of the literature of his time, particularly the novel. There are parallels with the approach to early modern tragedy in Hegel and Kierkegaard which are briefly discussed by Benjamin. The transfer and modulation of these terms in discussion of the novel occur most fully in relation to Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. The twentieth-­ century novel is seen as an exploration of emptiness, of forms of power which have lost their conviction. Kafka is put in the context of both Jewish traditional literature and the looming crisis of the bourgeois world. The enigma of Mosaic law in a Talmudic understanding fuses with a sense of the absence of justice and even the absence of purpose in a capitalist society, as understood in Benjamin’s own theologically inflected Marxism. Proust’s literary world is presented as one in which the high capitalism of the French Third Republic faces and evades its own disintegration. Similar concerns can be found in Adorno’s essays on novels, including Proust. In Adorno’s case there is more emphasis on the appeal of a different future hidden within negativity, even that the nihilistic can reveal utopia through negation. Benjamin and Adorno’s thoughts interact through personal connection as well as reactions to similar literary and philosophical and literary material, so a comparison often seems inevitable. However, for a really substantive work on the novel, with lasting influence, we have to pass to René Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1965). As with Auerbach, mimesis is a central term for Girard. However, it is a different sense of mimesis. Girard focuses not on imitation of reality, but on rivalry between individuals who seek to occupy the other person’s position. This can refer to erotic desire or social ambition. A greater desire underlies this, which is the desire to find a place of authenticity beyond the mimetic struggle. A sequence of French novels from Stendhal to Proust are discussed in these terms, but referring back to the Memoirs of Saint-Simon. That is autobiographical writing on the court of Louis XVI, where the struggle to be at the centre of the court and outrank other courtiers in prestige is a central theme. Again we see that the philosophy of the novel must take account of what lies outside the

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novel. Proust himself explicitly connects himself with Saint-Simon, so this is not just a philosophical or theoretical imposition. Girard’s writing on the novel in the 1950s, followed by a variety of books on literature, anthropology, theology, and war, is itself preceded as work on desire and violence by George Bataille. Bataille’s Literature and Evil (2012) is not a treatise on the novel, but deals with a number of examples of the genre. For Bataille, mimesis in the non-Girdardian sense is undermined by the force of desire which pushes against boundaries. The evil is what is disruptive of forms and social rules. Literature is what is evil if it is literature of any value. If we take Bataille together with Blanchot, particularly his work of the late 1950s The Book to Come (2003), we have a very large part of the impetus behind literary theory and what has come from its influence on literature and the humanities. Like Bataille, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, amongst the great influences on later literary criticism, gave a central place to de Sade, as an indicator of the role of desire in disrupting novelistic unities and claims to social realism. For Blanchot, realism in literature and our general sense of reality are challenged by the experience of limits. Death is the obvious limit experience, but other ways of experiencing limits of consciousness and reality at night, sleeplessness, and so on are related to the experience of art, including the novel. Blanchot’s account of the literary genre is undermining, but also very traditional in some respects. Homer’s Odyssey plays a role in his literary philosophy as it does for Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1986). As with Auerbach, there is a concern with the loss of tradition and classical unities, though focused in Blanchot’s case on Herman Broch’s twentieth-­ century novel Death of Virgil. Like Bataille, Blanchot wrote narrative fiction, which might be described as including contributions to the novel. What they bring together in both literature and philosophy is a sense of disintegration to the history and theory of this genre and other literary genres. The philosophy of the novel reached a stage with the successors to Adorno and Auerbach, along with the successors to Girard, Bataille, and Blanchot, which are still here. The conceptual and historical unity of any project of a philosophy of the novel looks very difficult to maintain in future. This sense of the loss of unity and tradition has always been part of the philosophy of the novel, so the current situation may generate some new philosophy of the novel, as well as the continuing exploration of the fragments in a multitude of literary critical and philosophical perspectives.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1981. Prisms. Translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. Edited and translated by Robert Hullot-­ Kentor. London and New York, NY: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 1986. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. London and New York, NY: Verso. Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle, II Volumes. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ and Chichester: Princeton University Press. Auerbach, Erich. 1949. Vico and Aesthetic Historicism. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism VIII (2): 110–118. ———. 1968. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. Dante, Poet of the Secular World. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York, NY: New York Review of Books. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Bataille, Georges. 2012. Literature and Evil. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. London: Penguin Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1985. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London and New York, NY: Verso. ———. 1996. Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005a. Selected Writings, Volume 2. Part 1: 1927–1930. Edited by Michael W.  Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005b. Selected Writings, Volume 2. Part 2: 1931–1934. Edited by Michael W.  Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2006a. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938. Edited by Michael W.  Jennings and Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2006b. Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W.  Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 2003. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Girard, René. 1965. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge and New  York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1978. Two Ages. The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. Kierkegaard’s Writings, XIV. Edited and translated by Edward V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren A. 1983. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI.  Edited and translated by Howard H. and Edna H.  Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1987. Either/Or, Part I & Either/Or, Part II. Kierkegaard’s Writings, III & IV.  Translated by V.  Howard and Edna H.  Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1988. Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Persons. Kierkegaard’s Writings, XI. Translated by H.  Howard and Edna H.  Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1989. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. Kierkegaard’s Writings, II. Translated by H. Howard and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press. ———. 1974. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press. Moretti, Franco. 2000. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Translated by Albert Sbragia. London and New York, NY: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. Basic Writings. Translated and Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Modern Library/Random House. Said, Edward W. 1985. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Schelling, F.W.J. 1997. System of Transcendental Idealism. Translated by Peter Heath. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Schlegel, Friedrich [Frederick Schlegel]. 1876. Lectures on the History of Literature: Ancient and Modern. London: Bell and Sons. ———. 1991. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stocker, Barry. 2014. Kierkegaard on Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Philosophy of the Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vico, Giambattista. 1984. The New Science. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Watt, Ian. 1972. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Penguin Books. Wheeler, Kathleen, ed. 1984. German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Hayden. 1978. What is Living and What is Dead in Croce’s Criticism of Vico. In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

13 Romance Marsha S. Collins

Romance and Its Paradoxes Near the end of Don Quixote, Part 1 (1605), Miguel de Cervantes’ fictional Canon of Toledo delivers a blistering attack on romances of chivalry. Despite the Canon’s words of condemnation, however, the narrator informs us that this most famous and articulate of critics of these bestselling books ‘found one good thing in them, which was the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered, …’ (Cervantes 2005, 1.47/413). The Canon notes that writers of romance could show their expertise in diverse disciplines and represent all the qualities of a noble mind and character: ‘And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the greatest goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time’ (Cervantes 2005, 1.47/413–14). This same fictional critic also confesses that he has composed more than 100 pages of a romance of his own, but has decided to abandon the project as an endeavor beneath the dignity of his profession. This abbreviated account of an intricate, much longer, and much more complex episode in Cervantes’ great classic of world literature encapsulates M. S. Collins (*) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_13

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many of the ambiguities and paradoxes that continue to vex and fascinate anyone engaging intellectually and imaginatively with romance, whether in the context of philosophy and literature, or in any other context. In the West, most scholars of the genre trace its origins to motifs and tendencies within Homer’s Odyssey (eighth to seventh centuries BCE), including the fact that this ancient epic is an example of a nostos, a tale of homecoming, of a devoted couple restored to one another, a splintered family reunited, and of rightful identities—royal in this case—reaffirmed in the private and public spheres, along with the establishment of a new world order, albeit tenuous and divinely imposed, at the end of this great poem. To this day romances remain fundamentally stories of homecoming, with a powerful, underlying telic drive only partially masked by strategies of delay, suspense, and digression, even if the protagonists do not recognize home or their arrival home until the very last pages of the work, or final scenes in a movie or television program.1 As for prose fiction assigned the generic label of ‘romance’, in terms of extant texts, one must leap almost 1000 years from Homer’s Odyssey to a small group of Greco-Roman narratives called Greek or Byzantine romances likely composed during the first three centuries of the Common Era: Chariton’s Chaireas and Kallirrhoé (c. 50 BCE–140), Achilles Tatius’ Kleitophon and Leukippé (c. 180–200), Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (c. 200), and Heliodorus’ Ethiopica (c. 250–380). The fictional worlds of these romances bear the unmistakable imprint of Homer’s influence as well as that of the classical theater, including a catalogue of character types and elements of epideictic oratory, roughly defined as ceremonial rhetoric that served a number of public functions. These works feature the essential characteristics of romance, which therefore have remained about the same for some 2000 years or more. No touchstone document from classical antiquity survives that can even partially serve to codify, describe, or legitimate romance as a literary type valued by the Greco-Roman world; in other words, no authoritative text exists that at first glance could serve to elevate romance to the level of honor and esteem epic and tragedy would assume in later centuries due in part to the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics. We know little with certainty about the intended audiences of these ancient romances, but given the sophistication of their style, the erudite references they contain, and their high quotient of self-conscious, metafictional strategies, we can reasonably assume that these Byzantine ­ romances constitute intricate forms of serious literary play geared toward an elite, engaged audience. Despite the mysteries surrounding these ancient works, they remain of paramount importance in influencing the subsequent development of Western prose fiction and in providing the relatively recent

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emergence of something akin to a viable definition and understanding of what romance is and how the genre functions.2 Detailed structural anatomies and critical descriptions of romance acknowledging the existence and import of this literary genealogy did not emerge until the twentieth century. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, writing on ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ in 1937–1938, provided the following plot schema for the Greek romances, works that he labels the ‘adventure novel[s] of ordeal’ (Bakhtin 1981, 86): There is a boy and a girl of marriageable age. Their lineage is unknown, mysterious (but not always: there is, for example, no such instance in Tatius). They are remarkable for their exceptional beauty. They are also exceptionally chaste. They meet each other unexpectedly, usually during some festive holiday. A sudden and instantaneous passion flares up between them that is as irresistible as fate, like an incurable disease. However, the marriage cannot take place straightway. They are confronted with obstacles that retard and delay their union. The lovers are parted, they seek one another, find one another; again they lose each other, again they find each other. There are the usual obstacles and adventures of lovers: … being sold into slavery, presumed deaths, disguising one’s identity, recognition and failures of recognition, presumed betrayals, attempts on chastity and fidelity, false accusations of crimes, court trials, court inquiries into the chastity and fidelity of the lovers. The heroes find their parents (if unknown). Meetings with unexpected friends or enemies play an important role, as do fortune-telling, prophecy, prophetic dreams, premonitions and sleeping potions. The novel ends happily with the lovers united in marriage. (Bakhtin 1981, 87–88)

Joseph Campbell, an American contemporary of the Russian Bakhtin, shortly afterward produced The Hero of a Thousand Faces (1949), a pioneering work of comparative mythology, in which Campbell describes a global monomyth, that is, a fundamental story found in virtually every culture on the planet, with basic narrative features that overlap to a remarkable degree with those of the plot of Greek romances outlined above. Campbell’s study emphasizes the universality and timelessness of romance or narrative akin to romance, along with the powerful appeal of the genre’s idealizing fictional world, and suggests that the origins of romance may actually lie in the simple stories, folk and fairy tales, often orally transmitted, that seem hard-wired into the human collective imaginary.3 Among those most inspired by the resurgence of interest in Campbell’s study in the 1970s was a young filmmaker by the name of George Lucas, who subsequently created the iconic and revolutionary Star Wars (1977), the movie that launched one of the most successful and enduring cinematic romance

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franchises, along with several stellar acting careers and special effects companies based on the then emergent digital technologies.4 Star Wars and its science fiction romance progeny in turn have inspired such blockbuster cinematic romances as Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), based on the J.R.R. Tolkien book series of the same name (1937–1949), three film adaptations (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe [2005], Prince Caspian [2008], The Voyage of Dawn Treader [2010]) of books from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956), along with cinematic adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series (1997–2007, 2016), Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones film franchise (1981, 1984, 1989, 2008), and James Cameron’s science fiction ecoromance Avatar (2009), which occupies the top of the list of the highest-grossing films of all time, worldwide (‘All Time Box Office’ 2016). This ancient genre thus clearly continues to thrive in a variety of mediatic forms, with varying mixtures of the verbal and the visual, appearing strictly in print media or on screens of different types and sizes, appealing to diverse audiences across differences of age, race, class, time, gender, language, and culture, sometimes appearing just to entertain, but at other times, to paraphrase the Canon of Toledo, they are of ‘such beauty and perfection that they simultaneously teach and delight’. Whether the romance in question is a Chrétien de Troyes Arthurian tale (twelfth century), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Cervantes’ Persiles (1617), a contemporary, Danielle Steel bestselling historical romance, or the latest Avengers superheroes movie, Campbell’s schematic, monomythic narrative substratum of a hero who wears a thousand faces and guises, who leaves home, undergoes numerous tests and trials in adventures, triumphs over all and returns home a changed hero, who subsequently is reabsorbed into the community, but also changes his society for the better, remains firmly intact, as surely as Bakhtin’s paradigm of the plot of ancient Greek romance remains part of this literary type’s DNA. Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture (1976) further developed the anatomy of romance’s enduring, persistent conventions during what was perhaps the height of popularity of structuralist approaches to literature, at least in the English-speaking literary world. Frye describes the conventions of the genre, from characterization—idealizing heroes and heroines, assisted through their trials and adventures by helper figures and frequently by magical, talismanic objects—to the distinctive sine wave profile of the romance plot, with its initial downward plunge into danger followed by an oscillating narrative pattern of descent and ascent, with the protagonists moving in and out of kidnappings, imprisonment, and myriad, calamitous episodes and close brushes with death before eventually assuming their true identities, almost always sanctify-

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ing and legitimating their love in a marriage ritual of some sort. That climactic celebration invariably signifies the initiation of a new social and/or world order embodied by the union of this idealized pair of lovers, whose youth emphasizes an optimistic rebirth and new beginning with the ascendancy of the next generation.5 Critics like Bakhtin and Frye, and more recently, Margaret Doody and Barbara Fuchs, have traced romance’s history in the Western canon, articulated the genre’s long-established motifs and conventions, and mapped its clearly identifiable plot. As a generic category, romance currently enjoys a level of acceptance, if not uncontested, perhaps unprecedented in its long history. Nevertheless, this in a sense conservative literary genre often mocked for predictability, especially as manifested in artifacts of popular culture destined for mass audiences, continues to raise questions and present paradoxes as thorny and labyrinthine as the intricate web of adventures, embedded stories, changing voices, and sometimes mind-numbingly long list of characters that romances frequently contain. Even the ambiguity and changeability regarding what the term ‘romance’ means have contributed to the controversy that haunts this genre. As Fuchs has pointed out, a short visit to the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for romance produces the impression of a bewildering array of interpretations, such as romance as the name of the languages that developed from Latin (Romance Languages); the Spanish word romance, which means ballad (among other things); and romance as all love stories and amorous adventures, among many other definitions (Fuchs 2004, 3–4). While the conventions of romance may thus have remained relatively stable across centuries, the word romance, or whatever we call the narratives that bear the structure and conventions of romance, has resisted this level of consistency. So much so that Fuchs argues that for today’s readers, romance as a critical term may prove most valuable ‘if it retains some of its historical commodiousness and is conceptualized as a set of literary strategies that can be adopted by different forms’ (Fuchs 2004, 2). Thomas Pavel similarly emphasizes that the English word derives from the French roman, which referred to all medieval narratives written in the French vernacular, while the German Roman and Italian romanzo encompass a wide range of texts (Pavel 2013, 17). For a number of critics, the historical trajectory of the genre, like the history of the term ‘romance’, defies clarity and precision. Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996) has contributed greatly to the present understanding of romance, including putting the link between ancient cults of goddesses and, indeed, the woman-centeredness of ancient romances back at the forefront in critical discourse on romance in general.6 In addition, she disputes altogether the distinction between novel and romance, maintaining that the novel

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a­ ctually has a continuous history of 2000 years with the Greek ‘romances’ actually being the earliest forms of the novel (Doody 1996, 1). Others who echo Doody in eliding the distinction between romance and the novel include Pavel, Franco Moretti, and Steven Moore.7 Our to-date inadequate grasp of the relationship between oral storytelling traditions around the globe and the transition at different times from oral to print culture enrich and multiply the issues raised in this regard, as does Western critical engagement with the classical romances—or novels?—of China and Japan, perhaps most notably exemplified by Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West (1590s), often interpreted as a Buddhist allegory, and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (eleventh ­century), which laces elements of Buddhist withdrawal and meditation with a fascinating portrayal of the hothouse environment of the Heian imperial court. These more recent critical studies recall the assertion made over 50 years ago by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in their seminal The Nature of Narrative (1966), which attempted to bridge some of these conceptual gaps, in which they draw readers’ attention to the instability of the modern novel as an art form and note the propensity of the novel to fracture into either satire or romance.8 If we agree with this observation, then this tendency suggests that romance is the older and more capacious of the two genres. The same tendency calls into question the steadfast insistence on subsuming romance into a greatly expanded history of the novel rather than subsuming or articulating the history of the novel within or in relation to the history of romance, a genre grounded in myth, folktales, and ancient texts. The matter of audience, the issue of the fictional form’s readers and viewers over the years, has generated paradoxes as well regarding the status of romance as a respected genre and even willingness to acknowledge romance’s status as a literary genre. The Canon of Toledo’s fear of being tarred with the brush of disrepute should he continue with his project of writing a romance was totally justifiable given the battle that raged in Early Modern Europe over imaginative literature and over the romances of chivalry in particular. These first bestsellers of the age of print were regarded by some conservative, moralizing clergy and humanists as potentially harmful for readers and listeners since, according to them, these works of fiction, with their abundance of magic, witches, wizards, and supernatural feats and elements, were full of lies and of alluring, frivolous stories. As the morally weaker of the sexes—so the argument went—women were even more susceptible to corruption from the sensual appeal of the romances and their frank, by the standards of the time, portrayal of sexual encounters and immoral, amorous adventures.9 Plato’s argument for banishing the poets as liars and corruptors of youth had been resurrected, redirected, and repurposed to attack this potential threat to public morality.

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The supposed power of romance to corrupt has remained a staple of negative criticism directed at the genre as, to a large extent, has the notion that romance remains a mindless indulgence of idle people, especially women. When one mentions romance fiction outside the academy, the frequent response still involves a query regarding the mass-marketed, formulaic romances targeted at female audiences—‘You mean like Harlequin romances?’ These queries demonstrate no recognition that the ‘manly’, popular Westerns of Louis L’Amour, for instance, are also mass-marketed romances with decidedly formulaic elements, and ignore the success and broad appeal of romances in cinematic form. Writing in 1785, the indomitable Clara Reeve asserted in The Progress of Romance: ‘It is remarkable, that among the learned and ingenious writers who have treated the subject, few have taken proper notice of the Greek Romances, which may justly be deemed the parents of all the rest. The learned men of our own country, have in general affected a contempt for this kind of writing, and looked upon Romances, as proper furniture only for a lady’s library.-Not so the French and Italian writers, on the contrary they have not only deemed them worthy of their own attention; but have laboured to make them deserving of ours’ (Reeve 1999, 1.xi). One should keep in mind that while Madame Bovary’s fondness for romances and her quixotic tendency to confuse them with reality may be identified with the stereotype of a weak female penchant for cheap fiction, Emma’s male creator Gustave Flaubert apparently also affirmed ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi’. Yet gender bias regarding the foregrounding of heroes and heroines in romance; blindness to the universality, popularity, and persistence of sizeable romance audiences over time; and a persnickety resistance to romance’s capacity to address serious issues remain obfuscating factors for appreciating the important functions romance fulfills in the collective imaginary. A chapter on romance fittingly concludes this volume’s Part II on the philosophy of literature, as romance is perhaps the most capacious of genres; includes components of myth, epic, drama, and lyric poetry; and often mixes elements from several of these genres within the form’s idealizing fictional worlds, going so far as to foreground metafictional qualities in performative manner, drawing attention to the form’s theatricality, staging pageants and mimicking the visual arts, and mounting elaborately embedded, storytelling extravaganzas. The genre contains as well the seeds of the modern novel, sparking not only Don Quixote’s madness but also Cervantes’ genius to ‘let his pen run’ and break new fictional ground. The conventions of the genre model stability, and have proven resistant to change over thousands of years, yet romance may be written in verse (e.g. Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian tales) as well as prose, has successfully been transferred from page to screen, and

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displays remarkably protean qualities that enable the genre to adapt to different times, cultures, languages, and artistic mediums. Shapeshifters appear frequently in the world of romance, and this malleable genre displays similar, chameleon-like qualities, shifting fluidly from the tragic to the comedic, from heroic epic deeds to quiet moments of lyric sentiment and introspection. Romance can be simple and formulaic, assuming the shape of fairy and folktales, traditional (Snow White and Rose Red) and modern, and/or superficially simple (Isak Dinesen’s Ehrengard [1962]), or intricate and conceptually complex, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1593) and Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits (1982). Romance characters generally manifest simple psychology, tending toward the symbolic and typological, which emphasizes their potential function as ideologues, allegorical figures, and/or vessels of values. Yet great authors, like Cervantes and Shakespeare, who engage with romance on a profound level, consistently play against type and against the facile assignment of character qualities like good and evil, pushing the envelope of expectations regarding romance characterization. While the romance plot assumes the signature, repetitive pattern of a sine wave, the narrative moves inevitably in telic fashion toward that climactic, triumphal scene that celebrates love and marks social renovation. Yet audiences of romance frequently remember most the plot’s adventurous twists, trials, detours, and suspenseful cliffhangers, and the links, albeit vestigial in some cases, to the cyclic time of myth and nature with an iterative pattern of death and rebirth. This particular paradox generates the fictional world’s capacity to access and represent simultaneously the historic and the mythic, the contingencies of a particular time and culture, and universal values both timeless and transcendent. Significantly, one of the most enduring and recurrent of romance tropes is that of fabric and weaving, which Doody associates with the ancient Greek plokē, a tangled thread, bringing to mind the plot’s movement of weaving and unraveling, entanglement and disentanglement, which also encapsulates the development of the themes of love, freedom, and identity, with all three coming together, woven, in a meaningful climax at the end (Doody 1996, 317).10

F ictional Worlds and Romance as Potential Purveyor of Truth To account for romance’s longevity, universal appeal and presence, and potential to serve as encapsulator and/or purveyor of truth(s), or microcosm in and through which to explore the truth, we should stop viewing romance’s fundamentally simple and predictable structure, and the paradoxes romance

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and the reception of romance generate, as an imaginative straitjacket that limits the audience and the artistic medium exclusively to entertainment and that precludes the genre’s presentation and successful communication of material of high seriousness traditionally afforded ideas that nestle beneath the wide, disciplinary umbrella of philosophy. Romance is perhaps most fruitfully viewed as a special form of idealizing fictional world, a created universe with long-established conventions that invite creative invention and experimentation, and readily lend themselves to philosophical and ideological expression. In fact, the term fictional worlds can trace its history back to Model Theory, which arose to prominence in the 1990s in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, and, more recently, computer science, and in that context deals with notions of possibility and probability, although the concept originates even earlier, to the late 1960s. Developed by Umberto Eco and others as an insightful concept for literary analysis and interpretation, fictional worlds was subsequently expanded in the fields of semantics and semiotics during the 1970s and 1980s. To consider romance or most any genre of imaginative literature as a fictional world means to acknowledge that of necessity the universe of the text or film must constitute a distilled microcosm of the world(s) that we imagine, and/or, in which we live, and, which may be complex, but cannot possibly contain all the richness of detail and often confusing ­complexity experienced or imagined by human beings. As Pavel has observed, a fictional world ‘refers to a complex entity that needs careful logical and aesthetic disentangling: The worlds that mix together in texts may resemble the actual world, but they may be impossible or erratic worlds as well. Works of fiction more or less dramatically combine incompatible world-structures, play with the impossible, and incessantly speak about the unspeakable’ (Pavel 1986, 62). Romance, like all fiction, gives shape and form to experiences real and/or imagined that defy or challenge comprehension. In this sense, according to Eco, fiction becomes a sophisticated type of play: ‘[T]o read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world’ (1994b, 87).11 Audiences and scholars of romance know well the derogatory accusation of ‘mere escapism’ frequently directed at romance, a variation of the condemnation the Canon of Toledo grappled with in his conflicted remarks on chivalric romances, yet such criticism consistently mutes the importance that periodically escaping into a book, ritual, or the countryside offers humans—the opportunity to step into a different culture that can provide the clarity that everyday life blocks and denies: ‘Participation in a ritual is participation in

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something serious and real; it is escape from the banality and opaqueness of life into an event that clarifies life and yet preserves a sense of mystery’ (Tuan 1998, 22). The basic structures of romance—the polarized universe, the archetypal heroes, heroines, and helpers, and so forth—are deeply embedded in the global collective imaginary, which means humans, worldwide, are early equipped with the conventions and protocols of playing the romance game in a variety of media. As for the creators of romance fiction, they have inherited a relatively simple but powerful matrix that with polarization and oppositional power sets up a strong foundation for a wide spectrum of adaptation, metamorphosis, and experimentation, in part, because they can trust that consciously or unconsciously their audience knows well the foundational template or paradigm that forms the basis for the creation of the romance fictional world, that is, the audience knows the rules of the game. When Aristotle observed in the Poetics that poets represent events not as they are, but as they could be, he opened the door for writers to create fiction’s artful lies and endow them with the weight of higher truths, poetic truth, legitimating such efforts with the canonical authority he has accrued down the centuries. Over the years, romance, perhaps more than any other form of fiction, has provided the artistic model, and imaginary world, in which to explore the ideological and philosophical implications of Aristotle’s observation. When readers or viewers play the romance game, then, they face the challenge of solving the puzzle of what those implications, if any, might be. Romance frequently connects with, and alludes to, spirituality and to a higher world of gods, goddesses, ideas, morals, values, concepts, and/or truths and, in this regard, has often been linked with allegory. This aspect of romance emerges early and remains a constant feature of the genre. For instance, readers of the Odyssey enter a fictional world in which Athena, Poseidon, and other inhabitants of the higher world of Mt. Olympus constantly intrude on human activities. By contrast, in the classical Greek romance Ethiopica, one of the most influential of Western romances, the reading public experiences another world that hints at veiled truths, ambiguous connections to the gods, and partially disclosed mysteries throughout. At the beginning of the romance, the hero and heroine find themselves at the mercy of the pirate Thyamis and his band of brigands. Charicleia buys time to pursue a way out of their current dilemma by claiming that her beloved Theagenes is her brother and promising to marry the pirate chieftain. Theagenes acknowledges that her ruse ‘was calculated to veil the truth and conceal our situation from the audience’ (Heliodorus 1957, 25). Charicleia then provides a lengthier explanation for her ploy, reminding her betrothed that a ‘lie too can be noble if it helps those who tell it and does not harm those who hear it’ (Heliodorus 1957, 26).

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Combined, these observations offer a metafictional wink and nudge to readers, reminding them that the entire text consists of an elaborate fabrication of artful lies that may veil noble truths from the audience outside as well as inside the text. In this light, the journey of Theagenes and Charicleia from enslavement to freedom, from symbolic death to rebirth, and from multiple disguises to true identity and ascent to leadership of a better society as the new rulers of an Ethiopia purged of the immoral practice of human sacrifice acquires an aura of auspicious significance and invites consideration for symbolic, if not quasi-allegorical, interpretation and understanding. As the young couple encounters one (mis)adventure after another and grows distant from the Mediterranean civic and spiritual centers of empire (Athens, Rome, Delphi) and draws closer to more ancient and mysterious—from the Greco-­ Roman perspective—religious practices and civilizations in Nilotic locales such as Memphis and Meroe, their association with the Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris intensifies in the romance.12 At first glance, the Ethiopica resembles nothing so much as a wondrous jigsaw puzzle to solve or an awe-inspiring mosaic to construct from the tesserae or fragments arranged in prose form. The Ethiopica’s evocative allusions to the cult of Isis appear especially strong and convincing as an interpretive lens for the romance.13 Under the Roman empire, the practice of religious syncretism enabled the Egyptian mystery cult of Isis and Osiris, which dates back at least to 2000 BCE, to merge in various combinations with the worship of Aphrodite, Demeter, Dionysus, and Fortuna, reaching widespread practice in the Roman Mediterranean world during the first centuries of the Common Era. Isis—associated with love, fertility, and mirth—gathered the limbs of her dead husband Osiris, who had been murdered and dismembered by his brother, the usurper Set. The goddess put Osiris back together again, somewhat like assembling a mosaic from tesserae or piecing a fragmented puzzle of a text together, and brought him back to life long enough to conceive Horus. The myth symbolizes salvation, resurrection, and the triumph of life over death, love over violence and jealousy, and also alludes to the annual cycle of the Nile flood, which fertilizes and, in essence, resurrects the land. The attributes identified with Theagenes and Charicleia throughout the romance reinforce the yin-yang, complementary, oppositional dynamics of the Isis-Osiris myth, along with the narrative’s link to fertility and continuity. Another highly influential ancient Greek romance, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (c. 200), similarly invites quasi-allegorical interpretation, which, if not goddess-centric, nevertheless focuses on procreation and fertility. Notably, too, Longus’ story of the erotic coming-of-age and passage from adolescence

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to adulthood of the eponymous couple indelibly ties the imaginative worlds of romance and idyllic Arcadia, while providing an important blueprint for the ‘romanced’ Arcadias of the pastoral romances that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, such as Sidney’s Arcadia and Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585).14 The theme of love, for instance, figures prominently in the Arcadia of Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, in which the shepherds sing most often of their sadness for lost or unrequited love, sentiments which resonate as strongly, but in a different key in the texts of Heliodorus and Longus, whose protagonists do not waver in their pure, loving devotion to one another. Daphnis and Chloe as well as Theagenes and Chariclea are tested and strengthened by the numerous trials they endure as individuals and as a loyal couple on the journey to a happy marriage, overcoming encounters with pirates, enslavers, and lustful, would-be rapists along the way. The lush Arcadian landscape of Lesbos, with a verdant countryside, rich agricultural fields, grottoes, and beaches, provides idealized and also theatrical settings for the intense lyric expressions of the young lovers and the frequent performance of poetry, mixing verse, prose, and ekphrastic passages in ways that characterize romance as well as Arcadian settings.15 The mythic, seasonal treatment of time and place anchors Daphnis and Chloe in the cyclic, self-replenishing world of nature and the divinities associated with fertility who guard and guide them. Although these two foundlings recover their rightful identities as children of wealthy parents who reside in the city at the end of the romance, they forever prefer their green, hierophantic, Arcadian childhood home of Lesbos where they live close to Pan, Dionysus, Eros, and Nymphs. Over time, romance has retained strong potential for symbolic signification, whether spiritual, philosophical, or ideological in nature. Interestingly, however, in a Christian context, the powerful female principle that appears foundational to the genre in classical antiquity may be displaced or eclipsed altogether. Consider, for instance, Chrétien’s medieval Arthurian romance, The Knight with the Lion, the Yvain narrative frequently labeled his best work.16 The story begins on a feast day at court that corresponds to the celebration of Pentecost, which pertains to return and reconciliation. The Holy Spirit appears with a loud noise and a rush of wind, followed by the famous imbuing of the disciples with the gift of speaking simultaneously in different languages, yet miraculously understood by all. Chrétien’s description of the supernatural spring in the forest associated with Yvain’s beloved, future wife Laudine alludes to the biblical passage regarding Pentecost (Acts I.9–II) without overtly mentioning the parallel. The Knight with the Lion subsequently interweaves numerous micronarratives of return and reconciliation, which

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echo the spiritual values identified with Pentecost in exalting love and forgiveness—the Lady Laudine and her attendant Lunete, the knights Gawain and Yvain, and the two sisters of Blackthorn. The overarching story also celebrates the miraculous power of mercy in effecting reconciliation in that Yvain forgets his vow to return to his wife Laudine, who repudiates him, but through a self-­ imposed penance of suffering and numerous heroic deeds, along with the clever intercession of Lunete, the knight regains Laudine’s love, trust, and devotion. Yvain proves himself worthy of the lion-hearted loyalty, nobility, and courage encapsulated in his epithet and represented literally in the text by the devoted lion that shadows and defends him. Chrétien draws on the medieval bestiary for the creature’s symbolic values as well, as the lion traditionally leads the list of animals in these volumes and manifests various kingly and Christological attributes, which might be applied to Yvain’s noble deeds and behavior. Meanwhile, what has happened to the active romance heroine? Laudine may rule Yvain’s heart, and justifiably withhold her love and devotion for an interval, as Yvain in essence betrays his marital vows. Laudine’s rejection also inspires the knight on his central quest to return home and be reconciled with her, but the lady remains confined to her castle, and like the other aristocratic women in the text, she depends on a male champion to protect her and support her needs and desires. The most active female in the romance, the clever helper figure Lunete, has been relegated to a secondary role, and even she must be rescued from unfair execution at one point by her champion Yvain. Yet significantly, Chrétien upholds married love and loyalty as an amorous and foundational social ideal, as well as a virtuous and courtly ideal, which stands in stark juxtaposition to the author’s complementary story The Knight with the Cart, Lancelot’s tale, which portrays the knight’s adulterous, and disastrous, love for Guinevere in an ambiguous, if not distinctly negative, light. If we turn from Chrétien’s The Knight of the Cart to Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale (c. 1390), we move from one highly sophisticated rendering of medieval chivalric romance to another, but we also chart a course from relative clarity to opacity in symbolic signification.17 Based on Boccaccio’s Teseida (1340) and Statius’ Thebaid (latter part of the first century), this tale of Palamon, Arcite, and Emily defies facile interpretation as readers could view the story as a celebration of chivalric values or an ironic, and powerful, condemnation of them, or as a double- or triple-voiced narrative in which the Knight’s views, and those of the author who created him, may very well be at odds with each other, and either of which may be in disagreement with those espoused by King Theseus. The tale culminates with the lengthy Prime Mover speech of Theseus (ll. 2987 ff.), which is informed by Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

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(523), a work translated into Middle English by Chaucer (c. 1382). The King’s speech provides the philosophical underpinnings for the oddly hollow, nominally ‘happy’ romance ending of Palamon’s marriage to Emily, which makes ‘virtue of the necessity’ of Arcite’s especially gory, painful, and sorrow-­ inducing death. If acceptance of the ways of the world, and of the law that all things must die, seems to be the basis for consolation and the unconvincing happiness of the newlyweds at story’s end, Chaucer, who obviously knows the Consolation well, has chosen to render aspects of Boethius’ philosophy in decidedly ironic fashion. Instead of the Platonic, ascending movement of the Consolation, Theseus’ speech descends from Prime Mover to stones, river, and disintegrating earth. Boethius’ work turns inward and celebrates the inner life of the mind, spirit, and reason and an ascendant return to the divine creator. Yet un-reason permeates The Knight’s Tale in the form of violence, passion, jealousy, and desire. When Palamon prays to Venus, Emily to Diana, and Arcite to Mars, they indulge their own personal wishes to the exclusion of all else, and Boethius’ rich, inner life of the mind and reason is conspicuously absent from this world in which brute force and selfish indulgence seem to rule human actions. Small wonder, then, that this romance that begins The Canterbury Tales remains a widely debated story open to varied interpretations. These sketchy analyses of romances composed by canonical, male, medieval authors demonstrate the genre’s ready adaptation to the values and sociohistorical circumstances of a given time and culture and show how an individual author can engage with romance’s conventions to problematize to an even greater degree themes as inherently complex as love, death, providence, and human agency. In the sixteenth century, the recovery of the Ethiopica and Aristotle’s Poetics in the West, and the widespread debate over the value of chivalric romances in particular and imaginative literature in general as Europe transitioned from oral to print culture, ushered in an era of even greater experimentation with the genre and, in the hands of some writers, a more profound engagement with romance’s capacity to convey poetic truths with artful lies. Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581) constitutes one of the boldest and most influential of the era’s numerous romance hybrids. Tasso composed his masterpiece at the court of Ferrara, where he continued a tradition already established by Matteo Boiardo and Lodovico Ariosto, who in their Orlando Innamorato (1483, 1495) and Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), respectively, blend the conventions of epic and chivalric romance together. In the case of Jerusalem Delivered, the author skillfully employs some factual details of a major historical event distant in time—the First Crusade (1095–1099)—as scaffolding for a sweeping epic that mixes grand battle scenes and armed skir-

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mishes between knights with amorous conflicts and encounters, abundant exoticism and supernatural elements, episodic adventures, multiple heroes and heroines, and numerous subplots that interweave into the main plot of the Christian wresting of Jerusalem from the forces of Islam, which culminates in the final stanza of the last canto when the commander of the Christian host, Godfrey of Bouillon, hangs his arms up in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and kneels in humble, devoted adoration. In his theoretical work, Tasso combats a number of aspects of romance questioned or condemned by moralizing clergy and/or humanists and found in prescriptive, literal-minded interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics. He legitimates the marvelous, celebrates variety in unity, and articulates something akin to an aesthetics of wonderment (admiratio), all of which are as important now for our understanding of romance as they were then, and all of which have contributed mightily to romance’s longevity and popularity as an art form. Moreover, his creative combination of the ancient (epic) and the modern (chivalric romance), and his embrace of some Aristotelian elements, while rejecting or modifying others, represents an implicit assertion of authorial and artistic freedom, which remains relevant today. Significantly, Tasso reshapes romance in this hybrid form for didactic purposes that promote the ideology of the Catholic Reformation, building periodic dissension into the Christian troops that symbolically depicts the religious schism between Christians in Western Europe, and reminds his contemporary readers of the ongoing Islamic threat to all Christians from the empire of the Ottoman Turks, portraying the First Crusade as a parallel to the current state of affairs. Tasso’s mobilization of intense emotions in lyric passages and his vivid imagery of religious emblems, processions, and practices show his enactment of the Council of Trent’s views on religious use of the arts, and successful adaptation of Ignatian meditational methods in fictional form, especially in merging them with romance’s aesthetics of wonderment. The famous scene of Clorinda’s death and baptism at the hands of Tancred (Canto 12) illustrates how Tasso fuses epic and romance heroism and adventure, lyric interludes and religious didacticism, in a dramatic high point rendered in painterly fashion and with high affect that moves and elicits compassion from the audience.18 The Early Modern hybrid progeny of Byzantine romances also include numerous examples of pastoral romance, continuing the legacy of Daphnis and Chloe. Writers as diverse as Jacopo Sannazaro, Miguel de Cervantes, Honoré d’Urfé, and Sir Philip Sidney experimented with imagining Arcadia as a fictional world in which to explore timely topics relevant to the world of the reader, expanding romance’s potential sociohistorical significance. Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585) and Sidney’s Arcadia (1593), for instance, which

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feature abundant debates, contests, and discussions with competing opinions, embed views within their symbolic shepherds’ communities and adventures on subjects as diverse as art, love, friendship, community, companionate marriage, and political philosophy. Romance merges with other literary forms as well in a variety of artistic experiments, such as drama and short stories. Today Shakespeare’s romance The Tempest continues to garner vast audiences, spawn varied adaptations, and inspire myriad interpretations, from an allegory of artistic creation to a postcolonial critique of imperial power. Cervantes composed a number of romances for his Exemplary Stories (1613), in which he addresses a variety of hot-button issues in Early Modern Europe, such as Erasmian views on marriage (The Little Gipsy Girl), the nature and possibility of miracles (The Power of Blood), and the notion of a universal, pan-Christian community (The Spanish Englishwoman).19 In Cervantes’ tales, the protagonists may be wealthy and respected ladies and gentlemen, at times with disguised identities, but they are not necessarily courtiers, and their nobility emanates from within, and may or may not correspond to aristocratic social status. If it is at all possible to generalize meaningfully about such a heterogeneous group of hybrid romances, and authorial intentions about which I can only speculate, the tendency is toward increasing diversity, complexity, and elasticity in adapting romance conventions and a growing propensity to introduce sociohistorical figures, events, and themes into the fictional world, maximizing that protean quality of romance, and the genre’s expansiveness in allowing authorial freedom to engage widely with matters timely and timeless. Given the widespread deployment of romance as an experimental fictional form in Early Modern Europe, the emergence of the modern novel in the West in Don Quixote (1605, 1615) should not be surprising, especially as overconsumption of chivalric romances supposedly drove the country gentleman mad and into his newly imagined identity as a knight errant. Romance did not fare well in the eighteenth century as the novel grew in popularity; Voltaire’s satirical skewering of romance and Leibnizian optimism in Candide (1759) offer a case in point. As mentioned above, however, many issues remain unresolved regarding the relationship between romance and the novel, for certainly many well-known novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries feature romance conventions and might well be considered examples of romance reconfigured to mirror the sociohistorical moment in greater detail and create a more convincing mimetic illusion of external reality while ­engaging with important social issues of the time.20 Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1742), George Sand’s Indiana (1832), Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833), Charles Dickens’ Nicholas

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Nickleby (1838–1839), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), and Benito Pérez Galdós’ Fortunata y Jacinta (1887) provide some instances of novels saturated with romance elements, yet more often studied as exemplars of Romanticism, Realism, and/or sociohistorical critique in fictional form. While the heroes and heroines may be members of the middle class with neither a title of nobility nor a drop of blue blood, they are clearly recognizable descendants of their aristocratic, literary ancestors. Despite strong opposition, women authors also began to make their way into the ranks of professional prose writers, and in the novels of both men and women, those repressed, powerful heroines and goddesses of ancient romance began to return in different guises, emerging as the female protagonists of novels and romances. Campbell apparently got it partly, but not completely, right, for heroines also wear a thousand faces in the world of romance. From the twentieth century onward, romance has gradually gained acceptance as a literary genre with identifiable conventions and a long, global literary history. In the pages of idealizing prose fiction—from popular Westerns and serial romances to soap operas, fantasy, and science fiction, and their made-for-the-screen counterparts—contemporary authors from C.S.  Lewis to J.K. Rowling to Suzanne Collins have mobilized romance for a wide array of purposes. The quasi-allegorical figures pitting good against evil, hewing closer to the model of classical romance and fairy tales, have undergone a remarkable resurgence in popularity. The initially ordinary and vulnerable demeanor and appearance of Bilbo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, and Harry Potter belie the nobility of character, courage, and strength that they acquire over time and through a lengthy series of ordeals, which make them worthy successors to Theagenes, Yvain, and Godfrey, as surely as Sauron, Voldemort, and Dumbledore descend from Arsace, Morgana Le Fay, Merlin, and the Lady of the Lake. The plots of comic books, whether in print form or as depicted in visual media, along with works like The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars, and The Hunger Games (2008–2010), seem to have tapped into the angst and enduring desire for a better world rendered more urgent by two world wars, an ongoing threat of annihilation by nuclear disaster, and widespread fears of proliferating violence fanned by global terrorism. Meanwhile, the strong romance heroines of folklore and classical antiquity have returned in full force, buttressed by the changing status of women in many parts of the globe. Thus, Dorothy Gale and Gwendoline the Good prove more than a match for the Wicked Witch of the West, Princess Leia is a fearless warrior and rebel leader who becomes a commander of armies, an equal in power and strength to her brother Luke Skywalker and her champion Han Solo, even as bow-and-arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen

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channels the archers Charicleia and the goddess Diana, and Hermione Granger continues the tradition of the wise and assertive Charicleia and Cervantes’ Little Gipsy Girl Preciosa. Yet romance also remains as protean and adaptable to changing times and values as ever, as the conventions of the genre lend voice to the promotion of more contemporary ideological viewpoints. Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast (1950; Gabriel Axel’s film 1987) might be viewed as a romance that portrays divine grace and exalts forgiveness and mercy, hearkening back to Cervantine and Shakespearean romances that focus on moments of spiritual transcendence and transfiguration, in which through the exercise of self-sacrifice and mercy, humans rise above their own earthbound limitations, while Kevin Costner’s nostalgic Dances with Wolves (1990) and James Cameron’s futuristic Avatar (2009) communicate environmentalist messages of ecoromance, support respect for the ‘other’ and cultural diversity, and condemn imperialist militarism while exalting simpler, more communal societies. Note that even Babette’s Feast provides a quiet and everyday setting for the eponymous, epiphanic feast, rendering the miraculous scene of anagnorisis all but invisible to the participants in divine grace, but heightening the reading and cinematic audiences’ awareness of Babette’s sacrifice, demonstration of love, and the transfiguring repercussions of those actions. Pastoral romance continues to flourish as well, similarly lending hybrid conventions to new purposes and conversations, such as the exploration of sexual freedom in Annie Proulx’ ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (1997; Ang Lee’s film 2005) and the fractal approach to time in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993).

Romance and the Human Imagination Fractals prove useful as a heuristic tool not only for grasping the concept of Arcadia and recurrent actions in time but also for understanding the enduring appeal of romance and the persistence of the conventions of romance’s fictional world. For romance’s imaginary universe, like that of fractals, consists of repetitive patterns that remain the same or similar across time and cultures, but that also evolve and change to appear almost random or even chaotic in form and substance. Romance thus flaunts iterative similarity and symmetry, while allowing and displaying organic and/or idiosyncratic difference or uniqueness. In a sense, a fractal approach to romance remits the reader/ viewer/critic of these fictional worlds to the Western origins of the genre in the Byzantine romances of classical antiquity. In the Odyssey, Homer links the ancient master trope of weaving with mental activity and singing (Circe,

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Calypso), while Penelope’s clever weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ funeral shroud is identified with the raveling and unraveling of the poem’s plot, laden with abundant peripeteia. At the heart of the weaving trope, which appears frequently in romance throughout the ages, is the dynamic process of interweaving oppositional voices, ideas, and actions, and the creation of images and repetitive patterns. The fictional world of romance is, in fact, one of patterned motifs, images, actions, and thoughts spun out in linguistic and textual (from the Latin texere, to weave) form. Recent cognitive approaches to art have similarly defined it as a form of ‘play with pattern’ that ‘acts like a playground for the mind’ of ‘visual or aural or social pattern’ such that ‘over time we strengthen the neural pathways that process key patterns in open-ended ways’ (Boyd 2009, 15). According to Patrick Hogan, on a global basis, universal, prototypical narratives arise to express and elicit emotions on the part of the storyteller and listener, respectively. The most common prototypical narrative, he asserts, is based on love and generates the plot of romantic tragicomedy (romance), which recounts the union, separation, and reunion of lovers and in which conflict involves tension between love and some aspect of the social structure. Response to romance stories is driven by situational empathy; that is, the reader or listener draws on memories of feelings and experiences of love that extend all the way back to childhood, relating to the emotions embedded in the text, and of course, in the case of romance, that most universal of narrative prototypes, relating with strong empathy to the playing out of romance’s teleology of separation from the lover, ensuing sorrow and suffering, and the inevitable return to love, reunion, happiness, and often marriage or multiple marriages.21 Whether oral or written, stories, much like dreams, daydreams, and child’s play, provide humans with vicarious experiences without the ­‘real-­life’ risks, serving as artistic versions of a virtual reality simulator in which people can confront problems, difficulties, challenges, and terrifying threats as well as a variety of potential solutions and/or outcomes to these complicated issues. Jonathan Gottschall affirms that world fiction offers a repository of skills and behaviors that equip people for social life and as such constitutes a sort of universal grammar that prepares humans for the often convoluted conflicts and interactions of our lives as social beings (Boyd 2009, 85–98, 129, 208; Gottschall 2012, 52–59). While one could argue that the fractal analogy of similarity with change might apply to any literary genre, the consistency, endurance, and universality of romance, the fact that the first stories children tell tend to assume a sketchy profile of romance, and the last, experimental works of one-per-world literary geniuses like Cervantes and Shakespeare can be romances of astonishing com-

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plexity (Persiles and The Tempest respectively) suggest that there is something special and unique in romance’s fictional world that links the genre to the structure and function of the human brain and imagination. After all, romance achieves an oppositional weave that at first glance seems impossible, with a predictable form that nevertheless explores and develops the theme of freedom, and ends with a celebration of a new social order, depicting within that conservative, iterative structure the very seeds of revolt, and with them, the never-ending hope for a better world. Romance may well be the fictional form that brings us closest to an anatomy of the imagination’s creative process, while providing increased insight into what makes us human and inspiring us to build and be part of a better world.

Notes 1. For general information on the Odyssey and issues of debate regarding the poem’s author(s), origin(s), date of composition, and the like, consult Whitman (1958, 285–309). On the Odyssey and nostos, see Barker and Christensen (2015, 85–110). On the importance of the Odyssey’s plot on numerous forms of Western narrative, consult Fusillo (1991, 24–31) and Lowe (2000, 129–56). Lowe calls the Odyssey ‘the supreme textbook of plot technology’ for classical antiquity (156) and writes that the poem is ‘the most encyclopaedic compendium of technical plot devices in the whole of ancient storytelling, and one of the most dazzling displays of narrative fireworks anywhere in literature’ (128). 2. I follow Doody (1996, 26) on the dating of the Greek romances. On the Odyssey and the adventure plot of Greek romance, see Silk (2004, 31–44) and Hunter (2004, 235–53). On the Odyssey and romance conventions in general, see Louden (2011, 57–104). Lowe (2000, 222–59) writes of the Greek romance as classical epic fiction strongly influenced by Homeric narrative form and with a close generic tie to New Comedy. See Fusillo (1991, 31–53) on the influence of classical tragedy and comedy on the Greek romance and its self-conscious theatricality. Mentz (2006, 55–6n30) provides a summary of the more recent criticism on Greek romance. Of this growing body of criticism, I mention only the following: Whitmarsh (2011), MacAlister (1996), Doody (1996), Konstan (1994), Reardon (1991), Hägg (1983), and Perry (1967). 3. See Bakhtin (1981, 86–110) on the Greek romance. For an overview of Campbell’s monomyth see Campbell (2008, 1–18) and Moyers (1988). 4. For more about Campbell’s profound influence on Lucas, consult Ferrari (2016) and Seastrom (2015). On Campbell’s life and works see Cousineau (1999). 5. Frye (1976, 161–88) summarizes his anatomy of romance.

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6. Doody (1996, 432–64) links the rise of romance in ancient times with religious practices devoted to an array of goddess and goddess-like figures—Isis, Cybele, the Virgin Mary, and so forth. 7. For more on the complex relationship between romance and the novel, consult Pavel (2013), Moretti (2006, 1, ix–x), Moore (2010, 3–7, 30–36). Note that in his two-volume collection of essays on the novel, Moretti stresses the ancient origins and planetary nature of the novel as an art form, while Moore (3), like Doody, elides the distinction between ancient romances and the novel. 8. Scholes et al. (2006, 3–81) address the transition from storytelling to narrative and the variety of classical narrative forms that established the major paradigms for fiction in the West. Doody, Pavel, Moretti, and Moore’s books in their own ways stress the ancient history and the enduring and global nature of romance as an art form. 9. On the recovery of the ancient Greek and Roman prose fiction and vernacular translations in Early Modern Europe, consult Reeve (2008), Mentz (2006, 47–71), and Bearden (2012, 19–46). On the subsequent influence of ancient Greek and Roman prose fiction, consult Sandy and Harrison (2008). For an excellent summary of the recovery of Aristotle’s Poetics, Heliodorus’ romance, and the debate over imaginative literature in the sixteenth century, consult Forcione (1970, 11–87). On the recovery of the Poetics, the growing debate over romance, genres, and fiction in general, see Weinberg (1961, 2, 635– 714), Hathaway (1962, 3–42). Bearden (2012, 20–21) notes that despite their kinship, early modern reception privileged Greek over chivalric romance for moral and aesthetic qualities and also for the cultural variety depicted. On the identification of romance with the female reader, see, for instance, Goody (2006, 1, 18–29), Radway (1991, 19–45). For essential information on the emergence of the romances of chivalry as bestsellers in the sixteenth century, consult Sieber (1985), Eisenberg (1982, 27–54), Thomas (1969, 1–83), and Chevalier (1968). Chartier (1987, 147–49, 154–56) discusses the practice of reading romance works aloud at gatherings and how this practice ties in with study and discussion groups focusing on literature. 10. Briand (2006) discusses Daphnis and Chloe as an exemplar of poikilia (variety, diversity, assortment), a polyphonic collection of varied themes, types, and techniques mixed together as part of a whole—the one and the many—an essential characteristic of romance. The classical master trope of weaving figures prominently in romances from ancient times to the present—note its appearance in the Canon of Toledo’s comments—and is one example of romance’s persistent, self-conscious foregrounding of metafictional elements, inscribing into or depicting within the romance a paradigm of multiple plots woven into one, and an emblem of craftsmanship, and the craft of Zeus and Athena, the goddess of weaving. See Scheid and Svenbro (1996, 111–69) for more on the weaving master trope in classical culture; on the weaving trope

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and Renaissance romance, see Doody (1996, 283, 308–17) and Collins (2016, 27–37). 11. For more on fictional worlds, consult Doležel (1998, 16–28), Ronen (1994, 76–143), Eco (1994a, 64–82, b), Pavel (1986, 43–113), and Maitre (1983, 21–75). Eco observes that ‘[e]ven legendary lands, as soon as they are transformed from a subject of belief to a fictional subject have come true’, reaching ‘a truthful part of the reality of our imagination’ (2013, 441). 12. Interestingly, nearly 2000 years after Charicleia espouses lying as a noble stratagem under certain circumstances, Star Wars’ Princess Leia lies to Darth Vader about her secret mission to help the Alliance in the opening scenes of the movie. Konstan (1994, 218–31) suggests that there may be a relationship between the polyglot, multicultural love, travels, and marriage in the romances and the increasing ‘decenteredness’ of the late Roman Empire. See Schmeling (2003) on ancient Greek romance as a fictional representation of what the society of the time thought of itself, stressing the mythic qualities of place and character, particularly the chaste, beautiful heroine, and noting the unRoman, Greek quality of the fictional world. 13. See Doody (1996, 62–81, 432–64) for more on the relationship between the ancient romances, religious mysteries and initiation rites, and worship of Mother goddesses. The pioneering works of Reinhold Merkelbach (Hirten 1988; Roman 1962) provide the impetus for exploring the potential relationship between the antique romances and the ancient mystery cults. On the influential cult of Isis in particular, see Merkelbach’s Isis regina (2012, 3–70). 14. Doody (1996, 213–73) discusses the impact of the antique romances on sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century fiction. She comments on Longus: ‘Longus’ story becomes almost synonymous with “pastorals” (pastoralia), and its influence can be felt in Montemayor’s Diana, in Sidney’s Arcadia, Cervantes’ Galatea, and other works; far-off echoes of it can be heard in the youthful loves of Tom and Becky in Twain’s Tom Sawyer’ (251). On Longus’ impact on Renaissance romance, see also Collins (2016, 19–23). Barber (1988, 1–26) writes of the sixteenth-century translations of Daphnis and Chloe, underscoring widespread familiarity with Longus’ text. See also the description of ‘idyllic romance’ articulated by Hardin (2000, 1–24), who focuses on Daphnis and Chloe as the original exemplar. Garland (1990) examines Greek romance’s long-standing celebration of emotional fidelity, if not chastity itself. 15. Steiner (1988) studies the prominence of ekphrasis in romance and the symbiotic relationship between the verbal and the visual in romance’s fictional world. 16. Varvaro (2006) links the twelfth-century French romance with the emergence of the novel. Brownlee (2000) examines the complex links between medieval Spanish narratives and Cervantine prose. On the main characteristics and development of twelfth-century French romance in general, consult Bruckner (1993, 60–108, 207–25, 2000), Gaunt (2000), Rider (2000), Kelly (1993,

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1–33), and Vinaver (1984, 25–32, 44–52, 68–98). On Chrétien and the fictional world of his romances, consult Bruckner (2005, 2008), Hunt (2005), Duggan (2001, 1–46, 311–27), and Lacy (1980, 1–66, 1987). 17. On Chaucer’s creative, transformational engagement with Boccaccio, Statius, and epic tradition, see Hanning (1980), Haller (1966), and Muscatine (1950). Haller (1966, 68) argues that love, specifically the possessive love that leads to violence in The Knight’s Tale, has displaced epic battles fought over political issues. On oppositional symmetry and the order/disorder, civil and domestic conduct issues, and ambiguity regarding chivalry in The Knight’s Tale, consult Miller (2004, 82–110), Howard (1978, 227–37), Elbow (1975, 73–94), and Muscatine (1969, 175–90). To my view, love’s central importance typifies romance, although selfish love that leads to aggression is neither idealized nor celebrated, and while the order/disorder dichotomy discussed by these critics and others is commonly present in romance, the tale’s ambiguity regarding order/chaos and fate and human agency is uppermost in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. On The Knight’s Tale and consolation in general, and Boethius’ Consolation in particular, see Schrock (2015, 107–27), Edwards (2008), Miller (2004, 111–51), and Elbow (1975, 19–48). I concur with Schrock (2015) that ‘The Knight’s Tale is a series of failed narratival and philosophical closures that ends in a diminuendo of consolation’ (107). 18. On Tasso’s use of allegory and dramatization of Counter-Reformation ideology in Jerusalem Delivered, see Quint (1993, 213–53), Treip (1994, 53–94), Murrin (1980, 87–127), and Giamatti (1969, 179–210). On Tasso’s theory of the epic, see Treip (1994, 80–88), Murrin (1980, 87–127), Tasso (1973), and Durling (1965, 185–95, 200–10). For more on the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, consult Weinberg (1961, 2, 797–813), Hathaway (1962, 437–59), and Maravall (1986, 294–98). On the celebration of admiratio/wonderment at the time, and its classical sources, consult Weinberg (1961, 1, 150–55, 188–90, 397, 2, 737–43). 19. On Cervantes’ experimentation with romance, and his engagement with a variety of topics, see Collins (2016, 136–89), Pavel (2013, 99–106), and Finello (1994, 49–57). On Sidney’s experimentation with romance, and his engagement with a variety of topics, see Collins (2016, 190–236), Pavel (2013, 99–106), Bearden (2012, 66–99), and Lamb (2008). For more on Cervantes’ The Little Gipsy Girl, romance, and Erasmian views on marriage, consult Forcione (1982, 93–223); on Cervantes’ The Power of Blood and the nature of miracles, consult Forcione (1982, 317–97). On the concept of a unified Christian community in Cervantes’ The Spanish Englishwoman, consult Collins (1996, 65–71). 20. Couégnas (2006), for instance, discusses the intersection between high and popular literature in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and England, noting the popularity of the ‘sentimental novel’ and the ‘gothic novel’, both literary types that I would identify as forms of romance.

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21. Hogan (2003, 76–121) presents his theory of human emotions and prototypical narrative; his view of the common form of prototypical narratives, 230–38. Hogan’s studies are not limited to the Western tradition.

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Konstan, David. 1994. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lacy, Norris J. 1980. The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative Art. Leiden: E. J. Brill. ———. 1987. The Typology of Arthurian Romance. In The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, vol. 1, 2 vols., 33–56. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lamb, Mary Ellen, ed. 2008. Romance. Special Issue of Sidney Journal 26 (2): 1–114. Louden, Bruce. 2011. Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and the Near East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, Nick J.  2000. The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacAlister, Suzanne. 1996. Dreams and Suicides: The Greek Novel from Antiquity to the Byzantine Empire. London: Routledge. Maitre, Doreen. 1983. Literature and Possible Worlds. London: Pembridge Press. Maravall, José Antonio. 1986. Antiguos y modernos: Visión de la historia e idea de progreso hasta el Renacimiento. Madrid: Alianza. Mentz, Steve. 2006. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Merkelbach, Reinhold. 1988. Die Hirten des Dionysos: Die Dionysos-Mysterien der römischen Kaiserzeit und der bukolische Roman des Longus. Stuttgart: Teubner. ———. (1962) 1988. Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. Munich: Beck. ———. 2012. Isis regina, Zeus Sarapis: Die griechisch-ägyptische Religion nach den Quellen dargestellt. 3rd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. Miller, Mark. 2004. Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the ‘Canterbury Tales’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, Steven. 2010. The Novel: An Alternative History Beginnings to 1600. New York, NY: Continuum. Moretti, Franco, ed. 2006. The Novel. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moyers, Bill. 1988. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth—The Hero’s Adventure. Bill Moyers and Company. Accessed December 11, 2016. http://www.billmoyers. com. Murrin, Michael. 1980. The Allegorical Epic: Essays in its Rise and Decline. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Muscatine, Charles. 1950. Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. PMLA 65: 911–929. ———. 1969. Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pavel, Thomas G. 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013. The Lives of the Novel: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Perry, Ben Edwin. 1967. The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Quint, David. 1993. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Radway, Janice A. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Reardon, Bryan P. 1991. The Form of Greek Romance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reeve, Clara. 1999. The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries, and Manners in a Course of Evening Conversations, 1785, 2 vols. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey. Reeve, Michael. 2008. The Re-Emergence of Ancient Novels in Western Europe, 1300–1810. In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, ed. Tim Whitmarsh, 282–298. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rider, Jeff. 2000. The Other Worlds of Romance. In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L.  Krueger, 115–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ronen, Ruth. 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sandy, Gerald, and Stephen Harrison. 2008. Novels Ancient and Modern. In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, ed. Tim Whitmarsh, 299–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheid, John, and Jesper Svenbro. 1996. The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric. Translated by Carol Volk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmeling, Gareth. 2003. Myths of Person and Place: The Search for a Model for the Ancient Greek Novel. In The Ancient Novel and Beyond, ed. Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wytse Keulen, 425–442. Leiden: Brill. Scholes, Robert, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg. 2006. The Nature of Narrative. Revised from 1966 ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schrock, Chad D. 2015. Consolation in Medieval Narrative: Augustinian Authority and Open Form. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Seastrom, Lucas. 2015. Mythic Discovery within the Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Joseph Campbell Meets George Lucas—Part 1. Star Wars. Accessed December 11, 2016. http://www.starwars.com. Sieber, Harry. 1985. The Romance of Chivalry in Spain. In Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina S. Brownlee, 203–219. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Silk, Michael. 2004. The Odyssey and Its Explorations. In The Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. Robert Fowler, 31–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steiner, Wendy. 1988. Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tasso, Torquato. 1973. Discourses on the Heroic Poem. Translated by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Part III Philosophical Aesthetics

14 Analytic Aesthetics Jukka Mikkonen

A passage from John Hospers’s Meaning and Truth in the Arts (1946) illustrates well the aim of the early analytic enterprise in aesthetics: the investigation of key concepts in a discourse. We ask, “What is the meaning of this piece of music?” without stopping to ask ourselves what it is that we are asking, precisely what sense of “meaning” is being used here, or what it means for a work of art to have meaning. We assert that art reveals reality, or expresses truth, without inquiring into the precise meanings of crucial words like “reality,” “truth,” “expression,” which are so constantly employed in discussions of this kind. (Hospers 1946, v)

While ‘analytic philosophers’ are today critical about both the demarcation between analytic and continental philosophy and attempts to define analytic philosophy, something can be said of the characteristics of the analytic enterprise in aesthetics. Typical for the analytic approach are, according to its self-­ acknowledged proponents, the application of formal logic, conceptual analysis, and rational argument; the focus on detail and distinctions and the orientation to narrowly demarcated problems; the emphasis on objectivity and a view of philosophical problems as timeless; and a respect for clarity and a preference for clear prose (Lamarque and Olsen 2004a, 2; Currie et al. 2014, 5). Analytic philosophers of literature have been interested in the nature of J. Mikkonen (*) University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_14

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general concepts, such as ‘literature’, ‘fiction’, ‘narrative’, and ‘meaning’, on the one hand, and the practice of literature, on the other hand.

The Analytic Approach Philosophers’ work around philosophy and literature may be roughly divided into two groups: ‘philosophy and literature’ and ‘philosophy of literature’. The former mainly explores the philosophical aspects of literary works (or the literary aspects of philosophical works) and deals with actual works, whereas the latter consists of systematic exploration of theoretical issues related to literature. In addition, analytic philosophers illustrating their theories with examples drawn from literature, philosophers of language examining fictional entities such as Hamlet and moral philosophers illuminating ethical problems with literary scenarios—these approaches that make use of literary works do not fall within either of the groups mentioned. Analytic aestheticians are mainly working on the philosophy of literature. There are, crudely stated, three popular views of the aims of the analytic mission among contemporary aestheticians. These views, which need not be mutually exclusive, are (1) a philosophy of criticism, (2) a philosophy of empirical study of art, and (3) a philosophy of art. 1. The early analytic aestheticians of the 1950s conceived their discipline as ‘metacriticism’ or the philosophy of criticism. Their aim was to discover the fundamental concepts and general principles of art criticism by looking carefully at the work of professional critics. This conception of the discipline was clearly manifested in Monroe C. Beardsley’s work Aesthetics (1958), which was subtitled ‘Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism’. Today, many analytic philosophers of art think that the scope of aesthetics is much broader than the analysis of concepts. Philosophers are interested in issues, such as creativity and restoration: also, questions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind have a central role in contemporary study (see Stock and Thomson-Jones 2008, xii). Some think that descriptive or normative metacriticism is not even possible any more, for criticism has become so diverse an object that a coherent view of its methods cannot be given—moreover, the rise of a new critical paradigm would make the philosophical descriptions of critical principles obsolete (Lamarque 2009, 7). Others defend metacriticism as a part of the analytic approach. Noël Carroll claims in On Criticism ‘that the time has come to rejuvenate [metacriticism], since there is probably more art criticism being produced and

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consumed now than ever before in the history of the world’ (Carroll 2009, 1). The metacritical conception is also manifest in many contemporary analytic aestheticians’ work in which critical readings, the interpretations of the experts of art, are cited as evidence supporting the philosopher’s theoretical thesis. 2. Interest in the ‘psychology of art’ has been strong in analytic aesthetics, which is no wonder, as analytic philosophers are often (but not always) sympathetic to natural scientific approaches. Along the rise of neuroscience and cognitive science, a growing number of aestheticians have taken an interest to the findings of the sciences of the mind. If neuroscience helps us to understand information processing in general, could it not also illuminate our engagement with works of art? Some philosophers have taken scientific studies to settle age-old philosophical debates for good, but Kathleen Stock (2014, 205) remarks perceptively that ‘given philosophers’ tendencies to cautious critical analysis, the use of such evidence is not always inspected as scrupulously as it could be’. Gregory Currie believes that aestheticians would learn much if they turned their attention to empirical disciplines, such as branches of psychology, linguistics, and economic and sociological studies of art consumption: yet, he thinks that empirical research is not much worth without careful philosophical reflection of the traditional sort, and he sees the task of philosophy in formulating theoretical models to strengthen the empirical study (Currie 2013, 435–36). Currie and his colleagues (2014, 12) argue that ‘[w]hilst phenomenological and conceptual analysis may tell us much about what we think we are doing [in experiencing artworks], even aesthetic experts may be mistaken about what they are actually doing. And this, at least in principle, may be the object of scientific investigation’. 3. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen propose that philosophy of literature is best understood as literary aesthetics or the philosophy of the phenomenon of literature. As Lamarque (2009, 8) sees it, ‘the “institution” of literature investigated by the philosopher concerns … fundamental structures, those that, in Kantian terminology, “make possible” any relevant interactions between participants in a practice’. In this view, the philosopher is after ‘the logical foundations of the “practice” of literature, rather as the philosopher of law examines neither particular legal systems nor the history of law but the grounds on which any such system depends[.]’ (ibid.). Moreover, Lamarque and Olsen (2004b, 201) emphasize that philosophy of literature ought to be aesthetics of literature and focus on the ‘recognizably valuable but non-instrumental experience that has ­traditionally been referred to by the term “pleasure”’. Such an approach examines, for instance, the sort of values associated with literature.

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Definitions of Literature The word ‘literature’ is used to denote any body of writing, on the one hand, and artistically valuable texts, on the other hand. In the latter group are works of the imagination, such as novels, epic poems, and plays. But not all works of imagination, such as genre fiction, are considered literature proper; in turn, some non-fictional works, such as works of history, travel stories, and philosophical works, are seen to possess significant literary value. As aesthetics in general has been eager to find out what art is, literary aesthetics is keen to know what literature is in the aesthetic sense. Aestheticians of today are extremely dubious about essentialist definitions that attempt to ground literature on some intrinsic quality, such as ‘literariness’, or some sort of psychological response to it in the audience. The consensus is that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions that would make a text literature. Noël Carroll (1988, 149) takes a ‘historical or narrative approach’ and claims that Art is a cultural practice that supplies its practitioners with strategies for identifying new objects as art…. Confronted by a new object, a practitioner of the artworld considers whether it can be shown that the new work is a repetition, amplification or repudiation of the tradition.

Likewise, Jerrold Levinson (2007, 28–29) states in his ‘recursive’ definition of art that ‘an artwork … is something that has been intended by someone for regard or treatment in some overall way that some earlier or preexisting artwork or artworks are or were correctly regarded or treated’. Robert Stecker (1996, 694), in turn, proposes a ‘disjunctive’ definition of literature: [A] work w is a work of literature if and only if w is produced in a linguistic medium, and, 1. w is a novel, short story, tale, drama, or poem, and the writer of w intended that it possess aesthetic, cognitive or interpretation-centered value, and the work is written with sufficient technical skill for it to be possible to take that intention seriously, or 2. w possesses aesthetic, cognitive or interpretation-centered value to a significant degree, or 3. w falls under a predecessor concept to our concept of literature and was written while the predecessor concept held sway, or 4. w belongs to the work of a great writer.

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In Lamarque and Olsen’s (1994, 255–56) ‘institutional’ view, ‘[a] text is identified as a literary work by recognizing the author’s intention that the text is produced and meant to be read within the framework of conventions defining the practice (constituting the institution) of literature’. Further, the aesthetic value of literature consists of mimesis and poiesis: humanly interesting content and the creative and imaginative aspect of treating that content (261–66). Of course, all these characterizations have been disputed. Perhaps there is only a ‘literary’ way of reading? Such a view has also been criticized for not being able to distinguish between works that possess literary value and works that are merely treated as literature (i.e. read with an emphasis on their rhetorical features, for instance).

Ontology and Epistemology of Literature In addition to the definition of literature, there has been a now somewhat declining interest in the ontology of literary works. How does a literary work exist? Analytic philosophers have provided subtle and nuanced ontological systems, of which two major strands are ‘textualism’ and ‘contextualism’. Textualists maintain that a literary work is to be identified with the text of the work or, rather, the text type. For Nelson Goodman (1976, 208), ‘[a] literary work … is … the text or script itself ’. A problem arises when we have multiple versions of the text, such as manuscripts of Joyce’s Ulysses. Moreover, in a strict textualist view, a literary work of art cannot survive translation, so a person who has read Notes from the Underground would not have read Dostoyevsky’s work Записки из подполья. Contextualism, in turn, maintains that a literary work is a text type tied to its context of origin. A ‘poem is not … the brute text that it comprises but rather that text poetically projected in a specific context anchored to a particular person, time, and place’ (Levinson 1996, 197). Because features of the art-historical context of the work affect its identity, textually identical texts that are produced in different historical contexts would constitute different works. Proponents of contextualism like to refer to Borges’s playful short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, 1939), in which a fictional twentieth-century French writer achieves to produce fragments that are verbally identical to Cervantes’s Don Quixote but which are much richer in meaning, for they connote things that Cervantes’s seventh-century text could not. But what all belongs to the ‘historical context’ of a work and how strict should the requirements be? Which properties of the

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work’s spatiotemporal context are accidental and which properties essential to its identity? How much contexts constrain textual meanings and how much this ultimately affects the works? Part of the ontology of literature is the question of how fictional characters, such as Emma Bovary, exist. Eliminativists like Nelson Goodman (1976/1968) and Kendall L.  Walton (1990) attempt to get rid of apparent reference to fictional entities by paraphrasing them, whereas accommodationists, such as Nicholas Wolterstorff (1980) and Amie Thomasson (1999), think that fictional entities are nonexistent objects, possible objects, abstract entities, Platonic kinds, or the like. While the study on the semantics of fiction has been to a large extent carried out by metaphysicians, the ontology of ‘fictional worlds’ and the question of ‘fictional truths’ have united aestheticians with metaphysicians and philosophers of language. A literary work does not reveal to its readers everything about the characters and the events, and readers have to make a great deal of inferences about the state of affairs in the world of the work. Readers supplement the narrator’s reports on both personal grounds (e.g. spontaneous visual imaginings) and ways that are suggested by the work. Some indeterminacies are subject to interpretative debates, for example, whether the ghosts the governess sees in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) are hallucinations or real. How do we determine what is true in a fiction? David Lewis’s (1978) view of a fictional world as a set of possible worlds and fictional truth as a matter of counterfactual reasoning has been highly influential and disputed. Kendall Walton (1990) has scrutinized two competing principles that have been proposed to explain how we infer fictional truths. According to the ‘Reality Principle’ (RP), readers assume that the fictional world is as much like the real world as is compatible with the work’s descriptions and make their inferences accordingly. Conversely, the ‘Mutual Belief Principle’ (MBP) maintains that our inferences about the world of fiction ought to follow the beliefs common in the artist’s society. In a society in which the earth is believed to be flat, adventurers near the ‘edge’ of the world are fictionally in danger of falling down; ‘Our superior geographical knowledge need not ruin the excitement for us’ (Walton 1990, 152). While both principles turn out to be problematic in Walton’s i­ nspection, he thinks that ‘MBP not only gives the artist better control over what is fictional; it also, in many cases, gives appreciators easier access to it’ (153). There are great many disputes around these principles. What are the ‘mutual beliefs’ of a society—and what if the author is at odds with them? Lamarque (1990, 335) has criticized the realistic assumptions underlying many theories

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of fictional truth and their neglect for literary interpretation, such as Lewis’s ‘assumption that there are “facts” about the fictional worlds waiting to be discovered’. Of late, he has claimed that it is difficult to establish beliefs about fictional matters and that many fictional ‘facts’ turn out to be disputable (Lamarque 2017). The question of truth in fiction has received much attention in aesthetics; little has been written on the aesthetic value of epistemic ambiguity in literature.

Fiction The definition of fictionality and the nature of our attitude toward the content of works of imaginative literature have greatly fascinated analytic philosophers. Today, most analytic aestheticians think that fiction is not to be defined in semantic terms (reference and truth), for works of fiction often accordingly refer to real people, places, and events, whereas non-fictional works may fail in their references (or truth) without becoming fiction. Rather, fictions invite a certain kind of response in the audience. In his Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), Walton made popular the idea that engaging with fiction means adopting a ‘make-believe’ attitude to the content of the work. Walton turned the attention to the social dimension of fiction and proposed that fictions are ‘works whose function is to serve as props in games of make-believe’ (72). The same year Gregory Currie, in his The Nature of Fiction, emphasized the role of the author’s ‘fictive intention’ as a base for fictionality. In Currie’s view, influenced by H.P. Grice’s theory of meaning, the informal definition of fiction is as follows: I want you to make believe some proposition P; I utter a sentence that means P, intending that you shall recognize this is what the sentence means, and to recognize that I intend to produce a sentence that means P; and I intend you to infer from this that I intend you to make believe that P; and, finally, I intend that you shall, partly as a result of this recognition, come to make believe that P. (Currie 1990, 31)

Currie thinks that the author’s intention is crucial for us to distinguish between works that are fictions and works that are merely treated as fictions; this idea has become a commonplace in the paradigmatic ‘fictive utterance’ theories that followed from Currie’s proposal. But is there a particular state of mind associated with our engagement with fiction? Currie (ibid., 21) notes that a newspaper article or a work of history

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can ‘stimulate the imagination’ the same way fiction does. He proposes that the reading of fiction differs from the reading of non-fiction not because of the activity of the imagination but the attitude we adopt toward the content of the work: make-belief in fiction, belief in non-fiction. There has been a lively discussion on the nature and kinds of imagination in our engagement with fiction. Stacie Friend (2008, 151) argues that ‘there is no interpretation of imagining or make-believe that designates a response distinctive to fiction as opposed to nonfiction’. She claims that The class of works that invite make-believe or imagining is substantially broader than our ordinary notion of fiction. … Vividly told non-fiction narratives invite us to imagine what it was like for people to live in different times and places, to undergo wonderful or horrible experiences, and so on. (Friend 2012, 183)

Friend suggests that we should think of fiction as a genre. For her (187), the distinction between fiction and non-fiction ought to pay attention to ‘how the whole work is embedded in a larger context, and specifically in certain practices of reading, writing, criticizing, and so on’. Derek Matravers also argues that we should not reserve imagination for fictions; he claims that we imagine fictional narratives not because of their fictionality but narrativity. In Matravers’s view our engaging with a representation (narrative) is neutral between non-fiction and fiction and that imagination does not separate fiction from non-fiction: The experience of reading de Quincey’s ‘The Revolt of the Tartars’ is the same whether we believe it is non-fictional, believe it is fictional, or (as is most likely) we are ignorant of whether it is non-fictional or fictional (in fact, it is a highly fictionalized account of actual events.). (Matravers 2014, 78)

Matravers wants to replace the distinction between fiction and non-fiction with a distinction between ‘representations’ and ‘confrontations’: situations in which action is not possible (what is being represented to us is out of reach) and situations in which action is possible. (2014, 50, 57). Currie has also revised his view of imagination in our engagement with fiction. Drawing on a distinction between ‘propositional’ and ‘perceptual’ imagination and the idea of the intensity of imagining, he proposes that ‘imaginings vary a good deal in their perceptual and emotional intensity’ and that ‘it is plausible to suppose that our judgments about the fictional status of a work depend partly on the intensity of the imaginings they provoke’ (Currie 2014, 361).

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Walton, in turn, has come to question his own definition of fiction, in which a proposition is fictional only in case there is a prescription that it is to be imagined: ‘I have come to realize, belatedly, that this is only half right. Prescriptions to imagine are necessary but not sufficient for fictionality’ (Walton 2015, 17). Walton remarks that metarepresentations, such as stories within stories and pictures within pictures, are to be imagined but are not fictional (fictionally true) in the world of the work. Of recent, analytic aestheticians have much explored the limits of imagining. There has been a sparkling discussion on ‘imaginative resistance’, our inability or unwillingness to imagine fictional propositions that clash with our moral attitudes, for instance. The phenomenon was problematized by Walton, who found it described by David Hume. Walton (1994, 29) remarks that ‘[m]orally repugnant ideas may so distract or upset us that we are unable to appreciate whatever aesthetic value the work possesses’—and that we may be unwilling even to try. He asks that ‘If the text includes the sentence “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl” … are readers obliged to accept it as fictional that, in doing what they did, Giselda or the elders behaved in morally proper ways?’ (Walton 1994, 37). Walton thinks that the difficulty is in our imagining such views justified or true. Tamar Szabó Gendler proposes that imaginative resistance occurs because the problematic fictional propositions take a general form: ‘we are unwilling to follow the author’s lead because in trying to make that world fictional, she is providing us with a way of looking at this world which we prefer not to embrace’ (Gendler 2000, 79; emphasis in original; see also Gendler 2006, 160). The study of fictionality is a healthy topic of research and future will show what direction the research will take. Perhaps advances in the philosophy of mind, for instance, will contribute to theories of imagination in aesthetics.

Narrative The zeitgeisty concept of narrative has received, for instance, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic attention in the philosophy of literature. Yet, several analytic philosophers are annoyed by the buzz and skeptical to, say, ethical or epistemic views grounded on the concept of narrative or narrativity. Paisley Livingston, for one, claims that there are serious problems in views which link narrativity and the epistemic merits or demerits of stories. Livingston (2009, 28) argues that narrative enthusiasts have not been able to show that the value of narratives would be based on their narrativity.

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A special issue in the debate on the value of narratives in explaining human action is the difference between real-life narratives, the stories we tell about ourselves and others, and literary narratives, such as novels. Peter Goldie (2012, 151) thinks that we have several ‘fictionalizing tendencies’, as we ‘tend to structure our autobiographical narratives in a way that makes them dangerously close to fictional narratives, and in particular to fictional narratives of the kind one finds in literature’. Goldie however argues that we need narratives for various purposes, such as understanding emotional processes (e.g. grief ). Also, he maintains that there is a surplus of meaning in narrative devices, such as dramatic irony and free indirect discourse. Lamarque has criticized theories that seek to understand real lives with the help of literary narratives, asserting that literary narratives and our real-life narratives are radically different. He argues that the content of a literary work is ‘perspectival’ and essentially given from a particular point of view. According to him, this ‘opacity’, as he also calls it, ‘runs deep in narrative representation: tone, irony, humour, connotation, allusion, narrative voice and other aspects of representation colour all narrative that aspires to literary status’ (Lamarque 2014, 166). Moreover, he claims that to see fictional characters as ordinary people and their lives essentially like ours is to ‘ignore all essentially literary qualities and reduce literature to character and plot at the same level of banality as found in the stories we tell of ourselves’ (ibid., 68). In the analytic tradition, the discussion on narrative also boils down to so-­ called fundamental questions: what exactly are narratives and what is the value of stories qua stories; how we can distinguish what is due to narrativity and what is due to temporality or causality in our explanations of human action; and so on.

Meaning and Interpretation Analytic philosophy, which many identified as linguistic philosophy at a time, has been obsessed with truth and meaning. Against this background, it is no wonder how keen analytic aestheticians have been exploring ‘meaning’ in the arts. Analytic philosophers of art have studied, for example, the idea of a ‘right’ interpretation and the compatibility of different critical interpretations (see Krausz (ed.) 2002). Reasoning and justification in art interpretation and the truth conditions of interpretative judgments have been historically focal topics. Barrels of ink have been spilled on the question of the author’s intention in art interpretation, a debate that began with William K. Wimsatt and

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Monroe C. Beardsley’s article ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946). Today, there are roughly three parties in the intention debate: ‘anti-intentionalists’, ‘actual intentionalists’, and ‘hypothetical intentionalists’. Anti-intentionalist or ‘value maximization’ theories claim that the author’s semantic intentions—what she meant by her use of words—are irrelevant in interpretation. Alan Goldman, for one, considers the aim of art interpretation to enhance the aesthetic experience of artworks. Goldman (1990, 207) states that ‘an interpretive explanation is best when it successfully aims to maximize the artistic value of the interpreted work’. The view allows that there can be equally acceptable but incompatible interpretations; yet, ‘not all interpretations are equally acceptable or acceptable at all’, for an interpretation has to be consistent with ‘elements and properties’ of the work and its context (ibid., 208, 206). Further, Goldman suspects that [A]rtists’ reticence about their intentions has much more to do with leaving room for unintended valuable properties in their works leading to better aesthetic experiences in audiences and positive evaluations by critics than it has to do with inabilities to express themselves in words …. (Goldman 2013, 33)

In turn, actual intentionalists are after the intentions of the historical, flesh-­ and-­blood author. ‘Absolute’ intentionalism, which does not have much support today, maintained that the meaning of a work of fiction is the meaning the author intended in composing it. The problem of the view is that an author could make her work mean anything simply by deciding so. For ‘moderate’ intentionalists of today, such as Noël Carroll, Gary Iseminger, Robert Stecker, and Paisley Livingston, a correct interpretation of a work of literature is the meaning of the text compatible with the actual author’s intention. For instance, in Carroll’s ‘modest’ actual intentionalism, the meaning of a work is constrained by the textual meaning, or word sequence meaning, and the best information about the author’s intended meaning, where available. Best information, in turn, consists of evidence such as the art-historical context of the work, common beliefs of the contemporary audience, the author’s public biography, her oeuvre, and the like (Carroll 2001, 197–98 & 200–01, 2002, 321, 323, 326 & 328). Hypothetical intentionalism considers the meaning of a literary work an assumption of either the actual author’s or a ‘hypothetical’ or ‘postulated’ author’s intended meaning by referring to the beliefs and expectations of the author’s ‘intended’, ‘ideal’, or ‘appropriate’ audience. Jerrold Levinson (2010, 150) writes that

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[I]t is false that [François Ozon’s film Swimming Pool (2004)] means only what it was intended to mean by its maker, even where it can somehow be seen as meaning what it was intended to mean. The film should rather be taken to mean, ambiguously, many of the other options … which are reasonably attributed to the filmmaker on both epistemic and aesthetic grounds. The film is a much richer, more satisfying, work of art when so viewed.

Alexander Nehamas (2002, 101) argues in his version of hypothetical intentionalism that while a literary work is interpreted and understood as its author’s production, its author is not identical with the historical author. Instead, Nehamas argues, the author of a literary work is ‘postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text’s features; he is a character, a hypothesis which is accepted provisionally, guides interpretation, and is in turn modified in its light’ (Nehamas 1981, 145). Participants in the debate have been happy to point out problems in their opponents’ models. Value maximization theories, for example, are said to distort the work’s nature: Carroll states that Heinrich Anacker’s anti-Semitic poems are rendered aesthetically more satisfying by regarding them as ironic, even though there are strong reasons to read them as sincere poems, as intended by Anacker. Maximizing their aesthetic value would be, however, dismissing their ‘conversational’ function (Carroll 1992, 122–23 & 178). The critique of actual intentionalism, in turn, has problematized the realization of intentions: Saam Trivedi (2001, 196–98) claims that we cannot find out whether the author’s actual intentions have been successfully realized in an artwork, because we cannot compare the intentions with some independent work meaning and see if the two fit. Hypothetical intentionalism is accused that it will ultimately collapse to actual intentionalism or that it cannot be distinguished from value maximization theory (for recent criticism, see Stecker and Davies 2010). Analytical theories of interpretation have drawn on the philosophy of language and applied concepts such as ‘speech acts’ and ‘conversation’ to literature. One topic of dispute has been whether literary works could be seen as utterances. Carroll (1992) and Stecker (2006) suggest that because of their nature as linguistic products of intentional human action, literary works are utterances similar to those used in everyday discourse. Conversely, Lamarque and Olsen claim that ‘the importation of philosophy of language into the philosophy of literature has had badly distorting effects’ (2004b, 204). They think that complete literary works do not possess a ‘meaning’—which is something that can be stated. Moreover, they propose that literary interpretation focuses on stages beyond verbal understanding, namely, thematic investigation and aesthetic appreciation.

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Some pluralistic models have been proposed: perhaps there could be several legitimate interpretative approaches to works of literature, the intentionalist/ conversational approach being one of these. Perhaps a single text could embody two works, say, a philosophical and a literary work, and these were to be interpreted accordingly (see Davies 1995, 8–10; Gracia 2001, 52–56). Debates on meaning and intention in the arts are peculiar. On the one hand, it would certainly be silly to narrow literary interpretation to a search for an authorial intention; on the other hand, the communicative dimension of art and issues such as a historical author’s unintended racism and its relation to the ‘meaning’ of the work are surely worth exploring.

Literature and Cognition The ‘cognitivist’ view that artworks, and literary works in particular, could provide their audiences significant knowledge and insight on worldly matters has been a perennial issue in aesthetics and one of the key topics in the analytic tradition. In addition to historical and geographical knowledge, literature is seen to provide knowledge of concepts (Gibson 2007), modal knowledge or knowledge of possibilities (Stokes 2006), or knowledge of emotions (Nussbaum 1990), to mention some. (Although analytic aestheticians speak of the cognitive value of literature, the investigation has been focused on the epistemic function of literature, which, again, is easy to understand calling in mind the history of analytic philosophy.) Cognitivists claim that literary works may communicate their readers propositional knowledge (knowledge-that) and/or non-propositional knowledge (knowledge-how or knowledge-what-it-is-like). The traditional cognitivist position maintains that literary works could provide readers propositional knowledge by making assertions or implications or by advancing hypotheses (for some recent views, see, e.g. Currie and Ichino 2017; Pettersson 2000; Kivy 1997a, b). Traditional is also the thought that literary fictions could function akin to scientific thought-experiments (see e.g. Swirski 2007). In turn, the non-propositional camp commonly proposes that literary works could offer their readers knowledge of what it is like to be a in a certain situation (Nussbaum 1990; Gaut 2007), typically highlighting empathic identification with the reader and a character. So-called neo-cognitivist theories often build on this non-propositional view, yet maintaining that literary works do not provide readers new knowledge but ‘deepen’ or ‘clarify’ or ‘enhance’ or ‘enrich’ readers’ existing knowledge (Carroll 1998a; Graham 2000; Gibson 2007). In addition, neo-cognitivists usually see literary works capable of train-

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ing readers’ cognitive skills: literary works may, for instance, challenge the reader’s assumptions or her standard ways of thinking (Elgin 1993; John 1998). But ‘anti-cognitivism’ has also had a wide support. Anti-cognitivists insist that literary works do not furnish their readers with new knowledge, at least that of a traditional, propositional kind, and that the works do not therefore have cognitive value proper. Anti-cognitivists argue that if we understand the knowledge that literature affords in the traditional sense of the term, we make literary works subordinate to fact-stating discourse, and the cognitivist’s task would be to explain how literature can convey knowledge, even though it is not assertive; the cognitivist ought to explain the distinctive cognitive value of literature, but so far her appeals to non-standard forms of knowledge are ‘mere’ metaphors with little explanatory value. Moreover, anti-cognitivists claim that literature’s contributions to knowledge are trivial at best or that the ‘points’ which literary works make are inarticulate or not agreeable among readers. If literary works could change a reader’s beliefs, would these changes inevitably be for good? Little has been said of the effects which literary works actually have on their readers. Partly inspired by the rise of empirical studies on the cognitive gains of literature, philosophers have started to ponder how learning from fiction could be studied and what would count as a proof for the claims on the educative function of literature (see, e.g. Currie 2013).

Literature and Ethics Literary works allow us to explore moral positions, and many philosophers have seen special value in this. Martha Nussbaum (1997) has famously defended the idea that literary works yield edifying lessons. The question is important in exploring the intrinsic and instrumental values of literature: are the ethical insights of an artwork part of its literary value? On the other hand, do ethical ‘flaws’ like an evidently racistic representation lessen the aesthetic value of an artwork? Carroll’s (1998b) ‘moderate moralism’ claims that in some cases a moral defect in a work of art can be an aesthetic defect and that in some cases a moral virtue can be an aesthetic virtue. Carroll argues that because works of art are incomplete and require the audience to fill them in or respond to them ‘in a manner that facilitates the aim of the work’, that response, including its emotional aspects, ‘is part of the design of the artwork’ (1998b, 520). He claims that American Psycho, for instance, fails aesthetically because ‘the serial killings

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depicted in the novel are so graphically brutal that readers are not able morally to get past the gore in order to savour the parody’ (Carroll 1996, 232). Matthew Kieran, for his part, defends ‘immoralism’ which advances the view that ‘a work’s value as art can be enhanced in virtue of its immoral character’. Immoralism holds that ‘imaginatively experiencing morally defective cognitive-affective responses and attitudes in ways that are morally problematic can deepen one’s understanding and appreciation’ (Kieran 2003, 72). Kieran reminds one that artworks ‘[d]rawing on our moral judgements, reactions and assessments should not be conflated with arriving at and making the appropriate ones’ (60). For ‘autonomists’, such as James C.  Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean, art is a realm of its own. Autonomists claim that ‘it is never the moral component of the criticism as such that diminishes or strengthens the value of an artwork qua artwork’ (1998, 152, emphasis in original).

Literature and Emotion Do we have to respond emotionally to works of literature in order to understand them properly? Many have argued that an emotional engagement with fiction is a requirement for its proper understanding. It is also common to connect this view to a cognitivist position and claim that an empathic identification with a character gives us experiential knowledge or knowledge of emotions. Susan Feagin (1996, 242–55) has argued that affective responses to a literary work is a central part of appreciating it and, further, that a work’s capacity to provide such responses is part of its literary value. For her, fictions expand the reader’s ‘affective flexibility’. Jenefer Robinson (2005, 110–11) claims that the reader’s emotional responses toward fictional characters are themselves ways of understanding the characters and the situations in which they are. Berys Gaut argues that emotional responses to fictions may enlarge the reader’s moral understanding: One way to learn morally is by seeing a person’s situation as relevantly like another’s to whom we know how to respond, and this can make the moral learning involved in our response to art both non-banal and aesthetically relevant. For instance, Tolstoy gives us a portrait of Anna Karenina that has psychological reality and depth, and Anna is presented in such a way that we are encouraged to view her sympathetically, rather than as a heartless woman who abandons a loyal husband. If one comes to learn morally from this artistic achievement, then one acquires the ability to see a real woman caught in a similar situation as an Anna Karenina. (Gaut 2007, 173)

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These positions are accused of being too straightforward and unsophisticated literary responses (Posner 1997). Also, it has been argued that emotions felt in literary experience are relative to the reader and the genre of the work and that the absence of such personal reactions in professional criticism shows that they are not an integral part of literary response (Lamarque 2009). In addition to the relevance of emotions in interpretation, analytic philosophers have debated on the ontological status of our emotions in literary experience. Colin Radford (1975) started an immense debate on the ‘paradox of fiction’. Radford asks how can we be moved by what we know does not exist? He considers such emotions genuine but largely irrational. Walton (1978, 13) suggests that we only ‘make-believedly’ pity Anna; what we feel is a mere quasi-emotion. Lamarque (1981, 293) argues that our emotions are genuine as they are toward intentional objects (mental representations). In turn, the ‘paradox of tragedy’ deals with our urge to engage with displeasing representations. How is it that we appreciate and gain pleasure from artworks that seem to offer us distressing experiences? In a characteristically analytic manner, Aaron Smuts (2009) has typologized the historical and contemporary discussion on the matter into six positions: (1) ‘conversion theory’ maintains that the overall experience of painful works of art is (retrospectively) pleasurable; (2) ‘control theories’ hold that we can overcome the pain as we have the ability to stop the experience at our will; (3) ‘compensation theories’ state that we gain compensation (e.g. aesthetic pleasure) for our painful reactions; (4) ‘meta-response theories’ assert that we are glad to see that, say, we feel pity at the suffering of others; (5) ‘catharsis’ theory claims that an unpleasant experience purifies—that is, immunizes or refines or expels—the emotions (pity, fear); and (6) ‘rich experience theories’ argue that also painful experiences may be valuable and motivating.

Conclusion There has been relatively little productive intellectual exchange between analytic philosophers of literature and literary scholars, partly because literary criticism has in the recent decades been drawing on continental philosophy and partly because of the divergence of analytic philosophical and critical interests. Analytic philosophers like to scrutinize general concepts and put aside historical, political, and social issues that are important in critical approaches to actual works. Indeed, analytic philosophers’ interest in the precise meanings of crucial words is so strong that sometimes they go so far as to invent their literary examples—something that literary critics might find dis-

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turbing. Then again, rigorous conceptual investigation may have problems in finding suitable examples from the actual practice. Analytic philosophers need to turn every conceptual stone, draw all the relevant distinctions, and test their views with all the relevant counter-examples they can imagine. Of course, there has been fruitful interchange between analytic philosophers and literary scholars in the study of fictionality, for instance. But while one might think that the two disciplines could improve each other in various ways, one ought to keep in mind their different aims.

Bibliography Anderson, James C., and Jeffrey T.  Dean. 1998. Moderate Autonomism. British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (2): 150–166. Carroll, Noël. 1988. Art, Practice, and Narrative. The Monist 71 (2): 140–156. ———. 1992. Art, Intention, and Conversation. In Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger, 97–131. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. ———. 1996. Moderate Moralism. British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (3): 223–238. ———. 1998a. Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding. In Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson, 126–160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998b. Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism. British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (4): 419–424. ———. 2001. Interpretation and Intention: The Debate between Hypothetical and Actual Intentionalism. In Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, 197–213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Andy Kaufman and the Philosophy of Interpretation. In Is There a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz, 319–344. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2009. On Criticism. New York, NY: Routledge. Currie, Gregory. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. On Getting Out of the Armchair to Do Aesthetics. In Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? ed. Matthew C. Haug, 435–450. London: Routledge. Currie, Gregory. 2014. Standing in the Last Ditch: On the Communicative Intentions of Fiction Makers. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (4): 351–363. Currie, Gregory, and Anna Ichino. 2017. Truth and Trust in Fiction. Art and Belief, ed. Helen Bradley, Paul Noordhof, and Ema Sullivan-Bissett. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, Greg, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Jon Robson. 2014. Introduction. In Aesthetics & the Sciences of Mind, ed. Greg Currie et al., 1–7. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Davies, Stephen. 1995. Relativism in Interpretation. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1): 8–13. Elgin, Catherine Z. (1991) 1993. Understanding: Art and Science, Synthese 95, 13–28. Feagin, Susan. 1996. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friend, Stacie. 2008. Imagining Fact and Fiction. In New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones, 150–169. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2012. Fiction as a Genre. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2): 179–209. Gaut, Berys. 2007. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2000. The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance. Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 55–81. ———. 2006. Imaginative Resistance Revisited. In The Architecture of Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun Nichols, 149–173. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, John. 2007. Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldie, Peter. 2012. The Mess Inside. Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Alan. 1990. Interpreting Art and Literature. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (3): 205–214. ———. 2013. Philosophy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodman, Nelson. (1968) 1976. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Gracia, Jorge J.E. 2001. Borges’s “Pierre Menard”: Philosophy or Literature? Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 591: 45–57. Graham, Gordon. 2000. Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Hospers, John. 1946. Meaning and Truth in the Arts. Hamden: Archon Books. John, Eileen. 1998. Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary Context. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (4): 331–348. Kieran, Matthew. 2003. Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Immoralism. In Art and Morality, ed. José Luis Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner, 56–73. London: Routledge. Kivy, Peter. 1997a. On the Banality of Literary Truths. Philosophic Exchange 28: 17–27. ———. 1997b. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krausz, Michael, ed. 2002. Is There a Single Right Interpretation? University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Lamarque, Peter. 1981. How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions? British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (4): 291–304.

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———. 1990. Reasoning to What Is True in Fiction. Argumentation 4 (3): 333–346. ———. 2009. Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2014. The Opacity of Narrative. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ———. 2017. Belief, Thought, and Literature. Forthcoming in Art and Belief, eds. Helen Bradley, Ema Sullivan-Bissett, and Paul Noordhof. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2004a. General Introduction. In Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, 1–5. Malden: Blackwell. ———. 2004b. The Philosophy of Literature: Pleasure Restored. In Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy, 195–214. London: Blackwell. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. Artworks as Artifacts. In Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation, ed. Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, 74–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism. British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2): 139–150. Lewis, David. 1978. Truth in Fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1): 37–46. Livingston, Paisley. 2009. Narrativity and Knowledge. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (1): 25–36. Matravers, Derek. 2014. Fiction and Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 1981. The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal. Critical Inquiry 8 (1): 133–149. ———. (1987) 2002. Writer, Text, Work, Author. In The Death and Resurrection of the Author? ed. William Irwin, 95–116. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Pettersson, Anders. 2000. Verbal Art. A Philosophy of Literature and Literary Experience. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Posner, Richard. 1997. Against Ethical Criticism. Philosophy and Literature 21 (1): 1–27. Radford, Colin. 1975. How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 49 (1): 67–93. Robinson, Jenefer. 2005. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. Art and Negative Affect. Philosophy Compass 4 (1): 39–55.

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Stecker, Robert. 1996. What Is Literature? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 50 (198): 681–694. ———. 2006. Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4): 429–438. Stecker, Robert, and Stephen Davies. 2010. The Hypothetical Intentionalist’s Dilemma: A Reply to Levinson. British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (3): 307–312. Stock, Kathleen. 2014. Physiological Evidence and the Paradox of Fiction. In Aesthetics and the Sciences of the Mind, ed. Greg Currie et al., 205–226. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stock, Kathleen, and Katherine Thomson-Jones. 2008. Introduction. In New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones, xi–xix. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Stokes, Dustin. 2006. Art and Modal Knowledge. In Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology, ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, 67–81. Dordrecht: Springer. Swirski, Peter. 2007. Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution and Game Theory. London: Routledge. Thomasson, Amie L. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trivedi, Saam. 2001. An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism. British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (2): 192–206. Walton, Kendall L. 1978. Fearing Fictions. Journal of Philosophy 75 (1): 5–27. ———. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1994. Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 68, 27–50. ———. 2015. Fictionality and Imagination—Mind the Gap. In In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence, ed. Kendall L.  Walton, 17–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C.  Beardsley. (1946) 1987. The Intentional Fallacy. In Philosophy Looks at The Arts, ed. Joseph Margolis, 367–380. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1980. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

15 Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy and the Romance Isabel Jaén

Preamble In the prologue to Don Quixote, through a playful and satiric captatio benevolentia, Cervantes regrets having given birth to [A] tale as dry as esparto grass, devoid of invention, deficient in style, poor in ideas, and lacking all erudition and doctrine, without notes in the margins or annotations at the end of the book, when I see that other books, even if they are profane fictions, are so full of citations from Aristotle, Plato, and the entire horde of philosophers that readers are moved to admiration and consider the authors to be well-read, erudite, and eloquent men? Even more so when they cite Holy Scripture! People are bound to say they are new St. Thomases and other doctors of the Church; and for this they maintain so ingenious a decorum that in one line they depict a heart broken lover and in the next they write a little Christian sermon that is a joy and a pleasure to hear or read. (Cervantes 2005 [1605], 4)

He then announces, My book will lack all of this, for I have nothing to note in the margin or to annotate at the end, and I certainly don't know which authors I have followed so that I can mention them at the beginning, as everyone else does, in alphabetical order, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, and with Zoilus and Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. (Cervantes 2005 [1605], 4) I. Jaén (*) Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_15

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Here, Cervantes not only mocks false or affected erudition but also evidences the early modern prejudice against fiction writers, who need the endorsement of philosophy to be taken seriously. This view of fiction as an inferior type of discourse that cannot be comparable to the truth of objective thought continues to be alive today. Fiction, however, contributes to our knowledge of human nature by providing models of mind and of social behaviour. Readers not only obtain didactic and moral lessons while following characters’ interactions—a benefit recognized since antiquity—but stories can be sources of philosophical and scientific knowledge as well. Recently, scholars, scientists and philosophers working at the cognition and literature interface, such as Patrick Colm Hogan, Richard Gerrig, Keith Oatley and Aaron Mishara1—to name just a few—have emphasized the role of fiction in our understanding of the mind and its processes. My own work follows this line of research, where the central question becomes: how does literature helps us understand the human mind? To this question, I add: how does literature help us understand human development? Cervantes’s ironic prologue also alludes to the separation of the two realms, the philosophical and the fictional. His falsely apologetic claim ‘I certainly don’t know which authors I have followed that I can mention them at the beginning, as everyone else does’ (Cervantes 2005 [1605], 4) validates and defends his own fictional voice. He does not need to rely on philosophical authority nor quote any names; his story stands as a source of human knowledge by itself. As I have written elsewhere, ‘[t]he story of the ingenioso hidalgo is a take on humanity, on how we become human, as much a treatise as those conceived in early modernity by other thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives and Juan Huarte de San Juan’ (Jaén 2013, 35). Indeed, in Don Quixote, Cervantes provides us with a fictional treatise on human nature where his own philosophical ideas are blended with the ideas that circulate during his time. The choice of a fictional conduit makes his treatise more compelling and powerful: through the story of the knight, his squire, and the rest of the characters that populate his narrative, he creates a rich portrayal of human consciousness and human development that embodies abstract notions. These notions are presented dynamically, via flesh and blood characters, minds that interact with other minds and that grow in their socio-physical environments. Taking Cervantes’s Don Quixote as my prototype, I discuss in what follows, how the notion of human cognitive development is comprehended and expressed through fictional discourses in the Renaissance. My chapter is divided into three parts. First, I introduce what I call fictions of human development and discuss their relationship to genre. Next, I highlight some of the early modern philosophical ideas that relate to these types of

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fictions and to the work of Cervantes, focusing on Spanish thinkers Juan Luis  Vives and Juan Huarte de San Juan.2 Finally, I discuss Cervantes’s portrayal of human development and how Sancho embodies this notion. The purpose of my chapter is not to offer a comprehensive account of the cognitive philosophy of the Renaissance, nor to carry out an exhaustive analysis of how it relates to Cervantes’s Don Quixote—which would be impossible to do in a single book chapter—but, rather, to highlight some of the ways in which fiction contributes to the early modern understanding of human development and how Cervantes’s ideas are in dialogue with the philosophy of this period regarding this theme.

Fictions of Human Development and Genre Let us begin with a short working definition of what I call fictions of human development: they are stories that both explore and portray the evolution of the human mind in relation to its physical, social and historical context. We have come to associate the idea of psychological portrayal with narrative modes such as the novel, in which we have ample access to the inner thoughts of characters. I myself have dealt previously with how the novelistic aspects of Cervantes’s narrative enable his complex representation of the human mind.3 In this chapter, I would like to expand this perspective by also considering other generic features. Although I will be mainly focusing on the romance, my general argument about fictions of human development can be articulated as follows: (1) they exist across genres4 but seem to find a ­particularly suitable vehicle of expression in the romance-novel continuum and (2) a view that goes beyond romance-novel oppositions and traditional genre theories is more useful to approach this type of fictions. Barbara Fuchs has recently drawn attention to the complexity of the romance notion: ‘Romance is a notoriously slippery category. Critics disagree about whether it is a genre or a mode, about its origins and history, even about what it encompasses’ (Fuchs 2004, 1). She specifies the origin of the genre— ‘the narrative poems that emerge in twelfth-century France and quickly make their way around Europe’ (Fuchs 2004, 4). Thematically speaking, ‘These poems are typically concerned with aristocratic characters such as kings and queens, knights and ladies, and their chivalric pursuits. They are often organized around a quest, whether for love or adventure, and involve a variety of marvelous elements’ (Fuchs 2004, 4). However, as she notes, such a restrictive definition became problematic, given the fact that the thematic and formal features of the romance continued to appear centuries later in European literature and, thus, critics needed to come up with broader notions that ­transcended

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generic qualities, such as the one originally proposed by Northrop Frye, where the hero is central. Frye tells us that the ‘pattern in romance is the story of the hero who goes through a series of adventures and combats in which he always wins’ (Frye 1976, 67) and states that ‘Most romances end happily, with a return to the state of identity, and begin with a departure from it’ (Frye 1976, 54). In his work on historical poetics, Mikhail  Bakhtin stresses the identity aspect, linking the romance to the adventure novel of ordeal, the earliest type of ancient novel. He points to the centrality of the trials of the hero (and heroine) and to the test of the hero’s integrity and selfhood as a basic compositional motif of the Greek romance. These trials often relate to chastity and fidelity, but nobility, courage, strength, fearlessness and—more rarely, he says—intelligence can also be tested. It is important to note that along those trials, as Bakhtin puts it, ‘“Fate” runs the game—he [the hero] nevertheless endures the game fate plays. And he not only endures—he keeps on being the same person and emerges from this game, from all these turns of fate and chance, with his identity absolutely unchanged’ (Bakhtin 1981, 105; italics in original). Indeed, ‘[no] matter how impoverished, how denuded a human identity may become in a Greek romance, there is always preserved in it some precious kernel of folk humanity; one always senses a faith in the indestructible power of man in his struggle with nature and with all inhuman forces’ (Bakhtin 1981, 105). Thus, when the hero returns home, his identity, his human essence, is intact. This idea, however, should not be interpreted as an absolute immobility. The hero’s human core is unchanged but he returns changed and improved. Joseph Campbell stated in relation to myth and dream that the hero ‘is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms …. The hero has died as a modern man; but as an eternal man—perfected, unspecific, universal man—he has been reborn’ (Campbell 2008, 14–15). As Marsha Collins tells us, romances are fundamentally stories of homecoming, in which protagonists (or heroes) develop a nobility of character, courage and strength over time through a lengthy series of ordeals (Collins, this volume, p. 264). In this sense, romance protagonists learn through their journey and return changed, reborn, wiser, more acceptable and/or useful to the community in which they reintegrate themselves. Because of their focus on the transformation and humanization of the hero, homecoming stories possess an intrinsic idealizing quality. Indeed, the pursuit of good and virtue is for romance protagonists an ideal to hold on to firmly in the face of evil and the many obstacles encountered during their journeys. To develop as a character in the romance means to overcome these obstacles in

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order to attain virtue, love and justice. Furthermore, romance narratives present us with moral-ethical reflections that often seem to occupy the centre of the story and to be more important than the protagonists themselves, to the point that romance characters are frequently viewed as manifesting a ‘simple psychology, tending towards the symbolic and typological, which emphasizes their potential function as ideologues, allegorical figures, and/or vessels of values’ (Collins, this volume, p. 270). Literary critics have opposed this idealizing quality of romance to the realistic tendency of the novel, often considering the novel the perfected, evolved version of more archaic forms of storytelling such as the romance—which the novel replaces—or the romance as an early form of the novel.5 In the words of Thomas Pavel, ‘Whereas the older kinds of narratives—sometimes called romances—looked at life through distorting lenses and portrayed idealized, implausible characters, the novel, we are told, turned its attention to the ordinary lives of real people in the real world’ (Pavel 2013, 1). In the novel, we are no longer dealing with the noble goal of achieving virtue, with the transformation of the hero into that universal man or woman, prototype of humanity, who has conquered evil throughout a journey full of obstacles. The story has shifted its focus from the goal to the actual journey and the hero might never arrive home, lost in weakness and evil. Indeed, in our real world, virtue is not always attainable and, thus, in the realm of the fictional representations of human consciousness, the novel has also been considered the realistic corrective of the romance.6 The diversity of perspectives regarding the relationship between the romance and the novel further complicates the task of identifying a particular generic vehicle for the expression of human development fictions and also reveals the impracticality of attempting to do so. As Barbara Simerka reminds us, there are ‘“genres” that embody indeterminacy in their combination of elements from many other forms, including the epic, romance, tragedy, and comedy as well as medieval chronicles and morality plays’ (Simerka 2003, 127). Such ‘combination of elements’ view is consistent with cognitive perspectives of genre such as the one offered by Michael Sinding, who draws on conceptual integration theory—also known as blending—as well as on cognitive category research to demonstrate how texts can participate in multiple genres (Sinding 2010, 465). While blending theory deals with the human ability to integrate mental patterns to create new meaning and, thus, it helps us to understand genre hybridization, category theory challenges the all-or-­ nothing, in-out view of belonging to a group, bringing to light that, ‘category membership is graded … categories often have no clear boundaries: “tall people” are a matter of degree’ (Sinding 2010, 475; italics in original).

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In the context of literary studies, the romance-novel distinction has been employed as an analysis tool by critics such as Ruth El Saffar, who uses the tags ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic’ to argue for a trajectory in Cervantes’s work towards the romance.7 This dichotomy has been challenged by literary scholars led by Howard Mancing, who also works with cognitive category theory and prototype theory.8 Following Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff, among others, Mancing proposes that we think of literary genres, and specifically of the romance and the novel as a graded continuum: ‘The point is that we can perceive much more detail, subtle distinction, and uniqueness if we use prototypical generic models and a graded continuum than if we talk in terms of categorical groups’ (Mancing 2000, 141). Mancing visually represents graded categories as a series of concentric circles with a prototype near the centre. For instance, if we think of the category romance in relation to Cervantes’s work, near the centre (but not at the centre) we will  find the Persiles, a romance which contains elements of the novel, and further away from the centre we will find Don Quixote, which is generally considered a novel but contains elements of the romance, including its seed as a story about the ‘effects’ of romance in the human psyche. The boundaries between these two genres are blurry and, thus, as Mancing shows, we are better served by thinking of the generic pair romance-novel as a ‘graded continuum’ rather than two opposite separate genres (Mancing 2000, 141). Julien Simon has expanded Mancing’s genre view to emphasize the fact that ‘Genres are dynamic, even if we are looking at historical genres. They evolve because we evolve’ (Simon 2014, 73). He points to the ‘ambiguous and amorphous nature of genre and the difficulty of the determination of its filiation’ and tells us that ‘[t]he final generic “decision”, so to speak, is inherently individual and time-dependent. It depends on our worldviews, mindset, personality, and expertise (or experience with the genre). All of these elements evolve with time’ (Simon 2014, 79). Simon’s dynamic reader reception approach to genre can be further expanded by including the authorial dimension.9 Just as the above described generic dynamism and ambiguity operates in the mind of the reader, so it does, we can argue, in the mind of the writer at the moment of the creation of their work. Authors such as Cervantes, who write in a period when fiction is dynamically evolving into new modes of narrative such as the novel, are both conscious of their affiliation to a particular genre (i.e., Cervantes creates a parody of chivalric romance in Don Quixote and a Byzantine story in Persiles) and of the need to transcend particular generic conventions in favour of telling a story where characters are not simply means for the narration but agents that develop throughout that story.

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In fictions of human development, authors inject a strong dose of idealism. Their characters walk a path towards virtue—although sometimes they do not know it, as in the case of Sancho Panza, Cervantes’s protagonist—and arrive home transformed, improved as human beings. These characteristics relate developmental stories to the romance genre. At the same time, there is an evolution of the minds of the protagonists that requires a less allegorical treatment of character consciousness in favour of a deeper portrayal of intentions, beliefs, desires and emotions. Cervantes seems to prioritize his philosophical enquiry on human nature and to place it at the core of his stories. In doing so, he necessarily breaks away with generic strictures, blending romance and other generic features into a dynamic hybrid that ultimately becomes his innovative work of fiction, Don Quixote, which has been widely credited with being the first modern novel. Finally, it is important to emphasize, as part of this generic discussion, that the ongoing transformation of fictional discourses that we find in early modern Europe is connected to more profound changes in how humans think and theorize about themselves. Fictions of human development emerge at a time when the understanding and the representation of consciousness are evolving and becoming increasingly complex,10 regarding both subjectivity (interiority, character psychology) and intersubjectivity (minds in interaction with other surrounding minds). An interest in exploring and portraying the mind arises within the context of decentralization and innovation that begins in the Middle Ages and culminates in the Renaissance, with its renewed interest on human nature.11 The development of fictional minds throughout literary history has been mainly explored in connection to theory of mind (our ability to ‘read’ others, to recognize their beliefs, intentions, desires, emotions). In the field of English literature, within the context of cognitive approaches to literature, this exploration of theory of mind and narrative boomed in eighteenth-century studies, thanks to the work of Lisa Zunshine, who evidenced the mastery of Jane Austen in portraying how humans read, misread—and cannot avoid being read by—each other.12 A few years later, projects such as David Herman’s The Emergence of Mind, which traces representations of consciousness in English-­ language narrative discourse since 700 to the present, attempted to examine earlier fictional models. An example is the work of Elizabeth Hart (included in his volume) who identifies a ‘tendency toward richer portraits of interiority in the early modern period’ (Hart 2011, 104). In spite of the pioneering work of Hart and Mary Thomas Crane13 in English and Paula Leverage14 in French—among others—the study of pre-­ modern fiction in relation to theory of mind remains underdeveloped, with

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the exception of Spanish studies, where the focus has been almost entirely placed on pre-modern literature, particularly on identifying early modern prototypes of psychological complexity.15 La Celestina (1499) and Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the story of a go-between and a picaro respectively, who make a living by manipulating others, are often cited as notable examples of early modern works whose authors are capable of portraying those intentions, beliefs, desires, and emotions with a high degree of sophistication, paving the way for the two fictions of development that I shall discuss here. Indeed, studies of early modern fictional minds have been instrumental in underscoring the representation of theory of mind in fiction, a gradual occurrence that starts well before the eighteenth-century and seems to peak during early modernity. However, it is important not to think of this complexity in representations of the mind and intersubjectivity as a sudden peak in a flat landscape. We are not looking at any sort of cultural mutation but rather at the emergence of fictional phenomena that had been slowly developing in narrative discourses since antiquity and that reaches a high developmental point by the end of the fifteenth century, in connection to new ways of thinking. We are obviously not talking either about a significant abrupt change during the early modern period in the ability of humans to understand other minds, since, as Mancing reminds us ‘Homo sapiens had virtually the same brain and the same mental capabilities fifty millennia ago that our species has today’ (Mancing 2011, 129). The Renaissance mind was not much different from the prehistoric mind. It is important to remark that our sophisticated interpersonal abilities seem to go hand in hand with our language and representation capabilities. In the words of Brian Boyd: Theory of Mind has arisen out of our social fine-tuning (increased altriciality, prolonged childhood, early infant imitation, social learning, fine articulation in facial expression, in vocalization, and in gesture), and it has in turn made still finer social tuning possible, including the development of protolanguage and then full modern syntactic language. Language of course has still further refined Theory of Mind and social fine-tuning in a powerful positive feedback loop …. When our innate event comprehension system began to be coupled with some means of re-presenting events intersubjectively, through reenactment, through images and especially though not exclusively through language, we had started along the road to narrative. (Boyd 2001, 199–200)16

The ‘theory of mind-social fine-tuning’ loop ultimately allows for the narrative representations of our consciousness, representations that become increasingly complex as new narrative media, genres, and technologies

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emerge. With the advent of the printing press, the early modern period sees a profound transformation in narrative transmission, a revolution, if you will, that permits the genesis of new ways of storytelling, both at the creation and the reception levels. Authors can reach larger audiences and audiences, in turn, become smaller, as readers can more easily engage in silent reading in the privacy of their rooms. The increasing inwardness of the fictional experience creates an optimal environment for the birth of more extensive forms of narrative that allow for diachronic portrayals of the mind. In this scenario, fictions of human development flourish along the romance-­ novel continuum, blending early modern philosophical notions of cognitive growth with ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic’—to employ these common tags, which are useful but inevitably reductionist—features and conventions coming from diverse literary genres. This idealistic-realistic blend celebrates, on the one hand, the human impulse towards goodness and virtue and, on the other, depicts the cognitive limitations that keep humans away from obtaining those goals. In fact, the combination of human themes (with development at the core) that these stories present seems to rise over and resist our traditional genre perspectives, to the point that we could consider fictions of human development as a genre in itself, one that is not based on morphological or plot features but on an essential universal human theme: our effort to reach what we perceive as good and how we change along the journey in relation to the circumstances that we encounter: how we develop. Having discussed the nature and literary context of the fictions at hand, let us now briefly introduce the historical philosophical context that ­surrounds them, focusing on some of the ideas by Vives and Huarte that will be relevant to our discussion of Cervantes.

 enaissance Cognitive Philosophy and Human R Development In the context of Renaissance humanism, cognitive development is understood in two main ways. At an ontogenetic level—each particular organism— every individual is believed to undergo different stages in life (the ages of man) and each of these ages, corresponds to a level of cognitive maturity. The following quote from Huarte describes this view: [E]n la puericia no es más que un bruto animal, ni usa de otras potencias más que de la irascible y concupiscible; pero, venida la adolescencia, comienza a descubrir un ingenio admirable, y vemos que le dura hasta cierto tiempo y no

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más, porque, viniendo la vejez, cada día va perdiendo el ingenio, hasta que viene a caducar. (Huarte de San Juan 1989 [1575], 244–45) [I]n childhood he is just a brute animal and won’t make use of any other potency than the irascible and the concupiscible, but when adolescence comes he begins to discover an admirable genius that will last some time only for in his old age, he loses his genius day by day, until it decays. (My translation)

In this representative quote, we find a comparison between the underdeveloped state of each man and that of the humans in general—‘in childhood he is just a brute animal’—which evidences the connection that early modern thinkers establish between the ontogenetic and phylogenetic factors of human development. Within the frame of what we can call a ‘cognitive’ hierarchy of beings, the development of the individual goes hand in hand with the development of the human species. In accordance with this hierarchical view of the living world—inherited from Christian Aristotelianism and embraced by humanist moral philosophers such as Vives—there are three main categories of beings with three different kinds of souls (or minds): plants, animals and humans. Human beings contain the three types of soul in themselves: our vegetative soul governs functions such as growth and nutrition. Our sensitive (animal) soul allows us to reach what is good for our organism and avoid what is harmful, and it is associated with instincts and passions. Finally, our rational soul, which is unique to humans, elevates us over our bodily needs and our passions, controlling them and inclining us to seek wisdom and virtue, and God. Embracing these goals is what makes us truly human. In his Introductio ad sapientiam [Introduction to Wisdom] (1524), Vives explains that there are two kinds of virtues. The first kind is the end of all things, the supreme good, the singular perfection of our nature, and comes from the contemplation and love of God, who gives it to us to help us achieve the perfection that we aspire to (Vives 1765 [1524], 68–69). The second kind is the one that we employ in the everyday exercise of our lives and is obtained through good deeds, consists in a habit that becomes our nature when our will—once the passions of the soul are tamed—follows reason and we are capable of acting according to it (Vives 1765 [1524], 69). For Vives, controlling the passions (emotions) is the key element to becoming a fully developed human being. Emotions are indeed the cornerstone of Vives’s early modern moral and cognitive philosophy17 and the subject of Book III of his treatise De anima et vita [On the Soul and Life] (1538), where he provides what can be considered

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one of the first comprehensive catalogues of emotion in Western philosophy. Vives presents the emotions as movements of the soul that help us reach what is good and avoid what is evil and explains: Emotions can be as light as the onset of a rising wave; others are stronger, while still others are powerful enough to shake up the soul and dethrone it from the seat of rational judgment by rendering it truly disturbed and impotent, deprived of self control, subject to strange powers and totally blind, unable to see anything. (Vives 1990 [1538], 5)

Vives clarifies that some movements of the soul arise from a bodily change— such as the desire to drink when we are thirsty—and, thus, precede judgement (Vives 1990 [1538], 2–3), as do those that are ‘so abrupt and violent that they do not give us any time to notice them, and seem therefore to [also] precede judgment’ (Vives 1990 [1538], 3). However, in humans—as opposed to animals—emotions are ideally processed and regulated by rational judgement: ‘a properly educated and well-trained mind is able to increase, decrease, repress, and change the direction and power of its affections’ (Vives 1990 [1538], 3). We must be able to tame those abrupt and negative movements of the soul in favour of those that help us get closer to virtue. Among the benign emotions that help us reach virtue and become more human, we find compassion or sympathy: ‘a very gentle emotion given by God to mankind as a great good and for our mutual help and consolation through the various misfortunes of life’ (Vives 1990 [1538], 47). According to Vives, ‘[n]othing is more human than to sympathize with those who suffer’ (Vives 1990 [1538], 46) and ‘[n]othing helps more to alleviate and soothe the pains and extreme sufferings of a soul than to share them with others’ (Vives 1990  [1538], 47). He further clarifies, ‘[I]f it is a precept of wisdom and goodness that humans be attached to each other as by a most sacred bond, and if nature has us so disposed, then obviously nature, wisdom, and goodness give and prescribe in us the feeling of compassion’ (Vives 1990 [1538], 47). In Vives’s view, compassion humanizes us. The theory of passions as movements of the soul that must be controlled by reason runs parallel to the early modern controversy on the cognitive differences between animals and human beings.18 Interestingly, these differences are viewed as a continuum, in which some animals possess some degree of cognition, whereas some humans (those who are unable to control their lower passions) are viewed as brutes. Humanist thinkers believe that it is possible to transcend this ‘brute’ or animal cognitive state, mainly, as Vives exposed, via the training of the body and the mind with habit and the control of the passions.

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Huarte, for his part, presents a view of human cognition that, in principle, seems to contradict the idea of development through wilful training and that strikes us as deterministic. In his Examen de ingenios para las ciencias [Examination of Men’s Wits] (1575), he offers a catalogue of the cognitive limitations that humans are subject to and exhorts readers to know the manner of their own intellect (by recognizing their own temperament) for the purpose of seeking a position in society that corresponds to the cognitive abilities that they have been born with. Just as Vives views self-knowledge as indispensable to attain wisdom and virtue,19 so does Huarte consider it a first step in improving society. Huarte’s view of cognition is embodied; our bodily constitution determines our intellect. As a result of the natural imbalance that all four temperaments (melancholic, cold and dry; choleric, hot and dry; sanguine, hot and humid; and phlegmatic, cold and humid) exhibit, every individual is bestowed with a series of cognitive limitations and, thus, all wits are somehow ‘defective’ or unable wits. Huarte expresses this view by listing four main profiles of cognitive inability: (a) those [men] who depend so much on their bodies that they waste their rational faculties (these men are not much different from brutes), (b) those who may reach a few conclusions with some difficulty but cannot keep them in their memory, (c) men who possess some genius and memory but are unable to organize things in their heads and are, therefore, confused, and (d) those who can learn facts but not understand causes and explanations.20 These cognitive profiles arise from a particular humoral combination within the parameters dry-humid, hot-cold. For instance, a dry organism with a dry brain cannot retain information, since memory needs humidity (profile b). On the contrary, a humid brain might be able to memorize facts but cannot understand causes, since understanding is promoted by dryness (profile d), as it is judgement, which is also absent from the disorganized brain of individual c. In profile a, we find a cognitive limitation of a different nature. It is produced by a negative habit: depending excessively on the body. These are wits that waste their faculties by overeating, oversleeping and engaging in other prejudicial patterns of behaviour. Their bodies become plump, hot and humid to the point of resembling pigs, and they are simpleminded. Although, as I initially mentioned, Huarte’s view can be interpreted as biologically deterministic (nature has given all men an unbalanced temperament

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and therefore an imperfect wit), the important role of habits in cognitive development is also considered in his treatise. Huarte believes that individuals can modify to certain extent their constitution by changing their diet and behavioural patterns. If overeating and oversleeping humidify the organism, behaviours such as fasting, remaining awake, and meditation promote dryness and coldness in the body, the two main parameters that benefit reasoning and correspond to the melancholic temperament. In line with Vives, whose philosophy is centred on the pursuit of truth and virtue as the main condition to attain moral progress, as well as on the belief that the personal cognitive growth leads to the improvement of society as a whole, Huarte conveys in the Examen his intention to help the King of Spain to perfect the republic and exhorts the monarch to follow his guidelines. The underlying message in Huarte’s recommendations seems to be that the ­republic is, in fact, unorganized and thereby inefficient, as many are carrying out tasks and duties for which they are unqualified by nature. This is highly problematic, particularly when those inappropriately placed people happen to occupy positions of power. There is in Huarte, as there is in Vives, a reformist intention. Their ideas of individual transformation fit in the wider reformist movement that emerges in Western Europe at the dawn of early modernity and is channelled, among other initiatives, through the efforts to bring about a religious reformation. Vives’s philosophy of development is a constructive one: ‘brutes’ can be turned into full human beings; they can be ‘reformed’ though training and habit. So is Huarte’s utilitarian view: those who are aware of their cognitive limitations must stay away from the jobs that they are unable to perform (for instance, those with limited memory should stay away from lawmaking and those with limited understanding should not be judges), but they can improve their cognitive abilities by modifying their bodies and minds through habit changes. Now, how do these ideas relate to our discussion of Cervantes’s cognitive philosophy and his story of human development?

 rute to Human Sancho: Cervantes’s Take B on Human Development In an essay for the journal of the Cervantes Association of America,21 I created the paradigm ‘Brute to Human’ to refer to Sancho’s developmental journey throughout Don Quixote. I argued that the squire is in fact the character that better reflects Cervantes’s interest and investigation of this human theme.

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It is important to remember that Don Quixote is a hybrid work of literature. It models, while parodying, chivalric fictions, thereby relating naturally to the romance genre. However, as I would like to emphasize, Cervantes’s masterpiece participates of this genre at a deeper level that has to do with its developmental theme core. Although the two main characters of this book, Don Quixote22 and Sancho, develop in relation to both their chivalric adventures and the reality that surrounds them, I believe that Sancho’s developing mind is portrayed more extensively and with a higher level of complexity. Sancho takes a long developmental hike, if you will, from his initial constitution as a sanguine type with wasted cognitive faculties—due to his dependence on his body and his cognitively detrimental habits of overeating and oversleeping— to his progressive understanding of social complexity, to his final arrival at self-knowledge and the acknowledgement of which is his right social role. His transformation is a remarkable achievement. It is believed that Cervantes knew Huarte’s Examen23 and was inspired by it to create Don Quixote, his portrayal of a singular ingenio (wit), a melancholic man who spends day and night reading chivalric romances, an organism deprived of sleep with a delirious mind and an idealistic intention to help others, a self-proclaimed knight-errant who takes on a journey to fight injustice and whose brain’s temperature is elevated by the extreme heat of La Mancha. Studies on Don Quixote in connection to Cervantes’s interest on the mind have focused traditionally on the knight’s melancholy, or ‘madness’,24 and have paid less attention to Sancho’s mind. I would say that, with the exception of more recent studies coming from the field of cognitive approaches to literature—which often employ contemporary cognitive theories to frame the discussions—25 Sancho’s mind has not been sufficiently explored. Developmental studies of Don Quixote26 in connection to either character, especially in the context of early modern cognitive theories remain also undeveloped. My own work has sought to fill this gap, by linking more closely the work of Cervantes and the ideas of two of the thinkers that I believe he follows more closely: Vives and Huarte. Yet, as I conveyed at the beginning of this chapter, his work should not be viewed as literature influenced by early modern philosophy but, rather, as a fictional investigation or a fictional ‘treatise’, if you will, that coexists with the philosophical treatises that circulate during the Renaissance, such as Vives’s De anima or Huarte’s Examen.27 In sum, we should think of ­permeability rather than influence or, perhaps more accurately, of the materialization in different types of discourse of a collective understanding of human cognition that gradually develops since antiquity and peaks during the early modern period.

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Cervantes, through the character of Sancho, provides us with his own dynamic model of human development, one that coincides in its main tenets with the theories of early modern medical and moral philosophers. However, rather than a set of abstractions or descriptions, we find in Don Quixote characters whose minds unfold in front of us—in ‘real time’—as we follow them. It is precisely this ‘live’ exposition of ideas through a story and through minds in interaction, what allows Cervantes to make a unique contribution to the understanding of human nature. Despite being populated with lively images and metaphors, Vives’s and Huarte’s works remain in the sphere of philosophical expositions, they belong to a genre where truth is told. Cervantes’s work, on the other hand, belongs to the realm of fiction, where the world is shown. Vives and Huarte talk about the dangers of letting ourselves be carried away by emotions and the need to control them with reason, of the importance of knowing ourselves and feeling sympathy towards others, of how we all should recognize our manner of wit and our cognitive limitations in order to better serve the republic, and of the benefits of adopting healthy habits to avoid wasting our rational faculties. As a fiction writer and worldmaker, Cervantes is able to demonstrate these ideas through the thoughts and behaviour of his characters, in a diachronic fashion that allows readers to see the evolution of their minds, as they seek what they perceive as good for themselves and for others: obtaining fame and helping others, in the case of Don Quixote, and wealth and a higher social status for his family, in the case of Sancho. Moreover—and this is his second main ‘advantage’ over Vives and Huarte— Cervantes is assisted by the generic conventions of the romance—mainly the theme of the hero’s homecoming and his transformation through a journey full of obstacles—which constitute the developmental foundation of his story. This romance foundation, frame or skeleton—whichever way we prefer to call it—further magnifies the philosophical developmental theme of self-control leading to self-improvement and virtue. Let me offer some particulars on how Sancho evolves in Don Quixote. Given the focus of this chapter, they will be just a few broad strokes on a wide canvas and, thus, I would like to refer my readers to the more extensive analyses of his development that I have undertaken in previous work.28 How is our initial Sancho? He appears to us at the beginning as an ordinary and ‘realistic’ character. He acts as the realistic corrective for Don Quixote’s extreme idealism, chivalric anachronism and delusion. However, he is also a romance hero, thrown into a difficult journey that begins with the promise of a material good (wealth through the government of an island) and ends with cognitive and moral development.

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Whereas Don Quixote’s evolution is more novelistic in nature—he suffers one disillusionment after another and develops towards the death of his idealism and of his own organism—Sancho illustrates renewal and rebirth, he represents the ability of the human being to improve himself, to transcend his animal nature, to be transformed. He is the humanized brute that manages to control his passions, develops sympathy towards others and, ultimately, succeeds at knowing himself. His story of homecoming corresponds to the conventions of the romance: he returns home having passed the tests imposed on his wit and having overcome the obstacles and challenges that Don Quixote’s chivalric delusion places upon him. The Sancho that we meet at the beginning of the book, also corresponds very closely to one of the cognitively unable wits that were described by Huarte: the man who depends so much on his body that he wastes his rational faculties, a man who is not much different from a brute. In fact, Sancho seems to correspond to all four types outlined by Huarte: he may be able to reach a few conclusions with some difficulty but cannot keep them in their memory, has a disorganized head and cannot understand causes and explanations. Simpleminded Sancho relies on folk psychology and communicates with proverbs, he is a rural mind in a Spain where a rustic character like him would not have access to education and where thinking or expressing a personal point of view—particularly if that opinion did not coincide with the official story—could get someone in trouble or even lead to interrogation by the Inquisition.29 Sancho is also a peasant who hopes to prosper, medrar,30 a notion that in Spanish has the socio-political connotation of transcending one’s own social class. Sancho, thus, also represents human ambition, which in his case is uncontrolled to the point of moving him to join his neighbour Alonso Quijano in a journey based on a knight’s reality that does not exist anymore but remains alive in chivalric fiction. With his ‘brute cognitive state’ as a point of departure, Sancho manages to gradually evolve in interaction with Don Quixote and the other characters that he encounters. He evolves both cognitively and morally. To cope with Don Quixote’s chivalric world, Sancho learns to recognize his beliefs, desires and emotions, and to predict his intentions, he develops a theory of mind and eventually learns to deceive his master for the sake of escaping the difficult situations in which Don Quixote puts him. The development of these cognitive abilities is illustrated by episodes such as the enchantment of Dulcinea in chapter ten of Don Quixote part II, where Sancho—knowing that she only

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exists in his master’s mind—succeeds at making him believe that an ugly peasant woman on a donkey is his beloved lady. There are several episodes such as this one throughout the book that illustrate Sancho’s progressive understanding and cognitive development.31 However, as I have argued, the highest point on Sancho’s developmental journey comes in the Barataria episode, which takes place over several chapters of Don Quixote part II (beginning in chapter 53). Finally, governor of his much-­ desired insula, Sancho undergoes a series of trials designed to test his capacity to rule. These trials are part of a farce that two idle aristocrats, the Duke and the Duchess, have created in Don Quixote part II to make fun of the knight and the squire, whom they quickly recognize, upon meeting them—a clever metanarrative device introduced by Cervantes—as the two foolish protagonists of Don Quixote part I. Does Sancho manage to prove that he is fit to govern? Surprisingly for the Duke, the Duchess, all those present and even Don Quixote himself, despite being an uneducated peasant, he indeed does. He successfully acts as judge, displaying memory and understanding, favouring virtue, exhibiting prudence and developing compassion for his subjects. He resigns himself to dieting according to the Galenic precepts imposed by his doctor. He shows restrain and acceptance, taming his animal impulses and negative emotions. He develops an elegant oral rhetoric that astonishes his listeners and even has the cognitive discernment to issue a series of ordinances to fight speculators, regulate prices and help the poor—known as the Constitution of the Great Governor Sancho Panza. Sancho’s greatest achievement, however, is arriving at the self-knowledge necessary to recognize his limitations and his inadequacy for the role of governor. In chapter fifty-three, during the mock invasion of the island crafted by the Duke and the Duchess, where Sancho is supposed to defend his subjects but, instead, is tied up and stumbled over, he can no longer endure the pressure and finally understands that the role of ruler is too complex for his nature. He resigns with the following words (Cervantes’s elaboration of the Huartian theme of adopting the right social role, according to the abilities that nature has bestowed on us): I was not born to be a governor, or to defend ínsulas or cities from enemies who want to attack them. I have a better understanding of plowing and digging, of pruning and layering the vines than of making laws or defending provinces and kingdoms. St. Peter’s fine in Rome: I mean, each man is fine doing the work he was born for. (Cervantes 2005 [1615], 808)

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Sancho’s road to his destination of cognitively and morally developed human being is a bumpy one: he walks backward in several occasions, when he, unable to control himself, behaves like a brute. Nonetheless, overall, his performance as governor is so exemplary that it provokes his subjects’ admiration, as illustrated by the comments of a steward, who proclaims, ‘I am amazed to see a man as unlettered as your grace, who, I believe, has no letters at all, saying so many things full of wisdom and good counsel’ (Cervantes 2005 [1615],  774). Don Quixote himself expresses his astonishment: ‘When I expected to hear news of your negligence and impertinence, Sancho my friend, I have heard about your intelligence’ (Cervantes 2005 [1615], 793; italics in original). Sancho’s ‘heroic’ homecoming and transformation, however, are not a surprise for us readers, who have been following his gradual development. For us, Cervantes has perfectly demonstrated, through the character of Sancho, the nuances of our dynamic human nature. We have had access to a fictional model of an evolving mind, something that is unavailable to us in a non-fictional narrative.

Epilogue Cognitive psychologists and literary scholars have traced the impact of fiction on our minds and have underscored the benefits of reading fictional narratives versus non-fictional or expository ones.32 Cervantes’s Don Quixote may be an early example of how fiction may amplify philosophy by offering a living scenario or ‘laboratory’—to employ Frank Hakemulder’s terminology—where we can follow the development of other minds. In addition to the aid of ‘living’ and evolving characters, the generic conventions available to writers help them create a compelling portrayal of human nature. Cervantes himself, draws from the romance genre to emphasize human nature’s inclination to virtue, a theme that connects us with the cognitive philosophy of his time, of which he takes part, producing his own fictional ‘treatise.’ One may wonder to what extent, in the same way some cognitive psychologists today turn to fiction33 as a model of mind for their research, early modern cognitive philosophers turned to Don Quixote as a source of inspiration and enquiry. Cervantes’s fictional portrayal of the developing mind not only deserves to be considered among the cognitive philosophical works of his time but also, I claim, constitutes one of the most accomplished—and perhaps the first in its nature—fictions of human development.

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Notes 1. See, for instance, Hogan (2017), Gerrig (2004, 2012), Oatley (1999, 2011), and Mishara (2012). 2. Spanish early modern thinkers such as Vives and Huarte are precursors of Descartes, Bacon, and other figures, as well as pioneers of what will later become a more nuanced and systematic understanding of human psychology. On the impact of these Spanish thinkers, see Watson (1915) and MartínAraguz and Bustamante-Martínez (2004), among others. 3. See Jaén (2005, 2012, 2013). 4. For instance, for an analysis of human development in the theatre of Calderón, see Jaén (2017). 5. See Doody (1996, 1). On the origin of the novel and the view that it replaced archaic forms of narrative modes, see Pavel (2013; Introduction). 6. See Severin (1989, 24). 7. See her study Novel to Romance (1974). As Mancing notes, El Saffar’s claim tries to reverse the traditional view of Cervantes’s production as progressing from a youthful tendency to the romance towards the novel (Mancing 2000, 129n4). 8. See Mancing (2000). On categorization and prototype theory, see, among others, Rosch (1978), Lakoff (1999), and Gabora et al. (2008). 9. In his work on literary genre in relation to Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina, Simon suggests this authorial dynamic affiliation thread: ‘the author’s decision to change, in response to the reception of contemporary readers and audiences, the generic filiation of his work (Simon 2014, 82n3). 10. See Simon (2016, 14). 11. On the Renaissance interest on man, see Kristeller (1990). On the decentralization of discourse and ideology and its connection to the birth of new forms of discourse, see Bakhtin (1981, 382). 12. See Zunshine (2006, 2007, 2011). 13. See Crane (2000, 2014). 14. See Leverage (2010). 15. See, among others, Jaén (2005, 2012, 2013), Simon (2009, 2017), Mancing (2011, 2014), Barroso Castro (2011), Simerka (2013) and Reed (2012). Simon has argued that ‘the study of the literary consciousness of characters from a Theory of Mind perspective can complement Bakhtin’s theory on the rise of the novelistic discourse’ and proposed that ‘the psychologizing of literary characters, as it is apparent in Celestina, constitutes another line of development of the modern discourse in addition to the two identified by Bakhtin in his essay “Discourse in the Novel”’ (2017, 46). 16. See also Boyd (2010).

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17. On Vives’s cognitive philosophy and his view of emotion, see Casini (2002, 2006) and Noreña (1989). 18. See Pereira (2000 [1554]). 19. See Introduction to Vives (1765 [1524]). 20. See Huarte (1989 [1575], 214–18). 21. Jaén (2012). 22. For a study of Don Quixote’s development through the contemporary lenses of autopoiesis, see Mancing (2016). 23. On the connection between Huarte and Cervantes, see, among others, Escobar Manzano (1949), Iriarte (1948), Salillas (1905), López-Muñoz et al. (2008), and Martín-Araguz and Bustamante-Martínez (2004). 24. See Soufas (1990), among others. 25. Mancing (2011), Jaén (2005, 2012, 2013), Wagschal (2012), and Wyszynski (2015). 26. An early hint at how both Don Quixote and Sancho develop throughout the novel comes from Madariaga (1926), who speaks of a ‘sanchification’ of Don Quixote and ‘quixotization’ of Sancho to refer to the osmosis between their two minds, to how they change and resemble each other by the end of the novel. Madariaga’s study, however, remains at a purely critical level and does not include the mind philosophy of Cervantes’s time. 27. As I have written elsewhere, ‘In the same fashion that we find today scientific and humanistic discourses contributing jointly to the investigation of the mind and its cultural manifestations, we encounter in early modernity diverse and powerful explorations—expressed through a variety of media and genres—that enrich and widen our understanding of humanity as it was viewed back then, aiding, in turn, our present-day understanding of what humans are, as individuals and as a species’ (Jaén 2013, 55). 28. See Jaén (2012, 2013). 29. See Giorgini (2017). Giorgini argues that Sancho, in fact, might have been previously questioned (and tortured) by the Inquisition, which might explain his elusive proverb-talk and his fear of the wooden horse in the Clavileño adventure in chapter forty-one of Don Quixote part II (wooden ‘horses’ were used by the Inquisition as instruments of torture). 30. The 1611 Spanish dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana by Sebastián de Covarrubias defines medrar as ‘vocablo antiguo corrompido del verbo Latino meliorare de melior, que es mejorar, y adelãtar vna coſa. Suéleſe dezir, en la ſalud, en la hazienda, en las coſtuſbres, y en toda cualquier coſa que va procediendo de mal a bien, o de bien en mejor. Medrar también vale ſer aprouechado en alguna coſa, como el que ſirue al ſeñor, que le haze merced, dezimos que està medrado…’ [Old corrupted word of the Latin verb meliorare from melior, that is to improve, and to advance something. It is usually said in the context of health, estate, habit, and about anything that goes from bad to good, or from good to better. Medrar also means to profit from some-

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thing, as in the one who serves his master, and obtains a favour from him, we say that he is medrado] (Tesoro 554v). 31. See also Reed (2012), on the episode of the fulling mills. 32. See Hakemulder (2000), Oatley et al. (2012), Kidd and Castano (2013) and Koopman and Hakemulder (2015). 33. See the work of Mishara, Gerrig, and Oatley, among others.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M.  M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barroso Castro, José. 2011. Theory of Mind and the Conscience of El casamiento engañoso. In Theory of Mind and Literature, ed. Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert, and Jennifer Marston William, 289–303. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Boyd, Brian. 2001. The Origin of Stories: Horton Hears a Who. Philosophy and Literature 25 (2): 197–214. ———. 2010. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd ed. with revisions. Novato, CA: New World Library. Casini, Lorenzo. 2002. Emotions in Renaissance Humanism: Juan Luis Vives’ De anima et vita. In Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, ed. Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri, 205–228. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2006. Cognitive and Moral Psychology in Renaissance Philosophy: A Study of Juan Luis Vives’ De anima et vita. Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 2005 [1605/1615]. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York, NY: Ecco. Covarrubias Horozco, Sebastián. 1611. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Madrid: Luis Sánchez. Fondos Digitalizados de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla. Accessed May 14, 2017. http://fondosdigitales.us.es/fondos/libros/765/ 1127/tesoro-de-la-lengua-castellana-o-espanola/. Crane, Mary Thomas. 2000. Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2014. Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-­ Century England. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doody, Margaret Anne. 1996. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. El Saffar, Ruth S. 1974. Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Escobar Manzano, Fernando. 1949. Huarte de San Juan y Cervantes en la locura de Don Quijote de la Mancha: Breve estudio clínico psicosomático. Granada: José M. Ventura Hita. Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fuchs, Barbara. 2004. Romance: The New Critical Idiom. New York, NY: Routledge. Gabora, Liane, Eleanor Rosch, and Diederik Aerts. 2008. Toward an Ecological Theory of Concepts. Ecological Psychology 20 (1): 84–116. Gerrig, Richard J. 2004. Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact. Poetics Today 25 (2): 265–281. ———. 2012. Why Literature Is Necessary, and Not Just Nice. In Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, ed. Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon, 35–52. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Giorgini, Massimiliano A. 2017. Fear and Torture in La Mancha: The Embodied Memories of Sancho Panza. In Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain: Studies in Honor of Howard Mancing, ed. Isabel Jaén, Carolyn Nadeau, and Julien J. Simon, 165–184. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Hakemulder, Frank (Jèmeljan). 2000. The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hart, F. Elizabeth. 2011. 1500–1620: Reading, Consciousness, and Romance in the Sixteenth Century. In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman, 103–131. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David J., ed. 2011. The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2011. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Simulation and the Structure of Emotional Memory: Learning from Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. In Cognitive Literary Science Dialogues between Literature and Cognition, ed. Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko, 113–134. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Huarte de San Juan, Juan. 1989 [1575]. Examen de ingenios para las ciencias. Edited by Guillermo Serés. Madrid: Cátedra. Letras hispánicas, 311. Iriarte, Mauricio de. 1948. El Doctor Huarte de San Juan y su Examen de ingenios: Contribución a la historia de la psicología diferencial. Madrid: CSIC. Jaén (Portillo), Isabel. 2005. Literary Consciousness: Fictional Minds, Real Implications. In Selected Papers from The 22nd International Literature and Psychology Conference, June 29–July 4, 2005, ed. Norman Holland. IPSA. http:// www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2005/proc/portillo.pdf. ———. 2012. Cervantes and the Cognitive Ideas of His Time: Mind and Development in Don Quixote. In Cognitive Cervantes, ed. Julien Simon, Barbara

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Simerka, and Howard Mancing. Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 32 (1): 71–98. ———. 2013. Cervantes on Human Development: Don Quixote and Renaissance Cognitive Psychology. In Don Quixote: Interdisciplinary Connections, ed. Matthew D. Warshawsky and James A. Parr, 35–57. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. ———. 2017. The Making of a King: Sensing and Understanding in Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño. In Making Sense of the Senses in Spanish Comedia, ed. Bonnie Gasior and Yolanda Gamboa. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. 2013. Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. Science 342 (6156, October): 377–380. Koopman, Emy, and Frank Jèmeljan Hakemulder. 2015. Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework. Journal of Literary Theory 9 (1): 79–111. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. 1990. Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lakoff, George. 1999. Cognitive Models and Prototype Theory. In Concepts: Core Readings, ed. Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, 391–421. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leverage, Paula. 2010. Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de Geste. Amsterdam: Rodopi. López-Muñoz, Francisco, Cecilio Álamo, and Pilar García-García. 2008. Locos y dementes en la literatura cervantina: A propósito de las fuentes médicas de Cervantes en materia neuropsiquiátrica. Revista de Neurología 46 (8): 489–501. Madariaga, Salvador de. 1926. Guía del lector del Quijote: Ensayo psicólogico del Quijote. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Mancing, Howard. 2000. Prototypes of Genre in Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares. Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 20 (2): 127–150. ———. 2011. Sancho Panza’s Theory of Mind. In Theory of Mind and Literature, ed. Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert, and Jennifer Marston William, 123–132. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. ———. 2014. The Mind of a Pícaro: Lázaro de Tormes. In Cognition, Literature, and History, ed. Mark J.  Bruhn and Donald R.  Wehrs, 174–189. New  York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2016. Embodied Cognition and Autopoiesis in Don Quixote. In Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon, 37–52. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Martín-Araguz, A., and C. Bustamante-Martínez. 2004. Examen de ingenios, de Juan Huarte de San Juan, y los albores de la Neurobiología de la inteligencia en el Renacimiento español. Revista de Neurología 38 (12): 16–30. Mishara, Aaron L. 2012. The Literary Neuroscience of Kafka’s Hypnagogic Hallucinations: How Literature Informs the Neuroscientific Study of Self and Its Disorders. In Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, ed. Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon, 105–123. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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Noreña, Carlos G. 1989. Foreword. Juan Luis Vives and the Emotions: Philosophical Explorations, ix–xiii. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Oatley, Keith. 1999. Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation. Review of General Psychology 3 (2): 101–117. ———. 2011. Fiction and Its Study as Gateways to the Mind. Scientific Study of Literature 1 (1): 152–164. Oatley, Keith, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic. 2012. Postscript. The Psychology of Fiction: Present and Future. In Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, ed. Isabel Jaén and Julien J.  Simon, 235–249. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Pavel, Thomas G. 2013. The Lives of the Novel: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pereira, Gómez. 2000 [1554]. Antoniana Margarita. Translated by José Luis Barreiro Barreiro. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela; Fundación Gustavo Bueno. Reed, Cory. 2012. '¿Qué rumor es ése?': Embodied Agency and Representational Hunger in Don Quijote I.20. In Cognitive Cervantes, ed. Julien Simon, Barbara Simerka, and Howard Mancing. Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 32 (1): 99–124. Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. Principles of Categorization. In Cognition and Categorization, ed. Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd, 27–48. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Salillas, Rafael. 1905. Un gran inspirador de Cervantes, el doctor Juan Huarte y su Examen de ingenios. Madrid: E. Arias. Severin, Dorothy Sherman. 1989. Tragicomedy and Novelistic Discourse in Celestina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simerka, Barbara. 2003. Discourses of Empire: Counter-epic Literature in Early Modern Spain. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2013. Knowing Subjects: Cognitive Cultural Theory and Early Modern Spanish Literature. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Simon, Julien J. 2009. Celestina, Heteroglossia, and Theory of Mind: The Rise of the Early-Modern Discourse. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference in Literature and Psychology, 119–126. Lisbon: Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada. ———. 2014. Schema Theory, Prototype Theory, and the Novela Dialogada: Toward a Perspectivist and Dynamic View of Literary Genres. Laberinto: An Electronic Journal of Early Modern Hispanic Literatures and Culture 7: 64–90. Accessed May 14, 2017. https://acmrs.org/sites/default/files/v7_Laberinto_Simon.pdf. ———. 2016. Contextualizing Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature. In Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon, 13–33. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Psychologizing Literary Characters in Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina: The Emergence of Mind in Early Modern Spanish Literature. In Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain: Studies in Honor of Howard Mancing, ed. Isabel

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Jaén, Carolyn Nadeau, and Julien J.  Simon, 43–56. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Sinding, Michael. 2010. Framing Monsters: Multiple and Mixed Genres, Cognitive Category Theory, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Poetics Today 31 (3): 465–505. Soufas, Teresa S. 1990. Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Vives, Juan Luis. 1765 [1524]. Introducción a la sabiduría. Translated by Diego de Astudillo. Valencia: Benito Monfort. Biblioteca nacional de España: Biblioteca digital hispánica. Accessed May 14, 2017. http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=58930. ———. 1990 [1538]. The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De anima et vita. Translated by Carlos G. Noreña. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Watson, Foster. 1915. The Father of Modern Psychology. Psychological Review 22 (5): 333–356. Wagschal, Steven. 2012. The Smellscape of Don Quixote: A Cognitive Approach. In Cognitive Cervantes, ed. Julien Simon, Barbara Simerka, and Howard Mancing. Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 32 (1): 125–162. Wyszynski, Matthew A. 2015. Clueless in Don Quixote (1615): Sancho Panza and Game Theory. eHumanista/Cervantes 4: 313–325. Accessed May 14, 2017. http:// www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.span.d7_eh/files/sitefiles/cervantes/volume4/18%20ehumcerv4.wyszynski.pdf. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. ———. 2007. Why Jane Austen Was Different and Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It. Style 41 (3): 275–299. ———. 2011. Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency. In Theory of Mind and Literature, ed. Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert, and Jennifer Marston William, 63–91. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

16 Hermeneutics Hanna Meretoja

Hermeneutics is a field of inquiry that explores the phenomenon of interpretation. It is often defined as ‘the theory of interpretation’, but instead of referring to a particular conception of interpretation, it is a field within which interpretation is approached from numerous different perspectives. Hermeneutics originates in the study of canonical texts such as Homeric epics, the Bible and law, but the term itself was coined in the modern period, and its first known use in English is from 1737.1 It has its root in the Greek word ‘hermeneuein’, which means to interpret, explain or translate. In its modern form, hermeneutics has come to signify theoretical reflection on the nature of interpretation and understanding. In this chapter, I will provide an overview of some of the main approaches to hermeneutics—as a philosophy of interpretation and of literature and literary studies. After first presenting briefly the main ideas of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, I will focus on Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics and its view of understanding as profoundly historical and dialogical. I will show how hermeneutics allows us to approach literature not only as an object of interpretation but as an interpretative practice in its own right. The chapter ends with a glance at some of the challenges that hermeneutics currently faces and with a brief discussion of how contemporary narrative hermeneutics explores narrative as a culturally mediated interpretative practice.

H. Meretoja (*) University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_16

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 rigins of Modern Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher O and Dilthey Friedrich Schleiermacher, often considered the founder of modern hermeneutics, established hermeneutics as a general theory of interpretation. While earlier hermeneutics had taken the task of interpretation to arise from exceptional texts and particularly difficult passages, Schleiermacher understood ‘hermeneutics as the art of understanding another person’s utterance correctly’ (1998, 5).2 Wilhelm Dilthey, in turn, built on Schleiermacher’s work and established understanding as the methodological foundation of the human sciences. Both Schleiermacher and Dilthey emphasized the inseparability of texts from their historical world and the necessity to understand the individual psychology of the author. Twentieth-century hermeneutics drew on and further radicalized the historical dimension and universality of hermeneutics, but it fiercely criticized Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s romantic psychologism and the idea of tracing the meanings of texts back to their moment of inception. Although in practice Schleiermacher (1998) considered the interpretation of texts to be the primary focus of hermeneutics, he was interested in the general structure of interpreting verbal communication. Dilthey (1972) expanded the scope of hermeneutics even further by arguing that the problem of interpretation concerns all human objectifications, including everyday actions, physical gestures and visual expressions. Nevertheless, he also privileged the interpretation of literary texts because they are fixed objectifications to which one can return time and again and in which ‘the inner life of man find[s] its fullest and most exhaustive, most objectively comprehensible expression’ (233). Dilthey defines hermeneutics as ‘the theoretical basis for the exegesis of written monuments’ (233) and presents text interpretation as the model for the methodological self-understanding of the human sciences in general. Schleiermacher and Dilthey emphasize the embeddedness of texts in their historical world, on the one hand, and in the life of the author, on the other. Schleiermacher’s important starting point was the Herderian view according to which thought is mediated through language and language is interwoven with a cultural form of life: ‘Every utterance presupposes a given language’, and the individual and the language are dialectically bound to each other because a person develops in relation to a language, and the person, in turn, influences language (1998, 8–9). In Schleiermacher’s theory, interpretation has two dimensions: linguistic and psychological. The former refers to the task of relating the author’s usage of words to ‘the totality of language’ in the historical context; the latter involves interpreting the individuality and distinctiveness of the author’s expression, understanding each utterance ‘as a fact in the thinker’ (8).

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Schleiermacher emphasizes that interpretation is holistic and follows the structure of the hermeneutic circle. In classical hermeneutics, the concept referred to the task of understanding a part of a text in relation to the whole and the whole in relation to the parts; drawing on this tradition, Schleiermacher suggests that an initial reading provides us with an overall understanding of the text, which we can use to analyse in more detail the parts, which in turn nuances our overall interpretation. In his hermeneutics, however, the whole also encompasses the broader cultural context in which the text is written (including the author’s corpus, the relevant genres, etc.) and the overall psychology of the author. Understanding the broader context depends upon the understanding of individual texts and vice versa. Understanding comes in degrees, and to move in the hermeneutic circle is to move towards greater understanding. For Schleiermacher (1977), the goal is ultimately to understand humanity as a whole: each individual is part of humanity and provides a particular perspective on human existence. The hermeneutic circle is the movement between the particular and the universal as we aspire to understand humanity and ‘to enrich our lives and the lives of others’ (207). Both Schleiermacher and Dilthey write under the influence of Romanticism, and the psychological dimension of their theories reflects ideas of Romantic psychology. The need to understand the uniqueness of the author is connected to the aesthetics of the genius that emerged in late eighteenth-century Germany. For Schleiermacher, texts that express linguistic creativity and high individuality move in ‘the element of genius’ (1998, 13). Particularly in his later work, Schleiermacher links psychological interpretation to the process of identifying an authorial ‘seminal decision’ (Keimentschluß) that underlies a work (110–17, 132). He believes that ‘speaking is only the external side of thought’, the author’s inner thoughts acquire expression at the moment of creation, and ‘every act of understanding is the inversion of a speech-act, during which the thought which was the basis of the speech must become ­conscious’ (7). Similarly, in ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics’ (1900), Dilthey argues that the interpreter aims to intuit, reconstruct or re-experience ‘the psychic reality’ of which an objectification ‘is the expression’ (1972, 232). As both the language and the individual are ‘infinite’, no understanding can be complete (Schleiermacher 1998, 11). Achieving a full understanding of the author’s meaning is hence for Schleiermacher a regulative ideal, which cannot be accomplished but nevertheless directs interpretation (Zimmermann 2016, 363). Similarly, Dilthey emphasizes how ‘all understanding remains partial and can never be terminated’: ‘Individuum est ineffable’ (1972, 243). It is a task that involves bringing to consciousness what the author was unconscious of, and hence the ‘ultimate goal of the hermeneutic process is to understand an author better than he understood himself ’ (244).

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In his later work, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910), Dilthey’s emphasis shifts in a less psychological direction, to cultural formations and their structural unity, in an attempt to provide a framework for studying historical worlds as productive systems (Wirkungszusammenhang) that produce values and meanings. He argues that the human sciences are founded upon the ‘nexus of lived experience, expression, and understanding’ (2002, 109). We express our lived experience in objectifications that give an external expression to our experience, and we can understand ourselves—and life in general—only through such objectifications. For Dilthey, artworks are expressions of lived experience, but they are great only when their ‘spiritual content is liberated from its creator’ (228) and they disclose something about human life in general: ‘What is expressed [in a literary work] is not the inner processes in the poet; it is rather a nexus created in them but separable from them’ (107). Dilthey sees as the primary object of literary studies the interconnectedness of different aspects of this nexus. He qualifies this, however, by suggesting—as Rudolf Makkreel (2016, 382) puts it—that in some cases ‘the psychic processes of the author may become relevant if there is something about the structural nexus of the work that seems unusual or even incoherent’. Psychological interpretation retains a place in Dilthey’s later work, too, but the emphasis shifts to what works of art express about human life in general. In sum, Schleiermacher and Dilthey launched the tradition of hermeneutics that privileges the author’s intention as the source of meaning. It is mainly the psychological aspect of their hermeneutics—the attempt to grasp the original thought that gave rise to the work—that twentieth-century hermeneutics has fiercely criticized. The relevance of the broader contexts of interpreted works has remained important for later hermeneutics, but the latter has taken distance from Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s failure to acknowledge ­adequately the role of the interpreter’s historical world and theoretical approach in shaping the meanings of a work.

 he Ontological Turn and the Universality Claim T of Hermeneutics In the early twentieth century, in Martin Heidegger’s and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work, hermeneutics went through an ‘ontological turn’: while nineteenth-century hermeneutics focused on interpretation and understanding as primarily epistemological issues concerning the methodological foundations of the humanities, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argues that

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understanding is the human mode of being in the world. This shift expanded the scope of hermeneutics to concern human existence in general. It is a key insight of twentieth-century phenomenological hermeneutics that all experience is interpretative and there is no such thing as raw or pure sense perception. As the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl argues, the formula of interpretation—‘something as something’ (2006, 250), which Heidegger (1996, 140) calls the interpretative ‘as-structure’ and Gadamer (1993, 339) the ‘hermeneutic understanding-something-as-something [das hermeneutische Etwas-als-etwas-Verstehen]’—is the basic structure of experience: we always orient ourselves to the world in a particular way and experience things from a certain interpretative horizon.3 Experience, even simple sense perception, interprets reality by structuring and giving it shape and hence ‘always includes meaning’ and an ‘articulation of what is there’ (Gadamer 1997, 91–92): ‘We are interpreting in seeing, hearing, receiving’ (1984, 59). After the existential-ontological turn of hermeneutics, interpretation came to refer to the sense-making process that structures all engagement with the world. As Gadamer (1993, 339) acknowledges, this turn is indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche, who launched the antipositivistic tradition according to which there is nothing more basic than interpretation: all that is ‘given’ (das Gegebene) to us is itself a result of interpretation. Nietzsche famously argued that ‘facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations’ (1968, 267). The idea of the primordiality of interpretation—that it is a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to anything more elementary—is the most fundamental tenet of philosophical hermeneutics. In his phenomenological hermeneutics, Heidegger explores different modes of being and argues that human existence differs from that of all other beings in that a human being (whom Heidegger calls Dasein) ‘is concerned about its very being’: its existence is characterized by an ‘understanding of being’ (Seinsverständnis) (1996, 10). He emphasizes that the objectifying natural scientific gaze that sees the world as measurable spatiotemporal objects is secondary with respect to our prereflective way of orienting ourselves to the world, structured by a practical understanding that renders it intelligible: ‘“Initially” we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle’ (1996, 153). We encounter things in the world not as geometrical shapes and abstract qualities but ‘as a table, a door, a car, a bridge’: ‘Any simple prepredicative seeing of what is at hand is in itself already understanding and interpretative’ (140). While in Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s work the hermeneutic circle concerned primarily text interpretation, in Heidegger’s (1996, 143–44) and Gadamer’s (1997, 266–69) thinking it characterizes experience in general. We

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orient ourselves to the world from a historically, culturally and socially constituted interpretative horizon which makes experience possible and is transformed through new experiences as we encounter in the world something that challenges our presuppositions: ‘Thus the circle of understanding is not a “methodological” circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding’ (Gadamer 1997, 293). All understanding is conditioned and enabled by the fore-structure of understanding, but it does not imprison us: we are capable of experiencing something that is genuinely new—something that transforms our horizon of understanding and our sense of who we are. Philosophical hermeneutics sees interpretative understanding as our embodied way of being in the world that involves understanding our possibilities: a bridge is not primarily a geometrical object to us but what makes it possible for us to cross a river. According to Gadamer, all understanding includes an aspect of self-understanding: ‘it is true in every case that a person who understands, understands himself (sich versteht), projecting himself upon his possibilities’ (1997, 260). While seeing a bridge as a bridge is a simple, uncontroversial interpretative perception, we are also entangled in webs of complex interpretations that not only affect our self-understanding and ­possibilities but also involve interpretative conflicts, such as different media narratives of the ‘war on terror’ or ‘migrant crisis’.4 In complex narrative interpretations, it is salient how interpretations are modes of orientation, sense-making and engagement, in which the cognitive and the affective are irreducibly intertwined. With its stress on understanding, hermeneutics may seem to neglect the affective aspects of our engagement with the world, but such a critique is largely based on a failure to appreciate how the hermeneutic notion of understanding concerns our mode of being in the world as whole embodied, emotionally engaged selves. Affective hermeneutics developed by scholars like Marielle Macé (2011) and Rita Felski (2015, 175, 178) has recently articulated the connection between interpretation and affect, showing how interpretation ‘constitutes one powerful mode of attachment’. As Felski acknowledges, the Heideggerian being in the world is characterized by ‘care’ (Sorge) and ‘mood’ (Stimmung) that causes the world ‘to appear before us in a given light’ and is ‘a prerequisite for any form of interaction or engagement’ (20). The structure of the hermeneutic circle applies to our whole being in the world as an affective, embodied process: our life histories attune us to orient ourselves to the world in a certain mood, and our affective sensibility and understanding of the world is changed by the new experiences we go through. The universality claim of hermeneutics, however, concerns not only our everyday interpretative practices but also the sciences. While Dilthey distin-

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guished between humanities and natural sciences in terms of the dichotomy between understanding and explanation, Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics rejects such a dichotomy and argues that all disciplines offer different ways of interpreting reality. This view is directed against the positivistic and objectivistic universality claims according to which natural science depicts reality objectively and neutrally, as a collection of facts independent of the researcher. Hermeneutics reminds us that the sciences inevitably explore reality through certain questions that open up a perspective which functions as the condition of possibility for seeing ‘facts’: what is thought to exist in itself is actually ‘relative to a particular way of knowing’ (Gadamer 1997, 450). This is not ‘relativism’ but a philosophy that acknowledges how ‘facts’ are constituted in relation to a particular interpretative horizon, that is, as answers to particular questions. It is a key insight of hermeneutics that ‘every statement has to be seen as a response to a question and that the only way to understand a statement is to get hold of the question to which the statement is an answer’ (1981, 106). In analytic philosophy of science, the post-empiricist turn has an affinity with the hermeneutic universality claim. As Thomas Kuhn (1991, 21) acknowledges, the natural sciences also have a ‘hermeneutic basis’ because there is no ‘neutral, culture-independent, set of categories within which the population—whether of objects or of actions—can be described’. Similarly, Jürgen Habermas (1984, 109) asserts: ‘From the point of view of the Verstehen problematic, then, it appears that no case can be made for social sciences having a special status’. Following Anthony Giddens (1976, 146, 158), Habermas (1984, 109–10) acknowledges that the social sciences have, in comparison to the natural sciences, ‘a double hermeneutic task’ because in the social sciences interpretative understanding pertains not only to the theory-dependency of data description but also to the nature of the object domain as already symbolically structured social reality. The notion of an ‘interpretive turn’ has also been used in philosophy to signal the situation in which ‘the old logical division of labor between explanation and understanding is abandoned and interpretation comes to characterize the whole field of human endeavour’ (Bohman et al. 1991, 2). From a hermeneutic perspective, theories and methods are practices of posing questions to reality.5 They are, however, frequently unaware of being such practices. Statistics, for example, ‘are such excellent means of propaganda because they let the “facts” speak and hence simulate an objectivity that in reality depends on the legitimacy of the questions asked’ (Gadamer 1997, 301). Philosophical hermeneutics attempts to further the self-understanding of the sciences so that they may develop into self-conscious practices of ques-

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tioning. Hermeneutics as a philosophy of science helps us reflect on what kinds of questions, presuppositions and interests various sciences are based. Such hermeneutic reflection can, ‘by making the dominant preunderstandings of the sciences transparent, open new dimensions of questioning and thereby indirectly serve methodological work’ (1993, 248).

Historicity and Dialogicality In philosophical hermeneutics, understanding as our mode of being in the world is seen to be irreducibly historical and dialogical. Understanding is mediated by the historically constituted webs of meaning in which we are always already entangled, and our subjectivity takes shape in a dialogical relationship to these webs. Historicity is linked to the essential finitude of human existence. We come to an always already interpreted world, and we can never become aware of all the premises of our thinking and acting: ‘To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete’ (Gadamer 1997, 302). Against the Hegelian ideal of self-transparency, philosophical hermeneutics accepts the inevitable incompleteness and finitude of understanding, which means that ‘[i]nterpretation is always on the way’ (2001, 105). Interpretation always takes place in a historical situation bound by a horizon that is constituted by certain unconscious presuppositions, and it expands insofar as one becomes conscious of them. Because understanding is necessarily situated, unfolding from the horizon of our own historical world, ‘we understand in a different way, if we understand at all’ (1997, 297). Gadamer argues that we should overcome the abstract opposition between reason and tradition that we have inherited from Enlightenment. It is dangerous to believe in absolute reason or freedom—in the possibility of freeing oneself from all traditions and presuppositions—for such hubris is precisely what results in our blindness to them. For Gadamer (1997, 276), ‘all human existence, even the freest’ is ‘limited and qualified in various ways’, and belonging to a tradition is not a mere restriction but also what ‘makes understanding possible’ (329). Reason and tradition are always intertwined and mutually condition one another: reason operates in history, and tradition is never blind transmission of the past to future generations—it always includes an ‘element of freedom’ (281). Gadamer (1997, 301) wants to replace the one-sidedness of Enlightenment thinking by hermeneutic ‘consciousness of being affected by history’ (Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). Such consciousness has emancipatory

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significance because only when we acknowledge that we encounter reality through culturally and historically formed concepts, questions and perspectives, can these be reflected, discussed and transcended. Otherwise we hold on to them blindly and remain their prisoner. What is historical is produced by human action and could be otherwise—hence, it can be subjected to critical reflection and changed. As Manfred Frank (1989, 6) puts it, the fundamental idea of hermeneutics is ‘that symbolic orders, as opposed to natural laws, are founded in interpretations; hence they can lay claim only to hypothetical existence, they can be transformed and transgressed by new projections of meaning’. Cultural and social systems are neither necessary nor natural, and understanding the historical processes that have produced them facilitates their critical evaluation. Despite their many differences, Gadamer and Habermas are both committed to critical thinking that strives to question seemingly self-evident or natural-­appearing ways of thinking and acting by revealing their historical nature.6 In this respect, their approach comes close to Michel Foucault’s (1984, 50) idea of critical philosophy as ‘historical ontology’ in which ‘the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’. However, philosophical hermeneutics elucidates more thoroughly than most other forms of contemporary philosophy how we can develop awareness of our own historicity and thereby overcome problematic practices. While Foucault skirts the question concerning the conditions of possibility for his own research, and Habermas seems to rely on ahistorical Enlightenment reason—arguing, in his famous debate with Gadamer, that hermeneutics ‘fails to appreciate the power of reflection’ (1986a, 268, see also 1971)—Gadamer succeeds in articulating the conditions of possibility for emancipatory reflection without resorting to ahistorical reason.7 For Gadamer emancipatory, critical reflection, like all understanding, takes place from within a historical situation and cannot be absolute: it cannot question everything or lead to perfect self-transparency. It is crucial to cultivate awareness of one’s own historical situation, but ‘the very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it’ and hence understanding one’s situation is ‘a task that is never entirely finished’ (1997, 301). For Gadamer, the key to emancipatory reflection is encountering the other—including such alien worlds of meaning as works of art: such worlds can function as ‘provocation’ that makes visible presuppositions that normally affect us unconsciously (299). He believes that self-understanding ‘always occurs through understanding something other than the self ’ (97).

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It is precisely dialogue as an event of encountering the other that enables awareness of what has determined one ‘behind one’s back’ and critical assessment ‘against other possibilities’ of what is justified and unjustified in one’s pre-understanding (Gadamer 1993, 244, 247). Encountering a historically or culturally distant other enables one to take critical distance from the dominant and natural-appearing practices of one’s own historical world: as Charles Taylor (2002b, 295) puts it, it entails seeing ‘that there are other possibilities, that our way of being isn’t the only or “natural” one, but that it represents one among other possible forms’. As Thomas McCarthy (1984, 189) points out, critical self-reflection is for Gadamer ‘not something opposed to understanding’, like it seems to be for Habermas, but rather ‘an integral moment’ of the attempt to understand the point of view of the other. Gadamer argues that ‘we understand the most’ precisely when a successful dialogue enables us to see through our previous presuppositions and to overcome them (1993, 243). Many commentators have regarded the fundamental role of the other in Gadamer’s hermeneutics as the factor that differentiates it decisively not only from Habermas but also from Heidegger.8 In Heidegger’s Being and Time, ‘being-with’ others (Mitsein) means primarily being in the manner of ‘inauthenticity’ (1996, 120), whereas Gadamer (1995, 97–98) believes that we learn only in dialogue with others both to understand our own historicity and to transgress our limits. Contemporary hermeneutics that continues Gadamer’s legacy has drawn on and further developed his ethos of dialogism. Ricoeur (1991, 283) argues that ‘only insofar as I place myself in the other’s point of view do I confront myself with my present horizon, with my prejudices’. For Taylor, the ‘great challenge of this century, both for politics and for social science, is that of understanding the other’ (2002b, 279)—a challenge that Gadamer has helped us to conceive ‘clearly and steadily’ (2002a, 142). Dialogicality is in philosophical hermeneutics integral to our existence as beings whose being is mediated by language. Gadamer (1997, 389, 443) argues that ‘language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs’ and that we live in ‘language-worlds’ which are never closed: ‘As verbally constituted, every such world is of itself always open to every possible insight and hence to every expansion of its own world picture, and is accordingly available to others’ (447). For Gadamer, ‘language has its true being only in dialogue’ (446) and so does our existence: we are in a constant process of being constituted in ‘the conversation that we ourselves are’ (378). He does not accept the relativistic view of the incommensurability of different forms of life but believes that the universal linguisticality of human being-in-the-world makes possible rational dialogue between any universes of meaning (1993, 230) and that reason has power to rise ‘above the limitations of any given language’

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(1997, 402). That the ‘crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character’ (Taylor 1991, 32) has become a central tenet of contemporary hermeneutics. It allows us to understand the relationship between individual subjects and social systems of meaning as mutually dependent: individuals become who they are in dialogue with the webs of meaning in which they are entangled, and these webs only exist through being constantly interpreted and reinterpreted by those entangled in them.9 On the basis of the above discussion, we can distinguish between a weak and strong sense of the dialogical in philosophical hermeneutics. All understanding is dialogical in the weak sense insofar as it necessarily takes shape relationally—in relation to other people’s views and experiences and to the intersubjective medium of language. Dialogue in the strong sense, in contrast, is an event in which we are open to the otherness of the other, willing to be transformed by the other. In this strong sense, dialogue is a regulative ideal towards which the human sciences should strive. Gadamer characterizes genuine dialogue as a movement that proceeds through questions and answers, in which the partners in dialogue do not merely attempt to defend their own position but are sensitive to the other’s ‘alterity’ and aim for mutual understanding that surpasses the initial views of both partners (1997, 269). Gadamer (1997, 367, 1993, 204) defends an ideal of critical dialogue based on ‘the art of questioning’ and being open to questions and suggests that such dialogue enables ‘critical attitude towards every convention’. Hermeneutic consciousness of how we become ourselves only in a dialogical relation to others can foster successful dialogue by alerting us to our fundamental dependency on one another.

L iterary Studies: Unfolding New Possibilities of Being But what kind of other is the one encountered in literary studies? Philosophical hermeneutics enables us to see the literary work as an other that has subject-­ like qualities: as an other that is not only the object but also the subject of interpretation. Literary works have the power to interpret the world in ways that open up new possibilities of thought, affect, experience and action. Gadamer is famous for problematizing aesthetic consciousness and arguing that ‘aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics’ (1997, 164). He sees an artwork as a meaningful structure that must always be interpreted differently; it acquires its ‘proper being’ only in these mediating interpretations in which

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the possibilities of the artwork ‘emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects’ (117–18). The ‘non-differentiation of the mediation (Vermittlung) from the work itself ’ (120) means that interpretation is not external to the literary text but belongs to its very being. Crucial here is the repudiation of the idea that an artwork is the object of subjective aesthetic experience that has nothing do with the ‘question of truth’ and simply gives momentary sensual pleasure (99): ‘art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork means sharing in that knowledge’ (97). But instead of being ‘definitive knowledge’, art provides us with insights into something, new modes of engagement, thought, orientation and attachment. Against ‘aesthetic differentiation’ that abstracts an artwork from its historical worldliness, Gadamer emphasizes that we encounter a work of art in the world, and we encounter in it a world through which ‘we learn to understand ourselves’ (97). If it is a genuine experience, it ‘does not leave him who has it unchanged’ (100). Hence, every true encounter with a literary work in its alterity entails a self-­ encounter as well as self-alteration. From a hermeneutic perspective, encountering the text as an other not only is a central task of literary studies but also presents a real challenge. Only through a genuine dialogue can we gain awareness of our own historicity, but only such awareness makes possible sensitivity to the otherness of the other: ‘The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings’ (1997, 269). Thus, the question arises: how does one get into this circle of understanding? It requires fundamental openness, ‘holding oneself open to the conversation’, which Gadamer (1996, 36) regards as the ‘highest principle’ of hermeneutics: I can do justice to the text as an other only when I approach it ‘in such a way that it has something to say to me’—as ‘a genuine partner in dialogue’ (1997, 358, 361). Some scholars have interpreted Gadamer’s dialogic conception of text interpretation as a claim to accept uncritically what the text says. This, however, is a grave misunderstanding. From Gadamer’s perspective, literary studies appears as a dialogic practice based on the art of critical questioning. The interpretative process begins as the text poses a question to the interpreter. Hearing this question requires fundamental openness to the otherness of the text. The interpreter responds by posing questions to the text that arise from the interpreter’s own historical world. Distance and tension between the text and the interpreter are integral to this process: ‘The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naive assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out’ (Gadamer 1997, 306). Distance should not be seen as an obstacle of understanding (as it was in nineteenth-century

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hermeneutics) but as something that enables us to understand differently and to see ‘what the author accepted unquestioningly and hence did not consider’ (374). Although Gadamer has always been clear on this point, it is a stubborn misunderstanding that the hermeneutic approach aims at reproducing the self-understanding of the object.10 However, even when the hermeneutically oriented human sciences interpret the self-interpretations of agents, texts or cultural forms of life, they explicate, as G.B.  Madison (1997, 351, 359) explains, not ‘the intentions but the logic of the order in question (text, culture, etc.)’. As the critical element that defines the hermeneutic process has been frequently overlooked, Gadamer (1987, 87) has specifically underlined this point in his later writings, arguing against ‘an uncritical acceptance of tradition and a socio-political conservatism’ and emphasizing that a genuine confrontation of the historic tradition involves ‘a critical challenge of this tradition’. This critical process of questioning is directed both at the presuppositions underlying the text and at one’s own historical world. In interpreting, we both challenge the text and expose ourselves to its challenge. The text functions as a question for us when it renders problematic something that we have taken for granted and thereby helps us discover new possibilities of thinking, being and experiencing.11 Similarly, the questions that the interpreter poses to the text can render problematic something that the text presents as selfevident. It is integral to this process of questioning that it ‘opens up possibilities of meaning’ (Gadamer 1997, 375). Literary studies, and the human sciences more broadly, can be seen as critical practices that cultivate our imagination—our ‘sense for what is questionable’ and worth questioning (Fragwürdige, 1977, 12, 1993, 227) as well as our ‘sense of the possible’ (Meretoja 2018). Following Heidegger’s (1977) aesthetics of disclosure, Gadamer (1997, 144, 159) understands a literary work as ‘an event of being’ (Seinsvorgang) in which certain possibilities of being are disclosed and brought to language. From this perspective, it is a pivotal task of literary ­studies to articulate how literary texts open up new possibilities of being for individuals and communities in the contemporary world. In line with this thought, Ricoeur (1991, 66) elucidates how in reading literature we constantly reinterpret and refigure our identity in relation to the possibilities of being unfolded by the texts. Thereby our views on how we can live our lives, who we are and who we want to be are enlarged and enriched. When we expose ourselves to the ‘imaginative variations’ of ourselves proposed by the literary text, we receive ‘from it an enlarged self ’ (88). Ricoeur’s (1988, 158–59) notion of refiguration, in describing the process in which readers reinterpret their lives in light of the encounter between the world of the reader and the world of the text, is a modification of Gadamer’s (1997,

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307–11) ‘problem of application’: both notions suggest that it is integral to the task of interpretation to reflect on the possibilities that texts open up in the context of one’s own historical world. Overall, the dimension of the possible plays a key role in hermeneutics. According to Gadamer, art points to ‘the dimension of the possible, and therefore also to the critique of reality’ (1997, 579). Ricoeur (1991, 300) reformulates this idea as follows: ‘The power of the text to open a dimension of reality implies in principle a recourse against any given reality and thereby the possibility of a critique of the real. It is in poetic discourse that this subversive power is most alive’. As Ricoeur notes, this critical theme is already present in the Heideggerian notion of understanding as ‘the projection of my ownmost possibilities; this signifies that the mode of being of the world opened up by the text is the mode of the possible, or better, of the power-to­be: therein resides the subversive force of the imaginary’ (300). Ricoeur’s treatment of the subversive force of the imaginary constitutes a central and one of the most original aspects of his hermeneutics. He articulates how literary texts can shape our visions of what constitutes a good life and function as ‘provocation to be and to act differently’ (1988, 249). In contrast to approaches that see literature as moral education or guidance à la Wayne Booth (1988, 211) or Martha Nussbaum (2010), philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes that literature is a mode of ethical inquiry in its own right and more important than answers are the questions it poses and the ‘possibilities of meaning’ (Gadamer 1997, 375) they open up. The hermeneutic ethos is characterized by openness to the other and readiness to acknowledge one’s own finitude and permanent incompletion. The critical potential of hermeneutics springs ultimately from the Socratic wisdom of knowing that one does not know. For Gadamer (1997, 362), this docta ignorantia points to the insight that only one who understands his or her fundamental finitude can pose authentic questions—questions that open up new possibilities of being, thinking and experiencing.

 hallenges and Prospects: Narrative C Hermeneutics In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski (2015, 33) argues that hermeneutics has received surprisingly little serious consideration in critical theory over the past few decades and is, hence, in need of ‘some vigorous rebranding’: ‘Given the surge of interest in questions of reading—close and distant, deep and sur-

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face—the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition in Anglo-American literary theory is little short of scandalous’. The reception of French theory in particular has resulted in deep-seated suspicion towards interpretation, expressed early on in Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1964).12 There are at least three persistent misunderstandings concerning hermeneutics: it is often assumed, first, that hermeneutics implies seeking hidden, ultimate meanings that wait to be discovered in the depths of objects of interpretation (e.g. Foucault 1966, 384; Badiou 2004, 43); second, that hermeneutics implies a tendency to reduce everything to meaning (e.g. Gumbrecht 2004); and, third, that hermeneutics is inherently uncritical, conservative or universalist.13 As my discussion of hermeneutics has hopefully shown, a careful reading of Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s work renders these criticisms problematic. Fortunately, recent years have also witnessed renewed interest in hermeneutics, which has developed in new, exciting directions. For example, a ‘critical hermeneutics’ has been developed by thinkers who are dissatisfied with the way in which philosophical hermeneutics articulates the role of power relations in interpretative practices but convinced that its theoretical premises have unharnessed critical potential.14 In this final section of this chapter, I will discuss one recent branch of this movement: narrative hermeneutics.15 In recent years, there has been growing interest in a hermeneutic approach to narrative, in connection with the boom of interdisciplinary narrative ­studies that increasingly brings into dialogue literary studies, social sciences, philosophy and psychology. Narrative hermeneutics approaches narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices (Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014; Meretoja 2014b, 2018; Freeman 2015; Brockmeier 2016 [ed,]). Ever since Ricoeur’s (1984, 1988) path-breaking work, hermeneutic approaches to narrative have emphasized the existential-ethical dimension of narrative—its inseparability from our being in the world. Culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making shape our engagements with the world, our relationships with others and our orientation to the past, present and future. Current literary scholars working in this area attempt to combine an exploration of the ontological significance of narrative for human existence with the need to develop an analytical framework that is attentive to the ethical dimension of different narrative forms and functions.16 They aspire to avoid the pitfalls of narratological approaches that neglect the worldly contexts in which ethical issues are embedded and of those cultural studies approaches that pay insufficient attention to the specificity of narrative forms and strategies. While structuralist narratology influentially defined narrative as a representation of a series of events, various forms of ‘postclassical’ narratology now emphasize the experiential aspect of narratives—that narratives convey a sense

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of what it feels like to be a particular person in a particular situation or ‘what the world is like from the situated perspective of an experiencing mind’ (Herman 2009, 157). The experiential aspect has been integral to narrative hermeneutics from the beginning: Ricoeur (1984, 3) already defined narrative as the human mode of experiencing time. From the perspective of narrative hermeneutics, however, the conception of experience in the dominant form of postclassical narratology, cognitive narratology, tends to be universalist, ahistorical and negligent of issues of social power.17 That interpretations change the world has been acknowledged by a range of hermeneutically oriented thinkers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Bakhtin and Ricoeur—who emphasize that understanding is our way of being in the world as embodied and enfleshed subjects in the temporal process of becoming. As Gadamer puts it, interpretation is not merely ‘reproductive’ but always also a ‘productive activity’ (1997, 296), integral to the process in which we become who we are, since ours is a ‘being that is becoming’ (312). His philosophical hermeneutics, however, pays little attention to the concrete ways in which the temporal, productive activity of everyday interpretative practices shapes social worlds and their power relations. In the Nietzschean-Foucauldian tradition, in contrast, the view of human beings as interpretative animals is inseparable from seeing them as constellations of forces, as agents with the capacity for affecting and being affected by social networks of power. Hence, I have argued that weaving together aspects of philosophical hermeneutics and the Nietzschean-Foucauldian hermeneutic tradition provides a framework for exploring narratives as culturally mediated and socially embedded interpretative practices that have a productive, formative and performative dimension (Meretoja 2016, 2018). As interpretations of the world, narrative practices have real-world effects: they take part in constructing, shaping and transforming human reality. Narrative interpretations are social acts of bestowing meaning on experiences and events, and they perpetuate, challenge and modify the ways in which we perceive our possibilities and act in the world. While all ways of orienting ourselves to the world—our perceptions, experiences, memories, attachments, actions, fantasies—have an interpretative structure, not all interpretations are narrative interpretations. We engage in narrative interpretation when we relate our experiences to one another in time and forge meaningful connections between them. I have argued (Meretoja 2018, 48–50) for conceptualizing narrative as a culturally mediated practice of sense-making that involves the activities of interpreting and presenting someone’s experiences in a specific situation to someone from a certain perspective as part of a meaningful, connected account. It has a dialogical and a productive, performative dimension and is relevant for the understanding of human possibilities. In other words, narrative does not merely report what

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happened; it provides an interpretation of how certain events are/were experienced by someone, in a particular situation and from a particular perspective. As an account communicated to someone, it is a material (typically verbal or visual) narrative artefact; as an interpretative activity, it renders experiences and actions intelligible and is mediated by cultural models of narrative sense-­making. Some theorists have conceptualized this interpretative process in terms of an assimilation to cognitive or emotional patterns,18 but it is also important to acknowledge that precisely when narratives unsettle our cognitive and affective categories, something ethically valuable can happen. Although narratives forge meaningful connections, they do not always produce unity or coherence; in fact, compelling narratives often explore possible lives in ways that challenge our certainties, including illusions of coherence and unity. That narratives have a dialogical dimension means that they always take shape in dialogue with other culturally mediated narratives and broader social and cultural webs of meaning. Through this dialogue, they perpetuate and transform social structures, including structures of violence and unequal distribution of vulnerability and privilege. A narrative implies a certain understanding of what is possible in a particular world: narratives provide subject positions, and in narrative worlds, subjects of experience and action seize certain possibilities that are open for them and dismiss others. Narratives explore these possibilities, and through this exploration, they can provide us with new perspectives on our present and future possibilities. This hermeneutic approach to narrative allows us, first, to understand the relation between narrative and experience in such a way that neither posits a dichotomy between them nor identifies them with each other. As experience already has an interpretative structure, narratives can be conceptualized as interpretations of interpretations, and when we use them to reinterpret our lives, the logic of a triple hermeneutic is at play (Meretoja 2014a, 98, 2018, 62). It forms yet another hermeneutic circle because cultural narratives are not merely retrospective interpretations of experience but also affect how we experience things in the first place. Second, narrative hermeneutics provides a framework for articulating the idea that life does not form one coherent narrative but is instead an ongoing—often incoherent and fragmentary—process of narrative reinterpretation. Third, it allows us to conceptualize in a non-­ reductive way the relation between narrative webs and the individual subjects entangled in them: the relation between subjects of experience and cultural narratives is dialogical and entwined with practices of power.19 Overall, narrative hermeneutics has much to offer to many contemporary interdisciplinary debates, including those revolving around posthumanism, affect theory, memory studies, cognitive studies and rhetorical theory. To take

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a few recent examples: Jens Brockmeier (2015) shows how narrative hermeneutics provides a theoretical framework for conceptualizing memory as an interpretative process; Liesbeth Korthals Altes (2014) demonstrates the importance of hermeneutics for (rhetorical) narratology and the study of the author’s ethos; David Herman (2016) acknowledges that non-human animals have their own interpretative practices and argues that hermeneutics should be extended beyond the human world; and Timothy Clark (2015, 196–97) shows how Colin Davis’s (2010) defence of ‘overinterpretation’ is useful in critical engagement with the Anthropocene. Narrative hermeneutics also provides tools for articulating the limits of posthumanism: as important as it is to imagine the experience of non-humans, such imaginings are nevertheless human interpretations of non-human experience  and should acknowledge this. Finally, it offers fresh insights into the currently lively study of empathy. While cognitive studies have generally approached empathy as a ‘sharing of affect’ in the sense that ‘I feel what you feel’ (Keen 2007, 4–5) and emphasized how narratives invite empathy through narrative techniques that create a sense of similarity and familiarity, hermeneutic approaches emphasize difference as the starting point for ethical understanding and the potential of narrative to function as a mode of engaging with the singularity of the other’s experiences in specific situations in the world (Ritivoi 2016; Meretoja 2015, 2018).

Conclusion Hermeneutics provides an important conceptual framework for the philosophical self-understanding of the humanities and literary studies. Interpretation and understanding of human reality remain central to the humanities, and there is currently renewed interest in developing the notion of interpretation in new directions. Yet hermeneutics also faces persistent prejudices. The project of reimagining hermeneutics should start with the acknowledgement that it does not imply a commitment to any particular conception of interpretation but is a field of inquiry within which many rival theories of interpretation can flourish and debate. I believe that literary studies would benefit from seeing issues of interpretation in a broader context that acknowledges how interpretation is fundamental not only to our engagement with texts but to our whole being in the world and how narratives mediate our interpretative engagements with the world and other people. Literary studies should also pay more attention to how narratives and literary texts are not merely objects of interpretation but interpretative practices in their own right.

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In this world of increasing uncertainty about the future, imagination has become evermore important—in politics, the human sciences and the everyday. Hermeneutics articulates how integral to understanding as our mode of being in the world are the ways in which we orient ourselves to our possibilities, how we need imagination to find new ways of interpreting our possibilities, and how literature can expand our sense of the possible.

Notes 1. The term hermeneutics enters the lexicon in the Latinate form in seventeenthcentury protestant theology (Keane and Lawn 2016, 1); according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first used in English in the second edition of Daniel Waterland’s Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist (1737). 2. Schleiermacher developed his hermeneutics in his lectures in 1805–1833. 3. On ‘etwas als etwas’, see also Heidegger (1996, 58, 139) and Gadamer (1997, 90). 4. This and the next paragraph draw on The Ethics of Storytelling (Meretoja 2018, 45–46),  in which I  analyse in more detail examples of complex narrative interpretations. 5. Gadamer questions the theoretical-methodological self-understanding that derives from modern natural science but does not reject theories and methods as such (as is often claimed): ‘It is imagination that … serves the ability to expose real, productive questions, something in which, generally speaking, only he who masters all the methods of his science succeeds’ (1977, 12). 6. See Habermas (1986b, 198) and Gadamer (2001, 149–50, 1993, 469). 7. For a similar point, see Warnke (2002, 318–20). See also MacKendrick (2008, 93–94). 8. See, for example, Dostal (2002, 255–57). 9. On the dialogical relationship between individuals and social systems, see Meretoja (2014b, 167–71, 2016, 2018, 74–85). 10. For example, Warnke (1987, 116) claims that Gadamerian hermeneutics ‘remains tied to a society’s explicit or implicit self-understanding’. 11. On the idea of the text as a question, see Figal (2000, 337). 12. On the suspicion towards hermeneutics in French thought, see Davis (2010, 32–33, 50, 63, 173), Meretoja (2014b) and Felski (2015, 32–33). 13. These charges were levelled against hermeneutics in the famous debate between Habermas (see 1971, 1986a) and Derrida (see Michelfelder and Palmer 1989). 14. See Thompson (1995), Kögler (1999), Pappas and Cowling (2003), Mootz and Taylor (2011), Roberge (2011) and Meretoja (2014b). 15. In the discussion of narrative hermeneutics, I draw on Meretoja (2016, 2018).

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16. See, for example, Meretoja and Davis (2018), Meretoja (2014b, 2016, 2018) and Korthals Altes (2014) and the contributions by several literary scholars to the special issue Narrative Hermeneutics (Brockmeier 2016). 17. See, for example, Fludernik (1996), who sees ‘experiencing’ as a universal cognitive frame. 18. See, for example, Velleman (2003); on narrative as a form of explanation, see also Ritivoi (2009, 33). 19. For a more thorough discussion of these advantages, see Meretoja (2016 and 2018, Ch. 2).

References Badiou, Alain. 2004. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. Translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum. Bohman, James, David Hiley, and Richard Shusterman. 1991. Introduction: The Interpretive Turn. In The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, 1–14. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Booth, Wayne C. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, ed. 2016. Narrative Hermeneutics. Special Issue. Storyworlds 8 (1): 1–152. Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics. Storyworlds 6 (2): 1–27. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury. Davis, Colin. 2010. Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1972. The Rise of Hermeneutics (1900). Translated by Fredric Jameson. New Literary History 3 (2), 229–244. ———. 2002. Selected Works III. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910). Edited by R.A. Makkreel and F. Rodi. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Dostal, Robert. 2002. Gadamer’s Relation to Heidegger and Phenomenology. In The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert Dostal, 247–266. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Figal, Günter. 2000. Philosophische Hermeneutik—hermeneutische Philosophie. Ein Problemaufriss. In Hermeneutische Wege. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten, ed. Günter Figal, Jean Grondin, and Dennis J. Schmidt, 335–344. Tübingen: Mohr.

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Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1984. What Is Enlightenment? In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Frank, Manfred. 1989. What is Neostructuralism? (Was ist Neostrukturalismus? 1984). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Freeman, Mark. 2015. Narrative Hermeneutics. In The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, ed. Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman, and Kathleen L. Slaney, 234–247. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1977. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and edited by David E. Linge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 1984. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion. In Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica, 54–65. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. ———. 2001. Reason in the Age of Science. Translated by Frederick G.  Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 1987. The Problem of Historical Consciousness. In Interpretive Social Science. A Second Look, ed. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan, 82–140. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 1993. Gesammelte Werke. Band 2: Hermeneutik II. Tübingen: Mohr. ———. 1995. Gesammelte Werke. Band 10: Hermeneutik im Rückblick. Tübingen: Mohr. ———. 1996. Reflections on My Philosophical Journey. In The Philosophy of Hans-­ Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Hahn, 3–57. Chicago, IL: Open Court. ———. 1997. Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960). 2nd ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York, NY: Continuum. Giddens, Anthony. 1976. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies. London: Hutchinson. Gumbrecht, Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik. In Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, ed. Jürgen Habermas, Dieter Henrich, and Niklas Luhmann, 120–159. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol 1. Reason and the Rationalization of Society (1981). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ———. 1986a. A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser, 243–276. New York, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 1986b. Life-forms, Morality and the Task of the Philosopher. In Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity, ed. Peter Dews, 191–216. London: Verso.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1936). In Gesamtausgabe 5: Holzwege, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1–74. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1996. Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927). Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York, NY: SUNY Press. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2016. Hermeneutics Beyond the Species Boundary: Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives. Storyworlds 8 (1): 1–30. Husserl, Edmund. 2006. Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934). Die C-Manuskripte. Dordrecht: Springer. Keane, Niall, and Chris Lawn. 2016. Introduction. In The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Niall Keane and Chris Lawn, 1–7. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kögler, Hans Herbert. 1999. The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault. Translated by Paul Hendrickson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1991. The Natural and the Human Sciences. In The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, 17–24. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Macé, Marielle. 2011. Façons de lire, manières d’être. Paris: Gallimard. MacKendrick, Kenneth. 2008. Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’s Critical Theory. London: Routledge. Madison, G.B. 1997. Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality. In The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Hahn, 349–365. Chicago, IL: Open Court. Makkreel, Rudolf. 2016. Wilhelm Dilthey. In The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Niall Keane and Chris Lawn, 378–382. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. McCarthy, Thomas. 1984. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge: Polity Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014a. Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics. New Literary History 45 (1): 89–109. ———. 2014b. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. A Sense of History—A Sense of the Possible: Nussbaum and Hermeneutics on the Ethical Potential of Literature. In Values of Literature, ed. Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, 25–46. Leiden: Rodopi Brill. ———. 2016. For Interpretation. Storyworlds 8 (1): 97–117. ———. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meretoja, Hanna, and Colin Davis, eds. 2018. Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Michelfelder, Diane P., and Richard E. Palmer, eds. 1989. Dialogue & Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mootz, Francis, and George Taylor, eds. 2011. Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics. London: Continuum. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Vintage. Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pappas, Robin, and William Cowling. 2003. Toward a Critical Hermeneutics. In Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code, 203–227. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative (Temps et récit I, 1983). Vol. 1 of 3 vols. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. Time and Narrative (Temps et récit III, 1985). Vol. 3 of 3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1991. From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II (Du texte à l’action, 1986). Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B.  Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ritivoi, Andrea. 2009. Explaining People: Narrative and the Study of Identity. Storyworlds 1: 25–41. ———. 2016. Reading Stories, Reading (Others’) Lives: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and Narrative Understanding. Storyworlds 8 (1): 51–76. Roberge, Jonathan. 2011. What is Critical Hermeneutics? Thesis Eleven 106 (1): 5–22. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1977. Second Academy Address. In Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, trans. James Duke and ed. Heinz Kimmerle, 195–214. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion. ———. 1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism. And Other Writings. Edited by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Dialogical Self. In The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, 304–314. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2002a. Gadamer on the Human Sciences. In The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert Dostal, 126–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002b. Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on the Conceptual Schemes. In Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, 279–297. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Thompson, John. 1995. Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Velleman, J. David. 2003. Narrative Explanation. Philosophical Review 112 (1): 1–25.

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17 Phenomenology Alexander Kozin and Tanja Staehler

It is doubtful that we will ever fully understand what Edmund Husserl meant when he said that ‘fiction is the life element (Lebenselement) of phenomenology.’1 The part we understand quite well, owing to scholars like Richard Kearney and Julia Jansen, concerns the vital role of the imagination for phenomenology.2 While the importance of imagination and thought experiments for Husserlian phenomenology are fairly obvious (though not uncomplicated, as far as the actual application and interpretation goes), the role of fiction in the sense of literature is more difficult to determine. In this chapter, we will rely on the second main phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, to provide us with a very plausible argument for the significance of literature for phenomenology. Heidegger states that a work of art, and especially a work of literature, opens up a world. What this means will be explained below; but it is helpful to already note that this is a crucial aid which art/literature provides to phenomenology because world proves the most essential concept to the phenomenological project. The significance of world will be shown in the first section of this chapter with the help of Husserl. After Heidegger shows us how literature reveals world, we will see an additional problem, namely, that world itself is too monolithic to open up for analysis. It may initially seem equally tricky to ‘break world down’; but it will turn out that the idea of elements or the elemental which we already find in Presocratic philosophy can accomplish the task. We will thus come to see that literature reveals world by way of revealing elements: air/wind, water, earth, fire. A. Kozin • T. Staehler (*) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_17

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Husserl and the Importance of the Lifeworld Husserl diagnosed a crisis in the 1930s that arguably continues in transformed versions into our times. This crisis, Husserl claims, is a ‘Crisis of European Humanity’ (original title of the lecture) that comes about through a ‘Crisis of the European Sciences’ (title of the book as published). The sciences have transformed, and while Husserl speaks mostly about the natural sciences, especially physics, we nowadays see an upsurge of neuroscience, for example, when it comes to the search for the truth about who we are. The dominance of economics and the ways in which economics in a more and more obvious way determines the political space is a more recent development in which a different science claims a central position. Economics shares the feature of being a science that tries to establish its methodological rigor by relying on the quantitative method at the expense of qualitative considerations. While Husserl, originally a mathematician, would be far from a condemnation of the quantitative approach as such, he considers it one-sided, as we will now briefly explain. The crisis that Husserl identifies did not begin in the twentieth century; its origins date back to Ancient Greece when philosophy and the sciences emerged. According to Husserl, the emergence of philosophy and the sciences came about through the very same realization which was then interpreted in a one-sided fashion. This realization concerns the difference between one unified object and the manifold appearances and meanings this object carries. Husserl believes that it may well have been the encounter with strangers or with ‘alien worlds’ (Fremdwelten) which brought this realization about because in the encounter with the stranger, it turns out that even the basic, stable, cosmic ‘objects’ like the moon exhibit this duality: ‘It is the same sun, the same moon, the same earth, the same sea, etc. that are so differently mythologized by the different peoples according to their particular traditionality’ (Husserl 1993, 387). The difference between one’s own nation and alien nations thus brings to the fore the difference of relative ways of givenness and a non-relative core. Husserl immediately answers the obvious objection: why is it in the encounter with the alien that this distinction first arises? Is it not already in the intersubjective intercourse of individual persons within our own nation that we get to know differences of diverging conceptions which refer to the one and same object? Husserl replies that those differences belong to the ‘long familiar form of everydayness in which normal practical life takes place’ (Husserl 1993, 388). This normality is only ruptured in an encounter with the alien.

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What is this special feature of the relation between home and alien, and what distinguishes it from the relation between normality and abnormality? Husserl calls the essential difference between home and alien a ‘fundamental category of all historicity’ (Husserl 1954/1970, 320/275). The special feature of an alien object is that it is not only an object unfamiliar and incomprehensible to us but an object that seems to belong to a context alien to us. The alien object seems to have a meaning that is unfamiliar to us but familiar to other people; it points to other objects that are equally more or less alien to us. An alien tool is still recognized by us as a kind of tool that supposedly fulfills a certain function, for example, is not a work of art, and so on. It belongs to an alien world. The rupture of the home by the alien, in other words, makes it clear that all beings in general appear in contexts, in horizons, that is, that they belong to a world: a familiar, meaningful context. But world becomes ever more taken for granted as the identical core of the object exerts its special pull. Once it becomes possible to attach a mathematical unit to it, the possibilities of identification and comparison become more pervasive. Mathematics is objective: a triangle is a triangle, and 1+1  =  2, regardless of culture, background, persuasion, opinion. Husserl explores the origin of geometry in detail because it was indeed an amazing discovery when the Ancient Greeks noticed that there are certain measurements—length, height, shape—to which a mathematical idea can be attributed directly. For other qualities of the object, only indirect mathematization is possible. Yet indirect mathematization is indeed possible, as the modern sciences have shown. Husserl explains this possibility by pointing out that the object’s sense-­ qualities are ‘closely related in a quite peculiar and regulated way’ with the spatiotemporal shapes (Husserl 1954/1970, 35/33). Husserl gives the example of the causal relation between the pitch of the tone and the length of the string set vibrating as it was noted by the Pythagoreans (Husserl 1954/1970, 37/36) or, more generally, the connection between the sensible quality ‘sound’ and the geometric quality ‘length of string set.’ Several further examples come to mind, and Husserl simply chooses one of the historically earliest. The important point is that sense-qualities exist in gradations; there are various degrees of warmth, various pitches of sounds, and so on. These gradations motivate the idea of a description in numbers; this possibility has to be explored and confirmed with respect to each quality. Once it has turned out, for example, that liquids expand in a regulated fashion when the temperature increases, the invention of a thermometer is only a small step away. Nevertheless, it is a big step from such individual examples to the idea of the universal mathematization of the world. Here lies the audacity of Galileo’s thesis or of the thesis of modern natural science—even though we now take

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this idea for granted. ‘Thanks to our earlier scientific schooling’ (Husserl 1954/1970, 36/35), we imagine sound as a wave between a source and our ear. Yet the fact that it is difficult to understand the ‘referring’ between spatiotemporal shapes and plena and thus the possibility of an indirect mathematization of plena might be an important indication that there is something in the plena which evades all mathematization or which gets lost in the reduction of sense-qualities to spatiotemporal qualities.3 Husserl therefore describes Galileo as ‘at once a discovering and a concealing genius’ (Husserl 1954/1970, 52/50). The idea of a universal mathematization is daring and has contributed to the sciences’ progress. Yet it also meant the loss of our direct, concrete relation to the sense-qualities and objects, and as a consequence, to the lifeworld in its indeterminacy and richness. Red is not just a wavelength; it is a sense-­ quality. What is it that gets lost in the mathematization of sense-qualities? Their aesthetic qualities, that which makes up art, that which puts us into awe and inspires wonder. In their ‘forgetfulness of the lifeworld,’ the sciences fail to recognize that the everyday lifeworld is the very foundation of the meaning of science and that the results of sciences always flow back into the lifeworld. This objectivism is one-sided because it forgets about the lifeworld and its sense-qualities. Yet world is crucial to who we are; our being is being-in-the-world, as Heidegger is going to say. We take world for granted to such an extent that we do not even notice the forgetfulness of the lifeworld that determines the sciences. How, then, can we approach world and overcome the forgetfulness? Heidegger argues that literature plays a crucial role.

 eidegger on Literature Opening Up Elemental H Worlds In his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ Heidegger wants to understand the traditional conception of art in a new and more appropriate way. Traditionally, a work of art is described as consisting of two layers or levels, be they called form and content or spiritual and material side, and so on. As a phenomenologist, Heidegger turns toward the work of art and investigates how it appears, how it is given. The main thesis of his essay is that the essence of a work of art is the setting-to-work of truth. In and through the work of art, truth in the sense of Greek aletheia, unconcealment, comes into appearance. Truth is not to be understood here as something that is primarily found in a judgment or that can be conceived as the conformity of knowledge with

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the matter; truth means that something shows itself in a genuine and actual way. The essence of truth as unconcealment is to emerge from an original concealment. This concealment can never be eliminated or removed, but remains as a permeating element of aletheia: truth is ‘never a merely existent state, but a happening (Geschehnis)’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 52/53)—a happening of opposition. The work of art sets truth as unconcealment to work by disclosing what and how a particular being is. This disclosure of truth takes place in a twofold movement: setting up a world and setting forth the earth. The world that is set up in the work of art is neither a collection of things in the world nor a mere framework for those things. If world consisted of things or were something like a container for them, then world would be the whole with things as its parts. In this case, it would not make sense to talk of the work of art as setting up a world; for a work as a mere part of the world could not possibly set up a world. Moreover, world as sum of things would itself be an object, even if an extraordinarily large one. But this concept completely misses the essence of world: ‘World is the ever-nonobjective’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 41/43). World is not a being; world ‘is’ not ‘world worlds’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 41/43). World that is set up in the work is a referential context in which everything as it appears points to something else. Referential implications can be taken up or neglected; if we follow up on an implication, new ones become obvious. World is becoming, is developing in the course of history. The work of art opens up the world of a ‘historical people’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 45/47). The work of art sets up this world by disclosing what remains hidden in our everyday life. Usually, we take up referential implications without reflecting on the context as such. Art ruptures this everyday course. ‘Setting forth the earth’ is Heidegger’s attempt to conceive of the putative setting forth of a work of art out of some material in a new way. Heidegger shows that the setting forth of the work is not a production of the work by a human being, but a setting forth of the earth by the work. In the work, the material does not vanish (as it does in equipment that is all the better the less its material ‘resists vanishing’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 42/44)). Rather, it is in the work that the material comes forth: the massiveness and heaviness of the stone, the brightening of color, and the clang of tone appear as such. The earth appears in the work of art since the work lets the earth be an earth; it lets the earth be as sheltering, as that which is essentially undisclosable. World and earth are opposed in a conflict; yet in this very strife, each opponent is raised into the self-assertion of its essential nature. The world always rests upon the earth and yet strives to surmount it; the earth is moved into the open region of a world and yet strives to draw the world into itself and shelter

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it there. This strife is carried out on the ground of truth as the original belonging together of concealment and unconcealment. Heidegger emphasizes that ‘truth does not exist itself beforehand, somewhere among the stars, only subsequently to descend elsewhere among beings’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 61/59). Truth only exists when it establishes its open region. One way in which truth can establish itself among beings is by setting itself to work. Therefore, truth has an ‘impulse toward a work’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 60/58)—a tendency to bring itself to being in a work of art. A privileged role can be attributed to literature or the linguistic work of art. Heidegger contends that all art is essentially poetry (Heidegger 1960/1971, 73f./70). Although he takes poetry in the broadest sense here, he claims that the linguistic work of art, the poem in the narrower sense, has a privileged role. The unique and privileged role of linguistic artwork, according to Heidegger, is grounded in the very meaning of language. The everyday conception of language as a means of communication misses the essence of language. Heidegger argues that language does not express that which has already been disclosed; rather, language is the very act of disclosure itself. By naming things for the first time, language first brings beings to appearance. The poet ‘has experienced that only the word lets appear and come into being the thing as the thing it is’ (Heidegger 1959/1982, 168/65). This even holds for the accomplishments of modern science and technology, although we would think that they are produced by human beings in an autonomous way and that a word is then attributed to the thing invented, without language playing a decisive role in this process. Even a sputnik is what it is ‘in the name of its name’ (Heidegger 1959/1982, 165/62). Only language lets the thing be a thing, and only on the basis of language’s disclosive power is a conversation (Gespräch) possible. Only in and through language can humans be with each other. We have to realize that usually, we conceive of the relation between humans and language in the wrong way: language is ‘not anything that man has, but on the contrary, that which has man’ (Heidegger 1980, 74). Speech is no autonomous action; we do not produce anything, but a thought comes to us. Therefore, Heidegger says that ‘language speaks’ and that ‘man speaks insofar as he corresponds to language (der Sprache entspricht),’ that is, listens to it (Heidegger 1959, 12). Language enables us to be what we are. Only because language speaks to us can we be human beings. For it is the essence of human beings to be with each other, and more specifically, to be in a conversation with each other: ‘What human beings are—we are a conversation’ (‘Was der

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Mensch ist—wir sind ein Gespräch’) (Heidegger 1980, 74).4 A conversation cannot be reduced to a mere exchange of information; a conversation ­presupposes our ability to listen. A listening conversation of this kind is only possible because we are able to listen to language, which lets us see things. We are always already familiar with language; ‘we are within language, at home in language, prior to anything else’ (Heidegger 1959/1982, 241/398). The literary work of art thus opens up world and sets forth earth in an exemplary fashion. Yet in his later philosophy, the opposition of world and earth is replaced by the opposition of sky and earth, two elements in the fourfold (with humans and divinities crossing through the sky/earth opposition). World becomes the name for the opposition of sky and earth, or even for the entire mirror play (Spiegelspiel) of the fourfold. World is not uniform, but made of oppositions and movements between oppositions. World is the place of the strife between those elemental forces between which we dwell. World is happening—by way of the elementals and the movements between them. Already Husserl realized that a phenomenology of the world is basically an impossible endeavor. Not only do we take world too much for granted and are thus dependent on literature for some distance and a change of attitude, but even with such a change, world is too large, encompassing, monolithic for a phenomenological investigation. In his work on the lifeworld, Husserl opens up the topic through an analysis of the current crisis, and he then suggests a stepwise change of attitude, first abstracting from the sciences. Elsewhere, he suggests ‘regional’ phenomenologies that attend to regions of the lifeworld; but he did not have an opportunity to work out in a systematic fashion what these regions would look like. Here, we can again learn from Heidegger whose thinking of the fourfold is much indebted to Presocratic thought. Rather than pursuing the specifics of Heidegger’s fourfold thinking, we will follow his general move of breaking world up into four main regions; but we will follow his move all the way back to the Presocratics and take these four regions to come under the headings of air, earth, water, fire. Manifestations can vary, as we will see: air can come as wind, earth as sand or dust, water as river, and so on. What remains and could even come under the heading of ‘a priori structures of the lifeworld’ that Husserl was so keen on finding are elements by way of sense-qualities that sustain our dwelling—although they can also threaten and even destruct it. Existence means being-in-the-world, and that means living with the elements.

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Air And yet, in the middle of all that there is something else that happens. In the midst of being as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lightning. … Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us, humans, a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not and access to those beings that we ourselves are. (Heidegger 1960/1971, 49/51)

With this passage from ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ Heidegger presents the elementals—the sky and the earth as well as the humans and the divinities—not as the components of a structural model held together by the operations of opposition and association but as the conditions for encountering the uncanny expressed as imaginary worlds in art. An access to these worlds requires a passage through an opening, a clearing, which is akin to a lightning, that is, a flash of realization. In this section I would like to take a short story by R. Kipling appropriately titled ‘At the End of the Passage’ in order to show how an elemental separates the humans from the divinities exposing the mortals to their fragile existence. In light of the theme of this chapter, I will be focusing on a particular elemental—air. Beginning with air is not an arbitrary choice, for in making it we follow Luce Irigaray’s title The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Although Irigaray mounts a formidable critique to Heidegger’s writings on the elementals, her own work itself is irrelevant here; suffice it that the title of her book discloses the nature of this elemental as the one most taken for granted. Phenomenologically, this fact should be a sufficient reason to give air immediate prominence. Parmenides states: ‘Air is secretion of the earth’ (Barnes 1987, 87). This means that it is rising from the earth, striving out of the earth’s hold. According to Empedocles, air satisfies this striving by bringing in ‘height,’ creating a creative openness for both the humans and the divinities (it might be worth reminding there that divinities are also the elementals). Air fills this openness with substance. The substance can be wondrous. Take, for example, the experience we commonly have when encountering twilight, that is, become wrapped up in it. Twilight is wondrous because it obscures the separation between the earth and the sky, making people take things and even themselves for divinities or missing the appearance of the divinities behind the haze created by nature. Insufficient air does not only conceal; air can be deadly. Without air, claims Empedocles, strife takes over the earth and the sky, killing the soul, which ‘consists of all four elements,’ and therefore cannot survive if one of them is missing (Barnes 1987, 145). The lack of air is a passage to madness.

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Madness on account of the missing air is the key theme Kipling pursues in his ‘At the End of the Passage.’ In a Himalayan folk poem that Kipling chooses as an epitaph to his story, he gives us an elaboration of air which, due to its liminal nature, provides the passage for the mortals by taking their souls in a passage to death: ‘And the winds of Hell are loosened and driven/And the dust flies up in the face of Heaven…/And the soul of man … flies up like the dust in the sheet’ (Kipling 1997, 36). The dust flying propelled by the dry sandfilled wind is what Kipling makes responsible for the premature and horrible death of a mortal in his story. In other words, this combination—the earth and the wind (the howling dust)—creates the liminal state of being for the protagonists of the story, instilling a certain attitude or a certain mood, which can only result in madness and death.5 The plot of the ‘Passage’ is simple: a group of four English men, stationed in India to work on different sections of the Guadhari State line under construction, get together once a month, as a habit and a tradition, to play a bit of twist and drink some beer. Their encounter occurs in a carriage rebuilt into a semblance of the house. Despite the difference of their positions (geological surveyor, civil servant, an emissary from the Home Office), ‘they were lonely folk who understood the dreaded meaning of loneliness’ (Kipling 1997, 36). The elementals responded to their state by filling their common world with nothing but dust. The dust was omnipresent. The ‘devil-wind’ moved it in all directions twisting and whirling the outside as if it was not air but water that did that. ‘There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon—nothing but a brown haze which rose from the ground without wind or warning’ (Kipling 1997, 36). The arduous journey that some of the players had to make to get to the game was harrowing enough not to want to ever step outside. The dust flying in the face of Heaven, repeating the Himalayan poem, created and, in some cases, exacerbated the conditions for the transition (passage) toward a different place. As Kipling describes it, the game is not going well, the food is mediocre, and after the players run out of beer, two of them decide to leave, taking their despair and disgust at their living conditions with them. The remaining two were Spurstow and Hammil. The resident of the bungalow, Hammil, was an assistant engineer. Spurstow was a local doctor. When Hammil suggested that Spurstow remained, there was indeed little reason to refuse the invitation: at the time the doctor was facing hundreds of cholera patients in the hospital located 150 miles away. Driving that distance was terrifying, but even more terrifying at the end was a conversation with Hammil, the conversation which was itself terror. The cause of the engineer’s terror was defined by the doctor in the psychiatric parlance as depression. He recommended rest. But there was something in Hammil’s descriptions of insomnia;

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he talked about it as the fear to fall asleep. When the other three fellows arrived for their next weekly get-together, they found Hammil in his bed dead. The doctor said that the death came as a form of what was a form of apoplexy, a visitation (itself an interesting choice of a word: Hammil could have indeed be visited by a divinity who terrified him to death) (Kipling 1997, 50). In fact, it was the lack of air that killed him, the lack of seeing an opening and thus being unable to possess a soul, or rather having his soul be taken from him. The howling wind was dragging it to hell. As a native said, ‘Heaven-­ born, in my opinion, my master has descended into the Dark Places, and there has been caught because he was not able to escape with sufficient speed’ (Kipling 1997, 49). The departed had no breath, in other words, he was suffocating from the lack of openness and clearing, the lack of shape and direction. His affliction was the fear produced by the howling wind in which he heard the voice of Hell and the dust was going to bring him there. He could not sleep because his terror enveloped him in blindness, as if air has called itself off. Unlike his fellow card players, who were annoyed, nostalgic, irritated, but did not undergo a passage, and no devil-wind or that foul hellish air could overtake them and obtain their souls. In this description, the dust appears as a quasi-elemental, already not a substance but an elemental being that fills in the between of the clearing that opens up the world to human moods, thus providing a passage to the terrifying existence of a human being who is stuck in the liminality where neither the sky nor the earth hold but on the contrary shake and shake the soul until it gets disconnected and disappears. The divine intervention, unlike the human one, gives nothing but an image that is empty despite being filled, for in the cloud of dust, one can lose oneself, letting oneself be taken by the clouds to the place where air forgets to let you breath.

Earth Dust leads us to earth, the elemental that often appears opposed to air. Its position in the group is rather contested. For Thales it is floating in the water, which will be our next element. Heraclitus is more interested in the relationship between water and earth, the relationship which is based on mutual renewal by way of change. Thus, he states that ‘change is path up and down: when water turns into earth—this is the path downwards. Then again earth dissolves, and water comes into being from it, and everything else from water (ehalaion),—this is the path upwards’ (Barnes 1987, 57). Later he states that from earth water comes into being, and from water soul (Barnes 1987, 63).

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The latter confirms the secondary status of earth for Heraclitus, which is also relationally tied to fire by both Parmenides and Empedocles. Heidegger, however, comes to disagree, suggesting that ‘the setting up of a world and the setting forth the earth are two essential features in the work-­ being of the work’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 44/46). The responsibility of the earth for bringing work forward can be associated with the creative potential of man whose soul rests upon it moving with the world and being moved by it. Earth, Heidegger explains, should be conceived with the help of the Ancient Greek concept of physis, coming forth by itself. With Heidegger, we also come to understand that the earth is a source of strife and that it can bring destruction when its relation with the sky is jeopardized by either fire or water. It is on the basis of the latter that we would like, for our second study of the elementals, to suggest Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky. Bowles sets up the novel’s narrative against the sedentary culture of the Moroccan port. The main three characters of the novel, a married couple, Port and Kit, as well as their friend Tunner, come here from New York City to avoid the postwar malaise, and although Port and Kit identify themselves as ‘travelers’ and Tunner stands out as a tourist, they all strive for the same: movement. Port, who is an informal leader of the group, is sporadic. He has no plan except for finding something someplace else, any place else, as far away from the home as possible. This ‘creative’ desire of his sends the group on all kinds of adventure, mostly down south into the Sahara. Neither character is interested in the natives. As Kit put it: ‘The people of every country become like the people of any other country’ (Bowles 1947, 12). Indeed, the atmosphere of the postwar North African city is described as drab and solemn; there is little wonder that one finds there. Moreover, it lacks the energy of movement, the very concern of Port, who would take any opportunity to explore the possibility of threading the earth. Such an opportunity presents itself almost immediately although it appears more of a prelude to a real travel. During a late night walk, Port finds himself followed by an Arab man, Smaїl, who talks him into visiting a camp of the nomads who have settled down below at the bottom of the city where in one of the tents young and beautiful girls from the Sahara would dance for men. After many attempts to shed the unwelcome other, Port agrees to follow his daemon. Smaїl brings Port to an empty tent where he asks Port to wait until he finally returns with a beautiful young girl. Soon after, a liminal creature named Marhnia walks in, makes tea, and then ‘dances’ for Port, making him feel as if he has met a goddess. He does not understand Marhnia’s speech, but the goddess could somehow communicate that she fell down to the earth to dance for the ‘ugly men,’ while far out there, in the Sahara, there are men as

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beautiful as angels, waiting for her to return and dance for them. Having to make them wait saddens her. She also misses sand, her home earth. Due to the circumstances which appear superfluous at this point, on the second leg of their journey to Boussif, Port and Kit go different ways. Kit goes by a slow train with Tunner, while Port chooses the company of the Lyles, the mother and the son, who travel in their own car to Boussif. The travels produce contrary effects. While Port is merely annoyed by the English couple, he finds the monotony of the sandy hills enjoyable. The strangeness of the earth attracts him. Kit however has a different experience: as she walks away from Tunner during her train ride, she encounters horrific images of raw and unpretentious humanity, a zombie-like human mass of the natives in the third-class carriage, where men were looking at her without sympathy or antipathy, but, surprisingly, not even curiosity, ‘they had the vacant expression on their faces as of a man who has just simply blown their nose’ (Bowles 1947, 65). After the train ride, Kit, who is extremely sensitive to ‘signs,’ feels as if the sky came closer, while the earth moved away. Her sense of disaster is realized in Boussif, where Port and Kit run away from Tunner and where Port becomes sick. He describes his sickness as the falling into a dark well a thousand miles deep; with a great difficulty he rises from the lower regions of his consciousness, and when he does, it is always with a sense of infinite sadness and repose: ‘The soul is the weariest part of the body’ (Bowles 1947, 65). As the impelling centrifugal force continues to drive Port to the other ways of non-being, he notices the change of the earth itself. Breathing the dust and feeling sharp stones underneath his feet, the chilling wind at night, and the blazing sun in the morning become those very ‘signs’ that remind him of the destiny that lies ahead: ‘One said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time’ (Bowles 1947, 104). But the pressing need to find ‘another time’ grew stronger as his emotions grew wilder, which coincided with the onset of typhoid that began to weaken his body. The sky, so welcoming in the beginning of the journey, now made him avert his eyes. The sound of the wind replaced the sound of human voices. Another trip and Port finds himself incapacitated and at the mercy of Kit, who becomes more together as his own humanity is being slowly swallowed by the earth. His imminent death gives him the final image: ‘the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge’ (Ibid., 188). After he is taken by the earth, Port leaves Kit alone to herself and her own journey through the alien-land. Despite her inner intensity and anxiety before life, Kit comes to Africa not by herself but in Port’s possession, physically,

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materially, and symbolically. Without him and his obsession with movement, her sense of herself involved only short intervals of time that had no history and no story, only images. Fleeing from the remains of his home-world, Port brought her to the edge of the liminal world and left her there when he died, transferring thereby his sense of self-alienation onto her. In the alien-land, edge is the essence, and in the desert there is no other edge but sand, ‘another horror’ (Bowles 1947, 156). After Kit escaped from the French barracks into the desert night with a valise filled with Port’s money and her essentials, she felt renewed. When Kit stopped a caravan moving to an unknown destination, she was sure of only one thing—she was not dead. All else appeared secondary. Only movement mattered. Even when the caravan made the first stop for the night, and master Belquassim and his older friend took her by force one by one, as they continued to do throughout the journey, she did not put up a fight; her screams were directed only at Belquassim, who became her daemon to whom she decided to attach herself and whom she followed almost to the end of the journey. After countless days in the house of Belquassim, where she was kept as a sex slave, Kit escapes again. ‘The journey must continue,’ she says to herself. She remembers that she had to send a telegram. But, unable to articulate the addressor, all that she writes is: ‘cannot get back.’ Soon a plane is sent from Tangiers by the US Embassy to pick her up and bring her back. The last memory of Kit when she boards the plane is the violent blue sky. Like a great overpowering light, it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone else said once that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person from the horror that lies beneath. But the earth is not letting her go: ‘At any moment the rip in the sky would occur, the edges would fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed’ (Bowles 1947, 231). She must escape the earth, which she does at the end of the novel by putting herself on the crowded street train and running with it through the entire city until it reaches the last stop.

Water We introduced earth as opposed to air or sky, following the order from Heidegger’s fourfold. But intuitively and according to the Presocratics, the element linked to earth by way of opposition could also appear to be water. There is no fixed order of the elements; they can be arranged into flexible pairs of strife, allowing for movement. With the help of literature, we explore the role of these elementals for our existence. For the literary work that discloses

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the sense of water, we take Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The choice of this work is stipulated by the approach to this elemental not as a pure substance or a root component of the world but as the condition for a particular disposition of the mortals who encounter this elemental as it is, as the river, in this case. For the Presocratics, water was one of the two ‘main’ elements. For example, Thales maintained that the earth rests on water, hence the movement of the world. Later, Aristotle objected to this definition, insisting that water was life in general, belonging to both the humans and the animals that produced the movement of the soul. Heraclitus explained the primacy of water is a different way, associating it with the earth. It is in the relationship between the two that movement, or rather change, even history, speaking in terms of the mortals, is possible: ‘Change is the path up and down. When fire coheres with water, water turns into earth—this is the path downwards. Then again, when earth dissolves, and water comes into being from it, everything else comes from water (ehalaion),—this is the path upwards’ (Barnes 1987, 57). The importance of Conrad’s novella in this regard is that its protagonist, Charlie Marlow, a seaman but also a wanderer, is the only character who ‘follows water’ looking for wonder. It is for this kind of wonder that he decides to go to Africa. He believes that there he could find one of the ‘dark places’ because by the end of the nineteenth century when all the blank places had disappeared anywhere, some dark places still remained. For his journey he takes a river, an especially mighty river that passes through the entire continent, ‘resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body of rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land’ (Conrad 1902, 12). Marlow wants to go down this river into the land which is neither friendly nor penetrable otherwise. It takes him a while and ultimately an intervention of a powerful relative to get a job in what they called Company which was essentially a trading enterprise that exchanged the ivory from the locals for rifles and trinkets of all kinds. It was hard for Marlow to imagine that it could be a profitable enterprise: the times of ivory trade were almost over, and the locals became rather hostile. So, now or never, thought Marlow. To make a long story short and trying not to deviate too much from the topic of this section, after much hardship, Marlow set off on his mission, down the river. There, they said he would have the privilege of meeting the best station master, Mr. Kurtz, who produced more ivory than the rest of the river posts, but who was somewhat ‘strange.’ Marlow wanted immediately to meet Kurtz, and since his station was the last one at the end of the river, deep in Congo, it suited Marlow’s yearning for the ‘dark place.’

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It was during that voyage that river as an elemental came into prominence for both Marlow and the reader. Its waters were dark and unruly: the steam boat was struggling through every curve. It was also incredibly alive too. Its waters sustained not just fish but alligators, water snakes, and other river-­ bound ‘inhabitants’ whose souls all together formed the river as the living water. This water was animated in other ways. Through its relation to earth, it rose, just like Heraclitus put it, as if it has indeed risen from the earth, like the locals who would appear from the jungle to bring earth to the travelers. They were paddling around, their canoes representing some of their homes. The earth was encroaching on the river to the extent that Marlow said that it was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, ‘when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings’ (Conrad 1902, 48). The world he wanted to experience was the world which would consist only of plants, water, and silence. Going by or rather being taken by the snake of the river meant to go deeper and deeper to the heart of darkness (Conrad 1902, 50). The prehistoric world created by the combination of the river and the sea of plant life made the travelers feel like they are gradually being cut off the civilization and comprehension of the modern world, which was slowly sipping out of them, leaving them only with a sense of an impending disaster. ‘The earth seemed unearthly, as if water replaced it’ (Conrad 1902, 51). As the steam boat was chugging along, surprise attacks by the natives became more frequent; one of them took away a member of the crew, but that was somewhat expected. The unexpected encounter was with a rogue white man (son of an arch-priest, allegedly), who was living among the natives and was quite familiar with Mr. Kurtz, whose madness became the main topic of his conversation with Marlow. ‘The power of darkness took him,’ insisted the stranger and added: ‘He is with the river now. “My river,” he calls it’ (Conrad 1902, 71). In the meantime, the river turned into a stream and then back into the river, looking more and more like the python that was lying on the shore digesting a recently swallowed pig. The words mad, madness, insane, and so on in regard to Mr. Kurtz resounded more often as Marlow approached his station, while the signs of it, as in rotting human heads sitting on long sharp sticks, appeared more often. At last the ship reached Mr. Kurtz’s station; there even the river seems to have quieted down, running slower and slower until Marlow’s ship docked in as if by itself. The appearance of Mr. Kurtz was remarkable. He appeared carried by half a dozen natives in a long chair and with his hanging legs appeared even taller that he was in fact, about 7 feet. Elevated to the status of a God, he behaved like one. His first words in front of the crew were addressed not to Marlow and his men, but to the river, for as a deity, it required first attention. After a short cleansing, he waved at his carriers to take him away.

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To Marlow, despite a medical affliction which was obviously suffered by Kurtz, his soul was indeed mad. ‘But in that madness, there was nothing either above or below him. His madness turned him into an untouchable, a divinity, and for that reason he had to be eliminated’ (Conrad 1902, 95). In Kurtz, Marlow saw the incomprehensible mystery of the soul that rose above all limits, knew no restraints and no fear. It was a soul ready to be taken. In an attempt to save Kurtz, Marlow took him on the boat hoping to deliver Kurtz to the nearest hospital still alive. The natives resisted: their master was one with them and the river. But his hours were counted: ‘as the brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing the crew down towards the sea, Kurtz’s life was running swiftly, too, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of the inexorable time’ (Conrad 1902, 97). Kurtz did no go through the agony of the inevitable death. He knew it would come to him, bringing him the horror. His last wish was not however to re-establish some long-lost contact but to reunite with the element that both brought him to the verge of becoming deity and consuming him in madness: ‘Coming to the end of the river swallowed him whole’ (Conrad 1902, 100).

Fire The element of fire is perhaps the most difficult to discuss. Not only traditional literature shuns it as is, that is, finds it incapable to be able to maintain a plot on its own, considering it a destructive force; one rarely encounters substantial insights tied to that elemental. It is for that reason, but also in the spirit of diversifying our literary examples, that this time, we would like to turn to the precursor to literature—myth (Ancient Greek mythos). The myth we would like to discuss is nonetheless ‘literary’ for it is imbedded in the Platonic dialogue Protagoras and is narrated by way of a rebuttal to Socrates by Protagoras during their discussion about man’s capability to acquire virtues. The myth is of Prometheus. Protagoras offers it to Socrates as an illustration of his view, namely, that a change of disposition, as in turning from good into bad, for example, is possible; he uses the myth to support his position. Importantly for our discussion, the topic of virtues is not just tied to a myth, but to its main topic—fire—and fire, speaking of the Presocratics, has an element of justice. Thus Heraclitus says that ‘fire will come to judge and convict all things for all things emerge from fire and are resolved by fire’ (Barnes 1987, 54). He also says that ‘all things are an exchange for fire’ (Barnes 1987, 60). The power of fire was also noted by Parmenides who counts it, along with earth, among the ‘main principles’ (Barnes 1987, 86). Between earth and fire

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Parmenides places air. When a soul is brought forth by earth, fire lets it rise to the height of humanity. The myth of Prometheus elaborates this thesis further by presenting a divine cosmology, which includes both animals and humans (as different species), with each, except for men, being endowed with special, unique ‘capabilities’ (Plato 1997, Protagoras. 320d). According to the myth, Zeus put Epimetheus in charge of this task. The latter successfully created, from a mixture of earth and fire, all the animal species, giving them equally unique capabilities, which allowed them to live and flourish without exterminating each other. It happened though that the not-so-intelligent Epimetheus forgot about the humans and ran short of qualities for them, leaving them entirely deprived. Prometheus noticed this fact and took it upon himself to help the suffering humans. By deceit, he stole the corresponding magic that belonged to Athena and fire from Hephaestus. According to Plato, he did so to help the ‘naked and weak humans’ acquire ‘the ability of living together by community’ (Plato 1997, Protagoras. 321d). Yet, fire was only a part of the problem; it united people but failed to bring order: ‘as soon as they [people] got together, they began to trouble each other because they did not know how to live together’ (322b). Giving the humans fire and the means of controlling it did not only separate the humans from the animals, it taught them how to cook food and make themselves warm in caves. Fire was thus indirectly responsible for learning how to build shelter. After the initial prosperity, however, the humans began to die out: fire alone failed to unite the humans. What they needed in addition to fire was the ability of living together but only the mighty Zeus possessed that quality, and it was impossible for Prometheus to steal it. It was then that Zeus himself took pity on the human race, and although Prometheus was not forgiven, he sent Hermes to give people what they needed most to survive and prosper: goodness (agathon). However, the divine goodness could not be granted to the humans in its pure form, for, once separated from its divine origin, it would be rendered impotent. And so Zeus gave the humans the final gift: justice (dikē) and shame (aidōs). The gift was a double-sided whole: shame made men stand upright and therefore allowed them to judge the other person from the position of height. The rest of the dialogue has Socrates and Protagoras argue about the ability of all or only select people to possess both qualities. Although this part of the myth is not relevant to our discussion of the elementals, it certainly demonstrates the far-reaching effects of fire, especially in the realm of communal existence and the avoidance of strife, which is a topic raised by the Presocratics in opposition to love. From Empedocles we remember that ‘strife makes souls naked and deserts them. In contrast, love collects time together, saving souls

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from the madness of strife’ (Barnes 1987, 115). The figure of Prometheus who sacrificed himself for the sake of the humans, no matter how successfully, ended up not just protecting the weaker race but connected it to the earth. In turn, Zeus’ gift, which was a behavioral extension of fire, created the structure of sociality which referred to two types of justice: self-directed justice and other-directed justice. In our normal and everyday life, we are not aware of the surrounding context that is so crucial to our existence; the world is not revealed. The experience of literature, however, ruptures the normality of everyday life, and such a rupture is the wondrous move to philosophy we discussed earlier. ‘In the nearness of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 29/161), Heidegger says. Where we usually tend to be is the natural or everyday attitude; literature as a way of settingtruth-to-­work can take us into philosophy by setting up a world which might cause us to wonder. It is a world in movement, in strife, falling into oppositions. As our existence is being-in-the-world, we have to negotiate the different dimensions of this world in flux, between sky and earth, water and fire. Hence, literature becomes the life element of phenomenology in trying to understand who we are.

Notes 1. Husserl (1976, 163). Most translators render ‘Lebenselement’ as ‘vital element,’ which is perhaps more elegant, but we would like to keep the affinity to ‘lifeworld.’ 2. Not only has the ‘eidetic reduction’ been a crucial element in early phenomenology, but it stays important as the search for essences through variation continues, in transformed, more ‘lifeworldy,’ and thus ambiguous ways. By way of imagination, we can ‘play’ with the phenomena and vary them, with the purpose of ascertaining when we have gone ‘too far,’ as it were, and have crossed the limit of what something is. The limits, the borders of an essence, are particularly difficult to discern, and discerning them through overstepping them is a useful idea. See Kearney (1998, 2002). As Jansen (2010) has shown, phantasy variation by no means becomes redundant with the move to genetic phenomenology. In fact, one could argue that phantasy variation becomes even more potent in the context of the later methodology since Husserl develops a more convincing concept of imagination or phantasy (Jansen 2010). Yet eidetic variation also immediately confronts us with the main specters of phenomenology: relativism, solipsism. It is again through ‘fiction,’ namely, through thought experiments, that Husserl defeats them. For a discussion of

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the thought experiments that Husserl conducts to overcome the ‘illusion of solipsism’ in his discussion of intersubjectivity, see Staehler (2008). 3. That which evades all mathematization might, in fact, be the very essence of the sense-qualities which would call for phenomenological rather than scientific analysis. Heidegger describes this evasion in his ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ as follows: ‘Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone’ (Heidegger 1960/1971, 172/170). 4. Heidegger interprets the lines ‘Since a conversation we are…’ (‘Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören können voneinander’) that stem from a fragment of a poem by Hölderlin. According to Heidegger’s reading, it is originally the gods who are addressing us (Heidegger 1980, 70). On the basis of this being addressed by the gods, a conversation between human beings and their Being-together is possible. 5. It is a strange coincidence that Heidegger, too, chose essentially an epitaph (Rilke’s poem) to speak of the importance of poetry in creating the same openness that Kipling reveals though his narrative.

Bibliography Barnes, Jonathan. 1987. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Penguin. Bowles, Paul. 1947. The Sheltering Sky. London: Penguin. Conrad, Joseph. 1902. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin. Heidegger, Martin. 1959. Vom Wesen der Sprache. In Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske [(1982), The Nature of Language. In On the Way to Language, trans. P.D. Hertz. New York, NY: Harper & Row.] ———. 1960. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Stuttgart, reclam. [(1971), On the Origin of the Work of Art. In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and ed. A. Hofstadter, 15–86. New York, NY: Harper & Row.] ———. 1980. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”. Freiburg Lecture Course Winter 1934/35. Gesamtausgabe vol. 39. Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann. Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Husserliana VI. Edited by W. Biemel. The Hague: Nijhoff [(1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.] ———. 1976. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Husserliana III.  Edited by K.  Schuhmann. The Hague: Nijhoff [(1982), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Dordrecht: Kluwer.] ———. 1993. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie.

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Supplementary Volume to the Crisis: Posthumous Texts 1934–1937. Husserliana XXIX. Edited by R. Smid. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Irigaray, Luce. 1970. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Translated by M.B. Mader. London: Continuum. Jansen, Julia. 2010. Imagination in Phenomenology and Interdisciplinary Research. In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Dordrecht: Springer. Kearney, Richard. 1998. Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2002. The Wake of Imagination. London: Routledge. Kipling, Rudyard. 1997. At the End of the Passage. In The Best Short Stories, 35–51. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Edited by John Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Staehler, Tanja. 2008. What is the Question to which Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is the Answer? Husserl Studies 2: 99–117.

18 Language, Ontology, Fiction Frederick Kroon and Alberto Voltolini

Introduction This chapter is about ontological issues that arise in the context of discourse within and about fiction and fictional characters. Note that it is not just about special kinds of fiction, such as fiction that has literary merit (literary fiction). Works of literary fiction have special features that are arguably aesthetically important. They may, for example, focus on the human condition in some distinctive way or engage us at a deep emotional level or exhibit deep moral insight. Such features are not our concern in this chapter. Nor are we especially concerned with fiction presented within some designated medium, such as written fiction. Although the examples we use focus on discourse in and about written fiction, most of what we say extends across different media. Our focus will be on fiction as such and on the ontological issues that are raised by the semantics of fiction. In particular, our focus will be on the divide between broadly realist accounts of fictional characters (the entities supposedly designated by purely fictional terms) and broadly antirealist accounts. Understanding what is at stake requires a brief look at the nature of fiction and fictional language and the ways in which the latter raises ontological issues, and this is the F. Kroon (*) University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] A. Voltolini University of Turin, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_18

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subject of the next section, ‘Fiction and the Language of Fiction’. The dominant accounts of the nature of fiction are imagination-based, and in a section on ‘Semantical Arguments for Realism and Antirealism’ we accordingly begin our review of the semantics of fiction by looking at anti-realist views inspired by such a focus as well as at some of the realist challenges to such views. After considering some arguments that are more directly ontological, (in a section on ‘Realism, Ontology and Ontological Commitment’), we finally turn from ontology to metaphysics and in ‘Varieties of Realism’ look at the dominant realist theories of fictional objects.

Fiction and the Language of Fiction A familiar characteristic of works of fiction is that they feature fictional characters: individuals whose exploits are written about in works of fiction and who make their first appearance in a work of fiction and as such don’t really exist. Fictional characters belong to the class of entities variously known as fictional entities or fictional objects or ficta, a class that includes not just animate objects of fiction (fictional humans like Sherlock Holmes and Anna Karenina, as well as fictional non-humans like Napoleon from Animal Farm) but also inanimate objects of fiction such as fictional places (e.g., Anthony Trollope’s cathedral town of Barchester and Tolkien’s home of the elves, Rivendell). As stated, however, it doesn’t include entities located in the real world, although real entities do have an important role to play in works of fiction. Thus, neither London nor Napoleon are fictional entities in the sense in which we are using the term, since both exist. By contrast, some think that the London of the Holmes stories and the Napoleon of War and Peace are different from the real London and Napoleon and should be considered distinctive fictional entities (Voltolini 2013; Motoarca 2014). The above characterization is a natural way to highlight something that is special to fiction: the way it typically sets out to portray things that don’t exist. But the characterization also raises a number of fundamental philosophical questions we can ask about such things. They appear to include people (Holmes) and places (Rivendell), yet these are not people or places in the usual sense. So what are they, precisely? And why suppose that there are any fictional entities in the first place? After all, our world never contained a Sherlock Holmes or a Rivendell—these alleged entities make their appearance in works of fiction, not works of fact. This chapter will begin by focusing on the second question, before it turns to answers that believers in fictional entities have given to the first question.

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We begin with some quick definitions. Fictional realists think that it is literally true that there are objects like Hamlet and Holmes that don’t exist. By contrast, fictional antirealists take talk of fictional objects with a grain of salt, since they do not acknowledge a sense in which there really are any fictional objects. Much of the battleground between these two camps involves the semantics of sentences containing fictional names, in particular whether they have truth conditions and, if so, whether these imply that there are fictional entities. And a good way to begin to understand the nature and role of such sentences is to ask what a work of fiction is in the first place. What, then, is a work of fiction? While there is lively debate on the topic, the most widely accepted accounts of fiction are ones that focus on the role of the imagination in the way consumers more or less self-consciously engage with the work. Consider, for example, Kendall Walton’s version of such a view in his groundbreaking Mimesis as Make-Believe (Walton 1990). Walton focuses on the way a text can be used as a resource in games of make-believe in which participants pretend, imagine, or make-believe that the world conforms to the way the text represents the world. Just as children use tree stumps as props in a game of make-believe in which the stumps count as bears, so a community of readers can use a text as a prop in a game of make-believe in which the text is treated as a record of events, situations, conversations, and so on. Any text whose function it is to serve as a prop in a game of make-believe, thereby prescribing imaginings about its content, counts as a work of fiction for Walton. Walton’s view is surprisingly inclusive. He thinks that objects that were not produced to function in this way, such as naturally produced cracks in a rock, could be treated as props that prompt imaginings and so could turn out to be works of fiction on his account (Walton 1990, 87). That is a step too far for those who think authorial intention is pivotal. For Greg Currie, for example (Currie 1990), authors engage in a special act of fictive utterance, which he describes in terms of Gricean intentions: in a fictive utterance, the author produces a text with fictive intent, in the sense that he ‘intends that we make-­ believe the text (or rather its constituent propositions) and he intends to get us to do this by means of our recognition of that very intention’ (Currie 1990, 30). (Like others, Currie acknowledges that works of fiction commonly contain factual material as well—the parts of historical fiction that are to be believed, for example—so that a work of fiction is in the end best understood as something that is dominantly, not necessarily exclusively, the product of a fictive utterance.) Views like Walton’s and Currie’s focus on the attitude of imaginative involvement that consumers of fiction are required to have to fictional texts.

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How should we understand the attitude of authors themselves on such imagination-­based accounts of fiction? Authors of fiction can scarcely intend to assert what they utter (apart from those parts of the work they believe to be true). At best, they only pretend to assert what they utter (a view also defended in Searle 1979). Other philosophers whose works on fiction appeal to authorial pretence include Saul Kripke (2013) in Reference and Existence and David Lewis in ‘Truth in Fiction’ (for Lewis, ‘the story teller [pretends] to be telling the truth of matters whereof he has knowledge’ (1983, 266)). All such views, then, agree that when authors or readers use sentences containing fictional terms in the course of presenting, or engaging with, a work of fiction, they are involved in a pretence or make-believe. And such cases raise no particular ontological issue. If, for example, we encounter the sentence (1) Holmes sniffed sardonically while reading Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the semantic behaviour of the name ‘Holmes’ doesn’t yield an argument for realism about the fictional character Holmes. Used in the context of our, or Doyle’s, pretence that the work presents Watson’s recollections of Holmes, the name stands for an ordinary fleshand-blood human being, someone who, like any other human being, has ordinary physical existence.

 emantical Arguments for Realism S and Antirealism Call a sentence that contains one or more fictional names a fictive sentence, and a fictive sentence that is uttered in the course of producing or engaging with a work of fiction an object-fictional sentence, or, better, an object-­ fictional use of the sentence. (As will become evident, one and the same fictive sentence can be used in different ways.) Such object-fictional uses of fictive sentences might also be called pretending uses (Schiffer 1996, 2003), or even better, conniving uses (following Evans 1982), and on such a use, they don’t have truth conditions but only fictional truth conditions. But now consider a different use of the sentence, as when someone asks you in a quiz ‘Was Holmes ever sardonic?’ The response (2) Holmes once sniffed sardonically

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appears genuinely true, not merely fictionally true or true in the pretence. But once we accept that the sentence is genuinely true on this use, it seems that the usual semantics for truth requires us to say that the name ‘Holmes’ so used has a referent, and that this referent satisfies the predicate—‘once sniffed sardonically’. If so, fictional realism is true, since it will then be the case that there are fictional entities. But this inference is too quick. To see this, recall Bertrand Russell’s antirealist view of fictional sentences. In ‘On Denoting’ (Russell 1905a), he famously argued that empty names should be treated as disguised definite descriptions which should then be analysed in accordance with his theory of descriptions, a view he later extended to all proper names that weren’t logically proper. But this suggests that a sentence like (2) has something like the following reading: (2R) There exists a individual who was uniquely thus-and-so [e.g., was a famous cocaine-addicted Victorian detective called ‘Sherlock Holmes who …’] and this individual once sniffed sardonically. This sentence is in fact false since no such person ever existed, and that seems like a devastating objection to Russell’s fictional antirealism. But Russell has a reply. He could argue that while the sentence is in fact false, it is nonetheless true in A Study in Scarlet. That is to say, Russell could agree that (2) is genuinely true once one takes it to be elliptical for the longer sentence: (2I) In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes once sniffed sardonically. Indeed, this sentence, which uses an intensional ‘in the story’ operator is genuinely true, not false, on a de dicto reading where the description abbreviated by ‘Holmes’ has narrow scope. Sentences like (2I) are often called metafictional sentences. Invoking them might seem a good way to save antirealism from the argument that (2) clearly has a true reading. But this amended form of Russellian antirealism still faces another difficulty, one that already affects the unamended Russellian account of fictional sentences. It seems that the only way one can accept a Russellian account of this sort is to accept a version of descriptivism about proper names. After all, given that fictional names lack a referent, the contribution they make to sentences cannot involve their referent but must involve something indirect, like a descriptive specification. Well-known arguments stemming from the work of Kripke (1980) and others, however, suggest that any such descriptivism is deeply problematic. Indeed, on what is probably the most

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widely accepted account of names, Millianism, the propositional contribution that names make is, or includes, their actual referent, and this leaves a sentence like (2I) unable to express any proposition, true or false. This difficulty also affects a recent antirealist solution to another problem for such an amended Russellianism. The problem is this. While (2I) might count as a good way to understand a fictive sentence like (2) on its non-­ conniving use, it doesn’t work for many other fictive sentences. For many such sentences do not mention stories, whether explicitly or implicitly. Call them external metafictional sentences, in contrast to internal metafictional sentences like (2I). Consider, for example, (3) and (4): (3) Anna Karenina is a fictional character. (4) Sherlock Holmes is more intelligent than Hercule Poirot. Clearly, (3) and (4) cannot be taken as elliptical for the internal metafictional sentences (on their narrow scope reading): (3I) According to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina is a fictional character. (4I) According to the Holmes stories (and/or the Poirot stories), Holmes is more intelligent than Poirot. For unlike (3) and (4), (3I) and (4I) are simply false. According to Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina is a woman, not a fictional character (a point already noted by Lewis himself: cf. (1978, 38)), and the Holmes stories have nothing to say about Poirot’s intelligence or the Poirot stories about Holmes’s intelligence. Many fictional realists have thus thought that fictive sentences of this kind constitute proof that here we really are committed to fictional characters. External metafictional sentences do not seem paraphrasable in the same way as (non-connivingly used) fictive sentences like (2) (cf. e.g., Schiffer 1996; Thomasson 2003b). One possible antirealist solution to this problem is what Stuart Brock calls fictionalism about fictional characters (Brock 2002). On this view, we should consider sentences like (3) and (4) to be implicitly prefixed by another intensional operator, so that even in this case the impression of any reference to a fictional entity disappears. The operator in this case would not mention an ordinary kind of story but would instead invoke the story of realism: the story on which the realist turned out to have been right to posit fictional characters. This view takes external metafictional sentences like (3) and (4) to be implicitly prefixed by an operator like ‘according to the story/theory of fictional realism’. For example:

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(3F) According to the story/theory of fictional realism, Anna Karenina is a fictional character Read in this way, there no longer appears to be any commitment to fictional entities. (For such a move, see Brock 2002, 2016; Phillips 2000.) But whatever the virtues of such an account, note that this approach inherits the problem of the intensionalist approach to internal metafictional sentences that we described above; to remain antirealist, the view will need to secure an appropriate de dicto reading of (3F), but that threatens a return to descriptivism. Brock (2016) acknowledges the seriousness of this semantic objection and, somewhat inconclusively, considers a range of other solutions. Walton himself proposed a rather different strategy. He thinks that an internal metafictional sentence like (2I) is really true just if the embedded fictional sentence (on its non-conniving use) is really true. As Walton says, the fictional sentence is ‘primary’ (cf. 1990, 401–02). And the fictional sentence (on its non-conniving use) is really true just in case there is a pretence of a certain kind in which that sentence is fictionally true (for this formulation, cf. Crimmins 1998, 2–8). Walton’s own formulation is more complicated and involves truth conditions that involve an explicit but problematic reference to the existence of a pretence practice. See Crimmins (1998, 34–35), Kroon (2000, 115–16), and Voltolini (2006, 179–82). Walton’s strategy has the advantage that it can be used both for fictional sentences and for external metafictional sentences. For Walton, what distinguishes the two cases is simply the kind of pretence that makes the relevant sentence fictionally true. In the former case, the make-believe game that the relevant fictional context singles out is an authorized one; that is, it is a game authorized by what serves as a prop in that game (in the case of a make-believe game for a work of fiction, this is the text written or narrated by the storyteller). The prop dictates how things go in the world of that game.1 In the latter case, the relevant make-believe game is an unofficial one that is not exclusively grounded on a particular text (cf. Walton 1990, 51, 406, 409). Thus, consider (3). In order for (3) to be fictionally true, hence for it to be really true in its non-conniving use, there must be an extended make-believe game in which certain individuals are correctly classified as fictional and others as non-fictional (games authorized for a standard work of fiction are not like this, of course, since these just feature ordinary people like Holmes and Anna Karenina). As before, what makes a proposition fictional in the game is that the rules of the game mandate that the proposition is to be imagined as true. What makes the proposition that Anna Karenina is a fictional character

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something that participants in this unofficial game are to imagine as true is just the fact that there is a work of fiction that features someone called ‘Anna Karenina’ as a person who is native to the fiction (not identical to an actual person). We can do the same with (4), this time appealing to an unofficial game that uses elements of both the Holmes stories and the Poirot stories and what they say about the levels of intelligence of the two men. Recanati (2000) calls such games or pretences ‘Meinongian’, since what they contain is not constrained by any particular work of fiction, unlike ordinary games authorized for a particular work. (We will encounter genuine Meinongianism in the section ‘Varieties of Realism’, when we discuss realist theories of fictional objects.)

Realism, Ontology, and Ontological Commitment Whether such an antirealist strategy way of dealing with internal and external metafictional sentences can succeed is a contentious matter.2 Of course, to show that some such antirealist account of fictional sentences does not work does not mean that no antirealist account will work. Successive failures do not establish the truth of realism. Partly for this reason, a number of realists have opted to approach the question of realism by looking more closely at what fictional realism, as an ontological doctrine, involves and then looking for arguments that aim to secure the doctrine more or less directly. One such argument goes by way of Quine’s famous dictum ‘to be is to be the value of a bound variable’. Quine writes: A theory is committed to those and only those entities to which the bound variables of the theory must be capable of referring in order that the affirmations made in the theory be true. (Quine 1948, 33)

If so, then finding true existentially quantified sentences that have fictional objects as the values of the quantified variables would make a commitment to such objects unavoidable. To this end, consider a true sentence like: (5) In some novels, there are important fictional characters who are not introduced by the author till more than halfway through the work. Over the course of many papers, Peter van Inwagen has argued persuasively that such a sentence can feature in patterns of reasoning that show the obvious

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correctness of applying quantifier logic to such talk of fictional characters (see, e.g., van Inwagen 2000, 243–44). So (5) should be understood as a true existentially quantified statement. For (5) to be true, there must be fictional characters among the values of its quantified variables (indeed, (5) logically implies that there are fictional characters). Hence there are fictional characters, exactly as fictional realism says. Van Inwagen claims that antirealists have no good response to this argument; in particular, pretence antirealists like Walton cannot capture the validity of inferences involving statements about fictional characters since the real-world truth conditions of such statements do not mention fictional characters at all (van Inwagen 2000, 243–44). Antirealists deny the force of van Inwagen’s argument (Walton 1990, 416–19; Brock 2016) and suggest they have other ways of accounting for the apparent validity of such inferences. There is also the following response. Pretence antirealists in particular have been keen to point out that talk of fictional characters seems continuous in some ways with talk of other problematic entities where we would be far less willing to use Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment as a guide to our ontological commitments. Suppose you thought you had spotted some little green men at the bottom of your garden, but finally admit: (6) Some of those little green men are just tricks of the light. Arguably, if we take the truth of (5) as evidence for there being fictional entities, we should, by parity of reasoning, take (6) as evidence for there being things that are mere tricks of the light or creatures of the imagination, and this seems a step too far (cf. Kroon 1996, 186; see also Caplan 2004).3 The problems we have considered suggest that, in order to get ontological results, there is no easy semantical shortcut. That has suggested to some realists that we should supplement any semantical arguments with genuine ontological arguments—arguments that are no longer language-based. One such argument, due to Amie Thomasson (1999), is that we cannot reject fictional objects if we admit fictional works, since fictional objects and fictional works belong to the same ontological category, and it would be false parsimony to accept one and reject the other. But this argument faces some obvious difficulties. As Thomasson herself admits (1999, 65), fictional works are syntactical-­ semantic entities comprising propositions with a certain syntactical structure. Fictional objects seem to be nothing like this; apart from not existing, they include objects that can, in some sense, be characterized as detectives, princes, unfaithful wives, and so on (Voltolini 2006; Everett 2013, 130–39). It is

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­ ifficult to see why we should accept such strange entities into our ontology d on the basis of accepting that there are works of fiction. Voltolini has proposed an alternative ontological line of argument on which fictional objects figure in the identity conditions of fictional works (Voltolini 2003, 2006), so that to admit fictional works is to admit fictional objects. This argument too has garnered criticism. Voltolini thinks that works that are word-for-word identical but written by different authors are clearly distinct, something he thinks can only be explained by supposing that they are about distinct fictional characters. In response, Everett (2013, 126–30) has suggested that there could also be two syntactically identical purely descriptive works of fiction, ones that feature no fictional characters at all; in the case of such works, there are no fictional objects to ground their difference, so that it is hard to see why fictional objects are needed to play this role in the case of standard works of fiction. Perhaps this problem can be circumvented (cf. Voltolini 2015). But antirealists also have a negative ontological argument at their disposal. According to Everett (2005, 2013), once we allow for certain intuitive bridge principles between fiction on the one hand and fictional entities on the other, we have to admit that, since fiction may violate basic logical laws and contain indeterminacies, fictional entities may themselves be illogical or indeterminate. This would be very hard to swallow. At least one prominent realist has admitted the force of Everett’s antirealist arguments and now advocates a ‘presuppositional’ form of antirealism (Howell 2010, 2015). Others have said that the bridge principles are not to be taken at face value (Schneider and von Solodkoff 2009; Thomasson 2010; Voltolini 2010), while still others have claimed that realism about fictional entities can live with such indeterminacies, since, alongside many other entities, fictional entities do not satisfy particular criteria of identity (Caplan and Muller 2015).

Varieties of Realism So far we have considered arguments for and against fictional realism. While there is no consensus, there is probably a majority opinion in favour of fictional realism. This is not really surprising. Our ordinary ways of speaking certainly suggest that there are fictional objects. As Kripke puts it in his Reference and Existence (Kripke 2013, lecture III) ‘everything seems to favour attributing to ordinary language an ontology of fictional entities’. Suppose, then, that we grant that there are fictional objects. We can then ask the metaphysical question: what are they like, and how are they different

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from other objects, such as ordinary human beings, works of fiction, and numbers, say? Any credible account should satisfy a number of criteria. One of them is what we might call the nonexistence datum: fictional characters don’t exist. Another one is that it should capture the sense in which fictional objects have ordinary properties like being human, a detective, a depressed prince of Denmark, and so on.

Variety One: Possibilism One way to account for the nonexistence datum is the possibilist theory of fictional objects. According to this theory, fictional entities do not exist for they do not actually exist. Instead, they exist in other possible worlds. Fictional entities are just like other possible entities, such as Donald Trump’s possible tenth wife. Existence on this account is understood as an ordinary first-order property, that is, a property that non-universally applies to individuals (some entities in the overall domain possess it while some others don’t). As such, it may be conceived as the property of having a spatiotemporal dimension (Williamson 1990, 2002) or of having genuine causal powers (Castañeda 1989). Merely possible entities fail to have it in the actual world, but they have it in other possible worlds. (For those who accept impossible worlds, this possibilist theory can even be extended to include existence in impossible worlds, the kind of existence we might grant the brilliant mathematician who squared the circle.) Such a possibilist theory is faced with a problem of ontological indeterminacy. For there is more than one possible world in which Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories are fact, and in which there is a witty, cocaine-addicted detective called ‘Holmes’ who lives at 221B Baker St, London. These Holmes candidates are not all identical to each other (they may have different parents, genetic make-up, etc.). We can now ask which of these different witty, cocaine-­ addicted detectives is Holmes (cf. Kaplan 1973, 505–06; Kripke 1980, 156–58). There seems to be no principled way of deciding. Kripke suggests that this indeterminacy shows that none of these possible entities is Holmes. Kripkean objections against possibilism about fictional entities have been very influential.4 Some have argued, however, that such objections only succeed if we use a ‘variable domain’ conception of what there is to quantify over at any particular world, a conception that allows the set of objects available at one world to differ from the set of objects available at another world (Kripke’s preferred semantics for modal logic is of this kind). Suppose instead that one adopts a version of a ‘fixed domain’ conception of quantification on which

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one has a fictional individual as a nonexistent entity in the actual world and as an existent entity in other possible or impossible worlds (Priest 2005; Berto 2011). If so, the indeterminacy problem may not arise. As Priest (2005, 119–20) puts it, Doyle intends or conceives of a particular individual that does not exist in the actual world but which instead realizes the Holmes stories in some other possible worlds; trivially, this individual is Holmes. For Priest and Berto, then, the work is done by an author’s mentally singling out a particular nonexistent object. The resulting version of possibilism provides a comprehensive modal account of fictional characters and the role that works of fiction play in representing them. Whether the view solves the problem of indeterminacy is unclear, however. We might still wonder how it is that Doyle is acquainted with some particular nonexistent individual via the intentionality of his thought, rather than with any of the other nonexistent Holmes candidates (cf. Kroon 2012; Berto and Priest 2014; Bueno and Zalta 2017). The view also faces some of the same problems that affect other versions of possibilism. Possibilism in general holds that fictional entities do not actually possess the properties in terms of which they are characterized in the relevant stories; they only have these properties in (some of ) the worlds in which they exist. Now consider cases in which we compare such objects with other objects, such as: (4) Holmes is more intelligent than Poirot. We seem to be saying that Holmes actually has such comparative features, that is, has them in the actual world, not merely in some possible world or other. Suppose that we read (4) instead as saying, à la Priest: (4P) Holmes has a greater degree of intelligence, relative to worlds in which Holmes is as he is in the Holmes stories, than that possessed by Poirot relative to worlds in which Poirot is as he is in the Poirot stories. (cf. Priest 2005, 123) Such a cross-world way of reading (4) doesn’t match the way we would read other sentences involving a comparison between individuals, say the sentence ‘Stalin was crueler than Kim Jong-il’. In addition, a possibilist reading like (4P) makes it hard to make sense of the attitudes we hold towards fictional characters. Our belief in Holmes’s great intelligence explains our admiration for Holmes. It is hard to see how our belief in Holmes’s intelligence in another possible world could do this. Surely we do not get to be admirable merely by

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being thought to have admiration-evoking features in some other possible world. (For further discussion, see Kroon 2008; Priest 2008.)

Variety Two: Meinong and (Neo-)Meinongianism The next approach to fictional entities to be discussed avoids such problems. Meinong (1904) thought that over and above the concrete entities that exist spatiotemporally and the ideal or abstract entities that exist non-­ spatiotemporally, there are entities that neither exist spatiotemporally nor exist non-spatiotemporally: these are the paradigmatic Meinongian objects that lack any kind of being. Even though Meinongian objects don’t exist, they do have properties. In particular, Meinong thought that their being such-and-so (their Sosein) is independent of their being or Sein. These Sosein-specifying properties, moreover, are precisely the properties in terms of which the objects are descriptively given, a claim that is captured by the so-called Characterization Principle, or CP. (The explicit formulation of CP is due to Routley (1980, 46), but the principle is already implicit in Meinong (1904, 82).) According to CP, objects, whether they exist or not, have the properties in terms of which they are given or characterized. Take, for instance, the golden mountain or the round square. The golden mountain does not exist, yet we can say that it is both golden and a mountain since these are the properties in terms of which the object is characterized; similarly, the round square is both round and square, even though it cannot exist. Note that these objects are not further determined with respect to their properties. The golden mountain can’t be said to be over 3000 metres high, for example, or to be no more than 3000 metres high. Unlike the merely possible objects of possibilism, it is incomplete with respect to these properties. On the usual understanding of Meinong’s conception of fictional objects, fictional objects are just a subset of his Meinongian objects—they are Meinongian objects that are given in terms of the properties they have in certain stories and (by CP) can therefore be said to have these properties.5 Note that the problem for possibilism mentioned towards the end of the discussion of variety 1 disappears on this account. For, so conceived, fictional entities do in fact possess the properties in terms of which they are characterized in the relevant stories: Holmes really does have a high degree of cleverness, higher, perhaps, than that possessed by Poirot, and so (4) might well be true. Modern versions of Meinongianism accept much of what Meinong has to say on the topic of nonexistent objects, but depart from his account at various

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points. Suppose we restrict our attention to properties appropriate to physical, spatiotemporal objects (e.g., being a mountain or a detective). What we might call orthodox neo-Meinongians (Parsons 1980; Routley 1980; Jacquette 1996) maintain that Meinongian objects characterized in terms of such properties are concrete correlates of sets of such properties (concrete in the sense that the objects have the properties in exactly the same sense as ordinary objects have the properties). Corresponding to a set S of such properties (e.g., {being golden, being a mountain}), there is a concrete object (the golden mountain) that has (at least) the properties contained in S. These properties in some sense constitute the essence of the object, but they don’t exhaust its properties. The golden mountain, for example, is not only golden and a mountain but also has the properties of being nonexistent and being often thought about by Meinong. Fictional objects can similarly be regarded as concrete correlates of sets of properties. For orthodox neo-Meinongians, Holmes is a concrete, albeit nonexistent, correlate of the set of properties that he has in the Holmes stories. By contrast, unorthodox neo-Meinongians (see especially Zalta 1983) maintain that Meinongian objects in general should be conceived of as objects that have a non-spatiotemporal mode of existence and hence as abstract rather than concrete. On their view, these abstract objects are in some sense constituted by the properties in terms of which they are described. A fictional object like Holmes, for example, is constituted by such properties as being cocaine-­ addicted and a detective, just as the golden mountain is constituted by the properties of being golden and a mountain. The above distinction is closely linked to another distinction relevant to Meinongian objects: the distinction between kinds of properties and modes of predication. Neo-Meinongians accept that there is a sense in which a Meinongian object possesses the properties in terms of which it is characterized, but for orthodox neo-Meinongians this means that Meinong’s principle (CP) cannot be accepted as it stands. As Russell famously pointed out (Russell 1905b), CP as it stands implies that an object like the existent golden mountain exists, since existence is one of the properties used to characterize it, a consequence he deemed fatal to Meinong’s view. In response (and following Meinong (1972 [1916]) who used a suggestion by his student Ernst Mally), orthodox neo-Meinongians have proposed restricting the properties that feature in CP. Here is a representative formulation. Let M be the Meinongian object correlated with a set of properties S. Then M has property P in S, so long as P is a nuclear property, where nuclear properties are broadly conceived as ordinary descriptive properties (cf. Parsons 1980; Routley 1980; Jacquette 1996). On this view, Holmes has the nuclear properties of being a detective

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and living in London, say. But a Meinongian object also has other non-nuclear or extranuclear properties. In the case of fictional objects, these are the properties that a fictional object has outside the scope of the story in which it appears. Thus, while Anna Karenina has the nuclear property of being a woman, she also has the extranuclear properties of being a fictional character and being nonexistent. Given the extranuclear nature of existence, neo-­ Meinongians who accept this distinction respond to Russell’s problem of the existent golden mountain by declaring that CP so constrained doesn’t permit us to derive the existence of the existent golden mountain. Some neo-Meinongians posit two ways of having properties rather than two kinds of properties. (This suggestion was first made in Mally 1912, but was not adopted by Meinong.) When we say that Anna Karenina was a woman, for example, we use a different mode of predication from the one we use when we say that Marilyn Monroe was a woman. On Zalta’s familiar formulation of this idea (Zalta 1983), fictional entities encode such properties, while ordinary individuals simply exemplify them. (Similar formulations are found in Castañeda 1989; Rapaport 1978.) Such a view can retain CP without substantive modification. Let M be an object constituted by properties F1, …, Fn. Then M has each of the properties F1, …, Fn, in the sense of encoding them. Applied to the case of a fictional object like Anna Karenina, we can say that Anna Karenina encodes but doesn’t exemplify the property of being a woman, and exemplifies but doesn’t encode the property of being a fictional character. On the surface, the ‘modes of predication’ distinction appears to be in a better position to handle the data than the ‘kinds of properties’ distinction. For one thing, there seems to be no workable criterion for distinguishing nuclear and extranuclear properties: some properties seem to be both. Consider the property of being a fictional character. This seems to be the prototypical candidate of an extranuclear property, but in certain ‘metafictional’ narratives, there are characters who, in the story, have the property of being a fictional character (e.g., the Father in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author). Or consider existence. Existence is supposed to be a prototypical extranuclear property, but it is true in Anna Karenina that Anna Karenina existed since she was a real flesh-and-blood person. These examples suggest, per impossibile, that certain properties are both extranuclear and nuclear. For believers in the nuclear/extranuclear distinction, one way of dealing with this problem is to insist that Anna Karenina does have properties like being existent and being a flesh-and-blood individual, but that these properties should be understood as ‘watered-down’ versions of their extranuclear counterparts, an idea first advanced by Meinong (cf. Parsons 1980, 44, 184–86). Many

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commentators find this idea deeply problematic, however (cf. Jacquette 2015, 98–102). Note that the ‘two modes of predication’ doctrine doesn’t have this problem. Anna Karenina, for example, can be said to encode existence without exemplifying existence. But the view may have other problems. Indeed, some critics think that treating predication as ambiguous borders on the incoherent (e.g., Berto 2013, 134–36; Jacquette 2015, 247–53). Others have rejected both distinctions as clumsy. Cross-fictional sentences like: (7) Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pippi Longstocking are both very strong are hard to be read in either way (Everett 2013, 176). And even if there are suitable neo-Meinongian readings for such sentences (Voltolini 2015, 617), there is the further worry that, whichever distinction a neo-Meinongian adopts, the claim that fictional entities are describable in terms of either nuclear properties or the properties they encode may yield the wrong identity conditions for such entities. Many now think the act of authorial generation of fictional objects is pivotal to their identity (something Lewis alluded to in Lewis 1983, 266), and that fictional objects can share all such properties and still be distinct if they are the result of distinct creative acts (Thomasson 1999).

Variety Three: Creationism Such a view has become perhaps the most widely accepted realist view over recent years. It stresses the intuition that storytellers have some kind of creative role to play in the genesis of fictional objects. The view is variously called artefactualism or creationism, and forms of it are found in Searle (1979), Salmon (1998), and, in its most detailed articulation, Thomasson (1999) and Voltolini (2006). The position, which has Ingarden (1931) as a significant historical forerunner, was also defended in Kripke’s 1973 John Locke Lectures (Kripke 2013), and elements of the position are found in van Inwagen’s (1977) theory of fictional objects as posits of literary criticism. According to such accounts, fictional objects are authorial artefacts, since they come into being by being generated by their authors. Moreover, they are abstract entities, just as unorthodox neo-Meinongians believe, but unlike Platonic abstracta, they not only have a beginning in time, but they also depend on other entities for their existence (see Thomasson 1999 for an extended discussion of such dependencies). The sense in which such objects have ordinary properties is usually given in terms of an ‘in the fiction’ ­operator:

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an artefact like Holmes is not literally a detective, but ‘he’ is a detective in, or according to, the Holmes stories. Alternatively, such objects are sometimes said to have properties in two different ways: for van Inwagen, for example, Holmes holds the property of being a detective, but has the property of being an abstract fictional character (van Inwagen 2000), while Kripke talks of applying ‘predicates according to their use in fiction’ and applying them ‘on the level of reality’ (Kripke 2013, 74).6 Creationism thus characterized earns its keep from the ‘obviousness’ of the thought that authors somehow create fictional characters through the creation of fictional works in which they appear. Language seems to support this thought: we routinely hear statements like ‘Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most complex creations’. But this move is far from innocent. Yagisawa (2001), for example, argues that creationism conflicts sharply with other seemingly obvious thoughts. Unlike neo-Meinongianism, for example, it doesn’t admit a category of literally nonexistent objects and so on the surface has trouble accounting for the thought that fictional objects don’t exist. (For a response, see Goodman 2004.) Creationism also faces the worry that the language of creation seems to admit too much. Tolkien can be said to have created the thousands of dwarves who each fought in the War between the Dwarves and Orcs, without his engaging in thousands of acts of dwarf creation (Kroon 2015). (In response to this worry, some creationists have denied that there are such characters; see, for example, Voltolini 2006, 234–35.) Perhaps the most significant problems facing the creationist have to do with the nature of the creative process and the relation between the creative process and the identity of fictional objects. It seems that an author’s conceiving of her literary creation suffices to make it an intentional object, but a mere intentional object is not yet a fictional object, as Thomasson (1999, 89) agrees. So what makes it one? And what are the identity conditions for fictional objects once created? These are difficult questions for the creationist; as yet there is no consensus in sight. (See Thomasson 1999, 2003a, b; Voltolini 2006 for attempts to grapple with such questions.) Critics of creationism see such attempts as fruitless. Brock (2010), for example, thinks they can’t succeed since the creationist’s appeal to creation is explanatorily void, while Everett (2013) provides a sceptical perspective on all such attempts from the point of view of a pretence theory of fictional discourse. To conclude this discussion of the metaphysics of fictional objects, it is worth noting that neo-Meinongian and creationist theories seem to suffer from complementary defects. On the one hand, neo-Meinongians provide exact identity criteria for fictional objects, but these criteria seem insufficient in that they do not take into account the fact that such objects are products of

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the human mind. On the other hand, creationists do account for this fact, but they only provide relatively non-specific (and contentious) identity criteria for such entities.7

Conclusion This chapter has tackled the language of fiction, and the ontological issues the language of fiction raises, especially in virtue of the semantics of such uses of language. We described how a study of the semantics of fictional language has encouraged two broad approaches to the ontology of fiction: a broadly realist approach, with debate about what kinds of fictional sentences should be interpreted as being about fictional objects, and an antirealist approach that attempts to construe all fictional language as being only apparently about real fictional objects. We pointed out the lack of consensus on which approach to favour but also suggested that probably the most widely accepted current approach is some version of realism. In the second part of the chapter, we briefly turned to the available realist options, describing their virtues as well as vices. Once again, and unsurprisingly, the conclusion was that there is no consensus, that, whatever their good points, all the options seem to face distinctive problems of their own. Rather than take this to be cause for pessimism, however, we think that the lively debate about the ontological issues in fiction that have brought such theories and their problems to light is testament to a growing interest in the philosophy of fiction in general. And that is surely something to applaud.

Notes 1. More precisely: for Walton, a proposition is fictional or true in the fiction just in case participants in a game authorized by the text are supposed to imagine it as true (Walton 1990). Note that there are two types of fictional truth: the primary fictional truths are evident in the work itself, while the implied fictional truths are generated from the primary ones. The latter include all the fictional truths that are implicit rather than explicitly stated, for example, that Holmes lived in a city in England. 2. This should already be evident from the above explanation of the fictional truth of a statement like ‘Anna Karenina is a fictional character’. Without more work, it is far from clear that it succeeds in avoiding a commitment to Anna Karenina as a genuine entity. For recent antirealist proposals along the lines above, see Everett (2013, ch. 3).

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3. Other examples include quantified sentences that seem to commit one to indeterminate fictional entities. (See also Yablo 1998 for a more general account of why we shouldn’t simply read our ontological commitments off from our language, even when it displays quantificational structure.) 4. These difficulties for possibilism do not equally affect all versions of the doctrine. In particular, the fact that there are so many distinct Holmes candidates is less embarrassing for Lewis than it is for other possibilists (cf. Lewis 1983; Currie 1990, 137–39; Kroon 1994). 5. Although this is the usual understanding of Meinong’s conception of fictional objects, some of his other work suggests that he thinks of them as higher-order entities—entities that are constructed out of simpler entities—in the same sense in which a melody is an entity constructed out of its constituent sounds (cf. Raspa 2001; Marek 2009). 6. The obvious similarity of such claims to the unorthodox neo-Meinongian’s claim that there are ‘two modes of predication’ has not gone unnoticed (see Zalta 2006). 7. Despite the apparent incompatibility of the two approaches, some have argued that the most promising elements of each can somehow be combined (cf. Zalta 2000; Voltolini 2006).

References Berto, Francesco. 2011. Modal Meinongianism and Fiction: The Best of Three Worlds. Philosophical Studies 152: 313–334. ———. 2013. Existence as a Real Property: The Ontology of Meinongianism. Dordrecht: Springer. Berto, Francesco, and Graham Priest. 2014. Modal Meinongianism and Characterization: Reply to Kroon. Grazer Philosophische Studien 90: 183–200. Brock, Stuart. 2002. Fictionalism about Fictional Characters. Noûs 36: 1–21. ———. 2010. The Creationist Fiction: The Case against Creationism About Fictional Characters. Philosophical Review 119: 337–364. ———. 2016. Fictionalism About Fictional Characters Revisited. Res Philosophica 2 (93): 1–27. Bueno, Otavio, and Edward N.  Zalta. 2017. Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (4): 761–778. Caplan, Ben. 2004. Creatures of Fiction, Myth, and Imagination. American Philosophical Quarterly 41: 331–337. Caplan, Ben, and Cathleen Muller. 2015. Brutal Identity. In Fictional Objects, ed. S. Brock and A. Everett, 174–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castañeda, Hector Neri. 1989. Thinking, Language, and Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Crimmins, Mark. 1998. Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference. The Philosophical Review 107: 1–47. Currie, Gregory. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Gareth. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Everett, Anthony. 2005. Against Fictional Realism. Journal of Philosophy 102: 624–649. Everett, Anthony. 2013. The Nonexistent. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodman, Jeffrey. 2004. A Defense of Creationism in Fiction. Grazer Philosophische Studien 25: 131–155. Howell, Robert. 2010. Fictional Realism and Its Discontents. In Truth and Fiction, ed. Franck Lihoreau, 153–202. Frankfurt: Ontos. ———. 2015. Objects of Fiction and Objects of Thought. In Fictional Objects, ed. S. Brock and A. Everett, 41–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1931. Das Literarische Kunstwerk. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Jacquette, Dale. 1996. Meinongian Logic: The Semantics of Existence and Nonexistence. Berlin and New York, NY: de Gruyter. ———. 2015. Alexius Meinong, The Shepherd of Non-Being. Cham: Springer. Kaplan, David. 1973. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. In Approaches to Natural Language, ed. K.J.I.  Hintikka, J.M.E.  Moravcsik, and P.  Suppes, 490–518. Dordrecht: Reidel. Kripke, Saul A. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 2013. Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kroon, Frederick. 1994. Make-Believe and Fictional Reference. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42: 207–214. ———. 1996. Characterizing Nonexistents. Grazer Philosophische Studien 51: 163–193. ———. 2000. ‘Disavowal Through Commitment’ Theories of Negative Existentials. In Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, ed. A.  Everett and T. Hofweber, 95–116. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. ———. 2008. Much Ado About Nothing: Priest and the Reinvention of Noneism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76: 199–207. ———. 2012. Characterization and Existence in Modal Meinongianism. Grazer Philosophische Studien 86: 23–34. ———. 2015. Creationism and the Problem of Indiscernible Fictional Objects. In Fictional Objects, ed. S. Brock and A. Everett, 139–171. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, David K. 1978. Truth in Fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 15: 37–46. Reprinted, with new postscripts, in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (1978), 261–280. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mally, E. 1912. Gegenstandtheoretische Grundlagen der Logik und Logistik. Leipzig: Barth.

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Marek, J. 2009. Alexius Meinong. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), ed. E.N. Zalta. Accessed January 10, 2017. https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/sum2009/entries/meinong/. Meinong, Alexius. 1904. Über Gegenstandtheorie. In Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandtheorie und Psychologie, ed. Aşexius Meinong. Leipzig: Barth. Reprinted in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Gesamtausgabe bd. II), 481–535. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1971. Translated by I. Levi, D.B. Terrell, and R.M.  Chisholm. In Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, ed. R.M. Chisholm, 76–117. Glencoe: Free Press. ———. 1916. Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit. Leipzig: Barth. Reprinted in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Gesamtausgabe bd. VI). Graz: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt, 1972. Motoarca, Ioan-Radu. 2014. Fictional Surrogates. Philosophia 42: 1033–1053. Parsons, Terence. 1980. Nonexistent Objects. New Haven: Yale University Press. Phillips, John. 2000. Two Theories of Fictional Discourse. American Philosophical Quarterly 37: 107–119. Priest, Graham. 2005. Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2008. Replies to Nolan and Kroon. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76: 208–214. Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1948. On What There Is. Review of Metaphysics 2: 21–38. Reprinted in Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Rapaport, William J. 1978. Meinongian Theories and a Russellian Paradox. Noûs 12: 153–180. Raspa, Venanzio. 2001. Zeichen, ‘schattenhafte’ Ausdrücke und fiktionale Gegenstände: Meinongsche Überlegungen zu einer Semiotik des Fiktiven. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 23: 57–77. Recanati, François. 2000. Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Routley, Richard. 1980. Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond. Departmental Monograph. Canberra: Australian National University. Russell, Bertrand. 1905a. On Denoting. Mind 14: 473–493. ———. 1905b. Critical Notice of: A.  Meinong, Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandtheorie und Psychologie. Mind 14: 530–538. Salmon, Nathan. 1998. Nonexistence. Noûs 32: 277–319. Schiffer, Samuel. 1996. Language-Created Language-Independent Entities. Philosophical Topics 24: 149–166. ———. 2003. The Things We Mean. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schneider, Benjamin, and Tatjana von Solodkoff. 2009. In Defence of Fictional Realism. The Philosophical Quarterly 59: 138–149. Searle, John R. 1979. The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse. In Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, ed. Peter A.  French et  al., 233–243. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.

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Thomasson, Amie L. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003a. Fictional Characters and Literary Practices. British Journal of Aesthetics 43: 138–157. ———. 2003b. Speaking of Fictional Characters. Dialectica 57: 205–223. ———. 2010. Fiction, Existence and Indeterminacy. In Fictions and Models: New Essays, ed. John Woods, 109–148. Munich: Philosophia Verlag. Van Inwagen, Peter. 1977. Creatures of Fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 14: 299–308. ———. 2000. Quantification and Fictional Discourse. In Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-existence, ed. A. Everett and T. Hofweber, 235–247. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Voltolini, Alberto. 2003. How Fictional Works are Related to Fictional Entities. Dialectica 57: 225–238. ———. 2006. How Ficta Follow Fiction. A Syncretistic Account of Fictional Entities. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2010. Against Fictional Realism. Grazer Philosophische Studien 80: 47–63. ———. 2013. Probably the Charterhouse of Parma Does Not Exist, Possibly Not Even That Parma. Humana Mente 25: 235–261. ———. 2015. Anthony Everett, the Nonexistent. Dialectica 69: 611–620. Walton, Kenneth L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williamson, Timothy. 1990. Necessary Identity and Necessary Existence. In Wittgenstein—Towards a Re-Evaluation: Proceedings of the 14th International Wittgenstein-Symposium, 3 vols. ed. R.  Haller and J.  Brandl, 168–175. Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky. ———. 2002. Necessary Existents. In Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, ed. A. O’Hear, 269–287. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yablo, Stephen. 1998. Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 72: 229–283. Yagisawa, Takashi. 2001. Against Creationism in Fiction. Philosophical Perspectives 15: 153–172. Zalta, Edward N. 1983. Abstract Objects: An Introduction to Axiomatic Metaphysics. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. ———. 2000. Pretense Theory and Abstract Object Theory. In Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-existence, ed. A.  Everett and T.  Hofweber, 117–147. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. ———. 2006. Deriving and Validating Kripkean Claims Using the Theory of Abstract Objects. Noûs 40: 591–622.

19 Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics Simon Morgan Wortham

Several of the critical voices enjoying ascendancy in continental philosophy today stake their positions in part on a declared dissatisfaction with ‘deconstruction’ or ‘poststructuralism’ as an ethical standpoint that is seen as responsible for a certain blockage of emancipatory possibility in the political field. Such a ‘deconstructive’ approach is frequently characterized as regressive, bound by the repetition of trauma, and given to a sense of redemptive entitlement, to the extent that it remains mournfully preoccupied with the worst events of the European twentieth century. This characterization of deconstruction has ramifications in both political and religious terms, indeed at the complex intersection of these two mutually implicated bodies of knowledge. It would be possible to critically dissect various instances of such complexly configured night raids on this particular strand of the European philosophical inheritance. For example, while during the second half of his lengthy philosophical career Derrida gave voice to the right and possibility of a broadly pro-Palestine stance, and other positions of this kind—positions that for him remained incompatible, in fact, with various forms of anti-Judaism or even anti-Israelism—nowadays the ‘ethics’ associated with deconstruction and the forms of thought it is supposed to inherit is all too hastily assimilated to an unequivocally ‘Judaic’ religious disposition seen to be at diametrical odds with radical emancipatory causes of several kinds. This, then, represents a peculiar and perhaps ironic turn in Derrida’s fortunes: while the Derrida of the 1990s S. Morgan Wortham (*) Kingston University, Kingston, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_19

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endured stiff criticism for maintaining political attitudes about the Middle East that were seen in certain quarters as an affront to the historic plight of the Jews, nowadays deconstruction is frequently dismissed as too closely aligned with an ethico-theological sensibility caught up in just the type of attitudes that, less than 20 years ago, it was held to transgress. While much recent work in the field of Derrida studies has concentrated on his later writings concerning topics such as sovereignty or death penalty1 in a way that sharpens the question of deconstruction’s ‘political’ interests (interests which might be demonstrated in a number of ways throughout Derrida’s entire corpus), comparatively few from within this field have examined more systematically the grounds of deconstruction’s general dismissal, one that has developed to the point of becoming almost a self-evident ‘given’ since Derrida’s death, the origins of which might nevertheless be traced back over decades. The complexity of this hostility towards deconstruction is not easily summarized, taking as it does different and often incompatible forms at various points in time. In this chapter my aim is to concentrate on some notable examples, not limited to the critical reception of Derrida’s work. What I hope to demonstrate from this is not only the basis of the current and indeed longstanding dissatisfaction with ‘deconstruction’ or ‘poststructuralism’ nor merely some of the ways in which those sympathetic to Derrida might challenge such well-established perceptions. My principal intention is to suggest, if only indicatively, that we should reckon more fully with the implications of such critique within the bodies of thought for which it is apparently so decisive in its importance. In the process, powerful connections between questions of ethics, aesthetics, and politics will emerge as key contours of the terrain over which these critical disputes move.

Part One If deconstruction is now all too frequently dismissed in terms of a mournfulness that invites paralyzing regression rather than futural action, it is worth reviewing some of Derrida’s own eulogical writings as means to assess such claims. In The Work of Mourning, which gathers together mourning writings by Derrida devoted to a host of thinkers including Barthes, de Man, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Levinas, we find two texts on Jean-François Lyotard.2 One is a short text published in Libération immediately after Lyotard’s death. The other was initially presented at the International College of Philosophy in Paris almost a year after Lyotard’s passing. It approaches the question of mourning by concentrating on Lyotard’s own remarks on the subject. Here a

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certain phrase, found in a short essay by Lyotard included in a special issue of a French journal devoted to Derrida’s work, recurs: ‘There shall be no mourning’. How—if at all—are we to read such a phrase, asks Derrida? For whom— if anyone—is it meant? What exactly does it prohibit and—if anything—what might it nevertheless make possible? It is not the manly rejection of excessive sentiment that is at stake here. Instead, the prospect of planned, organized mourning seems most under attack in this phrase, one that is also a form of currency between Derrida and Lyotard in a handful of exchanges. For the project of mourning—mourning construed as a concerted ‘work’ or ‘instituted commemoration’ in Derrida’s text (2001, 217)—would negotiate the absolute obligation to the dead to which Derrida alludes here only by way of a political pragmatism that is itself rebuffed by the phrase ‘there shall be no mourning’.3 In Lyotardian terms (as Derrida puts it), organized mourning risks converting the differend of the dead into the possibility of litigation, transforming what seems an unreckonable ‘wrong’ into calculable ‘damages’. Yet, for Derrida, the ‘grammaticality’ of the line, as much as its ‘meaning’, is of particular interest: ‘there shall be no mourning’ is less a constative statement than a normative or prescriptive phrase. In fact, it is less a normative phrase—in the sense that the former tends to control its own performativity in advance, formulating or effectuating by itself the legitimation of those obligations that it demands—than it is a prescriptive one. For the latter entails ‘a further phrase [that] is left to the addressee’, as Derrida puts it. In its very structure, then, the prescriptive phrase calls for the response of an addressee, therefore entailing an obligation (even if it may be absolute, in view of the dead) that is also a freedom of sorts, a freedom of the one who is obligated, as Lyotard himself observes. In a ‘quasi-grammatical way’, then, the phrase constitutes a form of address that demands reading, not in the sense of passive reception but in terms of active interpretation or response, albeit ‘reading’ that founders to some extent upon its own impossible desire for knowledge as to the motivation—that is to say, the destination or addressee—of such a phrase (Derrida 2001, 219). For Derrida, this impossible experience, given to the reader by the phrase itself, is nevertheless tantamount to that of mourning. Mourning thus reinhabits the phrase as the very mark of its readability: ‘Readability bears this mourning… This mourning provides the first chance and the terrible condition of all reading’ (Derrida 2001, 220). To the extent that Derrida mourns Lyotard by reading him, such mourning only occurs— can only occur—under the impossible jurisdiction of the phrase ‘there shall be no mourning’, an impossible injunction that is quite at odds with mourning in its planned or organized forms, in the sense that its prescriptive ‘no’

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­ isorganizes the very experience it at once prohibits and calls for, bans and d necessitates. If organized mourning aligns fundamentally with political pragmatism, then the phrase ‘there shall be no mourning’ opens at least the possibility of another politics. In their introduction to The Work of Mourning, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas observe that ‘the genre of the funeral oration’ (with which Derrida’s various eulogies, letters of condolence, newspaper tributes, memorial essays, and other mourning writings cannot help but engage) is ‘more than a powerful genre within an already given social and political context; it consolidates the very power of that context, with all the promises and risks it entails’ even up to the point where it may be said—alluding to such texts as Plato’s Menexenus—that ‘politics is related to, or founded on, mourning’ (Derrida 2001, 19). To the extent that the phrase ‘there shall be no mourning’ makes possible (and yet impossible) another mourning, outside of the organized forms mourning takes in its perhaps foundational relationship with conventional politics and political conventions (e.g., those of the fraternal tradition), it entails neither a retreat from politics nor any possibility of maintaining the political status quo, but instead a new or rather unrecognized form of the ‘political’. Derrida’s essay relates, then, the ‘quasi-grammaticality’ of the phrase in question to dissymmetrical forms of address that remain initially resistant to the forms of consensuality or commonalty implied by a ‘we’ or an ‘us’ or indeed by any stable identity and self-identical expression of a ‘you’ or an ‘I’ upon which they may be founded. In this same context, the testamentary falters in its very possibility, even to the degree that ‘what the most faithful inheritance demands is the absence of any testament’, at any rate in its more conventional guises (Derrida 2001, 221). Derrida therefore seeks to honour this dissymmetry in the act of reading Lyotard, whereby terms like ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘you’, and ‘me’ (as well as tu and vous)4 are not to be dispensed with but reconfigured—always at something of a guess—by the prescriptive phrase set down by Lyotard himself.5 If, as Lyotard himself suggests, the only possibility of a ‘we’ may be a posthumous ‘we’, this might have to do with the impossible mourning beyond mourning (‘there shall be no mourning’) that, post-­ mortem, disorganizes all of the relations of intention and address6 that give us the neat differentiations of ‘you’ and ‘I’. And such dissymmetrical and disorganized interlocutionary relations may take place with a politics in view so that, as Derrida notes, Lyotard ‘asked publicly, in full light, and practically, but with reference to mourning, the question of the Enlightenment or the question about the Enlightenment, namely—in that Kantian space he tilled, furrowed, and sowed anew—the question of rational language and of its

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­ estination in the public space’, a destination that is always elusive in that it d is not pre-determined as such (Derrida 2001, 217). Such would be a ‘new’ or an as yet—and perhaps permanently— ‘unrecognizable’ politics of the public sphere that, as we shall see, resonates powerfully with Lyotard’s own evocation of the other-human/other-than-­ human that founds the fragile yet potentially transformative possibility of civic life. For that matter, the radically dissymmetrical, perhaps untransactable, conditions of the post-mortem ‘relation’ (as non-relation) to which Derrida alludes via the phrase ‘there shall be no mourning’ only intensify the fraught interlocutionary situation of civil life that, for Lyotard, would foreshadow them. Importantly, as Derrida acknowledges towards the end of his essay for Lyotard, the untotalizable identities at play in such an interlocutionary situation—‘you’, ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘us’—do not simply hazard a sort of deconstruction tending towards oblivion or radical paralysis, but instead run the risk of what Lyotard in The Differend terms the ‘last phrase’, the further phrase that is called for by the prescriptive one upon which we have so dwelt, as the very possibility of an obligated or tasked freedom. However, as Derrida points out, Lyotard’s writing also demands that we consider this question of mourning in relation to that of the ‘ordered’ dead, those who die—or who are condemned to die—by another’s order or hand. The ‘beautiful death’ (like that of Socrates, say) is the one that has meaning to the extent that is conceived of as preferable by dint of an order given to an addressee (‘you must die because…’). Since such a death is effectively fulfilled and fulfilling in terms of its replete meaning, mourning as such may be dispensed with. It is almost as if such a death does not take place as death at all, as Derrida himself observes. The ‘order’ of such a death means that, in one sense, one dies in order not to die (rather than simply vanishing, to remain and transcend instead as pure and purely legible meaning). Auschwitz, meanwhile, is the exception to this order of the ‘beautiful death’, foremost because ‘Auschwitz’ is the name for a practice of the ‘extinction of the name’ whereby ‘the victim is not the addressee of the order’. Thus, ‘“Auschwitz” cannot, except through an abuse of rhetoric, be turned into a “beautiful death,” or a sacrificial holocaust’ (236). For Derrida, nonetheless, on these terms ‘Auschwitz’ can no more be mourned than the ‘beautiful death’, or at any rate the word ‘mourning’ is conspicuous by its absence throughout Lyotard’s discussion of these matters in The Differend. As opposed to the ‘beautiful death’, there is the ‘worse than death’ that may be associated with ‘Auschwitz’ where it is the extinction of the very name that forbids mourning, given that this murder of the name constitutes the very meaning of the order ‘die’ (Derrida 2001, 237).

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The ‘murder of the name’ sees the death order gather itself up to its full power. And yet the power of such an order—that which characterizes or defines it as such—is in another sense tied to the idea of an addressee (‘it is you who must die…’). Just as in the case of the ‘beautiful death’, the order in one sense fulfils itself but in another becomes self-confounding because the order ‘to die’ is transcended by the immortality thereby obtained by the victim, so the death order at ‘Auschwitz’ is quasi-suicidal in its practice of the ‘extinction of names’. But in either case mourning is out of the question, not simply because there is no-one to be mourned (to say this would be an abuse of the logic we are pursuing here), but since a more conventional ‘politics’ of mourning is decommissioned in advance by the fact that neither ‘death’ has a negotiable meaning. The negotiation or reckoning of meaning is what comes to an end by order in both the ‘beautiful death’ and ‘the extinction of the name’. To the extent that it risks lapsing into a permanent state of organized mourning, of coming to ‘signify the mourning of Auschwitz’, Israel may mourn where ‘mourning has no meaning’ (Derrida 2001, 237). In other words, it is as if ‘Israel had wished to go through mourning’ in the sense of ‘establishing damages that can be repaired’ or ‘thinking that it can translate the wrong into damages and the differend into a litigation, which is and remains impossible’, as Derrida puts it (Derrida 2001, 237). He cites several passages from The Differend where Lyotard expresses these concerns about Israel. For Lyotard, Israel aimed to put to an end the silence to which the Jews had been condemned by Auschwitz, but by seeking the common idiom of international law and politics, Israel tried to establish a consensus about a ‘wrong’ that could never be measured or reckoned in consensual terms. From this, it is easy enough to clarify Lyotard’s position on these issues in stark contrast to, as we shall see, Jacques Rancière’s dismissal of his writings as sponsoring an ethical consensus instituted upon an endless work of mourning and commemoration. Derrida’s mourning essay for Lyotard not only acknowledges but enacts another mourning beyond that which Lyotard’s prescriptive phrase proscribes, a mourning which does not readily partake of the forms of political limitation that Rancière, in his writings on Lyotard, will come to associate with ‘ethical’ mourning per se.

Part Two If it is perhaps Derrida more than any other who is most often the prime suspect where accusations about the melancholic disposition of a certain type of modern European philosophy are concerned—a ‘melancholy’ that must be

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resisted and overcome if new forms of political life are to be realized—nonetheless this line of criticism is far from restricted to him. For several years now the ‘ethics-of-the-other’ position that, for some writers, recalls deconstruction or poststructuralist thought more generally has been the subject of particular critique. One proponent of this criticism has been Jacques Rancière. One of the places Rancière tends to ground such a critique is Lyotard’s interpretation of the Kantian sublime and his assessment of its ‘modern’ importance. Many have sought to recuperate the idea of art’s singular resistance to appropriation, notably through reference to the Kant’s notion of sublimity. In Aesthetics and its Discontents7 Rancière (2012) argues that what is at stake in Lyotard’s attempt to radicalize the sublime by emphasizing an ‘irreducible gap between the idea and the sensible’ is the effort to define modern art as that which testifies to ‘the fact of the unpresentable’, which in turn licenses the founding of an ‘ethical community’ (20–21) on the basis of the aesthetic. Such a ‘community’ is ‘ethical’, for Rancière, insofar as it is constructed upon the supposed ruins of those discourses of collective, political emancipation to which the aesthetic form of art was hitherto powerfully linked.8 Rancière rejects what he sees as the Lyotardian sublime’s concern to place modern or ‘avant-­ garde’ art at an absolute distance from the everyday world. For Rancière, such detachment is not that of an alienation effect, replete with the ‘promise-­ carrying contradiction’ (42) that paves the way for political emancipation. Instead, he argues, sublimity of the Lyotardian stripe binds us to an absolute alterity which can neither be reconciled nor overcome. The ‘enigma’ of the work formed by the world’s contradictions is, for Rancière, thereby recast in terms of an impossible testimony to the power of the ‘Other’. For Rancière, the ‘ethical’ task of such impossible witness testifies to the constitutive state of ruination that supposedly is modern art,9 but also provides the (quasi-­ messianic) paradigm for keeping alive ‘the memory of catastrophe’— twentieth-­ century ‘catastrophe’ in particular—without any capacity for developing new means of politics or ‘becoming-life’. Rancière argument against Lyotard’s Kantianism is that, to the extent that the sublime in Kant does not refer to an art work as such but rather to the experience of imagination’s incapacity before reason,10 it places us in the domain of morality and not aesthetics. The sublime reminds reason of its superiority over nature and indeed its ‘legislative vocation in the supersensible order’, as Rancière puts it, thus leading out from the realm of art into ‘the ethical universe’ (2012, 89). For Rancière, Lyotard twists Kant’s thought such that imagination’s shortcomings in the face of the sublime encourage not so much ‘the autonomous law of the legislative mind’ as ‘subordination to the law of alterity’ or heteronomy. As such, the ‘ethical’ experience of the aesthetic

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sublime amounts to profound and insurmountable servitude to the ‘Other’ (2012, 93–94). Rancière turns to Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man as, for him, the better example of inheritance in regard to Kantian aesthetics, insofar as Schiller reveals rather than effaces their emancipatory potential. Here, Rancière argues, it becomes clear that all aesthetic experience, whether it be of the sublime or the beautiful, suspends both the law of understanding that necessitates conceptual determination and the law of sensation that entails a desired object. If aesthetic experience tout court thereby ‘suspends the power relations which usually structure the experience of the knowing, acting and desiring subject’ (Rancière 2012, 97), Rancière discerns in such experience freedom’s promise rather than the condition of servitude. Be that as it may, since there is never simply harmonious ‘agreement’ of the faculties in aesthetic experience, but instead a break with any such agreement each time the aesthetic is involved, Rancière disputes the necessity of Lyotard’s specific appeal to the sublime. For Rancière, the sublime’s ‘dissensual’ tensions reside not merely in the sublime as a form of aesthetic experience profoundly distinct from that of the beautiful, but instead strike at the very heart of aesthetic experience as such. As Rancière argues, it is this dissensus that permits Schiller to attribute political capacity to the aesthetic state. For him, aesthetic experience fosters a common sense of the dissensual in that it powerfully undermines the class distinctions and hierarchies that hitherto tied art to the established order of the world, while at the same time exposing ‘distant classes’ to precisely the experience of their own ‘distance’ within the specific distribution of the sensible. Yet if, as Rancière argues, the aesthetic (that of the beautiful as much as the sublime) was always characterized by an internal movement of dissensus—as a movement that is replete with politics—then how is it possible for him to distinguish and isolate the sublime as that which encourages simply a politically conservative movement of separation, a more or less inert form of withdrawal rather than politically charged distantiation? Just as engaged art—by desiring outreach or extension to the point of its own disappearance—propels itself towards new forms of life by dint of a movement for which aesthetic experience might be another name, so surely the sublime, to the extent that it must participate in this same dissensual structure of the aesthetic, cannot be entirely emptied of transformative political capacity? Be that as it may, by the last chapter of Aesthetics and Its Discontents, the ethics of the ‘Other’ are read deeply into the contemporary situation of global politics. Here, since the absolute rights of the absolute victim—those powerlessly subjected to ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, sectarian warfare, or other forms of extreme victimization—have become ‘the absolute rights of

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those without rights’, it has been deemed necessary for the rights of the ‘other’ to be transferred to and exercised (indeed, avenged) by the ‘ethical’ community, for example, through humanitarian intervention, international peace-­ keeping forces, the war on terror, and so forth. For Rancière, such a situation radicalizes catastrophe or ‘disaster’ since by dint of the ‘affirmation of a state of exception’ which in fact renders inoperative ‘politics and right’ in their classical forms, all we are left to hope for is some ‘messianic’ answer to despair. Yet forward-lookingness is relatively weak against the interminable memory of unrepresentable evil, of a catastrophic past extending itself seemingly endlessly into a desperate present (which is really all that calls up messianic ‘hope’). It is through a reading of Lyotard’s (1993) lecture for Amnesty International, ‘The Other’s Rights’, that Rancière sees this situation captured perfectly. He argues that what opposes and seeks to violate this absolute right of the other is, in Lyotard’s thought, the will to master the unmasterable and to thereby attain self-mastery (a ‘will’ in Lyotard’s work that, for Rancière, takes us far too directly from the Enlightenment to Revolution to Nazism). Since what is at stake in this ‘will’ is a refusal to bear witness to the law of the ‘Other’, it is therefore to be resisted, from the ‘ethical’ perspective, by ‘infinite justice wielded against infinite evil’, in Rancière’s ominous phrase in Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2012, 130)—a configuration of ethics that for him strongly suppresses the radical promise of emancipatory politics. While Lyotard has of course written extensively and complexly on the sublime in a number of major texts, Rancière’s condemnation of Lyotardian sublimity often revolves around just this short talk he gave as part of the Oxford Amnesty International Lectures in 1993.11 This occurs not just in Aesthetics and Its Discontents but also, for instance, in The Politics of Aesthetics and Dissensus. The reference is recursive, to say the least. While this decision to repeatedly ground much larger arguments on a comparatively minor work may strike some as odd, it is therefore worth revisiting this lecture in some detail in order to evaluate properly Rancière’s criticisms. From its opening paragraph, Lyotard’s lecture evokes the ‘other than human’ which founds the possibility of human rights. Such rights, Lyotard argues, accrue only at the point at which ‘the human is other than a human being’, that is to say more than just basic or bare human life. As its primary historical instance, this ‘other’ or excess of the human is embodied in the notion of the citizen. Lyotard affirms that it is only on condition of being other-than-human that such a being may become ‘an other human being’ within the social realm of the community. ‘Then “the others” can treat him as their fellow human being’ (Lyotard 1993, 136). If what makes human beings alike is, then, ‘the fact that every human being carries within him the figure of

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the other’, this ‘other’ emerges as the other-than-human in the other human that I also am. As such, it arises not as some primeval origin, divine enigma, or source of ancient debt. Instead, it is simply the foundational situation of citizenry in general, which—in a way that is surely not entirely remote from Rancière’s thinking of dissensus—Lyotard formulates outside of notions of the absolute identity of the social bond.12 (One implication of such citizenry as it occurs in Lyotard, of course, is that one never attains ‘full’ citizenship pure and simple, citizenship without remainder, since the figure of the citizen is also that of the ‘other than’, meaning that human lives can never be unproblematically reduced to the citizen form to which they nevertheless tend, but instead—to the extent that they partake of citizenry in some form—always risk its ‘beyond’.) What is the basis of this ‘other than’ of the human? For Lyotard, the communicability which underpins human interlocution is characterized by a certain heterogeneity, in that human language entails forms of address which are necessarily dissymmetrical: I speak, you listen (and, alternately, vice versa). While animals can instinctively and sensorily ‘merge into a community based on signals’, the very circumstances of interlocution mean that human beings cannot (Lyotard 1993, 138). This is a distinction that contemporary animal studies (in philosophy and elsewhere) would doubtless question, establishing as it does an instinctual and sensory identity for the ‘animal’ in contrast to the ‘human’. Be that as it may, what in one sense founds human community (the other-than-human in me which makes me an-other human) also establishes the frontiers of communal identity, or in other words the limit of the community’s integrity or coherence as such. It does so precisely to the extent that what founds the possibility of civil life is the heterogeneity and dissymmetry which grounds the operations of language or speech construed as a form of address to another. It is only with the reduction of the human being to bare life, or in other words the fall into complete non-citizenship, that the principle of heterogeneity established by human language is diminished. Or, rather, vice versa, as Lyotard puts it: ‘only when the impossibility of interlocution’ arises are we reduced ‘to that meager resource’ (Lyotard 1993, 138). Consequently, just such a human ‘we’ is therefore a product or condition of human interlocution, rather than the origin that founds its possibility. This is not to imply, since language and community do not derive from a prior human ‘we’ or an essential ‘humanity’, that the origin of the ‘human’ is nonor inhuman in the form of some divine or primordial Other to whom we are therefore impossibly indebted. Instead it simply affirms that the ‘other’ in me and in the other, which founds the possibility of human communicability and citizenry, is the necessary supplement to that possibility itself. It is not in any

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simple sense previous or external to but coterminous with the making of civil life. For Lyotard, then, ‘the citizen is the human individual whose right to address others is recognized by those others’ (Lyotard 1993, 138). The formulation of the human being as other-than-human/an-other-human, routed through the dissymmetry or heterogeneity of interlocution, is not equated with a law of the Other that is in any simple sense prior to or outside of the ‘human’, as its ‘divine’ or mystical origin. Instead, it is explicitly linked to the specific historical forms that civil society will have taken, entering in as a decisive yet non-integratable element. If the principle of the right to address the other, and of the other’s recognition of this right, founds the historical possibility of human society in its modern sense, whether it be ‘the Greek politeia or the modern republic’ (Lyotard 1993, 138), this possibility profoundly partakes of the future anterior, to the extent that in its very form or structure the ‘model’ cannot be spatially closed or temporally frozen since the heterogeneity which permits the interlocution of citizenry places a limit on the community’s coherence, stability, and identity (in other words, on what Rancière would perhaps call consensus), thus opening onto other possibilities, other futures, other forms of ‘human’ organization and interaction, for good or ill. Nonetheless, Lyotard asserts that while the social and geopolitical extension of civility may be promoted, restricted, or otherwise managed by various means (of which there are many examples throughout history: ‘an obligatory single language, an official language alongside which traditional languages are tolerated, compulsory multilingualism, effective multilingualism, and so on’), ultimately such strategies only determine how interlocution eventually extends, rather than being able to quell its extension more radically (Lyotard 1993, 140). Amid model social forms, it is for Lyotard the ‘republican principle’ in particular which introduces ‘civic interlocution’ into the community and which therefore maintains the principle of heterogeneity or alterity in the realm of human communication. Without it, he suggests, the ‘demos’ or ‘demotic’ in its pure form risks a fall into absolute consensuality. For Lyotard it is the ‘nation’ (presumably in its most ‘nationalistic’ form) that in modern terms most recalls such a situation. Here, alterity is excluded through a process of non-recognition in which the excluded is precisely not recognized as an other (Rancière would presumably have trouble disputing this analysis of exclusion since he frequently reminds us of it). Now, for Lyotard, the republican principle is avowedly ‘contractual’. As such, the ‘Other’ it maintains within the social form that the community takes is not that of an ancient or divine law preceding human sociability and interlocution in absolute terms.

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Instead, it arises on the strength of a ‘civil’ agreement between humans concerning the right to speech and the radical dissymmetry of address. I have the right to address you, and you me, a right established prior to any inkling that we may agree. The ‘civil’, then, entails agreement prior to the very possibility of agreement. Indeed, what binds ‘us’ is that on principle we may never be bound by anything other than the principle enshrined in the republican ‘contact’—that of heterogeneous speech and dissymmetrical address, to which we will have unconditionally agreed without having agreed to it. It is in light of these remarks that Lyotard evokes the ‘forgotten’, a term upon which Rancière dwells in order to mount his increasingly florid critique of Lyotardian thought as perhaps the most hyperbolic form of poststructuralism’s discourse of the Other. Here, though, the term arises in the context of a fairly down-to-earth explanation of Amnesty’s precise vocation, which Lyotard is careful not to inflate or overstate, describing it as ‘minimal’ and yet ‘decisive’ precisely within the limits of its own specificity. Amnestos, he writes, means the one who is forgotten: ‘Amnesty does not demand that the judgment be revised or that the convicted man be rehabilitated. It simply asks that the institution that has condemned him to silence forget this decree and restore the victim to the community of speakers’ (Lyotard 1993, 141). However, the restoration of interlocutory relations and rights might not just mean release without question. It might also take the form of a fair trial, proper rights and conditions in prison, insistence upon the legal accountability of the State, and so forth. To recall the forgotten in such contexts does not so much appeal to some primordial law of the Other, but first of all reaffirms the fundamental principle of the civil contract. ‘The others rights’, to reprise Lyotard’s title, are in this sense not those of some absolutized Other, but refer instead to those rights which make the ‘civil’ possible, possible among all of ‘us’ (rights which would seem especially important since, however it may be determined, the extension of the ‘civil’ cannot be curbed). To the extent that remembering the forgotten is, here, the particular task of Amnesty as a human rights organization, such recollection is therefore less a matter of hyperbolic melancholy or paralyzing obligation, testifying to itself in the enigmatic name of an absolute Other. Instead, perhaps more prosaically (or rather, more ‘minimally’ yet ‘decisively’), Amnesty’s task of vigilant non-­ forgetting is ‘in accordance with the provisions of the public law of the republican democracies’ (Lyotard 1993, 141)—that is, law founded on the right to speech and the capacity of address. The law of the republic establishes duty as much as right, yet such duty is not the debt of the absolute arche, but occurs instead because the right of the human being as other-than-human/an-other-­ human is by definition not natural, and is therefore ‘merited’ or earned

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through civilization, or in other words through the education or instruction that the civil contract promises. Within this model of interlocutory civility, silence does not commemorate the ‘Other’ as the absolute resource of a pure enigma. It is simply the condition of possibility of address. For instance, for Lyotard it is only through recognizing the value of his own silence before the teacher’s address—a silence which Lyotard equates with a certain productive ‘distress’—that the pupil in his turn earns the right to speak (in a phrase that the Rancière of The Ignorant Schoolmaster13 must have blanched at, Lyotard argues that ‘the exaltation of interactivity as a pedagogic principle is pure demagogy’ (1993, 142)—and no doubt it is this, as much as some erroneously detected trace of a commitment to ethical consensuality, that strongly fuels Rancière’s attempt to dismiss Lyotard’s politics). Whether the relationship of Rancière’s thought to that of Lyotard is to be understood in terms of the ‘distress’ of the differend (or, put otherwise, the very dissymmetry of instruction and address that for Rancière would repeat the severance of emancipatory politics from an ethics of the other), or whether it is to be thought of in terms of the pained agitation occasioned by, let’s say, différance (i.e., of a differentiation which cannot fully repress deferral or, put differently, the limits of differentiation itself ), one hesitates to see how its language games open on to the pure optimism of ‘dissensus’.14 Instead, the ‘distress’ I detect underlying Rancière’s position is also that of a desire to stifle the sublime, to reduce it as constitutive of a pure impediment to emancipatory politics, a desire which knows it threatens to delegitimize other aspects of the very same project or analysis—by which I refer to the double gesture on Rancière’s part of, on the one hand, a refutation of the sublime (as) blockage itself and, on the other, the semi-repressed inclusion of the sublime within a ‘Schillerian’ aesthetics of emancipation.

Part Three Rather reductive characterizations of the tradition which gives rise to deconstruction can be found in a number of contemporary authors enjoying critical success. In a way that is perhaps symptomatic of the more general discontentment with deconstruction that cuts across a number of approaches within the contemporary ‘theoretical’ field, Derrida’s corpus has been disputed by Slavoj Žižek as indicative of ‘poststructuralism’ at its worst. An example of this critique can be found in The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, published in English in 2014.15 This particular title by Žižek is important in that it represents a reworked version of his 1982 doctoral thesis, completed under

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the direction of Jacques-Alain Miller at the University of Paris VIII. The event of its publication in revised form has been taken not just to present Hegel as a Lacanian avant la lettre16 but to demonstrate that from his earliest writings Žižek pioneered an approach that would make possible the intersection of Lacanianism and Hegelianism to the benefit of forms of political thought capable of breaking through the ‘poststructuralist’ impasse. One chapter, ‘The Quilting Point of Ideology: Or Why Lacan is Not a “Poststructuralist”’, is, unsurprisingly given its title, of particular interest in this regard. Here, the Lacanian notion of a ‘quilting point’ takes centre stage as the ‘fundamentally contingent operation through which the ideological-­ symbolic field retroactively receives its “reason,” its necessity, or, to put it in Hegelian terms, through which it posits its own preconditions’ (Žižek 2014, 199). The stereotype of the ‘Jew’ in Nazi ideology serves as an exemplary figure of such a quilting point. Far from offering ‘an inarguable refutation’ that might ‘cause the ideological edifice to collapse’, the difference between the stereotype of the ‘Jew’ and everyday experiences of Jewish people is ‘already included in advance in the way anti-Semitism operates’: ‘You have to be very careful with Jews, it isn’t always easy to spot them because they can take on the appearance of ordinary people … in order to hide their true corrupt nature!’ (Žižek 2014, 196). Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s analysis of fascist ideology, Žižek therefore evokes the quilting point as that which operates as an exceptional element or ‘master signifier’ to unify a ‘patchwork’ of contingent elements into a single ‘edifice’ capable of ‘totalizing the field and stabilizing its signification’ (Žižek 2014, 199). However, this exceptional element is not so much exempt from the differential play of relations that it otherwise unifies or stabilizes such that it acquires the status of an ‘abundant’ signification or a ‘fixed point of reference’ (Žižek 2014, 200). Rather, it emerges on condition of a purely performative self-articulation that is sufficiently tautological or self-referential that the very idea of ‘reference’ is misleading, since the quilting point as ostensibly a point of reference is itself ‘reference-less’. Thus, it is ‘the mark of a lack, the empty space of signification’ that nevertheless secures the field of signification. Put differently, the quilting point is always already the ‘impossible’ of itself. The quilting point actually does no more than to, in Žižek’s terms, ‘incarnate’ and ‘positivize’ the impossible ‘Real’ whose impasses it seeks to overcome (Žižek 2014, 201). Coming back to Nazi ideology, the ‘Jew’ would then be nothing other than ‘the way in which Nazism presentifies its own impossibility’, the exemplary or exceptional figure of ‘the fundamental impossibility of the totalitarian project’. But Žižek’s point here is not to herald the inevitable foundering of totalitarianism on the basis of this paradox, but to show how its contingent operation is always to include this knowledge in

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its own structural or systematic workings, as in the example of the ‘sleight of hand’ that sees all Jewish people reincorporated regardless into the stereotype of the ‘Jew’. Totalitarianism is, in this sense, structured as a struggle not against the ‘other’ per se (Jewish people at large), but against its own conditions of (im)possibility configured as just this exceptional-impossible element we are calling the ‘Jew’. And, for Žižek, that’s precisely how fascism works. As the chapter enters its final phase, Žižek’s concern is to demonstrate how, despite appearances to the contrary, this form of analysis cannot be reabsorbed from a ‘poststructuralist’ perspective. Although it may seem that the quilting point might be reinterpreted as just another example of an always doomed attempt to arrest plurality or dispersion through the force of a totalization that can never complete itself as such, leaving us in the position of a kind of ‘bad infinity’ where the irresolvable interplay of quilting and un-­ quilting constitutes itself as an interminable process, nevertheless Žižek wants to establish Lacanianism here in terms of a possible exit from just this ‘poststructuralist’ situation. He argues that Lacan’s interest is not in affirming the inevitable subversion of totalization, its unavoidable lapse into fragmentation or division; but instead his concern is to ask the question of the quilting point’s very possibility, of what causes it to arise in the first place. For Žižek, this is a Hegelian question. And precisely the failure of the quilting point is, paradoxically enough, the very answer to this question of its origin. Žižek argues that if totalization and the ‘quilting point’ fail ‘it is because they can only bring about their own existence through an element that incarnates this very impossibility itself. For him it is therefore ‘superfluous to search for symptomal points, fissures that could cause the totality to collapse’, since the quilting point is nothing if not ‘the embodiment, the positivization of this fundamental failure, of this very impossibility as such’ (Žižek 2014, 203–04). The quilting point is ‘evidence of its own impossibility’ converted into contingent operations that make totalitarianism possible. This impossibility marks not so much the limit of totalitarianism, as ‘poststructuralism’ might have it (on Žižek’s account), but instead accounts precisely for its emergence, indeed its constitutive power. On the way to demarcating the ‘poststructuralist’ approach from that of Lacan, Žižek also wants to reverse the distinction that sees the former— ‘poststructuralism’—resisting the forms of mastery it accuses the latter— Lacan—of stealthily reintroducing or readopting. Thus, contra Derrida, Lacan does not merely seek to arrest and master textual dissemination by re-­ anchoring lack in a positive sense, ‘reducing or canceling lack by means of its very affirmation’ (Žižek 2014, 205)—if only because, through the exceptional example of the quilting point, the positivization of an impossibility happens

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as precisely a contingent operation. Indeed, such a perspective on Lacan’s thought is only made possible by means of a ‘poststructuralist’ perspective that, for Žižek, itself ‘holds together’ rather too well, holding to paradoxical formulations (there is no simple ‘outside’ of metaphysics; there is no self-­ contained ‘inside’ of metaphysics) which secure its position more or less ‘unimpeachably’, as he puts it (Žižek 2014, 206). From here, we are treated to a torrent of criticisms about ‘poststructuralist’ or ‘deconstructive’ poeticizations which mimic the textual or disseminal effects of literature only to better conceal their ‘firm’, ‘strict’ theoreticism. Be wary, then: ‘poststructuralism’ may not be what it seems. You have to be very careful with ‘deconstructionism’ (so-called), it can take on the appearance of its opposite in order to hide its true nature. (Indeed, it risks the spread of its own infection to the extent that, in sly denial of its own character, it projects its own shortcomings on to others.) If I am deliberately reinvoking the language that Žižek uses to reflect the way that fascist totalitarianism constructs the figure of the ‘Jew’, then it is perhaps telling that Žižek resolves the question of the ‘radical difference’ between Lacan and ‘poststructuralism’ by insisting that it is precisely the performative ‘utterances’ of Lacan as an expression of ‘impossible’ mastery which ‘prevent us from reverting back into the metalinguistic position’ with which ‘poststructuralism’ itself might be associated (Žižek 2014, 207). Here, it is not only that—on the strength of Žižek’s own analysis—Lacanian performativity itself looks rather ‘fascist’ (for Žižek implies this is exactly how fascism works) but also that the language of ‘reverting back’ (and, later on, ‘backsliding’) recalls the Nazi discourse of ‘Jewish’ degeneracy projected onto a debauched ‘poststructuralism’. One wonders, then, whether everything that Žižek has to say about the functioning of the word ‘Jew’ in Nazi ideology might not also apply to the way in which the terms ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘deconstructionism’ work in his own ‘Lacanian’ discourse. The point I’m making about this seeming paradox in Žižek’s essay seems so obvious that it is hard to believe the effect isn’t deliberate, a suspicion which is, in and of itself, further cause for concern. Regardless of whether his criticisms of deconstruction or ‘poststructuralism’ contain any truth or value whatsoever—a question I deliberately want to leave undeveloped here—my response is not merely a backsliding ‘deconstruction’ of his own discourse, operating outside of its own, pioneering terms and logic. On the contrary, I am only taking him at his word (something that deconstruction does rather well, in fact). But that, in itself, is a complicated matter, notably because, for Žižek, Lacan’s statement in Seminar XI—‘That is precisely what I mean, and say—for what I mean, I say…’—is not a lapse that allows renewed allusion to

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the ‘poststructuralist’ strawman of ‘mastery’, but is instead an utterance of precisely the ‘impossible’ kind that one might be tempted to associate with the contingent operations of totalitarianism or fascism. Perhaps it is mostly in this sense, then, that Žižek is saying just what he means to say in ‘Why Lacan is not a “Poststructuralist”’. One wonders what may be involved in an identification with the performative conditions of a Lacanian utterance which, for Žižek, posits a certain lack of ‘mastery’ only in order to assume ‘impossibility’ of a kind that would seem to echo, or at least mimic, the contingent operations of totalitarianism or fascism.

Notes 1. Since Derrida’s death in 2004, a concerted effort has been made to bring unpublished seminar materials into the public domain. The Derrida Seminar Translation Project, led principally by Peggy Kamuf and Geoffrey Bennington but based on a larger team including David Wills, Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and others, has worked to prepare several editions for publication in French and English translation, beginning with late material not substantially reflected in other published works. The Beast and the Sovereign and The Death Penalty, both published in two volumes by Chicago University Press from 2009 onwards, have generated a fresh critical literature in the field of Derrida studies. Examples include a special issue of The Southern Journal of Philosophy (Spindel Supplement) 50 (2012), ‘Derrida and the Theologico-­ Political: From Sovereignty to the Death Penalty’, and a special issue of the Oxford Literary Review 35.2 (2013), Death Sentences (both of which include essays by authors connected with the DSTP), as well as a number of edited collections such as The Animal Question in Deconstruction, edited by Lynn Turner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). However, this literature is sufficiently extensive and critically compelling on its own terms that, rather than exhaustively list and summarize such writings here, I will simply refer the reader indicatively and instead attempt to offer some other remarks and commentary on deconstruction today as outlined in the introduction to this chapter, notably against a broader critical background. 2. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 3. In The Work of Mourning, Derrida writes that ‘death obligates’ in a form that is ‘unconditional’ to the extent that, in contrast, ‘one can always negotiate conditions with the living’. Death, however, ‘ruptures’ this ‘symmetry’ (223–24).

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4. Derrida notes that, perhaps alone among their peers, he and Lyotard eschewed the ‘tu’ and instead retained the ‘vous’ as a therefore anomalous form of interchange, a ‘secret code’ with ‘transgressive value’, a practice of ‘exception’ or ‘contravention’, a ‘grammatical contraband’ that ‘left open its destinal singularity’ (226–28). 5. Derrida gives reasons why he may speculate that the phrase in fact addresses him, although of course this falls well short of an assertion or proof. 6. Not to mention the forms and borders of internality and externality that, post-­ mortem, introjection and incorporation struggle to maintain or negotiate. 7. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 8. Rancière makes such arguments across a number of his texts, often centring on Lyotard. He is fond of reprising his critique of the Lyotardian sublime. See the Foreword to The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2004), and those sections of the chapter on ‘Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity’ in which the comments included in the Foreword are further worked out (see esp. 29). See also Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2010), esp. 59–60, 72–74, 182. 9. To be more specific regarding Lyotard, in Aesthetics and its Discontents, Rancière argues that Lyotard contrasts the ‘positivistic nihilism of aesthetics as a discourse which, under the name of culture, delights in the ruined ideals of a civilization’ with just this ‘negative task’ of bearing impossible witness to the ‘unpresentable’ (89). 10. Although Rancière argues otherwise, Lyotard of course knows this. For instance, in Heidegger and ‘the Jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 45, he writes: ‘Art is an artifact; it constructs its representation. At cannot be sublime; it can “make” sublime….’ If nothing else, this points to Rancière’s haste in wanting to present a reductive image of the Lyotardian project. 11. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Other’s Rights’, in On Human Rights, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993), 135–47. 12. Lyotard therefore continues: ‘The likeness that they have in common follows from the difference of each from each’ (136). 13. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). The premise of this book is that the scene of teaching is characterized by an equal intelligence shared by teacher and student alike and thus that the beginnings of education are to be found in such ‘equality’.

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14. Fittingly, if ironically, the term is also used by Lyotard (even if its meaning is not identical with that of Rancière), for instance, at the very close of Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1988), where Lyotard writes that ‘the only consensus’ we should concern ourselves with pursuing is ‘one that would encourage … heterogeneity or “dissensus”’ (45). 15. Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). Page references will be given in the main body of the chapter. 16. See Jodie Matthews’ review for the LSE online at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/10/16/book-review-the-most-sublime-hysteric-hegelwith-lacan-by-slavoj-zizek/

Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New  York, NY: Columbia University Press. ———. 1990. Heidegger and ‘the Jews’. Translated by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1993. The Other’s Rights. In On Human Rights, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, 135–147. New York, NY: Basic Books. Matthews, Jodie. 2016. Review of The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan by Slavoj Žižek. LSE Blogs. Review of Books. Accessed January 10, 2017. http://blogs. lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/10/16/book-review-the-most-sublime-hysterichegel-with-lacan-by-slavoj-zizek/ Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York, NY: Continuum. ———. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London and New York, NY: Continuum. ———. 2012. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Part IV Literary Criticism and Theory

20 Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths Michael Mack

Introduction: Philosophy’s Declarative and Literature’s Dialogical Truths From Plato onwards, philosophers have called into doubt that we are able to discover new truths in literature. By denying that literature has any trustworthy truth value, philosophers from Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel to contemporary theorists (such as Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen, Jerome Stolnitz, Terry Diffey, and Eileen John) deny that we can receive any form of useful knowledge from the study of literature. This chapter challenges this philosophical demotion of literature. It does so by proposing a new understanding of truth as not only declarative and conceptual but also relational and dialogical. The following two sections analyse and critique some philosophical reductions of truth to what can be conceptually measured and assessed as declarations. The concluding chapter  to this Handbook (“Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue”) develops a notion of truth as relationality and dialogue first by discussing Martin Buber’s philosophy of the I and Thou (1976) and then by exploring how the Holocaust survivor and poet Paul Celan transformed this philosophy into a literary practice that renders inoperative language’s death-bringing speech (as manifest in an anti-Semitic declaration about Jews, as current in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s of the preceding century). M. Mack (*) Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_20

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Contemporary philosophers, who grant literature a special kind of truth, restrict the potential for a literary form of knowledge to the non-conceptual, to the sphere of the aesthetic, of affects and emotions (Carroll 1998; Cohen 2004). John Gibson has recently described this philosophical position vis-à-­ vis a non-declarative and non-conceptual truth of literature as follows: ‘These philosophers urge that if we look deep enough, we can discover a certain cognitive force in these features of art, which has the attractive consequence of showing us how to allow art to be just that yet find ground upon which to build its cognitive value’ (Gibson 2009, 478). On this view, literature’s truths are rather non-innovative and secondary. Philosophy seems to restrict literature to the sphere of aesthetics and representation. Here it is not capable of discovering new truths. Instead, it remains confined to the task of representing truths with which we are already familiar, as Gibson goes on to make clear: ‘Like Carroll, I want to argue that literature’s cognitive value resides in its ability not to offer knowledge but rather to act upon knowledge we already possess. And like Elridge and Cohen, I want to claim that the form of insight we get from this concerns not truth, properly so-called, but a certain cognitive orientation toward the “texture” of human experience and circumstance’ (Gibson 2009, 478). Literature adheres to ‘texture’, whereas philosophy and science are concerned with truth. This neglects that it is not only literature that is textual (i.e. language based) but also philosophy that is grounded in a linguistic sphere. Language is, however, ambiguous, even when it seems to be straightforwardly declarative and conceptual as Gibson is not tired of reiterating: ‘Literary works, however, lacking declarative power, and much else in addition, are not in the business of articulating truths’ (Gibson 2009, 477). Why is declarative power so important here? Because it seems to avoid the reader: thanks to their declarative and conceptual methodology, philosophical works appear to spell out their truths in a straightforward manner, independent of how the reader engages with them. Is this indeed the case? Do philosophical works avoid the ambiguities of language? How can this be, bearing in mind that they are themselves linguistic? Philosophers of literature seem to have avoided or ignored the linguistic turn of the 1960s. Gibson pays attention to it as a post-Frege event of sorts. It only concerns literature, as if it were only literature that is grounded in language. Whereas traditional, humanistic approaches to literature still presupposed a connection between world and text, Frege, Saussure and Derrida disconnected the literary from the worldly: ‘What we find here is a view of the language of literary works that has the consequence of severing whatever internal connection we once thought might exist between literary works and

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extra-literary reality’ (Gibson 2009, 474). By reading together Frege and the linguistic turn of the 1960s, philosophers of literature simplify the position of a continental philosopher such as Jacques Derrida. For Derrida it is not only literature that is trapped in linguistic fluidity but the whole of language-based human existence. In this sense there is no ‘extra-­ literary reality’ as many philosophers of language (Lamarque, Richard Eldridge, Olsen, and Gibson, amongst others) claim. This does not mean (as it is absurdly often taken to mean) that there is no ‘objective’, material reality. Of course there is. However, language mediates our approach to the material reality of us and our surroundings. Crucially, language goes far beyond the linguistic, narrowly understood. Language is itself part of the larger sphere of symbols that constitute our human world. Lacan most famously described this power of the symbolic in his discovery of the ‘mirror scene’. The image of us that we see in a mirror is not us. It is a symbol of us. Lacan argues that animals realize the deception of their own mirror image: it is not substantial; it is an image but not the thing itself. Hence from a young age they do not take mirror images seriously. Not so human children: This act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relationship between the movement assumed in the image and reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it duplicates—the child’s own body, and the persons and things, around him. (Lacan 2001, 1)

Derrida may have rightly taken Lacan to task for his denial that animals establish a relationship with a linguistic/symbolic sphere. However, the crucial point here is what Lacan’s psychoanalytical discovery of the mirror stage reveals about our (human or wider animal) constitution: that we approach the world not in a straightforward ‘declarative’ manner as philosophers of literature tend to claim but that our perceptions and interactions with the material world of our selfhood and our environment are themselves mediated by the virtuality of the literary—or what Lacan calls the symbolic: But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-­ into-­being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically …. (Lacan 2001, 1)

There is always a fictional, symbolic, virtual direction that informs our real world.

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As regards the claim to conceptual truth, concepts are part of a linguistic/symbolic structure, rather than residing in a Platonic sphere of ideas, where they are quasi-supernaturally freed from the symbolic pitfalls that partake of our world. We cannot extrapolate concepts from the ambiguity of language in which they operate. Derrida goes so far to call this insight ‘the erasure of concepts’ (Derrida 1976, 61). Rather than being original placeholders of truth, concepts are elements of linguistic ambiguity and fluidity. Concepts are themselves traces: ‘The trace is not only the disappearance of origin—within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin’ (Derrida 1976, 61). The origin is itself a trace. Concepts can thus not found original truths. There are none but traces. This, however, does not mean that we cannot discover truths. Most importantly, the truths in question here are not straightforward or simply ‘declarative’: they are ambiguous and contaminated with what appears to be their respective opposite. Derrida’s notion of the trace appears to be a neutral. Anything can be a trace of anything else. What it is the trace of can be something beneficial or something harmful. Derrida’s notion of the trace could be expanded into a theory of contamination (Mack 2016) where we come discover that there exists a parallelism between linguistic/symbolic fluidity and a rapidly changing material world—a world that is subject to precipitating changes in the age of the Anthropocene where humanity with its symbolic baggage has become a geological force that changes the climate of the planet which we inhabit. Climate change is driven by an increased rate of carbon emissions, which in turn is caused by an ever-accelerating rate of production and consumption. The increase in human productive energy use in large partakes of the symbolic sphere which shapes the economics of our behaviour from advertising slogans to the symbolic command to be successful and happy. Success and happiness are tied to the illusory ability to produce and consume (on the basis of gradually increasing carbon emissions). This brief description of the Anthropocene shows how our human world cannot, for good or for worse, be separated from the fictive, imaginary, and symbolic that keep us enthralled and make us desire the possession of consumer icons which are symbols—the star of a Mercedes car or the Apple computer icon on smart phones are classic examples of the symbolic that drives advertising and our culture of carbon intensive production and consumption. Literature is in particular capable of shedding light on the complexities of our world that are not merely a question of declaring truths. Literature can show that what we may have taken to be straightforwardly beneficial (such as production and consumption) has a disturbing underside:

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that is, the waste of the energy that is needed for production and consumption in the form of carbon emissions. Here literature illuminates aspects of our life which we may otherwise have ignored. A mere focus on declarative and conceptual truth misses the itinerary declarations and concepts undergo not only in a linguistic but also in a wider socio-historical context. For the prevailing philosophers of literature the fluidity and ambiguity of the symbolic and of language, in particular, does not in any way inform what they seem to celebrate as the declarative power of philosophical truth. Being not capable of proffering new knowledge, for these mainly English-speaking philosophers, literature is clearly inferior here to philosophy and the sciences. It is emotive and not rational. It can understand what we already know but is incapable of showing us new insights and new perspectives. Philosophers á la Gibson are still subscribing to a binary opposition between the emotions and reason and this at a time when neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio have shown that we cannot separate reason from the emotions. We may indeed question whether the philosophical demotion of literature to the sphere of the emotions and of representation is as philosophically watertight as it claims to be. Critics have indeed shown that ‘it is certainly not the case that literary texts simply drew on emerging scientific theories’ (Shuttleworth 2010, 3). As Shuttleworth puts it, ‘Indeed the reverse can be shown to be true, with key literary works playing a formative role in the development of the framework of nineteenth century psychiatry’ (Shuttleworth 2010, 3). Literature’s formative role in the discovery of scientific truths is not restricted to the sphere of psychiatry. John Lehrer (2007) has investigated how literature anticipated many twenty-first-century neuroscientific discoveries about the plasticity of the brain. Taking issue with the philosophical demotion of the literary to the non-­ conceptual and non-insightful, my book Contaminations (Mack 2016) analyses how classic literary and cinematic works such as Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady and Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo question the way we separate actions from perception and prioritize the former over the latter. James’s novel makes us discover how perception is a form of action as he highlights in the 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady: She sits up, by her dying fire, far into the night, under the spell of recognition on which she finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a representation simply of her motionless seeing, and an attempt to make the mere lucidity of her act as ‘interesting’ as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate. (James 1995, 15)

Here representation is active, making us see how Isabel Archer’s seeming passivity is extraordinarily active: how her contemplative mind is at the same time highly active. James indeed makes a strong case for the blurring of the

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traditional divide between the perceptive and the active aspects of our existence whose ‘truthful’, scientific foundations were proven by the discovery of mirrorneurons in the late 1990s of the last century. James attempts to illuminate the ways in which perceptions also partake of their seeming opposite: actions. This argument could be extended to the topic of representation. Like perceptions, representations are traditionally defined as secondary and passive. As we have seen, most contemporary philosophers in the English-speaking world locate the technologies of truth in the construction of declarations and concepts which they posit as a lack in literature. Literature, they claim, fails to engage with declarative and conceptual truth. As is discussed in the following section, this argument harks back to Plato’s famous ban on poetry and literature as part of the foundations of his ideal republic. Philosophy declares truth and these declarations are assumed to be active: they are performances of the truthful. Literature, by contrast, is confined to passivity: to representations. Contemporary philosophers of literature, as we have seen in this section, oppose literature’s passivity with the active appearance of the truth in works of philosophy. How does this activity unfold? Declarations and conceptions perform actions of truth, according to these philosophers. They thus implicitly contrast literature representations with philosophy’s declarations. The following section questions such neat separations and oppositions and argues for the contamination of what appear to be mutually opposed entities. We may come closer to an accurate account of what constitutes truth by contaminating rather than opposing literature and philosophy, representation and declaration, and perception and action. As we see in the concluding chapter to this Handbook (“Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue”), poetry (Paul Celan’s) constitutes the site of illuminating contaminations. The following first analyses the foundation of traditional oppositions between mimesis and truth in Plato’s and Aristotle’s ancient theories of literature. It then discusses how twentieth-century continental philosophers attempted to outdo such oppositions.

F rom Plato to Rancière: Is Representation a Question of What Is Appropriate or Representative? Significantly, Plato’s Socrates persuades his dialogue partner in the Republic, Adeimantus, to conclude that the stories poets tell represent a danger to the entire community: ‘these stories are definitely dangerous’ (Plato 2010, 47), Adeimantus concurs with the Socrates of Plato’s Republic. Poetry poses a threat to politics.

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Nonetheless, Plato’s Socrates takes the myths (stories) proffered by the poets seriously. They are a serious issue for the community, because they shape the way people think as well as behave: ‘it’s always been the poets who’ve composed untrue stories to tell people’ (Plato 2010, 46). The poets mislead by distorting the true nature of the god: ‘Using the written word to give a distorted image of the nature of the gods and heroes, just as a painter might produce a portrait which completely fails to capture the likeness of the original’ (Plato 2010, 46). Strikingly ‘true’ here means ‘appropriate’ as Plato’s Socrates makes clear when he contradicts himself, saying that even if these stories were true (in the sense of accurate representations) they should be forbidden, because they present an inappropriate image of the gods: Now, I think that even if these stories are true, they oughtn’t be told so casually to young people and people who lack discrimination; it’s better to keep silent, and if one absolutely has to speak, to make them esoteric secrets told to as few people as possible, who are to have sacrificed no mere piglet, but something so large and rare that the smallest conceivable number of people get to hear them. … And we must censor them in our community, Adeimantus’, I [i.e. Socrates] said. No young person is to hear stories which suggest that were he to commit the vilest of crimes, and were he to do his utmost to punish his father’s crimes, he wouldn’t be doing anything out of the ordinary, but would simply be behaving like the first and the greatest of gods. (Plato 2010, 47)

The poets depict the gods in an inappropriate, immoral way. This is the foundation of Plato’s accusation: poetry is false, because it is disrespectful of existing moral standards. Its violation of the truth is its inappropriateness. This dismissal of poetry as being false is deeply political and it is not accidental that the danger of poets plays such a prominent role in Plato’s main work on politics, The Republic. The book calls for the public interdiction of poets to continue their work. It asks for the exertion of political force to overcome the danger of poetry: poets ‘should also be forcibly prevented from trying to ­persuade the young men of our community that the gods are the source of evil and that the heroes are no better than ordinary people’ (Plato 2010, 47). Plato’s charge against mimesis is that it distorts not so much reality but moral standards of what our world should be: the gods should be a source of goodness rather than of the passions, as Homer and other poets, he claims, immorally depict them. Why, however, does Plato put such emphasis on how representational (i.e. moral) distortions endanger the life of the polis? To address this question it is crucial to draw attention to the respect Plato implicitly pays to poetry’s impact on society at large: he certainly takes seriously the force of poetry’s powers of

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imaging and imagining on the human mind. For Plato poetry changes its audience (for the worse rather than for the better): ‘However, we haven’t yet made the most serious allegation against representational poetry. It has a terrifying capacity for deforming even good people. Only a few escape’ (Plato 2010, 74). This quote establishes a close connection between mimesis/representation and morality: representational poetry casts an evil spell and has the capacity to deform in its effects ‘even good people’. Plato endows poetry with a live changing force. Far from being passive, representation here is transformative. Against this background we may wonder: why has representation and mimesis lost much of its capacity for political-moral subversion and change after Plato? One of the reasons for this mutation of art’s public status away from Plato’s dangerously activating to a rather innocuous role, relates to the element of a political threat that defenders of poetry tried to avoid or belittle from Aristotle onwards. In his Poetics Aristotle defines mimesis as an instrument not for change but for learning what we already know: ‘Representation is natural to human beings from childhood. They differ from the other animals in this: man tends most towards representation and learns his first lessons through representation’ (Aristotle 2010, 90). In contrast to Plato, representation here is accurate and passive, rather than distorting, ever-­ changing, and thereby transforming our moral and political universe. Aristotles’ poetic hierarchies mirror rather than subvert those of morality and politics. Tragedy ‘is a representation of an action’ (Aristotle 2010, 90). As Jacques Rancière has shown, this approach to action is itself a representational mirror for a social hierarchy in which only a few were granted the authority to act: Poetry, according to Aristotle, is defined by a specific use of language. It is defined by fiction. And fiction is the imitation of men who act. This apparently simple principle in fact defined a certain politics of the poem. It actually set the causal rationality of action against the empirical nature of life. The superiority of the poem, which links action, over history, which narrates the succession of deeds, was homologous to the superiority of men who take part in the world of action over those who are confined to the world of life, that is to pure reproduction of existence. (Rancière 2011, 9–10)

As in Plato, in Aristotle the philosophical concept of truth does not describe the accurate representation of empirical reality (life as it is). On the contrary, truth means what is socio-politically and morally appropriate: what is good (gods behave as they should do). In Plato mimesis distorts and thus changes

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our moral and political universe, whereas in Aristotle it affirms it precisely through the deliberate rearrangement of facts so that they fit an ideal and thus truly representational order: This is what Aristotelian mimesis is: the double removal of fiction from truth and reality. Fiction is not a simulacrum. It is an ordering. The ordering of causes— muthos—tears fiction away from history, conceived as the empirical flatness of the succession of facts. (Rancière 2011, 153)

From Aristotle onwards, poetry is fictional and thus engaging the work of mimesis and verisimilitude. The latter are, however, not a quasi-indifferent mirroring of actions, people, and things as they empirically are but as they should be according to Plato’s philosophical idea of truth: they are appropriate, not violating a society’s given moral and political standards but rather reinforcing them: ‘Aristotle asserted that the superiority of invented logical sequences over the unfolding of empirical events’ (Rancière 2011, 174). Representations are representative: they present a world as it ‘truthfully’ (in accordance with moral, religious, political standards) should be: ‘It is part and parcel of the representative logic that governs the classical world and harmonizes poetical hierarchies with social hierarchies’ (Rancière 2011, 175). Rancière implicitly agrees with Plato’s approach towards the political danger which poetry constitutes, thus making a strong case for the transformative (for Plato deformative and therefore dangerous) force of literature. According to Rancière literature thus breaks with mimesis and representation. Literature departs form a notion of truth that is representational, that is to say, based on conceptions of appropriateness: For the natural death of a knight to give rise to a scientific history, that logic has to be dismantled on its own turf, ordinary life has to be recognized not only as a possible subject for a poem but as a poetic subject par excellence. (Rancière 2011, 175)

It is worthwhile bearing in mind that (at least in the first instance) Rancière’s approach is historical. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature inaugurates democratic forms of writing, thinking, and living. Rancière’s notion of literature implicitly includes poetry (he refers to the ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge). Rather than being secondary, here literature founds new social and scientific truths: ‘the principle of Marxist science follows directly from the literary revolution that turned its back on the logic of actions allegedly governed by

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their rational ends and towards the world of meanings hidden within the apparent banality’ (Rancière 2011, 21–22). Rancière critiques Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach according to which: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx 1978, 145). According to Rancière, instead of being opposed to transformation, interpretation partakes of change: ‘But interpretations are themselves real changes, when they transform the forms of visibility a common world may take and, with them, the capacities that ordinary bodies may exercise in that world over a new landscape of the common’ (Rancière 2011, 30). Like Plato, Rancière highlights the socio-political effects of images, symbols, perceptions, and interpretations. By transforming our approach to what is visible, literature reorganizes not only our affects but also our thoughts and beliefs: ‘Literature is not a new name adopted by belles-lettres in the nineteenth century. Literature is the name of a new regime of truth’ (Rancière 2011, 30). By laying the foundation to a new regime of truth, literature founds a new politics. It is a democratic politics. Rancière establishes a parallelism between reality and fiction, between how politics works and how literature operates. As in literature, in real life we live along the guidelines and standards of constructed (a priori fictive) arrangements: ‘Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct “fictions”, that is to say material arrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done’ (Rancière 2004, 39). Crucially Rancière argues that truth in its socio-political sense derives from literature. Literature here is indeed the foundation of truth: ‘Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his “natural” purpose by the power of words’ (Rancière 2004, 39). As we have seen in the previous section, this notion of a literary truth that is the foundation of all our interhuman interactions also informs Lacan’s conception of the mirror stage. We humans are s­ ymbolic-­fictive animals. We take fictions seriously and let a priori fictive constructions govern our socio-political infrastructure. There is, however, a tension between Rancière’s historical approach (where he locates the birth of literature as democratic politics in roughly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and his ontological claim about truth. If literature is the foundation of how humans conceive of truth (as symbolic; as fictive construction), why does it only come into being 300 or 400 years ago? In his critique of Walter Benjamin’s work of art essay (known in English both as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’), Rancière insists on his historical coordinates which establish the long nineteenth century (stretching

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back to the eighteenth century) as the beginning of both literature and modern democracy. In a curious way Rancière distinguishes his ‘scientific’ from Benjamin’s ‘political’ approach: Perhaps first I should clear up a misunderstanding concerning the notion of ‘mechanical arts’. The connection I established was between a scientific paradigm and an aesthetic paradigm. Benjamin’s thesis presupposes something different, which seems questionable to me: the deduction of the aesthetic and political properties of a form of art from its technical properties. (Rancière 2004, 39)

Is Rancière accurate when he claims that Benjamin establishes technology as the paradigm that shapes transformations in the socio-political world? If Benjamin did so, he would concur with contemporary approaches to truth which identify the truthful with what is declarative and technologically existent. As I have shown elsewhere (Mack 2012, 100–152), the opposite is the case: Benjamin grounds his notion of the technological within the aesthetic (rather than the other way around, as Rancière claims, making the aesthetic derivative of the declarative force of technology). From his early reading of Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin (1914–1915) onwards, Benjamin reconfigures our understanding of poetry (and the arts as whole) away from a mimetic paradigm which has governed aesthetics so far. According to Benjamin’s anti-mimetic argument, the poem establishes a new space wherein we can encounter anew the truth of our world. The truth of poetry is the transformations that partake of it. It does not so much mirror consciousness and its objects of contemplation but sets out to change the coordinates of consciousness. Art still represents and the new cosmos created by poetry helps preserve aspects of our history and our contemporary world but it does so in changed form. This change of form is already part of traditional types of representation. The moot point here is, however, that the emphasis lies not with capturing something existent but on transforming our perceptions of and activities within our world. For Benjamin technology is merely a means of reinforcing poetry’s transformational impulse: he is concerned with an aesthetic-political shift from a declarative as well as mimetic notion of truth, from existence (things as they are declared to be there) to insistence (aesthetic-political action to change things as they are for the good of society). Contra Rancière, it is important to show how Benjamin makes art and not technology, the lynchpin for political change. In his work of art essay, Benjamin indeed casts the arts and poetry into a mode of interruption that

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swerves away from current harmful practices. By breaking the link between the work of art and the aura of its tradition, Benjamin casts his term ‘mechanical reproduction’ itself within an at once aesthetic and political mode. The new cosmos created by poetry interrupts the historical repetition of catastrophe and misery. Mechanical reproduction performs the work of poetry: it breaks with traditional forms of production and the perception of social reality. This becomes amply clear at the end of Benjamin’s work of art essay. It closes with a famous contrast between fascism and communism. His understanding of the latter is highly idiosyncratic, because it turns art into the substance and centre of the communist revolution. It is quite astonishing that we encounter Benjamin’s poetics (his uncompromising stance on poetry as a condition of its own making) at the core of his approach towards communism. This is so because Benjamin in the 1930s turns art into the heart of a communist revolution that has the potential to disrupt history as the continual state of exploitation and exclusion. At the famous close of his work of art essay, Benjamin declares that ‘fascism focuses on the aestheticization of politics (Ästhetizierung der Politik)’ and ‘communism responds with the politicization of art (Politisierung der Kunst)’ (Benjamin 1974, 508). Benjamin attempts to revolutionize the political as well as scientific role of art: not as copy of the knowledge we are familiar with but as a transcendental ground wherein we are able to discover new truths (politically as well as scientifically). Rather than subordinating poetry to historical forces (of politics and economics), Benjamin makes us see its intrinsic revolutionary potential. The revolution in question is one of knowledge and truth. Poetry emerges as the force behind new beginnings that disrupt the violence and the exclusion that are part of history’s continuity. According to Benjamin, poetry creates a non-exclusive mental space wherein we can discover new truths.

Bibliography Aristotle. 2010. Poetics. Translated by Richard Janko. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. New York, NY: Norton. Benjamin, Walter. 1974. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol I/II Abhandlungen. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Buber, Martin. 1976. Ich und Du. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider. Carroll, Noël. 1998. Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding. In Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrodl Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cohen, Ted. 2004. Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative. In Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings, ed. Eileen John and Dominic Lopes. Oxford: Blackwell. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gibson, John. 2009. Literature and Knowledge. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry. 1995. The Portrait of a Lady. 2nd ed. Edited by Robert D. Bamberg. London: Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 2001. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. Translated By Alan Sheridan. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 2nd ed. New York, NY: Norton. Lehrer, Jonah. 2007. Proust was a Neuroscientist. London: Canongate. Mack, Michael. 2012. How Literature Changes the Way We Think. New  York, NY: Continuum. ———. 2016. Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marx, Karl. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Edited by Robert C.  Tucker. New York, NY: Norton. Plato. 2010. Republic ‘Book II’. Translated by Robin Waterfield. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al., 2nd ed. New York, NY: Norton. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. New York, NY: Continuum. ———. 2011. The Politics of Literature. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Shuttleworth, Sally. 2010. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21 Rhetoric Rosaleen Keefe

Introduction Rhetoric is an interdisciplinary body of theory, the domain of which is the entirety of human communicative acts. Rhetoric is necessarily an interdisciplinary subject, taking as its purview all of human communication. Taught from classical times until the Enlightenment as the preliminary meta-skill needed for any further learning, the highest art of the classical trivium of the liberal arts, Ars Rhetorica, is the ‘art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance.’1 In the Enlightenment, more specifically, in Enlightenment Scotland, the reformation of rhetoric in light of the new scientific method brought about the reform of the scholastic curriculum, beginning the fracturing of the disciplines into the divisions we recognize today. But modern disciplinary boundaries have never been natural to rhetoric, and today it may be found explicitly taught in communications departments, history departments, history of ideas departments (in the UK), English departments, and philosophy departments, among others.2 The roots of literary criticism as a field can be directly ideologically traced to moment in the Scottish Enlightenment that Adam Smith began lecturing on ‘Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,’ including, for the first time, all genres of written language as included in the subject of rhetoric. The moment that marks the professionalization of literary criticism is the formaR. Keefe (*) Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_21

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tion of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh in 1792, for Prof. Hugh Blair. This chapter will look closely at the intimate relationship between philosophy, literary criticism, and rhetoric in the particular moment of the separation of those disciplines. As fitting with the nature of this book, this chapter will attempt to outline rhetoric’s place within philosophy and literary criticism, taking as a case study the correspondences between the rhetorical and moral philosophy of Smith. I argue that the continuing debates about the nature and purpose of the humanities, most particularly surrounding literary studies, would do well to reexamine their eighteenth-century roots in the Scottish rhetoric. Belles lettres was complex practice arising from the eighteenth-century Scottish reformation of rhetoric, to meet the needs of new political, social, and religious exigencies through the personal and civic moral consensus created by the arts. For the Enlightened Scots, criticism was the process of the creation of taste, both personal and public. Distinctively, Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric postulates the connection between moral, social, and language practices: an understanding of the moral extensity of language is essential to forming an appraisal of Scottish Enlightenment literary criticism. In order to examine Scottish Enlightenment rhetorical philosophy, this chapter will first glance briefly at the themes that unite rhetorical theory from the earliest times to the present. I will outline particularly three areas of importance, the relationship of rhetoric to logic, of rhetoric to the faculties, and of rhetoric to the moral sense.

Definitions and Themes George Kennedy notes that in ancient Greece, peitho (persuasion) was used to describe rhetoric, but often the Greeks just used logos, ‘literally “word,” but also meaning speech, argument, reason.’3 The ancient Greeks, and liberal arts tradition following them, considered rhetorical mastery an essential topic of instruction. One could not be expected to engage in discourse or logical dialectic without having first gained use of its implements, which encompasses all of the language arts. Aristotle defines this first art as ‘an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion.’4 Kennedy draws our attention to the fact that in Aristotle’s system, rhetoric belongs to the domain of ‘dynamis: “ability, capacity, faculty.” The actuality produced by the potentiality of rhetoric is not the written or oral text of the speech, or persuasion, but the art of ‘seeing’ how persuasion is effected.’5 Rhetorical ability, therefore, is not simply learning to read, write, speak in public, or even use

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argumentation. It is developing, through varied practices, flexible skills in understanding how communication works. This encompasses an awareness of the speaker, the audience, the subject matter, the available species of text, and how to adapt all these factors to each other in a specific situation. Persuasion in Greek means ‘to believe.’ Bringing an audience to belief expands the idea of rhetorical skill beyond argumentation, for belief requires understanding and acceptance. Rhetoric includes, therefore, argumentative modes and ‘also those “expository” modes of discourse that seek to win acceptance of information and explanation.’6 The range of practical and theoretical knowledge that rhetoric was expected to handle makes it is easy to see how rhetorical instruction was traditionally regarded as a cornerstone in education. The traditional five canons of rhetoric as delineated by Aristotle are invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery. Most classical texts followed these canons, with minor variations. In order to explain these five canons and how they are related, we must make some basic distinctions. First, classical rhetoric makes the meta-distinction between the two primary branches of the art: inventio (heurisis) and dispositio (taxis). Invention is the discovery of arguments, or ways of arguing, and includes both non-artistic proofs (oaths, laws, contracts, etc.), which fall out of the purview of rhetoric, and artistic proofs, which are the concern of rhetoric, as the rhetor must ‘invent’ these to use for her specific purposes. Artistic proofs have three categories: appeals to reason (logos), which among other tools use the enthymeme (the rhetorical syllogism) or example to argue deductively; appeals to feeling (pathos), which harness the emotions of the listeners to the purposes of the rhetor; and the appeal to ethics (ethos), which in the classical ideal means the establishment of the rhetor’s character and reputation so that the listener may trust the speaker’s reason and judgment. Much emphasis in classical rhetorics is devoted to the topoi, to which Aristotle, for instance, devoted the entire book Topics. Topoi is a metaphoric way of addressing the general categories of kinds of places (or loci) where one starts a logical line of argument.7 In more modern terms, the topics ‘constituted a method of probing one’s subject to discover possible ways of developing that subject,’8 but the lists of them as they proliferated from Aristotle down through the ages became long and tediously detailed. They were also subject to much debate, often circling around whether or not rhetoric included the invention of new ideas or simply the arrangement of existing ideas. Dispositio, the second overarching branch, is the art of arranging the content that one has invented or discovered for one’s argument to maximally persuasive effect. In classical rhetorical instruction, students practiced

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arranging the speech into six parts: introduction, narration, division, proof, refutation, and peroration. The three remaining canons, style, memory, and delivery, are all matters of actual execution. Certain basic observations of the earliest Greek and Roman rhetors persisted in defining the central issues of rhetorical instruction well into the Enlightenment period. A primary assumption from ancient rhetoric that becomes fully articulated in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetoric is that the individual is born with innate faculties that must be cultivated and developed via directed practice of the language arts. Isocrates, one of the first professional rhetoricians and a contemporary of Socrates, argues for the importance of deliberate instruction in rhetoric for the development of basic intellectual skills: [T]eachers of philosophy impart all the forms of discourse in which the mind expresses itself. Then, when they have made them familiar and thoroughly conversant with these lessons, they set them at exercises, habituate them to work, and require them to combine in practice the particular things which they have learned, in order that they may grasp more firmly and bring their theories into closer touch with the occasions for applying them.9

Here also, in the first sentence, we see Isocrates invoke another idea that comes to fruition in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetoric, that the forms of discourse are demonstrative of the ways the mind works. Against Socrates, who believes that rhetorical skills are oriented to deceiving or disorienting the listener, Isocrates argues for the confluence of virtue, truth, and good rhetorical skill, for truth alone truly convinces, and ‘those who desire to follow the true precepts of this discipline may, if they will, be helped more speedily towards honesty of character than towards facility in oratory.’10 His premise is that ‘the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul.’11 This juxtaposition of virtue and truth, and truth with sound discourse, is an essential theme in rhetorical instruction from an early period. The classical equation of good speech, sound reason, and personal virtue is founded in a sense that the faculties of understanding are naturally oriented to recognizing the true and the good. Again, the Scottish rhetoricians develop and clearly articulate grounds for the orientation of the innate faculties orientation along such lines. Related to the inherent connections between discourse and the faculties of the mind, and both in their tendency toward recognition of the good, is the importance of good rhetoric to civil society. For the

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classical mind, the skills necessary to the effective use of the language arts are the same as those utilized by the practice of virtue, both demonstrative of and requiring wisdom. The necessary connection between personal goodness, moral virtue, and rhetorical skill is based also on another necessary connection, that between rhetoric and logic. Whether these two arts are seen as interdependent or ­independent is the question upon which the morality of rhetoric rests. As rhetorical history has proceeded, the pendulum has swung both ways but perhaps never more strongly to the side of the interdependence of rhetoric and logic, and therefore rhetoric’s moral relevance, as in the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘new rhetoric.’ From the ancients, eighteenth-century Scottish rhetoricians carried forward three essential assumptions about the art of eloquence: that good rhetoric corresponds to rightly ordered thinking, that only a virtuous rhetor can truly be eloquent, and that rhetoric is a feature and function of civic life central to both public and private virtue.

Logic and Rhetoric ‘For in particulars, our Knowledge begins, and so spreads itself, by degrees, to generals’—John Locke, An Essay Concerning Understanding. From 1700 to 1800, logic and rhetoric were reformed from the scholastic traditions. The eighteenth-century reforms to logic and rhetoric must be seen primarily as a question of method. The method of the usage of signs and significations is created by the assumptions that underlie our understanding of our senses and their epistemological relationship to being. At the heart of the ancient contentions about the nature of the relationship between logic and rhetoric lies the question of probability or certainty. Rhetorical practice is one of probability, as persuasion and consensus do not necessarily require incontrovertible arguments, but can be achieved through probable arguments. There is within the communicative act room for multiple interpretations. In this sense, any argument within language necessarily consists of probable truth. Logic, on the other hand, has often considered itself to be the guarantor of certainty. A logical argument is either true or untrue, and the proper method of demonstration can prove it. Following Aristotle, in the classical tradition, dialectic, another name for logic, is the ‘counterpart’ of rhetoric. If rhetoric is the art of finding the available means of persuasion, dialectic is rallying those available means to a method that can produce agreement.

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A generation after the new scientific method of Newton, Thomas Reid, an avid reader of Locke, a mathematician in his own right, and a life-long devotee of new scientific knowledge, completed the reform of logic. In his decisive condemnation of the syllogism contained in ‘A Brief Account on Aristotle’s Logic’ (1774), Reid attacked Aristotle, saying ‘he determines boldly things above all human knowledge.’12 If this accusation seems extraordinary, we may remember that Aristotle had devised the syllogistic method of proofs and therefore could claim to know with certainty things that by the inductive method would be only probable. He argues that the reverse method, proceeding instead from the particular to the general, produces a probable conclusion that can be accepted with as much certainty, if enough evidence is gathered: [I]n reasoning by syllogism, from general principles we descend to a conclusion virtually contained within them. The process of induction is more arduous; being an ascent from particular premises to a general conclusion. The evidence of such conclusions is not demonstrative, but probable: but when the induction is sufficiently copious, and carried on according to the rules of art, it forces conviction no less than demonstration itself does.13

Essentially, Reid’s argument that copious induction is sufficient for demonstration summarizes the eighteenth-century reform of logic in the light of the new science and also of rhetorical argument. Logical argument requires mathematical-­style proofs; rhetoric requires ‘copious’ induction of empirical evidences. The study of language is the evidence of human mind; thus, rhetoric becomes the central concern of the ‘science of man.’ Assuming nothing a priori about the mind, its faculties, or its relationships to sensory perceptions, what could then be ascertained inductively? The human mind produces a whole range of language acts. Those acts can be cataloged and examined. A catalog of the range of communicative possibilities available, analyzed by their contexts and intended effects, can then be used as the basis of generalizations about human capacities and faculties. In Reid’s vision, and in the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophical milieu in which he participated, the scientific method—then defined as experimental inductive observations leading to probable generalities—fully reunites the fields of logic and rhetoric. While language might be the external evidence of internal operations, there is the important question of the mediating faculties of the senses. We shall now turn to the senses and consider the role assigned to them in the new logic and rhetoric of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy of mind.

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Sense Perception and Rhetoric Francis Hutcheson, Smith’s professor at Glasgow, made a systematic examination of the internal senses under this new paradigm (for this he is often considered the first to use psychological theory). He arrives at the conclusion that internal senses are as dependable and as passive and innate as external senses, claiming: [S]enses are either external, or internal. The external depend on the certain organs of the body, so constituted that upon any impression made on them, or motion excited, whether by external impulses or internal forces in the body, a certain feeling (perception) or notion is raised in the soul.14

The impressions made on our external senses guide our most basic response to good and evil. We may observe that things that are good for us produce pleasure, and things that are dangerous produce pain and discomfort. But there are also internal senses, ‘those powers [or determinations] of the mind, by which it perceives or is conscious of all within it, actions, passions, judgments, wills, desires, joys, sorrows, purposes of action.’15 These internal senses Hutcheson calls reflex or subsequent, because they are dependent on previously received or experienced ideas. The particular reasoning powers of man are observed to begin with the reflective sense we have from our external senses, what he calls ‘relish of sense’ of the ‘subtiler pleasures’ of sight or hearing.16 We receive aesthetic pleasure from external perception of material qualities such as proportion, harmony, beauty, and fitness. But also, our internal senses allow us to reflect upon the experiences of the external senses and to form ideas. This basic capacity is itself reflected by our use of language, which is also an innate faculty. Hutcheson’s unique explanation of the faculties—that our internal senses perceive what is good or bad for us with the same kind of instinct which functions in the external senses (i.e., independent of the will)— is a way out of the kind of solipsism caused by Lockean ideas. Hutcheson observes that humans have an innate moral sense, that is, our internal senses function automatically to approve or disapprove of actions. This is because we are innately inclined to receive pleasure from what is good, and further, from what is good for others. Hutcheson argues that we can empirically observe our instinct toward benevolence, but that it is still necessary to cultivate the desires by use of the reason and the will by following our pleasures (in goodness, harmony, beauty, symmetry, etc.). Taste therefore, for Hutcheson, is the development of our natural capacity to receive pleasure from beauty. Smith will develop this in language much more extensively, as we shall see.

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The following section will attempt to draw out the philosophical correspondences between rhetoric and moral sentiments, using Smith’s thinking as a rubric.

Moral Sentiments and Rhetoric For Adam Smith, critical reading and thereby developing taste and understanding was an essential part of the practices that develop moral agency. Poetry and literature in general in the Smithean system serves as experiential content in the economy of moral sensibility. In other words, criticism provides evidence for how language and sentiment are constituted and enacted. Ultimately, for Smith, taste is morally epistemic in that it practices the art of facilitating and arranging desire. In order to examine what this might mean, and the role poetry and literature might play in moral formation, it is necessary to explore Smith’s rhetorical theory of language in conjunction with the moral theory outlined in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.17 As the present chapter has indicated, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers considered rhetorical instruction centrally important to the development of reason and the cultivation of the higher human faculties. A close look at Smith’s moral theory will also demonstrate that his epistemic assumptions about language and his empirical generalizations about sensory perception are consonant with Scottish rhetoric’s belief about the epistemic nature of language in the culture of the mind and the primacy of eloquence. Taking Smith’s work as a whole, it is impossible not to see his thinking as more continuous than the earlier puzzle of ‘das Adam Smith problem’ has typically suggested. This problem was widely commented upon in the nineteenth century, as philosophers and economists considered the seeming disjunction of world-view between Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1984) and The Wealth of Nations (1981).18 The fundamental human motivation of sympathy within Smith’s moral theory was taken to be at odds with the fundamental motivation of self-interest within his economic theory. Partly, this problem was rooted in the fact that The Theory of Moral Sentiments was not widely read or available at the time. Smith’s main contribution to intellectual life was seen to be his wildly successful The Wealth of Nations and, of course, the rise and dominance of the free market which has been ascribed to his thinking. However, recent criticism has done excellent work rescuing Smith’s work from being solely identified with the modern capitalism, and much of this research has relied on reintegrating the view of the human subject

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explained in Theory of Moral Sentiments as vital to an understanding of his economics. Fonna Forman-Barzilai points out that [A]mong a majority of Smith scholars […} today we understand how thoroughly the nineteenth-century formulation of the “Adam Smith problem” distorted what Smith meant by self-interest, and missed the overall coherence of his moral philosophy and the place of the political economy within it.19

But very few scholars have done more than hint at what an integrated knowledge of Smith’s rhetorical theory might do within that coherence. I would argue, along with McKenna, that a large part of the problem in Smith’s interpretation disappears if we move his rhetorical thinking from the margins to the center.20 Various aspects of Smith’s life and thought seem to lend support for this argument. After studying at Glasgow, Smith spent six years at Oxford on a scholarship to Balliol College. Although we lack actual records of this period, and ‘there is no indication,’ as Smith’s biographer William Scott informs us, ‘of the influence which directed his attention to modern literature,’21 he certainly must have spent the six years reading widely. At any rate, he went back to Scotland from Oxford as the best man for the job to give public lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the behest of Henry Home, Lord Kames. His classroom lectures in rhetoric and belles lettres, published for the first time in the 1960s when a set of student notes from his later years teaching at Glasgow were finally found, reveal a comprehensive and novel rhetorical system. Smith first delivered his public lectures in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751 and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1756 and then The Wealth of Nations in 1776. There is plenty of biographical evidence to point to the fact that his creation of the manuscripts for The Theory of Moral Sentiments happened while he was teaching and lecturing at Glasgow, first appointed in 1751 as the Professor of Logic, then in 1752 as the Chair of Moral Philosophy. The obvious conjecture is that Smith’s rhetorical and moral theories were formed in tandem. Phillipson argues that not only were these inquiries co-extensive, but that Smith’s rhetorical theorization came first, in his teaching as in his thought: His hope that students of human nature would study the specialized problems of rhetoric as aspects of the principles of sociability, and would consider language and style as aspects of principles of communication that were essential to the maintenance of society, was as fundamental to his thinking in the 1740s as it was to remain for the rest of his life…Smith was preparing the ground for a much more wide-reaching theory of human nature, which held that all our

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sentiments—moral, political, intellectual and aesthetic—were acquired, developed, and refined in the process of learning to communicate with others. 22

In fact, all of Smith’s works are a methodological extension of his rhetorical theory, which contains the crux of the developmental, historical, and sociological view he has of human psychology and motivation. It is important to note, when reading Smith’s moral, rhetorical, and economic works as coherent and systematic, that Smith himself did not systematize his ideas. Smith’s ­ ineteenth theories in all areas rely on the principle of correspondence.23 As the n century progressed, however, the synthetic and methodological unity between his fields of interest became buried under the disciplinary fracturing of the social sciences.24 As is presently the case, Smith’s published works all stand alone, and indeed until very recently that is almost exclusively how he has been read.25 There is evidence that he did not consider either of his two books superior to the works that he was preparing, one of which was almost certainly a return to his earlier interest in language, a ‘sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, of Poetry and Eloquence.’26 It is a great tragedy that Smith demanded that his executors burn that manuscript, along with his papers, before his death, as it may have been that Smith did indeed himself write a systematization or synthesis of his theory of sympathy, language, and the origins of human society and progress. Like his close friend David Hume, Smith was not interested in a metaphysics of morals. He was interested instead in a science of morals, based on the empirical evidence available to the human person in action.27 The Theory of Moral Sentiments sets out to examine comprehensively the human moral capacity using the inductive method. Smith’s first insight into moral life is that faculties of reason work in conjunction with sentiments to contextualize the self and its decisions in the light of accumulating experience of the self and other people. We are instinctively inclined to pay attention to those around us. Our interest in other people is innate, Smith says. Further, our interest stems from the fact that we receive pleasure from the happiness of others and pain from their sorrows: How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their ­happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it…that we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane.28

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We cannot say from whence these ‘principles’ in our nature derive, but we can see that our ‘interest’ is based on the fact that howsoever we are constituted, it is to see and be passively moved by the observance of other people’s fortunes. It is clear from this very early passage that Smith’s choice of language utilizes economic imagery. He sees persons, from their outset, within a system of exchange of sentiment. That this is the case is morally neutral: we see and are affected regardless of our personal virtue. As natural as it is to observe others, so it is to form a judgment of approval or disapproval. This correlates to Reid’s principle that judgment is built into the act of perception itself. As we ‘see’ another’s situation, we automatically judge it. We may observe that we have the ability and the impulse to sympathize with what we observe in other people. As we do this, it is also instinctive to begin to approve or disapprove of our own actions as we contextualize them in light of others. We desire approbation, from very early on in life we can see that we start to modify our behaviors toward what those around us will find acceptable. Smith argues that all of our desires for approbation spring from the fact that ‘the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved, as I believe it does.’29 So, we craft our desires for approval upon the conventions of the moral system in which we find ourselves. As with language, we are born into an already-operating system of signification, and our natural faculties grow into function through their use within conventions. Knud Haakonssen argues that this insight is Smith’s major contribution to moral philosophy, providing a unique third way between the Stoic/Platonic view and the Epicurean position on the origin of human morals. Haakonssen argues that counter to these two options, ‘Smith suggested that artifice is “natural” to mankind, that is to say, there is no condition in which people do not generate moral, aesthetic, and other conventions.’30 In other words, Smith’s moral theory is aligned with Reid’s common-sense epistemology—as we cannot examine anything outside of its already-functioning conventions; it is therefore reasonable to assume that those conventions are natural features. There is no human moral capacity to observe that is not already invested in the economy of feeling and desire that we are born into. Therefore, particular evidence is the only ground for examination, and generalized rules come from observing particular instances. With regard to our moral judgment, Smith states that ‘the general rule … is formed, by finding through experience, that all actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner, are approved or disapproved of.’31 Thus, the first concept that Smith develops from his inductive investigation of moral sentiments is that we have the capacity and motivation to sympathize with others, and the second is that propriety is the basic first virtue.

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Sympathy, for Smith, is our drive to feel along with other people. Like language, it is not a representative capacity (if it were it would mean sympathy would provide us with a weaker, second-hand rendition of what we can observe another experiencing). We cannot actually experience what another experiences. Rather, Smith’s concept of sympathy is that we imagine ourselves in their situation and project what we would feel if we could exchange places with them. When we imaginatively enter into another’s situation, we feel sympathy as far as we can engage with their condition. Imagination, like the other distinctively human faculties, is innate but must be cultivated over time and through relationships with the outside world. Our capacity to imaginatively project ourselves into what someone else is feeling is only as good as our imagination allows: As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel like in the like situation. Though our brother be on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this in any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.32

Like our reasoning faculties, our feeling faculties work on the basis of being able to see distinctions and their contrary, similitude. What we ‘should feel like in the like situation’ depends first on our ability to recognize and compare among the multiple aspects of a single circumstance of human affect. Smith’s choice of the word ‘conceiving’ in the first sentence of this quote points to the creative or the inventive aspect of entering into sympathy. As with an act of language, the action itself brings something new into existence. In the case of sympathy, the act of engaging imaginatively creates in the viewer an affective experience separate from the one by which it is stimulated. Forman-Barzilai claims that sympathy itself is not a feeling; rather it is ‘primarily a principle of judgment and was impacted in very complex ways by the cultural, affective and physical proximity of the person or the object being judged.’33 Moral development, therefore, is dependent on experience, for it is only the deeper contextualization via particular engagements that allows for the increasing capacity to judge. The two experiences of actor and viewer can in fact have little to do with one another—this is where the concept of propriety, or fittingness, becomes important.

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Like rhetoric, propriety is more a practice, or practical skill, than a concept. Propriety is first employed in the earliest Greek literature to mean a kind of appropriateness that brings clarity and recognition through containing ‘aesthetic, emotional, and cognitive features.’34 Well-versed in its ancient and modern uses, Smith makes the concept of propriety central to both his ethical and rhetorical theory. In rhetoric, it is precisely the meta-skill demonstrated by fitting words, style, form, and so on, to the purpose and circumstance. A way of describing propriety could be the coordination of an understanding of the multiple aspects of an interaction in a creative action. In rhetoric, it is the act of rhetorical agency. In sympathetic imagination, it is an act of imaginative agency, demonstrating the same meta-skill of fitting feeling to the multiple aspects of an interaction of a person with their circumstance. To exercise propriety of feeling is to judge an action or a response to be appropriate to its occasion. There is no objective outside standard for this, so what we judge is the ‘correspondence of the sentiments of others with our own.’35 This judgment constitutes our sympathy. Thus Smith notes that to ‘approve of the passions of another therefore, as suitable to their objects, is the same thing as to observe we entirely sympathize with them.’36 As with Reid’s conclusions about judgment and perception, Smith believes that we give approbation or ­disapprobation to other’s situations at the same time as we perceive and engage. It is natural to approve and disapprove, and we base this, again, upon our engagement with and understanding of the situation. In other words, sympathy does not simply coordinate our judgment and our feelings, as if we were the only referent. There are three levels of necessary referents: the action and its circumstances, what we know of the other, and what we know of ourselves, which itself is formed by collating our reflected-upon experiences. Together, these three referents are checked against the norm, or the rule. Again, for Smith, the rules are not objectively derived. As we observe the experiences of others, and ourselves, we analyze their contents and their contexts and all of the relationships contained therein. From that analysis we start to form generalized moral norms—what is or is not appropriate in a given circumstance. Smith describes that ‘our continual observations upon the conduct of others, insensibly lead us to form to ourselves certain general rules concerning what is fit and proper either to be done or to be avoided.’37 We have an innate feeling of pleasure when we observe fittingness, when what we observe conforms to what we recognize, understand, and approve. We are also pleased by others’ pleasure, and we desire to be approved. Because of this, we exercise propriety. We scale our own actions and responses to the conventional norms. Like reason and logic, our natural capacity to feel is strengthened or weakened by its formation and use. For Smith, reason itself is our ability to

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determine truth and falsehood. To do this requires copious moral evidences, not recourse to general laws. As we mature, we gather evidence, observing our actions, the actions of others, their consequences, and generally practice our capacity for determining truth and falsehood in given situations. The experientially discovered truth of our moral condition informs our judgment of our own actions, in a recursive relationship. In turn, reason directs us to the centripetal truth of our moral condition: that we are one among many.38 When we exercise our reason upon our accumulated evidence of humanity, as we compare and contrast the similarities and differences, we realize that we are no special case. We are subject to the same standards, rules, and laws. This insight facilitates what Smith calls the ‘man within the breast,’ the ‘impartial spectator’ of the self. For Smith, the conscience is that part of the internal self that can view one’s own feelings, responses, and actions as other well-­developed and mature moral agents would see them. The more we cultivate the ‘self-­ command’ to allow this consciousness to inform our response to the situations and decisions we face, the more we facilitate our capacity to be impartial to ourselves. Smith argues, ‘the degree of self-approbation with which every man, upon such occasions, surveys his own conduct, is higher or lower, exactly in proportion to the degree of self-command which is necessary in order to obtain that self-approbation.’39 In the language of an exchange economy, the more we use this ability to govern ourselves via the norms of judgment, the higher our approval of ourselves will be. If we wish to earn our own approval, or satisfy the man in the breast, we must allow that same sense to guide our actions. But this is still not itself the development of virtue, which goes beyond the simple norms or rules for what is socially acceptable. In his significant revisions to the sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith offers a nuanced and sensitive articulation of ‘The Character of Virtue.’ Virtue is the corrective to the disorders of self-love. Reason can discern for us the truth or falsehood of a position, and our impartial spectator can inform us of the rules for propriety in a given situation. The passions, however, can overrule these things with ease. Self-command, to a heroic or sublime degree, is capable of imposing propriety even on our wildest sentiments and emotions. Self-command is virtue, and it derives from concern for the sentiments of others. As Smith points out: respect for what are, or what ought to be, or for what upon a certain condition would be, the sentiments of other people, is the sole principle which, upon most occasions, overawes all those mutinous and turbulent passions into that tone and temper which the impartial spectator can enter into and sympathize with.40

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Ultimately, virtue is the cultivation of the self-command that enables a person to think first of the betterment of others over the self, the humility to ‘at all times sacrifice and devote himself to the safety, to the service, and even to the glory of the greater number.’41 Thinking of others’ good before one’s own enables not only social betterment but also the personal satisfaction that comes with ‘knowing we deserve to be beloved.’42 Knowing we deserve to be beloved is the root of human happiness, and it is important to note that the way that Smith phrases this seems to indicate that virtue itself is beyond the social norms that dictate propriety. There is a significant distinction between being beloved and knowing we deserve to be beloved: there may be times in the Smithean moral economy when the conscience must be satisfied in defiance of social norms or majority mores. Smith maintains, ‘Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.’43 Being lovely, in Smith’s phrase, is having our own impartial spectator judge that we indeed deserve to be beloved. Smith’s descriptive terms here direct the reader to a profoundly phenomenological understand of human psychology. To be beloved, not only loved, is to be known and rests upon the same experiential grounds as all moral knowledge. Basically what we most deeply desire, according to Smith, is that other people’s experiences of us lead them to a state beyond approbation and into belovedness. Like rhetoric, moral science is an art of probable truth, as a moral science ‘does not admit of the most accurate precision’ (TMS VII.iv.6). As a probable science, it also admits for progress and greater or lesser degrees of success. The cultivation of virtue proceeds by the same principle as the cultivation of taste, with similar results. It is a matter of becoming more acute and judging with more accuracy. Smith makes the direct correlation of method between moral judgment and artistic judgment, when he argues that the degree of virtue is relative to the degree of distance from the norm: It is in this same manner that we judge the productions of all the arts that address themselves to the imagination. When a critic examines the work of any of the great masters in poetry or painting, he may sometimes examine it by an idea of perfection, in his own mind, which neither that nor any other human work will ever come up to; and as long as he compares it with this standard, he can see nothing in it but faults and imperfections. But when he comes to consider that rank which it ought to hold among other works of the same kind, he necessarily compares it with a very different standard, the common degree of excellence which is usually attained this particular art; and when he judges of it by this new measure, it may often appear to deserve the highest applause, upon

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account of its approaching much nearer to perfection than the greater part of those works which can be brought into competition with it.44

In both artistic excellence and moral excellence the standard ought to be the commonly available norm. The standard of judgment is analogous to the rhetorical idea of consensus: as in rhetoric, the aim is to achieve consensus by finding the common ground by which to appeal to your audience. The common ground is whatever arguments, facts, features, assumptions, and standards are readily accessible to the majority of the listeners. Finding a common place to start an argument is not a truth claim; it is a rhetorical strategy for beginning an argument. Again Smith emphasizes his basic belief that what we have available from experience is the only basis we have for judgment. We may have a composite idea of something perfect, but that idea is not something we have in common with other people. The ‘common degree of excellence’ that Smith finds as the basis for judgment also unifies the appeal to the sensus communis of logic and of language. Once we compare something to what we actually have in the stock of our common experience, we can judge with propriety. And often, he argues, we derive more pleasure from this judgment and judge with more approbation and approval. At no point in the judgment of moral or rhetorical action does Smith utilize an ideal outside of what can be actually found within what Forman-Barzilai calls the ‘cultural, affective, and physical proximity’ of the artifact or action. For both moral and aesthetic judgment, our natural capacities are only as good as the resources for comparison. In both areas, progress is made by reaching toward the more ‘comprehensive accuracy’ of ‘the acute and delicate discernment of the man of taste, who distinguishes the minute, and scarce perceptible differences of beauty and deformity.’45 The ability to distinguish more and more accurately and comprehensively comes from experientially founded reflective action, but there is always the primary context of fundamentally shared spaces.46 The negotiation of a moral judgment happens via its relationship with the proximities of the physical, feeling, and historical-cultural referents of the subject and object. The moral judgment itself produces new experience. The new experience, in a recursive relationship, produces new proximities, or grounds for judgment, and so presumably increases refinement and precision of taste. Forman-Barzilai’s argument that social practice within this tripartite space produces moral intersubjectivity is amply supported by Smith’s rhetorical theory. Hanley argues that for both Smith and Aristotle, ‘ethics is a rhetorical and dialectical process rather than a deductive process—one which calls for persuasion rather than either conviction or mere demonstration.’47 Persuasion, if

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we recall, aims at artistically arranging the component parts of an argument in order to reach consensus upon the most likely truth. The ‘man within the breast’ coolly adapts what has been generalized from particulars to the self and directs his actions in accord to his reasoned assessment of the good. For Smith, the rhetorical, dialectic process of moral science rests entirely on the particular, from the necessity of particular evidences in the process itself, to the economy of feeling which also begins and ends with what is proximate. We may actively want the good of the ‘great society of mankind,’ but we best serve it by exercising habits of virtue toward those closest to us in the system of human affections. Smith explains this: That wisdom which contrived the system of human affections, as well as that of every other part of nature, seems to have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing the principal attention of each individual person to that particular portion of it, which was most within his sphere both of his abilities and of his understanding.48

It is indicative of the character of Smith’s system that he should argue that human emotions, like nature, are oriented toward their own proper functioning. The ‘wisdom which contrived’ the system of human emotions did so in such a way as to orient them toward what is best for the whole moral economy of the individual and the whole moral economy of society. Smith sees the internal economy of the human faculties as a part of nature, in that they are, in some mysterious way by their very origination, self-sustaining and directed to organistic growth. Under its own laws, the system of the human faculties works from the particular toward the general. Therefore, moral attention and ethical action are best directed toward the particular. Smith’s conclusion regarding moral science proceeds from his examination of the science of language. Smith’s rhetorical practice requires the background of the same shared physical, affective, and historico-cultural spaces as his ethical practice. Because of the necessity of experience, and close attention to the particulars of experience, literary examples and the cultivation of taste—the acute and delicate ability to distinguish and discern—are forms of experiential content. This is Smith’s reason for adopting the belles lettres tradition from his French predecessors and making it a key pillar of his rhetorical theory and praxis. Experience of language mediates our use of language. Literature, and most especially examples of excellence, scale up our normative judgment for our own ­language use. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, in their widely taught textbook The Rhetorical Tradition, claim that belles lettres, with its inclusion of

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all genres of discourse as inquiry into the mind, creates a rhetoric that ‘sought not to make original inquiries but to judge whether the literary or oratorical performances conformed to such standards of human nature as orderliness, clarity, correctness, and good sense.’49 The aesthetic validation of such features of good rhetoric is indeed the one outcome of the theory. However, belles lettres is misjudged entirely if ‘orderliness, clarity, correctness, and good sense’ are not viewed in light of a wider moral understanding undergirding propriety, the rationally and moral epistemic function of language, and collectively derived norms and rules. The study of belles lettres is indeed meant to quantify judgments of conformity to cultivated social goods. However, in the more extensive rhetorical and moral theory in which belles lettres features in Smith’s work, those social goods are themselves created, and thus subject to critique and revision, by the same social-moral process. This exercise of judgment is a form of original inquiry. To approve of a language act means, in the Smithean system, to imaginatively enter into sympathy with it and to judge it as fitting or appropriate. Language and criticism for Smith is a moral enterprise because it creates shared affective experiences. In Lecture 6 of Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, he remarks: When the sentiment of the speaker is addressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is possessed of and intends by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off, then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty the language can give it.50

The force and beauty of language, in Smith’s rhetorical vision, provides the pleasure that we take from immediately approving, understanding, and imaginatively projecting ourselves into the experience of the speaker or writer. There is aesthetic value in the immediate judgment—the ‘force’ comes from the immediacy of recognition. Smith describes the qualities of language that can have this effect in such words as ‘neat,’ ‘clear,’ and ‘plain.’ We are pleased when we are moved immediately into correspondence with the language act. When a speaker successfully engages the audience thus, she has communicated with the ‘propriety’ in which the speech is fitted to its intention and its audience in the same way, moral sympathy is the transaction of imaginative action fitted to corresponding feeling between persons in order to create moral culture. The joint understanding created between a speaker and audience, writer and reader, or readers critiquing is itself a new experience from which to draw judgment. Propriety of language is also the scaling up or down of sentiment and fitting it to expression so as to transact understanding and feeling. Marcelo Dascal summarizes the correlation thus: ‘just as Smith’s ethics

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is a theory of propriety of action, his rhetoric is a theory of propriety of linguistic action.’51 The features that distinguish good language are ones that are socially and rationally epistemic. The first of these, which Smith describes in his lectures, is perspicuity, which he describes as the outcome of fittedness to sense. The ‘sense’ Smith describes is the ‘thought, but also the spirit and mind of the author.’52 Dascal notes that ‘the expression “spirit and mind” covers, in addition to the author’s emotions, his character, ethical virtues, ability to argue, the knowledge he has of the theme treated, and his sensitivity to the intended audience and circumstances.’53 Spirit and mind encompass all of these areas because they assume the development of the faculties as necessary for the higher-level use of language. An author’s spirit and mind will be contingent upon all the exigencies of their particular life and talents. When one’s language is fitted, or appropriate to one’s ‘thought, spirit, and mind,’ it has effectively drawn the audience into sympathy with one’s entire interior outlook. Style, for Smith, is the expression most fitted to character of the speaker, because language proceeds from the interior processes of perception and judgment. In this way, examining language, or exercising rhetorical analysis, holds a mirror up to the mind, and not only to show its contents, but the processes by which it produces language. Smith ‘redefined beauty in terms of this mirroring relation’54; in other words, the clearer the reflected picture we have into another’s mind, the deeper the sympathetic response and therefore the greater the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. We are social beings, in every aspect of our constitution. It should be clear from its rhetorical features that literary criticism, as it is presented in Smith’s system, is quite the opposite of the received canons deemed in good taste that became associated with belles lettres. While later generations viewed belles lettres as placing literary criticism at the paramount of civilized art to the detriment of the rhetorical arts, Smith clearly did not. In his view, belles lettres is not literary criticism or critique for its own sake. Smith in fact disliked the eighteenthcentury ‘reviews’ (literary review journals such as The Rambler, The Tatler, or the magazines such as the Gentleman’s Magazine) and did not read them. He is famously recorded as responding to a question regarding literary criticism with the statement that ‘You will learn more of poetry by reading one good poem, than by a thousand volumes of criticism.’55 Smith’s practices of rhetoric and belles lettres involve the critical examination of literature and of authors, but he did not see that as producing literary criticism, as it came to be known toward the latter part of the eighteenth century and far into the nineteenth century.

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Conclusion Moral development, within Scottish eighteenth-century thought, becomes profoundly intertwined with the cultivation of taste. Smith maintains, ‘the principles of imagination, upon which our sense of beauty depends, are of a very nice and delicate nature, and may be easily altered by habit and education.’56 For this reason, an extensive rhetorical education with copious induction from works of all the genres of writing was seen as crucial to the formation of personal and civic moral consensus. Taste, such as it arises from this reflective process, is at once socially oriented and culturally epistemic as it is personal, relational, and contingent.

Notes 1. Sister Miriam, Joseph (2002), The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, Edited by Marguerite McGlinn (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books), p. 3. 2. In the US, after several decades of fierce re-territorializing, rhetoric has largely become the purview of burgeoning US academic field of Composition and Writing Studies. Last year this discipline (which defines itself separately from English Literature and in large universities is frequently its own department) graduated almost 300 new PhDs from nearly 70 universities. 3. Kennedy, George (1999), Classical Rhetoric in its Christian and Secular Tradition (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press), p. 1. 4. Aristotle (1991), On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Edited and Translated by George Kennedy (Oxford University Press), p. 36. 5. Kennedy, George (1999), Classical Rhetoric in its Christian and Secular Tradition (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press), footnote 34, p. 36. 6. Corbett, Edward J., and Connors, Robert J. (1999), Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (Oxford University Press), p. 1. 7. Broadie, Alexander, ‘Introduction,’ Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric, and the Fine Arts, xxxiii. 8. Corbett, Edward P.J., and Connors, Robert J. (1999), Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Fourth Edition (Oxford University Press), p. 19. 9. Isocrates (1929), ‘Antidosis,’ in Isocrates, Vol. III, translated by Larue Van Hook, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 291. 10. Ibid., p. 171. 11. Ibid., p. 327.

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12. Reid, Thomas (2005), ‘A Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic, with Remarks,’ in Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts, Edited and with an introduction by Alexander Broadie (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 97. 13. Reid, Thomas, ‘A Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic, with Remarks,’ in Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts, ed. Alexander Broadie (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 146. 14. Hutcheson, Francis (2006), Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria. Book I, Section I. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund), p. 26. 15. Ibid., p. 27. 16. Ibid., p. 27. 17. This work follows Stephen McKenna’s argument that Smith’s rhetorical theory must be taken into account first, as the methodological groundwork on the human person within which he developed his moral theory. (2006), Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press). 18. See Evensky, Jerry (2005), Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective on Markets, Law, Ethics, and Culture (Cambridge University Press); Kennedy, Gavin (2005), Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); Lundestad, Eric, ‘The Adam Smith Problem: A Reinterpretation,’ Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Vol. 12, Issue 2 (September 2014), pp. 181–97; Tribe, Keith (2002), ‘The German Reception of Adam Smith,’ in A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (London: Pickering and Chatto); Montes, Leonidas (2002), Adam Smith in Context: A Critical Reassessment of Some Central Components of His Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); Roberts, Russ (2014), How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life (New York: Portfolio/Penguin). 19. Forman-Barzilai, Fonna (2002), Adam Smith’s Circles of Sympathy (Cambridge University Press), p. 31. 20. See Stephen, McKenna (2006), Adam Smith and the Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New  York Press). Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson make a good case for the rhetorical theory Smith uses in his explanations of economics; see ‘The Rhetoric of the Market: Adam Smith on Recognition, Speech, and Exchange,’ Review of Politics 63 (2001), 549–78. 21. Scott, William Robert (1965), Adam Smith as Student and Professor, with Unpublished Documents, including parts of the “Edinburgh Lectures,” a Draft of the Wealth of Nations, Extracts from the Muniments of the University of Glasgow and Correspondence. Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Augustus Kelley Publisher), p. 40. 22. Phillipson, Nicholas (2010) (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 11. 23. Marcelo, Dascal (2006) calls this the ‘mutual correspondence that must obtain between interacting human beings in order to create and sustain social life.’ ‘Adam Smith’s Theory of Language,’ in Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 101.

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24. ‘As it happens, the twilight of the classical rhetorical tradition in the nineteenth century coincides with the rise of the modern social sciences—political economy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics—and these are conspicuous places to look for rhetoric’s afterlife. If this in part explains the seemingly diminished importance of nineteenth-century rhetorical theory— rhetoric’s traditional theoretical work now being done in these various new fields—it begs all the more for a re-examination of Smith the rhetorician, the theorist as well as the practitioner, for Smith is one of the founders of the modern social sciences, and his view of them was fundamentally interdisciplinary’ McKenna (2006, 6). 25. Kennedy, Gavin (2005), Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. xvi. 26. Winch, Donald (2004), ‘Adam Smith,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press). 27. Haakonssen summarizes that TMS ‘analyzed those features of the human mind and those modes of interaction between several minds that gave rise to moral practices in the human species.’ Haakonssen, Knud (2006), ‘Introduction,’ in Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4. 28. Smith, Adam (1985), Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Edited by J.C. Bryce, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, 1983). Reprinted by the Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, Indiana, and p. 9. 29. Smith, Adam, TMS II.ii.5, p. 1. 30. Ibid., p. 9. 31. TMS III.4.8, p. 159. 32. Italics original. TMS, 9. 33. Forman-Barzilai (2002, 6). 34. McKenna (2006, 29). 35. TMS I.i.2.2, p. 14. 36. TMS I.i.2.6, p. 16. 37. TMS III.4.1, pp. 156–57. 38. I owe this point to a class lecture and discussion on Smith’s theory of moral sentiment with Prof. Paul Guyer, Brown University, April 2015. 39. TMS III.3.26, p. 147. 40. TMS VI, conclusion, p. 263. 41. TMS VI.ii.2.2, p. 228. 42. TMS I.ii.5.2, p. 41. 43. TMS III.ii.1, p. 113. 44. TMS I.i.5.10, p. 26. 45. TMS I.i.4.4, p. 20. 46. Forman-Barzilai, Fonna (2002), Adam Smith’s Circles of Sympathy (Cambridge University Press), p. 137.

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47. Hanley, Ryan (2009), Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press), p. 90. 48. TMS, VI.ii.2.4, p. 229. 49. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg (2000), The Rhetorical Tradition (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press), p. 653. 50. LRBL, 26-6. 51. Dascal, Marcelo (2006), ‘Adam Smith’s Theory of Language,’ in Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge University Press), p. 101. 52. Smith, Adam. LRBL, I.v.47, p. 19. 53. Dascal (2006, 99). 54. Ibid. 55. Smith, as recounted after his death by an anonymous ‘Amicus’ in The Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer for Wednesday, May 11, 1791. (1983) Appendix 1, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Edited by J.C. Bryce, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 230. 56. TMS. V.2.1, p. 200.

References Aristotle. 1991. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Edited and translated by George Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. 2000. The Rhetorical Tradition. New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. Corbett, Edward J., and Robert J. Connors. 1999. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dascal, Marcelo. 2006. Adam Smith’s Theory of Language. In Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evensky, Jerry. 2005. Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective on Markets, Law, Ethics, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forman-Barzilai, Fonna. 2002. Adam Smith’s Circles of Sympathy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haakonssen, Knud. 2006. Introduction. In Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanley, Ryan. 2009. Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutcheson, Francis. 2006. Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria. Book I, Section I. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Isocrates. 1929. Antidosis. In Isocrates, vol. III, trans. Larue Van Hook. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.

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Joseph, Sister Miriam. 2002. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. Edited by Marguerite McGlinn. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books. Kalyvas, Andreas, and Ira Katznelson. 2001. The Rhetoric of the Market: Adam Smith on Recognition, Speech, and Exchange. Review of Politics 63: 549–578. Kennedy, George. 1999. Classical Rhetoric in its Christian and Secular Tradition. Charlotte, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Kennedy, Gavin. 2005. Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lundestad, Eric. 2014. The Adam Smith Problem: A Reinterpretation. Journal of Scottish Philosophy 12 (2): 181–197. McKenna, Stephen. 2006. Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Montes, Leonidas. 2002. Adam Smith in Context: A Critical Reassessment of Some Central Components of His Thought. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillipson, Nicholas. 2010. Adam Smith, An Enlightened Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reid, Thomas. 2005. Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts. Edited and with an introduction by Alexander Broadie. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Roberts, Russ. 2014. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. New  York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin. Scott, William Robert. 1965. Adam Smith as Student and Professor, with Unpublished Documents, including Parts of the “Edinburgh Lectures,” a Draft of the Wealth of Nations, Extracts from the Muniments of the University of Glasgow and Correspondence. New York, NY: Reprints of Economic Classics, Augustus Kelley Publisher. Smith, Adam. 1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 2 vols. Edited by R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner and W.B. Todd. Reprinted from The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Indianapolis. ———. 1984. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D.D.  Raphael and A.L.  Macfie. Reprinted from The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Indianapolis. ———. 1985. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Edited by J.C. Bryce. Reprinted from The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Indianapolis. Tribe, Keith (2002) The German Reception of Adam Smith. In A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith. Edited by Keith Tribe. London: Pickering and Chatto. Winch, Donald. 2004. Adam Smith. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

22 Feminism and Gender Kimberly J. Stern

On the first day of class, surrounded by a group of eager students, I asked the vital question: why do we engage in the literary study of gender? How does literature illuminate the concerns of gender in ways distinct from the methods of social policy, cultural theory, or political science? The class was instantly afire with thoughts about the capacity of literature to reflect complex historical realities; to provide an outlet for unspeakable subjects; to reflect the performative dimensions of gendered identities; to serve as a testing ground for theoretical interventions. I nodded in approval, delighted by the varied and insightful responses to what was admittedly a fairly challenging opening gambit. In the midst of all of this enthusiasm, a hand shot up. ‘But what exactly do we mean,’ the student asked, ‘when we talk about “literature”?’ Eloquently and passionately, he explained that by even using the term ‘literary’ we risk validating a canon that has historically excluded the most vital questions about gender—a canon that has almost by definition resisted what is enigmatic and unorthodox. Another hand flew into the air: ‘We are all aware,’ she responded, ‘that we should question what we mean by terms like “male,” “female,” or even “gender.” We should regard the term “literature” with the same degree of skepticism.’ Smart students. In only 20 minutes, they had managed not merely to answer but actually to deconstruct the question I had posed.1 K. J. Stern (*) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_22

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What do these responses suggest about the literary study of gender today? When I was in college in the 1990s, I suspect we would have spent most of our time reflecting on how literature helps to contextualize the historical study of gender. Questions about the canon and critical vocabularies surely would have arisen, but I doubt that my peers would have fractured the question into pieces as these adept young scholars had done. To some extent, the responses from my students seemed to reflect the triumph of poststructuralism. They all seemed to have a direct or indirect understanding of ‘performativity’ and gender, and most of them recognized intuitively the problems with speaking about ‘women’s writing’ as a coherent category. When Michel Foucault and Judith Butler were invoked, many nodded in silent recognition. But if this exchange suggests the tenacity of certain theoretical precepts— especially the tendency to regard gender as a performance defined by myriad social and political factors—it also reflects some of the more vexing problems in feminist and gender studies today. While my more vocal students queried the terms of the discussion, I noticed a few furrowed brows around the room. As the conversation proceeded, these students would gradually and tentatively hypothesize: if the terms ‘gender,’ ‘feminism,’ and even ‘literature’ are open to scrutiny, then what are we really talking about here? Is the literary canon defined by exclusion and so perpetually yoked to gender discrimination? Is it possible to speak of a feminist methodology when even within this classroom we hold such different understandings of what that might mean? My initial answer to these questions takes its inspiration from my students. Feminism is, at its heart, a mode of inquiry: one might say, it is a kind of epistemology.2 The word ‘epistemology’ originates from the Greek terms epistēmē (justified true belief ) and logos (speech). Hence, to describe feminism as an epistemology is not merely to suggest an interest in feminist ways of knowing; it is to suggest that feminism in all of its iterations—in literature, theory, or practice—seeks to uncover and give utterance to the origins of what culture has deemed to be ‘justified true beliefs’ about gender, even as it queries the manner in which those utterances take shape. Whether those beliefs are to be resisted, reinforced, or revised is a matter of variance within the larger field of feminist inquiry: it does not define or delimit the scope of feminist thought. Indeed, as shall become readily apparent, diversity and dissent within the community of feminist scholars has been a signature quality of the field, not only in the twenty-first century but also far into the past. To summarize all or even a representative sampling of work on the literary study of gender in a single chapter is surely an impossible task. The following pages do not provide such a survey but rather an overview on the state of

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literary investigations into feminism and gender from the 1960s to the present day. This account is underwritten, however, by discrete claims about how we might approach the challenges and opportunities afforded by our own intellectual moment. In other words, I want to consider not only the substance of current literary conversations about feminism and gender but also how we approach the challenge of conversation in the first place, given that the promise of consensus—even upon the meaning of the terms under discussion—seems to have disappeared before our very eyes. In what follows, I will attempt to chart how we moved from the epistemological questions of the 1960s—what has often been termed the ‘recovery’ period of feminist theory—to a nonlinear, many-sided, perhaps even protean understanding of gender studies. Feminist theory, as I see it, must be recursive and self-reflexive. If it initially seems that we have foregone the work of our forebears, trading in a coherent and cohesive narrative in favor of a more diffuse and often divided field of concerns, I want to propose that these two visions of gender studies may be more akin than at first appears. Recent work in the field of feminist theory and gender studies in many ways recuperates, enhances, and expands the work of our critical precursors, making possible a conversation that is paradoxically more—not less—cohesive. * * * If feminism is an epistemology, we would do well to recall that its rise within the field of literary studies was rooted in an archaeological project. Kate Millett’s book, Sexual Politics (1970), provided an important stimulus to this movement by proclaiming that literature encodes attitudes toward gender and sexuality that have become naturalized in modern culture. By reinspecting traditional works through a feminist lens, she observed, we can perceive alternative and often troubling narratives, highlighting the implicit and explicit violence that has been historically practiced upon women.3 Combined with the work of other early feminist theorists (including Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ellen Moers, Nina Baym, and others), Millet paved the way for a new generation of scholars interested not merely in exposing silenced female voices in male-authored works but in broadcasting the voices of real women writers speaking about real female experiences.4 In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist critics committed themselves to the work of search and recovery, attempting to rescue women writers from obscurity by amassing information about their work and by analyzing the processes through which they were once excluded from a male-dominated canon. To some extent, we might regard the work of these pioneers as a direct response to Virginia Woolf, who in A Room of One’s

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Own (1929) documents her futile attempts to seek out a tradition of women’s writing in the British Museum, surveying the shelves in vain for all of the ‘books that were not there.’5 Elaine Showalter’s landmark work, A Literature of One’s Own (1977), was central to this project.6 Suggestively, the book takes its title from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1869), not from Woolf ’s famous essay, as was initially posited by several critics of Showalter’s work.7 In this treatise, Mill boldly stipulates that women writers were prevented from developing their own literary traditions because they only ever worked in the shadow of a male-dominated canon. ‘If women lived in a different country from men,’ Mill explains, ‘and had never read any of their writings, they would have had a literature of their own.’8 In this spirit, Showalter’s volume does not merely produce a linear catalog of women’s writing, although it certainly does much to establish the groundwork for such a history. Placing familiar women writers alongside the marginalized or forgotten, Showalter illuminates the social conditions that once eclipsed the history of women’s writing, ultimately calling for a rigorous excavation into the literary past in search of alternative experiences, histories, and modes of expression—opportunities to read beyond what Harold Bloom terms the ‘anxiety of influence’ and to seek out a distinctly female literary tradition.9 Sandra K.  Gilbert and Susan Gubar inverted Bloom’s model in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), proposing that it was not the powerful influence of male writers so much as the absence of productive female precursors that had shaped the tradition of women’s writing. Female aspirants must find recourse, they argued, in a ‘secret sisterhood’ of women writers, whose work is frequently inflected by a discomfort with assuming the authorial role.10 This discomfort often manifests through the production of double-voiced texts, which conceal feminist interests within more conventional narrative structures, so that ‘surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less socially acceptable levels of meaning.’11 While their approach was largely informed by psychoanalytic criticism, the influence of The Madwoman in the Attic has been far-reaching, affording feminists from all corners of the academic world a way of finding hidden messages in the work of the past.12 Hence, the 1970s witnessed the publication of countless volumes seeking to chart new feminist teleologies, works like Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction (1979) and Mary Jacobus’s Women Writing and Writing About Women (1979), both of which advance alternative ways of understanding the female literary tradition. As the recovery movement helped to expand the corpus of texts written by and about women writers, it also inevitably met with resistance from within the ranks of feminist scholars. After all, to excavate the past in search of the

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female voice risks implying that there is such a thing as ‘woman’ and that her voice is both audible and comprehensible to the contemporary scholar. Moreover, triumphalist narratives often overlook the fact that women continue to be objects of violence and discrimination, both in places where the subjugation of women is sanctioned by law and tradition and in places where their rights are ostensibly protected. One might add that the rise of feminism has often been seen as indistinguishable from other forms of cultural violence. In the words of Alka Kurian, the ‘grand narrative’ of feminism is a ‘story of western endeavor, and relegates the experience of non-western women to the margins of feminist discourse.’13 A narrative that tracks the success of Western feminism and its literary outlets may well fail to account for variations in the treatment of gender across class, race, nationality, and other contingencies.14 In this spirit, countless scholars have rightly questioned the very concept of a grand narrative that promised to track the ‘rise’ of the woman writer from a position of silence and submission to one of expression and empowerment. Janet Todd proposes that such skepticism may have been inevitable. She eloquently remarks: ‘The early socio-historical criticism that is now denigrated formed the base and condition of later study, was in a way the begetter of us all, and so inevitably, like a mother, appears naïve in the light of changing modes.’15 In transforming the shape, content, and scope of the conversation about women’s writing, Todd suggests, recovery feminism paradoxically rendered itself an object of critique. The analogy Todd establishes between this theoretical shift and a generational struggle between mothers and daughters is, I think, striking. It is worth remembering that the period of recovery feminism coincided with a surge in feminist psychoanalytic theory. Building upon the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Melanie Klein, these thinkers would propose that the child’s first sexual object is the mother figure, who constitutes a vital link between the child’s psyche and the world of desire.16 If the daughter, as Chodorow claims, feels an identification with the mother, it is unsurprising that she would also see in the mother her own limitations, contradictions, and frustrations. With this in mind, we might well regard the evolution of feminist literary theory itself in light of a psychoanalytic investigation. As critics probe the past in search, as Alice Walker famously put it, ‘of our mother’s gardens,’ they also seek out ways of accounting for their own anxiety of influence. If we are embattled with our mothers, it is because we are embattled with ourselves. In this spirit, theorists in the 1980s and 1990s grew skeptical not only of the grand narrative but of the very historiographies that gave rise to them in the first place. This is precisely the point made by Margaret Ezell, whose work highlights the problems and possibilities entailed in constructing literary tra-

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ditions. In Writing Women’s Literary History (1993), Ezell persuasively argues that the project of historicizing women’s literature has been impeded in part by a failure to consider the cultural origins and assumptions of historiography itself. ‘By unconsciously permitting our perceptions of the past to be shaped by unexamined ideologies,’ Ezell writes, ‘perhaps unwittingly carried over from certain privileged texts or theories, we may have infused the values and standards of those texts and theories in our constructions of the past.’17 Accordingly, Ezell calls for feminists to undertake a ‘self-conscious study of the past,’ one that recognizes the political ends of tradition-making in order to set in relief the ‘difference between past and present.’18 Such an approach has informed the work of countless literary historians in recent years, like Betty A. Schellenberg, who argues in the Professionalization of Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (2005) against regarding the history of women’s writing as a linear narrative that proceeds from suppression to liberation. Likewise, Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (2004) and Susan Staves’s A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (2006) attempt in various ways to challenge traditional approaches to the periodization of women’s literature.19 What is important in these approaches, for the present discussion, is not their insistence on any particular version of literary history—my point here is to emphasize how important it has been in recent years for scholars to revise the ‘search and recovery’ methods of earlier generations by recognizing the many possible histories we might trace for the woman writer. Such an approach might well help to illuminate the value and limitations of the canon as a form of literary classification. As John Guillory puts it in Cultural Capital (1993): ‘If much feminist theory now problematizes the ­category of “woman” itself, what theoretical inhibition disallows the problematization of the “woman writer” in the canon debate?’20 This is not to suggest that sex and gender have not played a significant or even dominant role in the formation of literary traditions; on the contrary, Guillory’s question prompts scholars to apply the same critical lens to their own methodologies that they apply to the literary institutions that constitute the focus of their research. In the end, Guillory questions whether feminist scholars might not reinforce the value of the very canon they seek to unsettle: If current research has recovered a number of otherwise forgotten women writers from the period before the eighteenth century, this fact is not directly related to canon formation as a process of selection or exclusion on the basis of social identity, but to the present institutional context of a valid and interesting research program whose subject is the history of women writers and writing. No

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other defense is required for studying these writers than the aims of the research program (and these could well be political aims).21

By this logic, recovery work becomes a form of methodological inquiry, helping not only to unearth forgotten or suppressed voices but also to prompt new questions about the relationship between the political impetus for feminist research and the institutional structures that at once support and undermine it.22 If we wish to admit more women writers to the canon, we must interrogate our own priorities regarding what constitutes valuable women’s writing. We, no less than our nineteenth-century precursors, are shaped by the political, material, and professional conditions within and against which we forge new traditions. One of the most powerful articulations of this approach has been advanced by Sharon M. Harris, who insists that although recovery feminism is often regarded as a thing of the past, its methodologies have changed alongside new disciplinary and theoretical approaches to knowledge formation. She writes: Once a text is “recovered,” it must be analyzed through an equally broad compendium of theoretical perspectives, cultural contexts, transatlantic contexts, interdisciplinary contexts, and print and production contexts. That is, the scope of contexts in which we place texts is really what recovery is about, and in that sense our work has and always will have only begun.23

For Harris, the work of recovery must be modulated by an attention to contemporary methodologies and modes of scrutiny, moving beyond the celebration of ‘forgotten’ texts and focusing instead on new ways of reading. In this spirit, Carol Hanbery Mackay has observed that recovery often becomes a matter of repairing the damage done by partial, expurgated, or corrupted texts: ‘The recovery process sometimes devolves into a rescue mission.’24 Alison Chapman adds that the digital revolution has raised new questions about recovery work, radically expanding the scope of what can and should be deemed canonical. ‘One of the ironies of the digital revolution,’ she writes, ‘… is a new reckoning of literary value that comes with this recovery.’25 This dilemma has been addressed most directly by the Orlando project. Leaving aside the problem of canonization, the editors advocate for an ‘integrated history of women’s writing’—that is, an archive of women’s writing that transcends the ‘powerful challenges to literary history as a genre.’26 As Orlando editors Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy observe: The genre itself has been seen as monolithic, hegemonic, teleological, dependent upon a single-voiced narrative that obliterates the multiple and ex-centric

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narratives of writers outside of canonical traditions (including women). Narrative itself has come under scrutiny as always ideologically invested and deeply implicated in masculine subjectivities and power structures. Literary history, traditionally organized in terms of ethnic or linguistic groups and nationalist identity categories, has been criticized as a dangerous hangover of the nineteenth-century nation-state, one that perpetuates “a single, endlessly reiterated fable of identity.”27

If recovery is divorced from the concept of canonization or even conventional literary history—if the electronic medium makes possible a nonlinear, nonhierarchical archive of women writers—perhaps it becomes more feasible to seek out a female literary tradition without insisting on any particular ­narratable sequence of developments and priorities.28 Theoretically, at least, the work of recovery can be reconciled to the more diffuse field of concerns we see before us today. Still, one wonders—how to make sense of this ever-­expanding archive? Might it one day become so large as to be essentially un-navigable? If recovery work has found a new raison d’etre, how do we make the most of it? Today, the female literary tradition faces several overlapping and intersecting challenges: the infinite expansion of the known literary universe made possible through digital technology; the challenges of accounting for difference within the larger feminist community; postmodernism and its assertion that we have reached the ‘end of history’; and finally, how to speak of a female literary tradition at a time when the very terms of the discussion seem subject to constant negotiation.29 For some, the answer is simply a matter of defining one’s terms. Constance Penley observes: ‘In order to be either a movement or a discipline, feminism must presuppose the category “woman.” … because no movement can constitute itself without notions of identity and commonality.’30 On the face of it, this would seem an irrefutable statement. Surely, a community—academic or political—cannot exist without a common basis for belief or experience. Today, however, we find ourselves confronted by diffuse feminist enclaves, each claiming the title for itself and yet each meaning something slightly different by it. To highlight (and often to lament) the lack of consensus within the feminist community has by now become de rigueur in gender studies. If this seems like a problem of the twenty-first century, it is worth noting that it in fact predates us by at least a century. In a review of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), Vernon Lee (née Violet Paget) explains her own reluctance to identify with the women’s movement, a cause that represented precisely the political and social principles she otherwise embraced:

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Indeed, when I seek the depths of my consciousness, I think the real mischief lay in that word ‘Woman.’ For while that movement was, of course, intended to break down the barriers—legal, professional, educational and social—which still exist between the sexes, the inevitable pitting of one of these sexes against the other, the inevitable harping on what can or cannot, or must or must not be done, said or thought by women, because they are not men (women! women! everlastingly women!), produced a special feeling, pervading, overpowering, unendurable (like that of visiting a harem or a nunnery), due to that perpetual obtrusion of the one fact of sex, while the other fact of human nature, the universal, chaste fact represented by the word Homo as distinguished from the mere Vir and Femina, seemed for the moment lost sight of.31

We can hear reverberations of this statement in the words of Virginia Woolf, who wrote in A Room of One’s Own (1923): ‘Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am.’32 Woolf highlights here the historical presumption that women are incapable of forging meaningful communities, a presumption that helped to undermine precisely those early collectives that sought to advance feminist causes.33 Yet her invocation of this disparaging stereotype also comes with a twist. If she is ‘sick to death of ’ hearing about women, it is not because she dislikes them: it is because the term itself risks reducing her to nothing more than biological sex. The political stakes of classification became especially pronounced with the rise of identity politics in the twentieth century. bell hooks opens her important study Ain’t I a Woman? (1981) by comparing her own generation unfavorably to the outspoken Anna Cooper, who argued in 1893 before the World Congress of Representative Women that the black woman was ‘doubly enslaved.’34 Racial and class identities are inextricably encoded in the popular understanding of what it means to be a ‘woman,’ hooks contends, though the contemporary theorist is often reluctant or unable to perceive it. Strikingly, by borrowing her title from Sojourner Truth’s address to the 1851 Women’s Convention, bell hooks reminds us that the questions of the moment are not unique to our own time. Then, as now, women recognized that the vocabularies we use to discuss gender invariably pose obstacles. Is it possible to speak of ‘woman’ as a coherent category, when the challenges of gender are invariably shaped by other social conditions? By the same token, can the category ‘women’s writing’ accommodate an endless variety of gendered experiences, or does such boundless inclusivity lead to incoherence? At the heart of this problem is a long-standing tension between feminist theory and feminist practice. In her introduction to the reissue of Feminist

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Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory (2015), Josephine Donovan claims that deconstruction and its celebration of ‘liberal pluralism’ are fundamentally at odds with feminist theory.35 Feminist criticism must, she argues, ‘not allow its central political vision to be compromised by pluralism, deconstructionism, or any other obscurantist mystifications.’36 Gender issues, by this logic, are not merely questions of ‘diffèrence,’ to borrow Jacques Derrida’s famous nomenclature.37 They are real and often life-changing—sometimes they are matters of life and death. Feminist theory, Donovan claims, must be understood as a praxis—that is, as a coherent theory that is realized in the world through social action. Yet to regard feminism strictly as a form of ‘prescriptive criticism’ also risks overlooking that deconstruction and gender studies have productively played off of one another for decades. It is this fruitful collision of theories that made possible, for instance, Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on gender and performativity. Butler’s work presents gender as ‘a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.’38 On the one hand, Butler would seem to exemplify precisely the approach that Donovan rejects. Deploying the techniques of deconstruction, she denies the innate reality of gender and accepts instead the manifold possibilities presented by a liberal plurality. On the other hand, Butler’s work—and much that has followed in the wake of deconstruction—has proven vital to the advancement of feminism as both theory and social practice. In her essay ‘Unmaking: Men and Masculinity in Feminist Theory,’ for example, Robyn Wiegman has suggested that the movement from identification to difference as the defining concern of feminist theory has only reinforced the epistemological leverage of feminism as a vehicle for cultural interpretation. Several scholars have claimed that the move toward liberal plurality in feminist theory has led to either the occlusion of women’s interests or the ceding of power to institutions and traditions— including liberalism itself—that are historically rooted in patriarchy. In response, Wiegman tracks how the recognition of difference within feminist communities precipitated the recognition of difference within ‘masculine’ cultures and eventually the possibility of a ‘masculinity without men.’39 She explains: ‘Such “unmaking,” if you will, of the category of men importantly remakes masculinity as pertinent to if not constitutive of female subjectivity, thereby rendering complex feminism’s ability to negotiate the distinctions and interconnections between sex, sexuality, and gender.’40 By this logic, masculinity becomes not the normative center against which femininity is measured, challenged, or subdued; instead, masculinity becomes a contestatory

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site, where the meaning of the terms ‘gender,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘female’ (not to mention ‘intersex’ or ‘transgender’) can be extended and explored. By regarding feminism as more than a ‘woman’s question,’ Wiegman and others have made possible the decentering of masculine experience, which has motivated so much feminist activism from the 1960s on. My point here is not simply to advocate for the value of pluralism within gender studies; rather, I want to suggest that pluralism works paradoxically with and not against more traditional, prescriptive approaches to feminist thought. For some, especially at the turn of the last century, the apparent dissolution of a feminist community united by a common set of experiences and subject positions seemed to signal the end of feminism itself. For others, it raised the possibility of revising feminist social agendas and extending the stakes of the discussion to an even larger community. Whereas feminism had once depended upon shared bodily and social experiences, the last several decades have seen the literary scholarship of gender shift onto more uncertain terrain, mobilized by Butler’s understanding of gender as a site of cultural production. As Susan Stryker has observed, Butler’s intervention was absolutely crucial to the cultivation of a belief in ‘gender’s productive power—how “woman” was also a “site” or a “location” that its occupants identified themselves with, understood themselves through, and acted from.’41 If the body could be disciplined through social and cultural institutions to assume and unwittingly reproduce specific ‘performances of gender,’ those performances could also be coopted in the interest of recognizing alternatives to traditional, heteronormative narratives.42 Such an understanding of the body and of gendered identity has made possible, over the last two decades, an efflorescence of work in the field of transgender studies. The term ‘transgender’ finds its origin in John F.  Oliven’s Sexual Hygiene and Pathology (1965), a work that treats transsexuality and transgenderism as medical conditions. Yet with Sandy Stone’s use of the term in her 1991 ‘Posttranssexual Manifesto’ and Leslie Feinberg’s popularization of the term the following year in Transgender Liberation, the word has assumed a more dynamic and empowering role in literary and cultural theory.43 As Stryker herself eloquently puts it: Most broadly conceived, the field of transgender studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role perfor-

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mance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood.44

In other words, transgender studies works toward an understanding of identity that transcends tradition, biology, or even classification. The relationship between trans-theory and feminism has not always been a congenial one. Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys contended that transgender and transsexual people, by seeking escape from embodiment as a woman or by actively inhabiting a female subject position, only reinforce the normative gender categories feminists seek to upend.45 Such an approach to transgender identity has met with passionate criticism, many noting that trans-culture is a variegated and dynamic field of experiences which challenges more rigid views of how we ‘do’ gender. In other words, if the concerns of transgender studies are largely epistemological—highlighting how the body and material culture instantiates meaning—then it also promises new ways of understanding the relationship between the embodied experience of gender and social identity, as well as the limitations and legibility of such identities.46 Moreover, because transgender theory is, as Stryker puts it, fundamentally concerned with contingency—with ‘undoing’ gender—it offers a new epistemological framework for reflecting on the terrain of gender studies at an historical moment that has become noteworthy for testing the limits of the human body: ‘Transgender studies helps demonstrate the extent to which soma, the body as a culturally intelligible construct, and techne, the techniques in and through which bodies are transformed and positioned, are in fact inextricably interpenetrated.’47 To some extent, this hearkens back to Donna Haraway’s signature 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ in which she proposes the cyborg as a model for the rejection of conventional boundaries—the boundary between animal and human, as well as between human and machine.48 By adopting a cyborg politics, Haraway suggests, women might well transcend the corporeal and political limitations historically practiced upon women, moving instead toward a more progressive, anticategorical form of gender politics—a gender politics for the future. In a similar spirit, Jack Halberstam has argued in In a Queer Time and Place (2005) that transgender theory affords the possibility of new narrative approaches to gender, within both personal and political contexts: ‘Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.’49 Halberstam elaborates on this idea in Gaga Feminism (2012), suggesting that the newest form of feminism ‘hints at

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a future rather than prescribing one.’50 For Halberstam, the performative excess of an artist like Lady Gaga suggests less the undoing of gender than the multiplication of its futures: … this version of feminism looks into the shadows of history for its heroes and finds them loudly refusing the categories that have been assigned to them: these feminists are not ‘becoming women’ in the sense of coming to consciousness, they are unbecoming women in every sense—they undo the category rather than rounding it out, they dress it up and down, take it apart like a car engine and then rebuild it so that it is louder and faster.51

Halberstam’s discussion of ‘gaga feminism’ as a creative, riotous, and relentless multiplication of possibilities is compelling. Certainly, the concept of ‘unbecoming women’ would seem to fly in the face of an entire century of feminist and gender theory, from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that one becomes a woman through a process of acculturation that endorses certain models of femininity and rejects others, to the work of celebrated literary scholar Linda Peterson, whose work Becoming a Professional Woman of Letters (2009) suggested that the concept of literary ‘professionalism’ itself took shape alongside shifting discourses on gender.52 The principle of ‘becoming’ has for a long time been central to feminist theory and gender studies. Yet Halberstam’s argument in favor of ‘unbecoming women’ does not reject the concept of gender altogether. On the contrary, Halberstam proposes that ‘undoing gender’ entails a fundamental challenge to the social and political limitations placed on women and therefore, paradoxically, bodies forth endless possibilities for doing gender. Even as Halberstam suggests that these ‘unbecoming’ women ‘undo the category rather than rounding it out,’ the seeming chaos of ‘gaga feminism’ is thus quite productive. Indeed, it helps us to see the search and recovery mission of the 1970s with fresh eyes—if earlier generations sought to present an authoritative and legible history of women’s writing, theorists have increasingly recognized the coexistence of many different, contingent, sometimes conflicting histories (and futures) for the gendered subject. Janus-faced, we must now look to the past as well as into the futures of gender studies; through this recursive process, we continually reshape and refine our own methodologies, so that theory too becomes a process of doing and undoing. * * *

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What, then, do we mean by the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’? Annette Kolodny suggests that feminism is ‘more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation.’53 Judith Fetterley insists that feminism has always demonstrated ‘a resistance to codification and a refusal to have its parameters prematurely set.’54 Yet to acknowledge that coherence has always been a problem for scholars of feminism and gender may be of little comfort to those who long to bridge the gap between difference and equity, between narrative and hypertext, between subjectivity and collectivity. On the last day of class, I decided to ask my students. I reminded them of our first conversation and of their astute analysis of the terms under discussion. I fed the question back to them: if the terms ‘gender,’ ‘feminism,’ and even ‘literature’ are always open to scrutiny, then what are we really talking about here? Their responses were every bit as compelling as they had been on the first day. As a group, they rejected the premise of my question: why, they pleaded, are we compelled to choose between difference and equity, between activism and academia, between feminism and humanism? ‘Unity and pluralism,’ one sagely remarked, ‘are not mutually exclusive.’ Another provocatively noted: ‘You ask how we can all get on the same page. I ask whether we should.’ One extremely sharp young woman added fodder to the question itself: ‘As we continue to probe what we mean by femininity and masculinity, are we trying to destroy barriers or to determine how they got there in the first place?’55 One of the greatest values of studying literature through the lens of gender, according to this next generation of scholars, is that literary texts embrace the power of paradox. By admitting a logic that is recursive, if not at times contradictory, literature serves as an alternative outlet for theoretical inquiry. As Robin Truth Goodman has eloquently observed, the literary has always been ‘necessary for thinking like a feminist.’56 She continues: ‘Novels, poem, memoirs, and other fictive and non-fictive literary practices can be said to complete what is incomplete in theoretical critique and argument in feminism, and literary language and literary form can be said to inhabit and even influence the possibilities of feminist theory from inside its own design.’57 As writers challenge the uses of language, narrative, and genre, they challenge our ways of knowing the world, including the place gender plays within it. Gender studies demands that these questions be articulated and engaged. For we are all, in some way, engaged in the politics of gender, and we are all engaged in the essential questions posed by the field. Who am I? To what extent does the body determine cultural identity? Are the narratives we tell (about history, literature, or culture) complete? What stories remain untold? How do we recuperate them? Should we?

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Over two centuries ago, Mary Wollstonecraft insisted that the duties of women ‘are HUMAN duties.’58 For Wollstonecraft, an appreciation of what is unique in the experiences of women as women is compatible with a rhetoric that pushes against the cultural categories of sex and gender. In an 1898 essay discussing the ‘woman question’—the nineteenth-century term that referred expansively to the legal, economic, and political advancement of women— Sarah Grand revisited the issue again. ‘But why,’ she inquires, ‘woman-­ question rather than human-question or humanity-question, or any other expression which would suggest the combined interests of men and women, since they cannot be separated …’59 Like her precursors and those who followed her, Grand was vexed by the problem of how to speak of gender without limiting the scope of her social and cultural investments. Why did Grand feel compelled to raise the same question Wollstonecraft had raised in 1792— the same question that Woolf again raised in 1929? Is it because writers and scholars in the intervening years had failed? Are we destined merely to repeat the arguments of the past? I prefer to think that this question—reiterated so many times over the centuries—does not reflect the failure so much as the victory of a feminist epistemology. We turn to the past not merely to resurrect lost texts or to justify for the work we do today as theorists of gender. We turn to the past, instead, with a recognition that many of the questions raised by our forebears are questions we continue to raise—questions that must be raised from one generation to the next, as each successive wave of scholars makes and remakes gender studies for itself. I have attempted to model such an impulse in this chapter, highlighting how earlier thinkers (Wollstonecraft, Mill, Lee, or Woolf ) anticipated theoretical dilemmas that are often thought to be specific to the twenty-first century. We examine our critical history as we look into a mirror, finding in the glass a reflection of ourselves but one that is inverted and framed by our own movements. To this extent, feminist inquiry always demands that we inhabit a paradox, wherein we must distance ourselves from and yet recognize ourselves as a part of the history—and future—we seek to construct. Certainly, this paradox has generated much confusion in scholarly discourse. I want to suggest that it might also generate a sense of possibility.

Notes 1. The conversation described occurred in my Fall 2016 course ‘Literature and Gender.’ Of necessity, I have reconstructed the students’ remarks from memory, but I have done my best to give them a faithful rendering here. Thanks

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especially to Cecelia Beard, Elizabeth Bonesteel, Alexander Buckley, Sarah Burk, Erin Flood, Marley Grosskopf, Kristen Hefner, Izzie Hirschy, Lena Jones, Kaelin Kennedy, Stewart Kingdon, Connor Kirkpatrick, Kent McDonald, Katie Otto, Shirley Pu, Madison Schaper, Isabelle Smith, Sierra Smith, Bennett Steidinger, Kacey Thigpen, Lydia Trogdon, and Eldon Zacek. 2. I am not here speaking of ‘feminist epistemology,’ which reflects intersections of epistemological and gender issues. Rather than merely engaging with what it means to know the world through a feminist lens, I am suggesting that all feminist thought constitutes an inquiry into the way our world is constructed—and known—through gender. 3. Millet (1970). Millet’s work is often considered alongside that of Mary Ellmann, whose book Thinking about Women (1968) tracks female stereotypes and their psychosocial repercussions in British and American literature, reflecting especially upon how some male critics respond to and sometimes reproduce those stereotypes. 4. Patricia Meyer Spacks asks, in The Female Imagination (1975), why the plot of the female heroine is so often predicated upon reacting to or rejecting existing female tropes, hence pointing to the absence of an affirmative model of female experience in the literary canon. Focusing on the trope of the female heroine in British literature, Ellen Moers provided one of the earlier attempts at outlining a female tradition in Literary Women (1976). Nina Baym’s work has pursued similar questions in the American literary tradition, perhaps most notably in Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1978). 5. Virginia Woolf (2015, 45). 6. Showalter (1978). 7. Showalter herself reflects on the misprision in ‘Twenty Years on: “A Literature of Their Own” Revisited’ (1998, 99–413). In her account, Showalter especially singles out two critics for commentary. Toril Moi wrote: ‘A distinguished a subtle feminist critic like Elaine Showalter, for example, signals her subtle swerve away from Virginia Woolf by taking over, yet changing, Woolf ’s title’ (Moi 1985, 1). Janet Todd additionally noted: ‘In A Literature of Their Own, already a snub, many thought, to the original Woolfian text, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf was trounced for evading the problem of femaleness in her projection of the disturbing and dark aspects of a woman’s psyche onto men’ (Todd 1988, 36). 8. Mill (1989 [1859], 187). 9. Bloom (1978). 10. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2000, 51). 11. Gilbert and Gubar (2000, 73). 12. Psychoanalytic feminism has proven to be a productive field for reexamining the nature of female agency, as experienced by authors and subjects alike. Theorists like Karen Horney and Simon de Beauvoir are notable for challeng-

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ing Freud’s privileging of the male libido, which ostensibly cultivates in women feelings of envy and anxiety. In Beauvoir’s view, women aspire to the social and political power, not the physical condition, of masculinity. If Gilbert and Gubar frame female authorial anxiety in terms of perceived lack, then, it is by no means clear that they align this anxiety with ‘penis envy’ as such. Beauvoir constitutes a powerful presence throughout The Madwoman in the Attic. See Beauvoir (2014 [1949]). See also Horney (1967 [1922–37]). 13. Kurian (2004, 54). 14. See, for instance, Yegenoglu (1998) and Grewal and Kaplan (1994). 15. Janet Todd (1988, 1). 16. Klein (1932) constitutes, of course, a very early theorist of psychoanalytical feminism, her writings spanning from the 1930s into the 1960s. See also Chodorow (1978). 17. Ezell (1996, 4). 18. Ezell (1996, 13). 19. See Schellenberg (2005), Clarke (2004), and Staves (2006). 20. Guillory (1993, 16). 21. Guillory (1993, 15–16). 22. See also Winders (1991). 23. Harris (2009, 298). 24. McKay (2015, 172). 25. Chapman (2015, 84). 26. Brown et al. (2016). 27. Ibid. 28. See also Klein (2014). 29. While Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others announced the ‘end of history’ as early as the nineteenth century, more recent articulations of the idea include Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (2006) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (1991). 30. Penley (1986, 143–44). 31. Lee (1902, 72). 32. Woolf (2015 [1929], 109). 33. See, for instance, Auerbach (1978). 34. bell hooks (1982). 35. Donovan (2015, ix). 36. Donovan (2015, xii). 37. Feminist engagements with Derrida abound, but helpful overviews of the subject are to be found in Nancy Holland’s Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida (1997) and Ellen Feder’s Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman (1997). 38. Butler (1990, xiv–xv). 39. Robyn Wiegman (2002). 40. Wiegman (2002, 33).

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41. Stryker (2008, 125). 42. See Butler (1990). 43. See Sandy Stone (1996) and Feinberg (1992). 44. Susan Stryker (2006, 3). 45. Raymond (2005) and Jeffreys (2014). 46. Stryker (2006, 9). 47. Stryker (2006, 12). 48. See Haraway (1991). 49. Halberstam (2005, 2). 50. Halberstam (2012, xiii). 51. Halberstam (2012, xiv). 52. Peterson (2009). 53. Kolodny (1976, 420). 54. Fetterley (1978, viii). 55. Thank you to Sarah Burke, Kaelin Kennedy, and Stewart Kingdon, respectively, for providing these insightful responses to the question. 56. Goodman (2016, 1). 57. Goodman (2016, 2). 58. Wollstonecraft (1995 [1792], 124). 59. Grand (1898, 379).

References Auerbach, Nina. 1978. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Baym, Nina. 1978. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bloom, Harold. 1978. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. 2016. Scholarly Introduction. In Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present.  Accessed December 15, 2016. http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/ svDocumentation?d_id=ABOUTTHEPROJECT. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Chapman, Alison. 2015. Fame and Canonicity. In Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Linda H. Peterson, 73–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clarke, Norma. 2004. The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters. London: Pimlico.

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de Beauvoir, Simone. 2014 [1949]. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Judith Thurman. New York, NY: Random House. Donovan, Josephine. 2015. Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Louisville: University of Kentucky Press. Ellmann, Mary. 1968. Thinking about Women. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and the World. Ezell, Margaret J.M. 1996. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Feder, Ellen, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin, eds. 1997. Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman. New York, NY: Routledge. Feinberg, Leslie. 1992. Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. New York, NY: World View Forum. Fetterley, J.  1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. The End of History and the Last Man. New  York, NY: Simon and Shuster. Gilbert Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 2000 [1979]. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goodman, R.T. 2016. Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grand, Sarah. 1898. Marriage Questions in Fiction. The Fortnightly Review 69 (375): 378–389. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Halberstam, Jack J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York, NY: NYU Press. ———. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston: Beacon Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York, NY: Routledge. Harris, Sharon M. 2009. “Across the Gulf ”: Working in the “Post-Recovery” Era. Legacy 26 (2): 284–298. Holland, Nancy, ed. 1997. Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. hooks, bell. 1982. Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. New  York, NY: Routledge. Horney, Karen. 1967 [1922–1937]. Feminine Psychology. New York, NY: Norton.

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Jeffreys, Sheila. 2014. Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. New York, NY: Routledge. Klein, Melanie. 1932. The Psychoanalysis of Children. Oxford: Hogarth Press. Klein, Ula. 2014. Feminist Recovery Practices and Digital Pedagogies: Teaching Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 1: 95–125. Kolodny, Annette. 1976. Literary Criticism. Signs 2 (2): 420. Kurian, Alka. 2004. Feminism and the Developing World. In The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, 54–64. New York, NY: Routledge. Lee, Vernon. 1902. The Economic Dependence of Women. North American Review 175 (548): 71–90. McKay, Carol Hanbery. 2015. Life-writing. In Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Linda H.  Peterson, 159–172. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1989 [1859]. On Liberty and Other Writings. Edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. New York, NY: Doubleday. Moers, Ellen. 1976. Literary Women. New York, NY: Doubleday. Moi, T. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge. Nancy, Jean Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Penley, Constance. 1986. Teaching in Your Sleep: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. In Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cynthia Nelson, 143–144. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Peterson, Linda H. 2009. Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raymond, Janice G. 2005. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. London: Beacon Press/Women’s Press. Schellenberg, Betty A. 2005. The Professionalization of Women Writers in EighteenthCentury Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1978. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. Twenty Years On: ‘A Literature of Their Own’ Revisited. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 31 (3): 399–413. Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer. 1975. The Female Imagination. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Staves, Susan. 2006. Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stone, Sandy. 1996. The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto. In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Sexual Ambiguity, ed. Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Stryker, Susan. 2006. (De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies. In The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1–17. New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2008. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Todd, Janet. 1988. Feminist Literary History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wiegman, Robyn. 2002. Unmaking: Men and Masculinity in Feminist Theory. In Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner, 32–59. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Winders, James A. 1991. Gender, Theory, and the Canon. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1995 [1792]. A Vindication of the Rights of Men and a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 2015 [1929]. A Room of One’s Own. New  York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Yegenoglu, Meyda. 1998. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

23 Psychoanalysis Will Long

Two recent introductions to the field agree that psychoanalytic literary criticism has become ‘marginal,’ even conceding that ‘most of the time’ it is considered merely ‘a pretext for a good laugh before the serious work begins.’1 Perhaps these comments are intended as oblique validations of a body of theory that mandates serious consideration of the marginal and stresses the importance of jokes in mental life. Perhaps, in the context of psychoanalysis, the attribution of intention is neither here nor there. In the introduction to her edited collection Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1994), Maud Ellmann observes how Freud’s texts have ‘never lost their power to irritate,’ evoking both the dismissive attitude sometimes adopted towards psychoanalysis in the name of scientific rationalism, and what was, at its inception, psychoanalysis’ unrivalled speculative investigation into the most obscure functions of the body. ‘Irritation’ can refer to the excitement of ‘a bodily organ or part’ to ‘morbid action,’ or even ‘to some characteristic action or condition,’2 and Ellmann attributes the ‘sniggers’ that psychoanalysis can elicit in classrooms to ‘the body rejecting with convulsions what the intellect refuses to assimilate’ (2013 [1994], 1). The rejection of psychoanalysis as ‘unscientific,’ however, can be understood partly in relation to an idealized objectivity or ‘view from nowhere’ that is itself increasingly challenged by the study of the brain-mind.3 The widely discredited ‘application’ of psychoanalytic diagnostic motifs to literary texts, W. Long (*) Wolfson College, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_23

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which hypothesizes a hermeneutic telos based on idealized universals of human nature (to which psychoanalysis might provide the key), is based on a similar assumption. As substance dualism, the abstract nature of language, and the unitary self are all challenged by cognitive science, both the prescience of Freud’s theory and the limitations under which it was constructed are becoming more apparent.4 Literary readers have also increasingly found support in Freud’s own writing for challenges to the ideal of interpretative finality, either in the literary text or in personal identity. Meanwhile, clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis continues to explore how selfhood and aesthetic experience not only resist definitive articulation but also permeate one another’s previously distinct taxonomical boundaries. In this chapter I will suggest that Freud’s commitment to a hypothesis of mind-body nondualism situates psychoanalysis on a threshold between, on the one hand, idealist and dualist philosophies long dominant in the Western intellectual tradition and, on the other, challenges to dualism and idealism brought about by the study of the mind and brain, to which psychoanalysis itself significantly contributes. Freud’s nondualism culminates in the subpersonal, processual ontology of his life and death drives, which troubles not only the stability of subject and object (and for the purposes of this chapter, literary text and reader) but also the distinction between the two. While the ­ontological scope of Freud’s life and death drives appears to transcend specifically humanist or psychological considerations, post-Freudian psychoanalytic paradigms, including Lacanianism, British object relations, and more recently object relations-inspired interpersonal psychoanalysis in America, offer increasingly nuanced conceptual frameworks through which to experience the creation of both personal and literary meaning, based on clinical and neurobiological evidence. Finally, because nondualism dictates that language is not merely an abstract mimetic procedure, but rather an open-ended and materially ‘real’ mode of being, the histories of both psychoanalysis and literature do not constitute an end-oriented refinement towards ‘truth,’ but rather successive actualizations of what Charles Lamb called ‘possible existences.’5 In his 1962 article ‘Beyond the Reality Principle,’ the British independent psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft draws on T.S. Eliot’s argument that the scientific outlook and method developed in the European seventeenth century was central to a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ characterizing modern intellectual history in the West. Modern man, writes Rycroft, ‘views reality from two unconnected and incompatible standpoints, one scientific and objective, the other imaginative and subjective.’ The difficulty of understanding Freud, he continues, ‘derives in part from his having been compelled, as a scientist, to use language which presupposes this split to express ideas which annul it’ (1962,

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108). Of these ideas, the one which most decisively annuls Rycroft’s (and Eliot’s) ‘split’ is Freud’s insistence on mind-body nondualism, the philosophical implications of which he does not fully acknowledge, and, some would argue, are not fully acknowledged even today.6 In his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ [1895], Freud’s intention was to ‘furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science,’ representing psychical processes as ‘quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles’ (SE I, 295).7 Although he abandoned a wholly neuronal theory of mind, Freud never gave up on the principle of a materialist psychology. Freud reminds us, in ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914), that his ‘provisional ideas in psychology will presumably some day be based on an organic substructure’ (SE XIV, 78). In ‘The Unconscious’ (1915), he calls his materialist hypothesis ‘a hiatus…which at present cannot be filled.’ He continues: ‘Our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy; it has reference not to anatomical localities, but to regions in the mental apparatus, wherever they may be situated in the body’ (SE XIV, 174–75, emphasis in original).8 His speculative theory about the residual influence of the properties of constituent inorganic material on biological organisms, introduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920] and developed in later work, clearly demonstrates that Freud espoused a fundamentally nondualist, materialist philosophy. As Rycroft observes, however, Freud wrote in terms that apparently continued to presuppose, at least tacitly, the hypothesis of substance dualism on which the ideal of absolute objectivity depends. Ultimately employing both scientific and humanistic approaches, Freud articulates a universal theory of human identity and development, implicitly conceding that the psyche had an objective existence that was uniform, stable, and clearly delineated from its environment. In The Question of Lay Analysis [1926], Freud prioritizes knowledge of the humanities in the training of the analyst (SE XX, 248). Though this reflects an ongoing appreciation of the importance of culture in understanding human experience, cultural artefacts remained merely the symptoms of universal, ‘natural’ traits, a sentiment expressed most famously in Freud’s letter to Wilhelm Fliess of 15 October 1897. The ‘riveting power’ of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Freud writes, is attributable to ‘a universal event of early childhood’ (SE I, 265); being in love with one’s mother and jealous of one’s father. As Freud’s texts have encountered readers in cultural contexts transformed by decolonization, globalization, and expanded political enfranchisement, however, the universality of his theories has been tested. Critiques of Freud are sometimes also organized around forms of substance dualism. ‘Like it or not,’ wrote the Martiniquais-French psychiatrist Frantz

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Fanon in 1967, ‘the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes’ (1967, 151–52). Fanon’s objection to the presumed universality of Freud’s theory is in part due to its failure to acknowledge the actuality of traumatic events in the lives of colonized people. Fanon prefers Swiss psychiatrist Germaine Guex’s concept of ‘abandonment neurosis,’ which, like the nearly contemporaneous attachment theory of John Bowlby in the UK, focused on the traumatogenic effect of separation on children. As Fanon writes, being ‘pre-Oedipal in nature’ (1967, 72), abandonment neurosis acknowledges the impact of real experiences with a directness of which Freud’s theory of complexes might be deemed incapable. The ‘organic,’ Fanon argues, ‘is a myth only for him that can go beyond it’ (1967, 80). The opposition of the actual and the mythical, however, is founded on presumptions derived from substance dualism, in this case implying that authenticity is based on materiality, and that mental processes are immaterial mediations with no direct claim to authenticity of their own. According to Freud, however, endogenous stimulation differs in degree, but not in kind, from stimulation from exogenous trauma, and because ‘the cortical layer which receives [endogenous] stimuli is without any protective shield against excitations from within,’ mental processes have ‘a preponderance in economic importance and often occasion [comparable] economic disturbances’ (SE XVIII, 34). Without the protection of sensory apparatus on the epidermis, in other words, the seemingly slight and immaterial myths of the mind are registered as acutely material. Some feminist critiques of Freud have employed a similar dichotomy, enlisting the ‘pre-Oedipal’ as an ideal of inchoate but ‘natural’ authenticity overwritten by oppressive socio-cultural conventions. Freud introduces the concept of a pre-Oedipal phase in the essay ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ [1925], although as Juliet Mitchell observes, the concept is relatively underdeveloped in his subsequent work (1974, 229).9 Jacqueline Rose notes that Luce Irigaray’s association between a return to the undifferentiated autoerotic experience of the pre-­ Oedipal phase and ‘the return of the (feminine) exile’ (1978, 36) could be seen as reproducing sexist stereotypes of the ‘irrational’ woman. Maud Ellmann is similarly troubled by the impression that Irigaray conceives of female discourse ‘only in the form of gush, as if incontinence were the equivalent of liberation’ (1994, 25). Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, imagines a productive oscillation between the ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’ aspects of language, a gendered distinction between abstract masculine writing and embodied feminine prosody. Mitchell, while acknowledging Freud’s patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions, observes that psychology ‘must reflect the

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social at least as much as the biological background’ (1974, 226). As Virginia Goldner writes, ‘we can neither essentialize gender nor dematerialize it’ (2003, 115). Mitchell, indeed, argues that it is precisely because Freud’s theories are ‘about sexism’ that they are useful for understanding and resisting sexism (1974, 228). In The Assault on Truth (1984), Jeffrey Masson claims that Freud abandoned and suppressed his ‘seduction theory,’ which located traumatic aetiology in ‘premature seductions’ (or sexual abuse) occurring during childhood. Masson argues that Freud replaced the seduction theory with his Oedipal theory of repressed incestuous desire in order to avoid confronting the prevalence of such incidents in the Viennese society on whose patronage he depended. This claim resonates with contemporary debates about the credibility afforded to abuse victims, and the emphasis on the under-reporting of sexual abuse is supported by the work of feminist trauma theorists (Herman 1981, 1992). Peter Fonagy, however, citing textual evidence, refutes Masson’s claim that Freud entirely discounted the significance of historical incidents in traumatic aetiology (2001, 48). The study of trauma, with its emphasis on the actuality of the traumatogenic event, contributed to the sense that narratable conscious experience and ‘reality’ stand in opposition to one another, mediated by mental representations—a highly influential notion for literary hermeneutics. Citing Freud’s surprise that the traumatic nightmares of World War One soldiers reproduce actual events rather than encoding them according to the particular symbolic logic of normal dreams, Cathy Caruth describes traumatic flashbacks as ‘the literal return of the event’ (1996, 59). In cases of trauma, Caruth writes, ‘the outside has gone inside without any mediation’ (1996, 59). For the literary critic employing psychoanalytic theory to read a text, the emphasis on the ‘literality’ of the traumatic event promises an ideal of actuality, however unattainable to ordinary narrative consciousness. Trauma reveals, for Caruth, an ‘inherent latency’ (1996, 17), to history, a sense that it is ‘not fully perceived as it occurs’ (1996, 18). Authenticity, according to this model, is irredeemably ‘latent,’ a lost object that initiates our search for meaning. It is, by its nature, that which is repressed, achieving consciousness only through attenuating representations.10 Jacqueline Rose, however, suggests that the importance of psychoanalysis is precisely how it ‘throws into crisis the dichotomy on which the appeal to the reality of the event…clearly rests’ (1978, 14). The search for epistemological certainty, though undoubtedly of value and rightly asserted in cases of overlooked abuse, risks reintroducing idealism and normativity, limiting the scope

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within which the mind can imagine itself into actual new becomings, and therefore restricting responsiveness to growth and change. As Rose writes: [I]t remains the case that—without reifying the idea of a pure fragmentation which would be as futile as it would be psychically unmanageable for the subject—only the concept of a subjectivity at odds with itself gives back to women the right to an impasse at the point of sexual identity, with no nostalgia whatsoever for its possible or future integration into a norm. (1978, 15)

However, post-Freudian schools of psychoanalysis such as object relations in the UK and interpersonal psychoanalysis in the US have de-emphasized stable identity in favour of reconciling the ‘fragmentation’ to which Rose refers to a ‘manageable’ continuity of experience, with consequences for the concept of authenticity, literary and otherwise. Despite Freud’s attempts at scientific objectivity, a number of his readers note that his most consistent and definitive theoretical statements are at odds with the overall tenor of his work, a tension that is comparable to the hermeneutic open-endedness associated with the category of the aesthetic. Lionel Trilling’s essay ‘Freud and Literature’ (1940), for example, identifies two ­separate ‘Freudian realities,’ a ‘limited reality by which we get our living, win our loves, catch our trains and our colds’ (1961 [1940], 43), and to which the analyst attempts to reconcile his patient, and a second, more essential, and more ‘essentially Freudian’ reality, which ‘assumes that the mind, for good as well as bad, helps to create its reality by selection and evaluation’ (1961 [1940], 44). Leo Bersani similarly identifies a conflict between ‘elaborating a clinically viable theory’ and ‘certain radical speculative moments and the wish to practice and even to institutionalize the speculative process itself ’ (1986, 3). Edward Said, while acknowledging, with Fanon, the limitations of Freud’s Eurocentric outlook, attributes to Freud’s writing—especially the essay ‘Moses and Monotheism’ [1939]—the ‘intransigence’ and ‘irascible transgressiveness’ of ‘late style,’ acknowledging Freud’s power ‘to instigate new thought, as well as to illuminate situations that he himself might never have dreamed of ’ (2003, 29). Freud’s writing constitutes a textual ‘upper body’ that, as Bersani (among others) has observed, is in constant dialogue with itself and with a ‘repressed’ but insistent paratext of footnotes, successively added in revised editions (Bersani 1986). This open-ended literary or aesthetic quality to Freud’s investigations follows from his nondualism: if the mind and body are one substance, essays at its ultimate or ideal nature become untenable, and its study accomplished not via progressively reductive articulations, but by recording

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its ongoing proliferation in actual experience. The punning title of Bersani’s The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986) identifies the ‘dense’ and ‘troubled’ (1986, 1) textuality of Freud’s corpus with the subject upon which it expounds. Trilling notes that Freud reveals how poetry is ‘indigenous to the very constitution of the mind’ rather than a ‘beneficent aberration of the mind’s right course’ (1940, 52, 53), and Shoshana Felman observes how the consequences of nondualism go both ways, revealing not only the ‘textuality of life’ but also ‘the vitality of texts.’ Indeed, Trilling defines Freud’s contribution to literature as ‘most notably the license and injunction to read the work of literature with a lively sense of its latent and ambiguous meanings, as if it were, as indeed it is, a being no less alive and contradictory than the man who created it’ (1940, 39). Freud’s late essay ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ [1937] explores the tension between Trilling’s two ‘Freudian realities.’ In it Freud revises his previous claims about the permanence of psychic structures and the corresponding prophylactic efficacy of psychoanalysis. In a famous but much debated passage from lecture 31 of the New Introductory Lectures  on Psychoanalysis [1933], Freud had described the aim of analysis as ‘to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be’ (SE XXII, 80).11 Under the increasing influence of his theory of the death drive, however, Freud becomes more equivocal about the possibility of the ego remaining stable and self-­ identical, or even distinct, acknowledging that the theoretical delineation between ‘what is ego and what is id loses much of its value’ (SE XXIII, 241). To produce ‘generalizations, rules, and laws which bring order into chaos,’ Freud writes in the opening of the same essay, is to ‘falsify’ the world. ‘In the real world,’ he continues, ‘transitions and intermediate stages are far more common than sharply differentiated opposing states.’ In attempting to define identity, Freud writes, we too often impose an ‘outcome’ on processes that are in fact ‘more or less incomplete,’ ignoring potentially contradictory ‘residual phenomena’ (SE XXIII, 228). Rather than valorizing a single ideal of authenticity, Freud’s processual ontology of the death drive defines authenticity according to an open-ended quality more familiar to the study of literature and other art forms. This shift in emphasis from the end-oriented theorizing of an idealized subject to an exploration of the processual nature of experience takes two important forms in psychoanalysis, which correspond better to acknowledged ideas of literary value than the diagnostic procedures of ‘applied psychoanalysis’ and reveal the importance of nominally aesthetic procedures in the science of the self.

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First, elaborating on Freud’s own developing interest in the role of relationships over self-contained psychic structures and processes, psychoanalysis bifurcated into a solipsistic one-person paradigm and a two-person paradigm that foregrounded the dialogue with the other as a determining factor in the formation of experience. This led to an increasingly complex and responsive understanding of the transference-countertransference phenomena between patient and analyst, initially proposing that experience arises as an interaction between two people, but increasingly exploring the idea that subjectivity itself comprises multiple transitory self-states in constant dialogue with each other and their environment. Second, Freud’s theories of sexuality and the death drive provided the opportunity to go beyond this fragmentation of the psyche and hypothesize a subpersonal, even posthuman multiplicity of agential forces comprised from fundamental, molecular components, ultimately calling into question the distinction between organic and inorganic. Accompanying this shift in emphasis, psychoanalytic literary criticism has distanced itself from the end-oriented hermeneutics of suspicion (exemplified by psychobiography or diagnostic criticism), replacing these approaches with creative, performative acts of reading. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,’ the introduction to her edited anthology Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), draws on Melanie Klein and the affect theory of psychologist Silvan Tomkins in order to critique the hermeneutics of suspicion and its implicit basis in a normative, mimetic theory of art. Some readers have interpreted psychoanalysis’ adoption of the principle of performativity as contributing to its ongoing incompatibility with scientific empiricism. Stephen Frosh notes a historic ‘tension between psychoanalysis as “causal/scientific” versus “hermeneutic”’ (in Marcus and Mukherjee 2014, 31), and opts, by focusing his own account on the latter aspect, to ignore any potential rapprochement between these apparently incompatible positions. In fact, as mind-body nondualism becomes more orthodox, and neuroscience reveals the role of neuroplasticity and cultural determinism in brain development, unflinching objectivism has seemed increasingly incompatible with the study of mental phenomena, and a proliferating array of mental states elevated to suitable subjects for a form of empirical study that William James would have termed ‘radical empiricism.’ To be ‘radical,’ James writes, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must them-

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selves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything in the system. (1996 [1912], 42, emphasis in original)

James’s radical empiricism was influential for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis. In Anti-Oedipus (1984), Deleuze and Guattari describe psychoanalysis’ ‘great discovery’ as ‘the production of desire,’ but suggest that the Oedipus theory buried this discovery ‘beneath a new brand of idealism’ (1984, 26). Following James’s principle, they argue that ‘if desire produces, its products are real’ (1984, 26), a sentiment more faithful to the principle of nondualism than Freud’s own writing proved to be, but which post-Freudian theorists would go on to explore more fully. Shoshana Felman describes the introduction of the death drive, in Freud’s pivotal Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920], as the ‘ominous’ annunciation of an ‘inherent exile of psychoanalysis: an exile from the presence-to-itself of psychoanalytic truth; an exile from the non-mythical access to truth’ (1983, 94, emphasis in original).12 Fanon’s criticism of Freud, that the organic is ‘a myth only for him that can go beyond it,’ conceptualizes truth, actuality, or authenticity according to a logic similar to the one Caruth infers from trauma theory: the literality of the traumatogenic event matched by the literality of its re-enactment in flashbacks and nightmares. Freud himself writes that the ‘normal ego…like normality in general, [is] an ideal fiction,’ whereas the ‘abnormal ego…is unfortunately no fiction’ (SE XXIII, 235). However, to understand the opposition between the ‘fiction’ of the normal and the ‘non-­ fiction’ of the abnormal as an ontological difference akin to substance dualism, in which the actuality of pathology has a more direct claim to authenticity than the fiction of normality, is inaccurate. The psychoanalytic myth, Felman writes, is not ‘pure fantasy,’ but ‘a narrative symbolic logic that accounts for a very real mode of functioning, a very real structure of relations’ (1983, 96). It is, in fact, scientific, as there is ‘a fictive moment at the genesis of every science, a generative fiction (a hypothesis) at the foundation of every theory’ (1983, 99). Science is ‘the drive to go beyond,’ and the scientist’s commitment ‘at once to acknowledge the myth and to attempt to go beyond the myth’ (1983, 99). If the organic is ‘a myth only for him that can go beyond it,’ neither the ‘myth’ nor the going ‘beyond’ represents experiences any less real than those seemingly more immediate embodied sensations suffered by the person whose narrative consciousness is attenuated by trauma. Moreover, neither the organic nor the myth takes a person closer to or further from an ideal of ultimate authenticity: ‘There is no beyond to the narrative movement of the myth,’ Felman continues, but ‘the

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narrative movement of the myth is precisely that which takes us—if we dare to go with it—beyond itself’ (1983, 100). Authentic experience, in other words, while it is heterogeneous, is also unavoidable. Felman examines the role of myth in psychoanalysis through a comparison between Freud and Jacques Lacan’s readings of Oedipus Rex. The difference in Freud and Lacan’s approach also demonstrates how psychoanalysis functions as a threshold epistemic model between the dominant idealism and dualism of Enlightenment Europe, and the increasing influence of nondualism that accompanied new understandings of the brain-mind. For Felman this is exemplified in a shift in the meaning of the word ‘recognition,’ which, for Freud as well as Lacan, was ‘the crucial psychoanalytic stake both of the clinical and the literary work’ (1983, 82). Whereas Freud read Sophocles’s play as ‘validating psychoanalytic theory,’ Lacan read it as ‘informing psychoanalytic practice’ (1983, 82). For Lacan, as Felman writes elsewhere, the unconscious is ‘not only that which must be read, but also, and primarily, that which reads’ (1977, 118). Lacan’s reevaluation of the ideal of humanist individualism on which Western philosophy rests is illustrated most aptly in his inversion of one of its foundational shibboleths, the Cartesian cogito, in place of which Lacan proposes the formula ‘Either I am not thinking or I am not.’ Thought (in this case referring to the productive performance of unconscious play, for example, in free association), while desirable, is also antithetical to Being, the ego’s misplaced belief in its own ontological stability, which Lacan terms ‘false being.’13 For Freud, Oedipus’s recognition of his unwittingly fulfilled incestuous desire prompts the audience to recognize that their own, identical (because universal) desire has been repressed. This type of recognition, Felman writes, is ‘cognitive,’ or about an extant reality, and therefore the language that describes it is abstract and informative. For Lacan, meanwhile, the value of recognition is ‘performative.’ It is, Felman writes, ‘a speech-act, whose symbolic action modifies the subject’s history, rather than cerebrally observing and recording it, at last correctly’ (1983, 82). Felman quotes a passage from The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: To bring the subject to recognize and to name his desire, this is the nature of the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something that would already have been there—a given—ready to be captured. In naming it, the subject creates, gives rise to something new, makes something present in the world. (cited in Felman 1983, 82–83)

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The psychoanalytic ‘myth,’ in other words, does not seek to better represent a Platonic ideal of identity; it interposes ontologically in identity. Recognition, in this sense, does not mean uncovering or identifying a preestablished meaning, or even intuiting an unattainable, idealized meaning from its apparent absence, it simply means a thinking again—just as Lacan re-cognizes Freud’s initial interpretation of Sophocles, creating out of an end-oriented hermeneutics an open-ended practice in its place.14 In his seminal juxtaposition of psychoanalysis and narrative theory, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984), Peter Brooks describes the death drive as Freud’s ‘masterplot.’ The tension between Eros, or the life drive, which, as Freud writes, ‘endeavours to combine what exists into ever-­ greater unities,’ and Thanatos, or the death drive, which ‘endeavours to dissolve those combinations, and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise’ (SE XXIII, 246), can, Brooks suggests, be seen as revealing ‘psychic equivalencies’ to previously acknowledged ‘textual dynamics’ (1984, 90). Psychoanalysis, Brooks suggests, is a significant episode in the genealogy of our relationship to narrative. Antecedent texts such as Rousseau’s Confessions not only attempt to account for an ongoing life by narrating incidents from its past but also tend towards open-ended narrative proliferation, as recollections beget further insight, revision, and elaboration (1984, 32). Religious stories of origins and predestinations are replaced by a text that becomes, as Brooks writes, ‘a system of internal energies and tensions, compulsions, resistances, and desires’ (xiv), so that neither text nor person is any longer understood purely in terms of linear narrative.15 The desire to interpret the text within the linear structure of beginning-­ middle-­end, to form ever-greater units of meaning, becomes at the same time a ‘discourse of mortality’ (1984, 22). In a form of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, initial impressions expire as we read on, our anticipation and retrospection mutually transforming one another to form a non-linear ‘oscillation’ (1985, 100) or ‘arabesque’ (1985, 104) of narrative desire. The ‘truth’ of the narrative, its appeal to authenticity, becomes ‘[r]epetition toward recognition,’ though as Brooks clarifies: ‘recognition cannot abolish textuality, does not annul that middle place that is the place of repetitions’ (1985, 108).16 As the ultimate impetus for the repetition compulsion (replacing Freud’s initial theory that repetition derives from a drive to re-find the lost immediacy of infancy), the death drive replaces a repressed and idealized core of subjective authenticity with a processual ontology that not only forecloses personal stability but also, in its origin in the inorganic, transcends the boundary between self and world.

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Although Brooks concedes that the ‘equivalence’ between psychic processes and textual dynamics ‘can never be “proved”’ (1985, 123), the burden of ‘proof ’ reintroduces the spectre of idealism on which absolute objectivity depends. The character of Freud’s drive theory is ontological, rather than narrowly psychological, a point Brooks himself acknowledges when he writes that the reader is driven not by ‘his individual desire and its origin in his own personality,’ but by ‘his transindividual and intertextually determined desire’ (1985, 111–12). The open-ended ambiguity that is acknowledged as a sign of literary authenticity does not stand in a relation of similarity with the ambiguity of self-experience—it is, rather, a function of the interpenetration of these two only nominally discrete domains. Ellmann notes how the application of diagnostic motifs to a literary text tells us ‘less about eroticism than about the will to power over literary ambiguity’ (1994, 3). Similarly, Brooks cites Susan Sontag’s injunction, from her essay ‘Against Interpretation’ [1966], to replace end-oriented hermeneutics with an ‘erotics of art’ (1994 [1966], 14). The essay begins with a critique of Platonic idealism intended to defend aesthetic practice as the production of authentic meaning in its own right, rather than its mediation or secondary symptomatic manifestation. As Sontag writes, Plato’s ‘mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself ’ (1994 [1966], 3). In Freud’s early work, sexuality refers to the undifferentiated desire of the infant, a mutually contradictory cacophony of bodily impulses that, as socialization takes hold through submission to the constraints of reality, is ordered into a hierarchy of conscious and unconscious desires, with sexuality in the ‘popular sense,’ namely, ‘the need for coitus’ (SE XI, 222), only then channelled through corresponding erotogenic zones. In a footnote added in 1915 to the Three Essays on Sexuality (1907), Freud writes that he has ‘been led to ascribe the quality of erotogenicity to all parts of the body and to all internal organs’ (SE VII, 184). Psychoanalytic sexuality per se, therefore, is a quality attributed to all the matter that makes up an organism, a theory that will be consolidated in the opposition of Eros and Thanatos.17 Sontag, Brooks, and Ellmann present psychoanalytic sexuality— ‘eroticism’—as a guarantor of ambiguity, and therefore of literary authenticity. However, in her analysis of the critical debate around Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Shoshana Felman wonders whether ‘a reading of ambiguity as such is really possible’ (1977, 117). Psychoanalytic sexuality, Felman observes, is ‘not a simple deviation from literal meaning,’ but a ‘problematization of literality as such’ (1977, 110). Sexuality, in fact, is ‘that through which meaning in the text does not come off’ (1977, 112). It is only in critical disagreement, Felman argues, that ambiguity is realized, as ‘the text, through its reading,

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orchestrates the critical disagreement as the performance and “speech act” of its own disharmony’ (1977, 115). Disagreement over James’s ‘true meaning,’ therefore, demonstrates ‘spectacular agreement over Freud’s “true meaning”’ (1977, 117), the erotic ambiguity of art existing only from a critical meta-­ perspective. However, Felman’s orchestration of ambiguous disharmony appears to rely on multiple unitary perspectives, and psychoanalysis, through the ontology of Eros and Thanatos, but also through more narrowly psychological theories, can further deconstruct such perspectives, turning them into multiplicities in their own right. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920] and later work, Freud reimagines the sexual or life drive as the secondary consequence of a particular organization of matter, such that the drive within that organization’s component elements to return to a state of equilibrium (the death drive) is diverted along a specific detour that constitutes the life span of the organism, before it dissolves into the undifferentiated milieu from which it formed.18 Freud’s earlier conception of polymorphous sexuality, therefore, is similar to his later conception of death. This confusing equivalence is compounded by Felman’s observation that the relation between text and reader, which she describes as a ‘love-relation,’ is, in its attempt to ‘grasp’ and fix meaning, ‘revealed to be the strict appropriation of precisely nothing—nothing alive, at least’ (1977, 174). Reading becomes, for Felman, a ‘murder weapon,’ with which textual vivacity is curtailed in the making of ‘sense,’ a sense that is always already its own opposite: ‘the ultimate nonsense of death’ (1977, 178). Both the absence of meaning and its apprehension, therefore, constitute death, but both also constitute sexuality, in either its polymorphous potential or its secondary organizations. Although Freud notably insists on the ‘dualistic’ nature of his theory (SE, XIX, 46), it is important to distinguish between this particular dualism and the common usage of the term in Western philosophy. Freud’s life and death drives do not differ ontologically, nor are either a form of immaterial idealism. The life drive refers to a process of temporary material organization, the death drive to a universal material process that ensures both the ephemerality of that organization and its growth and change across time. This is not the same as Cartesian dualism, which proposes a fundamental ontological distinction between matter and spirit. In fact, Freud’s theory of drives places the distinction between organic and inorganic under significant strain. As Todd McGowan writes, the death drive does not refer to ‘the death that occurs at the end of life,’ but rather ‘comes out of a death that occurs within life’ (2013, 35). As the precondition for growth, this ‘death’ and the ‘life’ in which it occurs appear to resolve into a single, undifferentiated process.19

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Leo Bersani develops this conceptual blending of sexuality (or life) and death in his concept of ‘productive masochism’ (1986, 63), in which the polymorphous sexuality of infancy and the destructiveness of the death drive combine to form an ‘ontology of sexuality itself ’ (1986, 41). Bersani proposes that we ‘aestheticize’ the Freudian text and that Freud’s ontology itself displays a fundamentally aesthetic (and also anti-subjective) quality. Literature is defined as writing that operates with ‘a particular kind of replicative insistence’ which ‘erodes its own statements and thereby blocks interpretation’ (1986, 11), while the aesthetic more generally is ‘a perpetuation and replicative elaboration of masochistic sexual tensions’ (1986, 43, 107). These ‘sexual tensions,’ combining the codependent productive and destructive forces of Eros and Thanatos, Bersani writes, ‘provide the energy of thought without defining its terms,’ and Freud’s contribution is therefore not a ‘secure philosophical or anthropological system of knowledge’ (1986, 26), but rather the ‘problematizing of the act of knowing’ itself (1986, 89). The aesthetic, as either a way of being or a cultural artefact, should be seen not as a ‘formal achievement’ but as a ‘continuously menaced activity by which an eroticized consciousness is provisionally structured by a perception of relations among its terms’ (1986, 110). A psychoanalytic reading of literature, therefore, should be ‘the most resolutely superficial reading,’ not because it is insensitive to complexity, but because it acknowledges ‘the continuous disappearing and reappearing of relations and forms’ (1986, 110). The aesthetic, therefore, is fundamentally relational, but this relationship is not between stable and self-identical nodes—at the person-level critical disagreement that Felman discusses, or at more subpersonal levels—but between ‘provisionally structured,’ ‘eroticized’ consciousnesses. Brooks and Felman also identify the literary with a relation of transference. Both psychoanalytic and literary meanings, Brooks suggests, are ‘located in the interstices of story and frame, born of the relationship between tellers and listeners’ (1984, 260). This ‘transference’ realizes Mikhaïl Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘dialogic’ whereby, Brooks writes, ‘discourse internalizes the presence of otherness, becomes marked by the alterity inherent in any social use of language’ (1984, 283). Felman, similarly, reads the critical debate around The Turn of the Screw as an orchestration of the text’s ‘own disharmony’ (1977, 115). However, as Bakhtin himself recognized, what Brooks describes as the ‘social use of language’ rests not on stable, unitary interlocutory voices but on a recursively fragmenting narrative ground. Not only this, but Bakhtin’s ‘dialogic imagination’ is not an attempt at a universal theory of human nature, but a resolutely historical hypothesis about the material effect of proliferating

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discourses, not only in the genesis of the novel but also in the ‘novelization’ of all literary genres: What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the “novelistic” layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present). (1981, 6–7)

While Brooks observes how psychoanalysis emerges from antecedent narrative practices that share a tendency, related to the proliferation of narrative texts in general, to reject hermeneutic closure in favour of the production of more narrative, Bakhtin explores the ‘prehistory’ of the novel and the novelization of discourse generally. Relatively ‘stable and monoglotic’ historical societies such as Ancient Greece, Bakhtin writes, produced the ‘straightforward genres’ of epic, lyric, and tragedy, which express ‘centralizing’ and ‘unifying’ tendencies in language. More cosmopolitan historical circumstances, however, defined by polyglossia between languages, produce more ‘heteroglossia’ within language (1981, 67).20 The relative cultural and historical prevalence of this reflexive, ‘novelistic’ discourse does depend, however, on a fundamental capacity in language for dialogue: ‘It must not be forgotten,’ Bakhtin writes, ‘that monoglossia is always in essence relative. After all, one’s own language is never a single language: in it there are always survivals of the past and a potential for other-­ languagedness that is more or less sharply perceived by the working literary and language consciousness’ (1981, 66). If the history of discourse is not the history of a neutral, abstract code employed in ever-refining mimetic procedures, but rather one of actual, material interactions between bodies (textual and organic), one can see how the development of psychoanalysis, and its relation to other forms of discourse such as literature, constitutes the actualization of an array of ‘possible existences.’21 In ‘Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject’ (2006), Bersani suggests that the transference relationship enacted in both psychoanalysis and the reading of literature initiates ‘correspondences between subject and world that are free of both of an antagonistic dualism between human consciousness and the world it inhabits and the anthropomorphic appropriation of that world’ (2006, 139). Such correspondences are defined not by a subject-object rela-

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tion, in other words, but by what Bersani describes as the ‘solidarity of being’ (2006, 142), a concept, like William James’s radical empiricism, designed to dispel any residual idealism. Solidarity of being obtains ‘both among human subjects and between the human and the non-human’ (2006, 139–40), and the ‘aesthetic subject,’ Bersani writes, ‘while it both produces and is produced by works of art,’ is also ‘a mode of relational being that exceeds the cultural province of art and embodies truths of being’ (2006, 142). In other words, art such as literature provides a particular means of producing experience, but only according to more general ontological principles that are themselves imagined as ‘aesthetic.’ While Bersani’s ontology of aesthetics and ‘productive masochism’ is broadly subpersonal, based as it is on the molecular forces of desire revealed by the death drive, a similar exploration of inter- and intrapersonal relations in the more explicitly psychological domain of object relations psychoanalysis has produced a useful refinement of the concept of ‘relating’ itself. In The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (1987), Christopher Bollas writes that until Paula Heimann’s innovations in the theory of the transference-countertransference relationship, ‘it had always been assumed that the speaker was the patient who had formed a therapeutic alliance with the analyst, and therefore was a neutral or working speaker who was reporting inner states of mind.’ Heimann, Bollas writes, revealed how at any moment the patient ‘could be speaking with the voice of the mother, or the mood of the father, or some fragmented voice of a child self either lived or withheld from life’ (1987, 1). This cast of alternately foregrounded self-states can transform both individually and collectively and can be said to ‘relate’ to one another and their environment only to the extent that the relation itself is recognized as ‘real.’ The relating agents must not, as Freud writes in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable,’ have an ‘outcome’ imposed upon them, but should rather be acknowledged as the ‘transitions and intermediate stages’ that Freud suggests are ‘far more common’ (SE XXIII, 228). In Playing and Reality (1971), Donald Winnicott explores the ‘transitional’ and ‘intermediate’ category of experience that exists in such interstitial spaces. The relation between subject and object, Winnicott writes, is one of being simultaneously ‘joined and separated,’ a defining paradox of experience that ‘must be tolerated’ (2005 [1971], 145). The apparently distinct terms are joined by an ‘intermediate zone’ that Winnicott refers to as the ‘potential space’ (2005 [1971], 135, 144), in which ‘transitional phenomena’ occur that are essential for the ‘play’ that facilitates what he imagines as authentic selfhood. Although associated with the school of object relations, Winnicott distinguishes between ‘object relation’ and ‘object usage.’ The latter is a ‘more

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sophisticated’ mode of being which relinquishes the illusory ideals of a stable, hermetic subjectivity—the ‘false self ’ (similar to Lacan’s ‘false being’)—and an unchanging object. While one ‘relates’ to a ‘subjective object,’ to use an object is to properly inhabit the transitional space between the disproportionately psychological reality of fantasy and the wider reality of other things and people (2005 [1971], 126). If the object is to be ‘used,’ Winnicott writes, it ‘must necessarily be real in the sense of part of a shared reality, not a bundle of projections’ (2005 [1971], 118). Partaking in such a ‘shared reality,’ neither the object nor the subject remains unchanged. The object is ‘always being destroyed’ (2005 [1971], 126), while what Winnicott calls the ‘true self ’ transforms in response to its changing environment.22 Bollas develops Winnicott’s concept, proposing that, optimally, ‘use’ produces a ‘transformational object.’ Initially using ‘object’ in the traditional psychoanalytic sense to refer to a carer or parent, Bollas defines the transformational object as one who, being both attentive to the child’s needs and responsive to their creativity, facilitates the growth of an optimistic attitude that allows for further object ‘use’ (1987, 10). The list of objects whose transformational potential can be ‘used’ is then extended to anything to which ‘thingness’ can be attributed—a person or a person’s mood, a visual perception, a p ­ hilosophical concept, a novel, a line of poetry, a word, a letter (Bollas 2009). A person with good-enough transformational objects ‘will have a sense of hope built into object use’ (1989, 112), so that the ‘fashioning of life’ becomes ‘something like an aesthetic: a form revealed through one’s way of being’ (1989, 110). Objects that can be used in this way become ‘evocative objects,’ each with an ‘evocative processional potential’ capable of initiating complex and transformative psychosomatic experiences (2009, 79). Philip Bromberg combines influences from American interpersonal psychoanalysis and British object relations, as well as pursuing a concerted rehabilitation of the theory of dissociation, proposed by Freud’s contemporary Pierre Janet but largely rejected by Freud. ‘If one wished to read the contemporary psychoanalytic literature as a serialized Gothic romance,’ Bromberg writes, ‘it is not hard to envision the restless ghost of Pierre Janet, banished from the castle by Sigmund Freud a century ago, returning for an overdue haunting of Freud’s current descendants’ (1995, 189). A pivotal concept for interpersonal psychoanalysis and object relations, Bromberg notes the increasing influence of dissociation across psychoanalysis in general (1995, 189–90), as well as citing neuroscience research in support of the concept (2011, 3, 174–202). Also increasingly central to non-psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary theories of trauma (Van Der Kolk 2014; Chefetz 2015), dissociation offers an alternative to Caruth’s largely Freudian-inspired ‘pathology of history’ in

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which an apparently idealized ‘outside’ world intrudes in all its unmediated literality. Charles Rycroft, quoted at the opening of this chapter discussing T.S. Eliot’s speculation about a Europe-wide ‘dissociation of sensibility,’ states that the aim of psychoanalysis is ‘not primarily to make the unconscious conscious,’ but rather to ‘re-establish the connection between dissociated psychic functions so that the patient ceases to feel that there is an inherent antagonism between his imaginative and adaptive capacities’ (1962, 113, cited in Bromberg 1991, 130). Bromberg describes the mechanism of dissociation as ‘an evolutionarily derived psychodynamic that is mediated at the brain level by processes not yet understood’ (2011, 3–4). A mental process originating in the brain, but not restricted to localized (and therefore universal) brain areas, dissociation is enacted through an array of unique, person-specific ‘self-states,’ established over time according to personal history and enjoying a varying and variable degree of prominence in determining behaviour. Through the ‘creative use of dissociation,’ Bromberg writes, ‘the mind selects whichever self-state configuration is most adaptive at a given moment without compromising affective safety’ (2011, 4). In cases of trauma, an exaggerated version of the normal function of dissociation is enlisted as a defence, so that a ‘formerly fluid and creative dialectic between self-states’ is replaced by a ‘rigid Balkanization of the various aspects of self ’ (2011, 5). The process of dissociation is replaced by a dissociative structure, in which, for example, perpetual hyper-vigilance to potential re-traumatization is maintained at the expense of a more nuanced attunement to environmental cues. Flashbacks associated with traumatic dissociation, while rooted in the actuality of the original trauma, possess an ongoing reality of their own. The trauma victim, Bromberg writes, enters therapy not simply to deal with what happened, but with ‘what is happening to him now’ (2011, 5). Replacing the implied dualism of the conscious-unconscious antithesis and its inverted hierarchy of authenticity, dissociation offers a plurality of agential forces, producing experiences that differ in their affective quality, their desirability, and their potential to further personal transformation, but not in their fundamental ‘reality.’ Authenticity, according to the theory of dissociation, is not founded on an ideal of external objectivity. The therapeutic goal, for Bromberg, is to support the ‘patient’s transition from a dissociative mental structure to increased affective tolerance for intrapsychic conflict,’ so that ‘realities that have been kept apart by discontinuous states of consciousness are gradually able to be held within a single transitional state of mind’ (2011, 196). When dissociative

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processes are heightened and lead to an increasingly rigid dissociative structure, Bromberg suggests that the patient’s experience comes to feel ‘inauthentic in specific ways’ (1995, 190). This inauthenticity is comparable to Winnicott’s ‘false self ’ and Lacan’s ‘false being,’ referring not to a substantial ontological difference, but to a pattern of experience associated with negative affect, the misconstrual of social situations, and a kind of closed-circuit dynamic of relations to processes occurring within the organism rather than the use of the wider object world. For the many psychoanalysts for whom experience arises from a dialogue between the various forms of otherness discussed by theories such as object relations, ‘authenticity’ comes to mean an integrated but heterogeneous processual existence, in which the fullest possible array of ‘inner’ states are able to interact with a similarly wide variety of ‘external’ objects, leading to the progressive transformation of all elements. Dissociation reveals how a felt sense of ‘inauthenticity’ can arise from traumatic environmental factors that lead to the alteration of this fluid process into a more static organization, but neither way of being can claim to be ‘more real’ per se. While both the theory of dissociation and the ontology of sexuality and death offer an ambiguous ground for literary ambiguity, and while the work of cognitive linguists such as Mark Turner seem to corroborate Freud’s discovery, described by Lionel Trilling, that poetry is ‘indigenous to the mind’s right course,’ it is nonetheless important to remember that the desirable therapeutic outcome of a heterogeneous but integrated processual identity could itself be seen as limiting the field of ‘real’ experiences with which literature might wish to experiment. In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989), Julia Kristeva writes ‘I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression’ (1989, 4), reminding us that so-called pathology, without belittling its hardships, is not without its own way of broadening one’s horizons. Jacqueline Rose, meanwhile, in a 2016 article on trans narratives for the London Review of Books, highlights how even expanded political inclusiveness tends towards the reification of identity. ‘It is a paradox of political emancipation, which the struggle for trans freedom brings starkly into focus,’ Rose writes, ‘that oppression must be met with self-affirmation.’ In claiming one’s identity as politically valid, ‘[t]o vacillate is political death. No second thoughts. No room for doubt or the day-to-day aberrations of being human’ (2016, 11). As Freud noted in 1937, an outcome is imposed on the reality of transitions and intermediate stages. Both literature and psychoanalysis can be used as processual, transformational objects, capable of their own productive masochisms, or as static, fantasized objects whose identities we grasp onto in

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order to maintain a given relation. The ambiguous, negative construction of Trilling’s description of literature as ‘a being no less alive’ than its writer is perfectly apposite for open-ended psychoanalytic interpretation. The claim appears to affirm the shared vitality of text and writer, but admits a counter reading, the meaning of which is both opposite and identical to the original— the writer is a being no more dead than the text. Consequently, both text and reader are formed from a vacillation between the two positions, life and death incorporated into a nondualist ontology that neutralizes what had appeared to be their radical difference. ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,’ Henry James writes in his Preface to Roderick Hudson, in a section quoted by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, ‘and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so’ (cited in Brooks 1984, 281). Philip Bromberg, by coincidence, cites another section of the same Preface to illustrate his psychoanalytic method. James writes: ‘True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out, and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand’ (cited in Bromberg 1984, 56). For Bromberg, psychoanalysis is such an ‘absorbing errand,’ a practice traditionally associated with getting ‘into oneself ’ that is in fact productive, he writes, only ‘if it is part of the larger process of getting out of the solipsistic s­ trait-­jacket that is used to maintain a fixed image of who we are in our own eyes and what we are willing to perceive as “reality”’ (1984, 57).

Notes 1. Marcus, Laura, ‘Psychoanalysis at the Margins,’ A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee, eds., Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014, p.  4; Rabaté, Jean-Michel., The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis, 2014, p. 4. 2. ‘irritate, v.1.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2016. Web. 9 February 2017. 3. In their influential account of cognitive science, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch critique the ‘abstract, theoretical reasoning’ traditionally employed by Western science to describe the mind, asserting that mind-brain nondualism demands an ‘open-ended’ study of mental processes rather than reductive or foundationalist abstractions. Their model demands not only the inclusion of the subjective perspective as a valid field of study but in doing so

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proposes a ‘nonobjectivist (and at best also nonsubjectivist) approach to biology and cognitive science’ (1991, 9). This approach is ‘open-ended’ because, by including rather than attempting to exclude the ongoing experience of the observing consciousness, it becomes necessary to acknowledge that the mindbody relation is ‘not simply fixed and given but can be fundamentally changed’ (1991, 28). Psychoanalysis, the authors suggest, is ‘the closest discipline familiar to Westerners that verges on a pragmatic, open-ended view toward knowledge’ (1991, 31). Although the authors critique Freud’s reliance on theoretical abstractions, they single out Jacques Lacan (1991, 48) and object relations psychoanalysis (1991, 108) as desirable paradigm shifts towards an open-ended study of the mind. 4. See Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books, 1999. 5. Lionel Trilling quotes from this passage from ‘The Sanity of Genius’ in the essay ‘Freud and Literature’ (1940), adding that ‘the illusions of art are made to serve the purpose of a closer and truer relation with reality’ (1961 [1940], 45). 6. In the period referred to by Eliot, of course, mind-body dualism or ‘substance dualism’ is associated most with Descartes, whose insistence that res extensa and res cogitans differ ontologically has, as Antonio Damasio notes, remained influential. Substance dualism, Damasio writes, ‘is no longer mainstream in science or philosophy, although it is probably the view that most human beings today would regard as their own’ (2003, 187). Although Freud insists on the ‘dualistic’ nature of his theory, Freud’s use of the term ‘dualism’ refers specifically (and, as is discussed later in this chapter, rather ambiguously) to his theory of drives and is not to be mistaken for the more fundamental substance dualism of Descartes. Freud’s ambitions of absolute scientific objectivity nevertheless betray the influence of Cartesian dualism, although Damasio also notes a single instance in which Freud, in a letter of 1931, explicitly acknowledges the influence of Spinoza, one of the few European philosophers of the seventeenth century to espouse a nondualist model (2003, 260). This acknowledgement was, however, slight and fleeting. 7. James Strachey adopted the title ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ for the Standard Edition. The title in the original German publication was ‘Sketch of a Psychology.’ Neither title was Freud’s, who did not include one. The specification of Freud’s enterprise as ‘science’ in its English translation points to a distinction between the so-called two cultures that is somewhat culturally specific—the German Wissenschaft refers more broadly to ‘knowledge’ and can include subjects thought of in English as humanities. 8. Freud’s insistence on mind-body nondualism is acknowledged today in the field of neuropsychoanalysis, which employs a range of conceptual and descriptive tools in order to integrate the more ‘subjective’ (or ‘top-down’)

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study of the mind with the more ‘scientific’ (or ‘bottom-up’) study of the brain, a form of ‘dual-aspect monism’ (see Fotopoulou, Aikaterini; Pfaff, Donald W., From the Couch to the Lab: Trends in Neuropsychoanalysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). In their seminal work on affective neuroscience, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (2011), neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp and psychoanalyst Lucy Biven describe their joint endeavour as ‘thoroughly monistic, with no remaining dualistic perspectives,’ and use the alternating term BrainMind/ MindBrain depending on whether the ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’ approach is taken. 9. The significance of the maternal relationship in early infancy is explored in greater detail by the school of object relations, pioneered by theorists such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott and building on the work of Freud’s contemporaries Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank. It is also central to John Bowlby’s attachment theory, which, though often considered antithetical to psychoanalysis, overlaps with it in a number of ways (Fonagy 2001). 10. The notion that psychoanalysis can be ‘applied’ to reveal an underlying truth to art is critiqued in Jean-­Francois Lyotard’s ‘Beyond Representation [1974]’ (in 1989). It is epistemologically ‘flabby,’ Lyotard writes, to suggest that ‘a body of theory, more or less rigorously formulated, can be applied without modification to a set of data or to a field of study (in this case, works of art), different from that for which it was constructed’ (1989, 155). Lyotard’s critique itself betrays the influence of substance dualism, presuming as it does the clear taxonomical separation between the text and the person to be ‘analysed,’ although the general tenor of the essay is to propose, in keeping with a nondualist approach, the rejection of a mimetic theory of artworks: ‘they are not in place of anything; they do not stand for but stand; that is to say, they function through their material and its organization’ (1989, 158). 11. The aphorism Wo Es war, soll Ich werden is much debated in psychoanalysis. The translation used here in the Standard Edition, ‘Where id was, there ego shall be,’ is questionable on the grounds that elsewhere in the translation the terms ‘id’ and ‘ego’ are used mainly when Freud uses the definite article das before Es and Ich. The sentence could equally be translated as ‘Where it was, there I shall/should/or must be.’ Lacan bases his processual ontology and ethics of the subject on this passage, taking it to mean that the subject must be defined by a continual coming into being (Fink 1995). 12. Shoshana Felman makes liberal use of italics in her writing. All italics in the following quotes from Felman are, as here, in the original. 13. Lacan’s very complex and rigorous theory of the subject is amply and lucidly outlined in Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995), especially ch. 4, in which Fink crucially explains that ‘The

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Lacanian Subject Is Not the “Individual” or Conscious Subject of AngloAmerican Philosophy’ (1995, 36). With his terms ‘true self ’ and ‘false self,’ Donald Winnicott employs similar language to convey the desirability of a responsive, processual selfhood that does not grasp onto an ideal of identity. 14. Felman in fact describes how, for Lacan, the usefulness of Sophocles’s dramatization of the Oedipus myth culminates in the passage, in Oedipus at Colonus, in which Oedipus asks: ‘Is it now that I am nothing that I am made to be a man?’ In Seminar II, Felman writes, Lacan describes this as ‘the end of Oedipus’s psychoanalysis’ (cited in Felman 1983, 83–84). Felman also compares the relationship between Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Beyond the Pleasure Principle to that between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Lacan’s reference to Oedipus at Colonus, Felman writes, tells the story of ‘psychoanalysis’s inherent, radical, and destined self-expropriation’ (1983, 94). 15. As we come to understand the ‘tenuous, fictive, arbitrary status of ends,’ Brooks writes in his epilogue, we find that narrative meaning ‘no longer wishes to be seen as end-determined, moving toward full predication of the narrative sentence, claiming a final plenitude of meaning’ (1984, 314). While Brooks observes how our narrative understanding evolves from an end-oriented hermeneutics to a processual ontology in a manner that reflects (or enacts) the central innovations of Freud’s drive theory, Nancy Armstrong traces how the development of the novel reflects (or enacts) the genesis and development of the liberal individual in the West through the creation of a particular kind of agential protagonicity (Armstrong, Nancy, 2005, How Novels Think, New York: Columbia University Press), before, in a more recent essay, observing how the study of mind, brain, and affect is contributing to the dissolution of this concept in the less humanist and more broadly ontological concerns of the contemporary novel (Armstrong, Nancy 2014, ‘The Affective Turn in Contemporary Fiction,’ Contemporary Literature, vol. 55, no. 3, Fall 2014, pp. 441–65). 16. Replacing the concept of a search for the lost (and idealized) object of infancy with the death drive as the source of the compulsion to repeat brings Freud’s theory of repetition into much closer correspondence with a wider intellectual genealogy (Hume, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Deleuze) that theorizes repetition not as the duplication of something identical but as the production of something different and new. 17. For a psychoanalytic work that focuses on embodiment in Freudian theory, see Anzieu, Didier (2016 [1985]) The Skin-Ego, trans. Naomi Segal, London: Karnac (see also Segal, Naomi (2014), ‘Touching Not Touching,’ in A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee, eds., Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell).

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18. In this respect, Freud’s theory of the life and death drives is remarkably similar to Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s biological theory of autopoiesis. See Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco J. Varela’s (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Dordrecht, Holland, Boston: D Reidel Pub. Co. 19. The tension between Freud’s nondualism and the forms of Platonic idealism that dominated Western thought at the time appears in his reference to the pre-Socratic physicist Empodocles in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable.’ Freud’s description of Empodocles recalls the cliché that imitation is the ­sincerest form of flattery: ‘He was exact and sober in his physical and physiological researches, yet he did not shrink from the obscurities of mysticism’ (SE XXIII, 245). Freud attempts a subtle differentiation between Empodocles’s theory of ‘Love and Strife’ and his own theory of Eros and Thanatos, initially suggesting that Empodocles’s theory is a ‘cosmic phantasy’ while his own is ‘content to claim biological validity’ (SE XXIII, 245). However, Freud immediately concedes that Empodocles’s belief that the universe possesses the same ‘animate nature’ as individual organisms ‘robs this difference of much of its importance’ (SE XXIII, 245–46). Love and Strife and Eros and Thanatos are, Freud writes, equivalent ‘in name and function.’ Although he later claims that, in his own time, ‘what is living has been sharply differentiated from what is inanimate,’ he qualifies this distinction by noting ‘the urge of what is living to return to an inanimate state’ (SE XXIII, 246) and adds that his own contribution does not claim to deny that ‘an analogous [drive] already existed earlier’ nor to ‘assert that [a drive] of this sort only came into existence with the emergence of life’ (SE XXIII, 246–47). (Here I substitute the more correct and now more widely used ‘drive’ for the Standard Edition’s ‘instinct’ as a translation of Trieb.) Any critique of Freud’s assertiveness and self-belief regarding his own theory should be measured alongside the following quote from The Question of Lay Analysis: ‘Only a few years ago I should have had to clothe this theory in other terms. Nor, of course, can I guarantee to you that the form in which it is expressed to-day will be the final one. Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness, immutability and infallibility for which human thought so deeply longs’ (SE XX, 191). 20. Bakhtin refers not only to different national languages in his concepts of polyglossia and heteroglossia but also to ‘territorial dialects, social and professional dialects and jargons, literary language, generic languages within literary language, epochs in language and so forth’ (1981, 12). In other words, language fragments into an unending multiplicity of voices and registers, each one unique and specific to its moment of utterance and capable of transforming and being transformed in the continually shifting context of parodic relations.

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21. Lacan’s reading of Freud’s Oedipus theory, which, in his seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, he refers to as ‘Freud’s dream’ (implying that it conveyed both manifest and latent meaning), could be said to constitute a kind of ‘novelization’ of Freud’s interpretation of the original Greek text. 22. See Agamben, Giorgio, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016, for a philosophical analysis of how the concept of ‘use’ subverts the dualist dichotomy of the subject-­object distinction.

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———. 1915. The Unconscious. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, 159–216. London: The Hogarth Press, 1957. ———. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, 3–66. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955. ———. 1925. Some Psychical Consequences on the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX, The Ego and the Id and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, 243–260. London: The Hogarth Press, 1961. ———. 1926. The Question of Lay Analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX, An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, The Question of Lay Analysis, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, 179–258. London: The Hogarth Press, 1959. ———. 1933. New Introductory Lectures. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XXII, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, 3–184. London: The Hogarth Press, 1959. ———. 1937. Analysis Terminable and Interminable. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII, Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, 209–254. London: The Hogarth Press, 1964. ———. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII, Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, 3–140. London: The Hogarth Press, 1964. Frosh, Stephen. 2014. The Freudian Century. In A Concise Companion to Literature, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, ed. Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee, 15–33. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Goldner, Virginia. 2003. Ironic Gender/Authentic Sex. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4 (2): 113–139. Herman, Judith. 1981. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1992. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York, NY: Basic Books. James, William. 1996 [1912]. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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24 Postcolonialism Bill Ashcroft

* * * Postcolonialism deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies and those societies’ responses. Unlike ‘colonialism’ this term is of much more recent provenance, emerging in the late 1970s to describe a range of literary and cultural analysis of colonized and formerly colonized societies. As originally used by historians after the Second World War in terms such as ‘the postcolonial state,’ ‘postcolonial’ had a chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s, the term has been used by cultural critics to discuss the various social, political and cultural engagements of colonized people with imperial power as well as the more widespread effects of colonization. It now describes neither a historical period nor a fixed range of societies, nor a specific experience, but is best understood as a discourse generating a specific reading practice. The study of the controlling power of representation in colonized societies had begun in the 1950s with the work of Frantz Fanon, and reached a climax in the late 1970s with Edward Said’s Orientalism. The politicization of the young Edward Said had a profound effect on his work, for he saw that even literary theory could not be separated from the political realities of the world

B. Ashcroft (*) University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_24

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in which it was written. Ten years after the war, he wrote his trilogy Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), which located Palestine as a focus of all the issues of textuality and power which had been preoccupying him. The significant thing about Said’s work is that we cannot separate this political concern for the state of Palestine, this concern with his own identity and the identity of Palestinians in general, from the theoretical and literary analysis of texts and the way they are located in the world. The political implications of postcolonial theory have remained a central feature although the immediate effect of Said’s work was the development of colonial discourse theory. Orientalism, despite the plethora of disciplines it fostered, could be seen to be what Michel Foucault calls a ‘discourse’: a coherent and strongly bounded area of social knowledge, a system of statements by which the world could be known (Foucault 1971). Said’s use of Foucault was selective and his theory was ultimately grounded in a form of subaltern humanism that ran counter to Foucault’s view of history. Nevertheless, Orientalism and Said’s use of the concept of discourse led to the development of colonial discourse theory in the work of critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Although generally perceived to be descendants of Said’s discursive view of orientalism, these two critics were, at least at the beginning, much more strongly oriented towards poststructuralism, Spivak being the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Bhabha evincing a strong leaning to Lacan and Althusser. Although the actual term ‘postcolonial’ was not employed in these early studies, they demonstrated the power of colonial discourse to shape and form opinion and policy in the colonies and metropolis. While the analysis of the effects of colonial representation were central to the work of these critics, the term ‘postcolonial’ per se was first used to refer to cultural interactions within colonial societies in literary circles (e.g. Ashcroft et al. 1977). This was part of an attempt to politicize and focus the concerns of fields such as Commonwealth literature and the study of the so-called New Literatures in English, which had been initiated in the late 1960s. The Empire Writes Back by Ashcroft et al. (1989) offered the first systematic account of the theoretical issues generated by postcolonial literatures and initiated the field that became known as ‘postcolonial literary studies.’ The term has subsequently been widened to the field of ‘postcolonial studies,’ which analyses the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies that were former European colonies. From its inception and as it developed during the 1990s, postcolonial theory was heavily invested in the analysis of literature since it was not so much focused on the operation of colonial discourse, as we find in Orientalism, as in

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the various strategies by which postcolonial cultural producers responded, resisted and transformed that discourse. This was an approach taken up by Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993) in which he proposed that the novel and imperialism were inextricably aligned. In the British Empire, the growing dominance of literature was grounded on two historical events, the compulsory teaching of English and the promulgation of literature as the ideal tool of the civilizing mission. The profound importance of the study of English arises from a pivotal moment when Lord Macaulay delivered his Minute to parliament in 1836. The background to this was that the Charter Act of 1813, devolving responsibility for Indian education on the colonial administration, had led to a struggle between Anglicists and Orientalists, ultimately resolved by Macaulay’s Minute, in which we find stated not just the assumptions of the Anglicists, but the profoundly universalist assumptions of English national culture itself. “We must educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue,” said Macaulay. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence… with the most profound speculation on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade… . Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. (Macaulay 1835)

The advancement of any colonized people could only occur, it was claimed, under the auspices of English language and culture and it was on English literature that the burden of imparting civilized values was to rest. The challenge was to provide a framework for inculcating European Christian values in a less provocative form than the Bible. It worked so well as a form of cultural studies because “the strategy of locating authority in the texts of English literature all but effaced the sordid history of colonialist expropriation, material exploitation and class and race oppression behind European world dominance.” English literature “functioned as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state” (Viswanathan 1987, 22–23). One could add that without the profoundly universalist assumptions of English literature and the dissemination of these through education, colonial administrations would not have been able to invoke such widespread complicity. Consequently, English literature became a prominent agent of colonial control; indeed, it can be said that English literary study really began in earnest once its function as a discipline

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of cultural indoctrination had been established and its ability to ‘civilize’ the lower classes had thus been triumphantly revealed. The response of colonial societies was most clearly demonstrated in those literatures that appropriated English and ‘wrote back’ to the empire. The forced education of English and the prominence of literature had a consequence that the colonial administrators could not have foreseen: postcolonial writers appropriated the language they were forced to learn and transformed it according to the grammar and syntax of their own languages. The most radical examples of this occur in the literatures of the Caribbean creole continuum, but they describe the language use in all postcolonial literatures, including the vernacular variations in the settler colonial literatures. The engagement with English was a matter of abrogating its aesthetic, its illusory standard of normative or ‘correct’ usage, and its assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning ‘inscribed’ in the words and appropriating the language to communicate a specific cultural reality to a world audience (Ashcroft et al. 1989, 37–43). The fact that imperialism has a profoundly alienating effect on the use of language is obvious in societies that have a pre-colonial culture suppressed by military conquest or enslavement, but it becomes an issue of contention in all colonized societies. The issue of language use is a vigorously debated political topic because language is often held to be isomorphic with culture, suggesting that we don’t simply have a language, but that we tend to believe that our language is us—that it inhabits us and we inhabit it. Consequently, Ngugi wa Thiongo declared that to speak the colonizer’s language was to remain colonized—a colonization of the mind. However, Indian novelist Raja Rao and the Nigerian Chinua Achebe saw the opportunity to transform the language, to use it in a different way in its new context and so, as Achebe says, quoting James Baldwin, make it “bear the burden” of their experience (Achebe 1975, 62). Although Rao and Achebe do not suffer a literal geographical displacement as many other colonized people have, they had to overcome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacement of the pre-colonial language by English. The creation of literature written in a transformed English was driven by a desire to interpolate the global distribution of English literature with representations of cultures that had lain on the margins of empire and consequently their literatures on the margins of the discipline (Ashcroft 2001, 45–55) The strategies by which this linguistic transformation was effected were numerous and subtle, producing what might be called an ‘inner translation.’ Caribbean poet and critic Kamau Brathwaite describes the transformed English as ‘nation language.’ Using poems to illustrate the rhythm of the

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­ urricane, which “does not roar in pentameters,” Brathwaite shows the way a h language influenced by an African model rather than an English one can ignore the pentameter. This language is called nation language: “English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features. But in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English” (1981, 13). The strategies used include simple glossing of terms, the inclusion of untranslated words, the development of what Nemser (1971) and Selinker (1972) called ‘interlanguage,’ syntactic fusion, code switching and vernacular transcription. Settler colonial writers employ several of these strategies as well. The disciplinary base of early postcolonial scholars in literary studies involved, from the very beginning, a powerful compulsion to engage the text as a cultural practice. Despite the celebrity of poststructuralist colonial discourse theorists, most scholars in the field have been committed to revealing the material and discursive connections between the text and its cultural grounding. Where literatures in English were concerned, the dismantling of the filiative relationship with the canon of English literature was accompanied by a commitment to explore the full range of cultural affiliations—the worldliness—of the literature written by formerly colonized people (see Said 1983, 23). Because of its constant interplay between the analysis of specific cultural materialities and the production of more global explanatory theories, the field has by its very nature always pushed against disciplinary boundaries.

Postcolonial Theory The idea of ‘postcolonial literary theory’ emerges on the one hand from the dominance of literary theory in the academic world after the 1970s and, on the other, from the inappropriateness of European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and varied cultural provenance of postcolonial writing. European theories themselves emerge from particular cultural traditions, which are hidden by false notions of ‘the universal.’ Theories of style and genre, assumptions about the universal features of language, epistemologies and value systems are all radically questioned by the practices of postcolonial writing. Postcolonial theory has proceeded from the need to address this different practice. Indigenous theories have developed to accommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions as well as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features shared across those traditions. Postcolonial writing and literary theory intersect in several ways with recent theoretical movements such as postmodernism and poststructuralism, and with both contemporary Marxian ideological criticism and feminist criticism.

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These theories offer perspectives that illuminate some of the crucial issues addressed by the postcolonial text although postcolonial discourse itself is constituted in texts prior to and independent of them. As many postcolonial critics have asserted, we need to avoid the assumption that they supersede or replace the local and particular. But it is also necessary to avoid the pretence that theory in postcolonial literatures is somehow conceived entirely independently of all antecedents. However, conflating postcolonial theory with recent European theories involves a number of dangers, the most threatening of which is the tendency to absorb postcolonial culture into a universalist paradigm. This practice is shared by both the apparently apolitical and ahistorical theories of poststructuralism and the sociocultural and determinist theories based in contemporary Marxist thought. Conversely, it is arguable that such dominant European movements as postmodernism, which have sought in recent times to reabsorb postcolonial writing into an international postmodern discourse, may themselves, in fact, be more indebted to the cultural effects of the material practice of colonization and its aftermath than is usually acknowledged. This is clearly the case in the rise of modernism. Modernism, and the sudden experimentation with the forms of the dominant bourgeois ideology represented by late nineteenth-century realism, is itself, in part, a product of the sudden discovery of cultures whose aesthetic practices and cultural models were radically disruptive of the prevailing European assumptions. Europeans were forced to realize that their culture was only one amongst a plurality of alternative ways of conceiving reality and organizing its representations in art and social practice. Central to this perception was the encounter with African culture in the period of the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the eighties and nineties. Even while the dominant cultures were engaged in violently suppressing the ‘savage’ cultures they encountered in West and East Africa, they were importing into Europe, as loot, the revelation of an alternative view of the world in the form of African masks, carvings, and jewellery—artefacts which were, for the most part, stored away in the basements of the new museums of ethnology and anthropology. It was this material which, placed on display in the early decades of the next century, was to inspire the modernists and encourage them in their attempts to create the images of an alternative and radically ‘unrealistic’ art. The great exhibition of African art recovered from the punitive expeditions against Benin which was put on display at the British Museum in 1916 was directly responsible for the inclusion of images of African art in novels such as D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915). Similarly, the collections that were to form the basis for the Musee de l’Homme

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in Paris were the source of the inspiration of such works incorporating African elements as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (Ruthven 1968). The relationship between postcolonial study and the strategies of postmodern discourse is somewhat more ambiguous. Asking the question “is the post in postcolonialism the same as the post in postmodernism?” Anthony Kwame Appiah says All aspects of contemporary African cultural life including music and some sculpture and painting, even some writings with which the West is largely not familiar—have been influenced—often powerfully—by the transition of African societies through colonialism, but they are not all in the relevant sense postcolonial. For the post in postcolonial, like the post in postmodern is the post of the space-clearing gesture I characterised earlier: and many areas of contemporary African cultural life—what has come to be theorised as popular culture, in particular—are not in this way concerned with transcending—with going beyond—coloniality. Indeed, it might be said to be a mark of popular culture that its borrowings from international cultural forms are remarkably insensitive to—not so much dismissive of as blind to—the issue of neocolonialism or ‘cultural imperialism’ (1992, 240–41).

However the postcolonial, as it is used to describe and analyse the cultural production of colonized peoples, is precisely the production that occurs through colonialism, because no decolonizing process, no matter how oppositional, can remain free from that cataclysmic experience. Once we determine that postcolonial analysis will address all of a colony’s cultural production after invasion, our sense of the “space-clearing gesture” of which Appiah speaks becomes far more subtle, far more attuned to the transformative potential of postcolonial engagements with imperial discourse. It is quite distinct from the space-clearing gesture in postmodernism. Postcolonial discourse is the discourse of the colonized, which begins with colonial invasion and doesn’t stop when the colonizers go home. The postcolonial is not a chronological period but a range of material conditions and a rhizomatic pattern of discursive struggles, ways of contending with various specific forms of colonial oppression. The problem with terminology, the problem with the relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism, lies in the fact that they are both, in their very different and culturally located ways, discursive elaborations of postmodernity, just as imperialism and enlightenment philosophy were discursive elaborations of modernity.

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The Functions of Postcolonialism Crucially, words such as ‘postcolonial’ do not describe essential forms of experience but forms of talk about experience. If the term “postcolonial” seems to be homogenizing in the way it brings together the experiences of colonialism in a wide variety of situations, it must also be remembered that these experiences are just as various within particular national or linguistic communities. Once we see the term ‘postcolonial’ as representing a form of analysis rather than a form of experience, we will be better equipped to see that such analysis encompasses a wide and interwoven text of experiences. For instance, what is the essential experience of oppression, invasion or domination? These involve various forms of material experience, located in their specific historical and political environments. Just as the experiences of colonization within colonized societies have varied from the most abject suffering to the engendering of filiative feeling, the responses of those colonized societies to colonialism have occupied a continuum from absolute complicity to violent rebellion, all of which can be seen to be ‘postcolonial.’ If we see postcolonial discourse in the Foucauldian sense as a system of knowledge of colonized societies, a space of enunciation, the rules that govern the possibility of statements about the field, we must still confirm the discursive significance of language, of talk about experience. If it is the potential of the political subject, to engage the power of the modern imperial state, postcolonial writing testifies to discourse in which this may occur, and interpolation the strategy by which it may occur. Colonialism itself is much more complex and problematic than it seems at first: it is by definition transhistorical and unspecific, and it is used in relation to very different kinds of historical oppression and economic control. Every colonial encounter or ‘contact zone’ is different, and each ‘postcolonial’ occasion needs, against these general background principles, to be precisely located and analysed for its specific interplay. The materiality and locality of various kinds of colonial experience provide the richest potential for postcolonial studies, and they enable the specific analysis of the various effects of colonial discourse. The theoretical issues latent in these two fundamentals—materiality and location—lie at the basis of much of the dispute over what the term means and what it should or should not include. Yet, despite these disputes and differences, signs of a fruitful and complementary relationship between various postcolonial approaches have emerged in recent work in the field. Whether beginning from a basis in discourse theory, or from a more materialist and historical reading, most recent discussions have stressed the need to

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retain and strengthen these fundamental parameters in defining the idea of the postcolonial. As critics like Robert Young have indicated, the crucial task has been to avoid assuming that “the reality of the historical conditions of colonialism can be safely discarded” in favour of “the fantasmatics of colonial discourse” (Young 1995, 160). On the other hand, as Young also warns, although the totalizing aspects of discourses of the postcolonial are of real concern, it is necessary to avoid a return to a simplified form of localized materialism that refuses entirely to recognize the existence and effect of general discourses of colonialism on individual instances of colonial practice. The challenge for many postcolonial critics and theorists became the need to strike a proper balance between the specific cultural and social conditions of colonized and formerly colonized peoples and the larger theoretical frameworks in which the cultural practices of those societies are analysed. Not every colony will share every aspect of colonialism, nor will it necessarily share some essential feature since, like any category, it is, to use an appropriate metaphor, a rope with many overlapping strands (Wittgenstein 1958, 87). Despite the material differences of particular postcolonial peoples, each must deal with a common discursive medium, provided or imposed by colonialism itself. Postcolonialism in general is an engagement, in all its many varieties, with this discursive medium. The ways in which postcolonial peoples have appropriated and transformed metropolitan languages may differ in particular instances, but the general political processes by which this appropriation occurs show the continuing value of broader postcolonial frameworks. A major feature of postcolonial studies has been its ability to analyse a vast array of cultural developments: race and racism, expressions of anti-colonial nationalism, the paradoxical dissolution of the idea of nation along with the continuous persistence of national concerns, the question of language and appropriation, the transformation of literary genres and the question of ethnicity and its relation to the state. In addition, the term has expanded to engage issues of cultural diversity, ethnic, racial and cultural difference and the power relations within them, as a consequence of an expanded and more subtle understanding of the dimensions of neo-colonial dominance. This expanded understanding embraces the apparently ambiguous situation of Chicano experience in the US. Alfred Arteaga explains that Chicanos are products of two colonial contexts. The first begins with the explorer Colón and the major event of the Renaissance: the ‘old’ world’s ‘discovery’ of the ‘new.’ Spanish colonization of the Americas lasted more than three centuries, from the middle of Leonardo da Vinci’s lifetime to the beginning of

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Queen Victoria’s. The second colonial context begins with the immigration of Austin’s group from Connecticut to Texas, Mexico (1994, 21).

Engaging the actual complexity and diversity of European colonization, as well as the pervasiveness of neo-colonial domination, opens the way for a wide application of the strategies of postcolonial analysis.

Place and Displacement Place and displacement demonstrate the very complex interaction of language, history and environment in the experience of colonized peoples and the importance of space and location in the process of identity formation. In many cases, ‘place’ does not become an issue in a society’s cultural discourse until colonial intervention radically disrupts the primary modes of its representation by separating ‘space’ from ‘place.’ A sense of place may be embedded in cultural history, in legend and language, without becoming a concept of contention and struggle until the profound discursive interference of colonialism. Such intervention may disrupt a sense of place in several ways: by imposing a feeling of displacement in those who have moved to the colonies; by physically alienating large populations of colonized peoples through forced migration, slavery or indenture; by disturbing the representation of place in the colony by imposing the colonial language. Indeed, in all colonial experience, colonialism brings with it a sense of dislocation between the environment and the imported language now used to describe it, a gap between the ‘experienced’ place and the descriptions the language provides. One of the deepest reasons for the significance of place in colonized societies lies in the disruptions caused by modernity itself in the links between time, space and place in European societies. In pre-modern or pre-colonial times, as Giddens (1990) explains, all cultures had ways of calculating the time, but before the invention of the mechanical clock, no one could tell the time without reference to other markers: ‘when’ was almost always connected to ‘where.’ The mechanical clock was instrumental in separating time from space, telling the time in a way that could allow the precise division of ‘zones’ of the day without reference to other markers. With the universalization of the calendar and the standardization of time across regions, the emptying of time (its severance from location) became complete and became the precondition for the ‘emptying of space.’ In pre-modern times, space and place are more or less synonymous with one another, but once relations with absent others were made possible by the invention of the clock, the calendar and the map, things

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changed radically. Locales became shaped by social influences quite distant from them, such as spatial technologies, colonizing languages, or, indeed, the very conception of place that those languages came to transmit. Even more important were the emergence of mapping and the concomitant naming of colonial space which subjected world space to the ocularcentric strategies of European representation. The most concerted discussion of place and its location in language has come from settler colony writers for whom the possession of English as a first language has produced a particularly subtle, complex and creatively empowering sense of the lack of fit between the language available and the place experienced. Canadian Robert Kroetsch, in ‘Unhiding the hidden’ (1974), suggests that the particular predicament of the Canadian writer, and perhaps all settler colony writers, is that they work in a language that appears to be authentically their own, and yet is not quite. For another Canadian writer, Dennis Lee, this experience has had a profound effect on his writing, even drying up his writing altogether at one stage because he felt he could not find the words to express his experience authentically (1974). What becomes apparent in these writers is that ‘place’ is much more than the land. The theory of place does not propose a simple separation between the ‘place’ named and described in language and some ‘real’ place inaccessible to it, but rather indicates that in some sense place is language, something in constant flux, a discourse in process. These writers become compelled to try to construct a new language that might fit the place they experience because the language does not simply report the visual or proximate experience but is implicated in its presence. Dennis Lee coins the term ‘cadence’ to describe this: “a presence, both outside myself and inside my body opening out and trying to get into words” (1974, 397). The concepts of place and displacement have become increasingly important with the rise of environmentalism and ecocriticism. Postcolonial ecocriticism arose because environmental degradation—what colonizers would call ‘improvement,’ the clearing of land and the creation of property—is one of the most prominent features of colonial invasion. But importantly this critical discourse recognizes that the degradation of place and people go hand in hand. If we look to the history of human efforts ‘to subjugate nature,’ we find that this is also a history of humans subjugating humans. The “Domination of nature,” according to Horkheimer, inevitably “involves domination of man,” (1974, 93) such that civilization produces “the alienation” of human beings “from extrahuman and human nature” (1974, 169). The postcolonial perspective is that social and economic justice may be unattainable without environmental justice.

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The Rise of Postcolonial Studies The remarkable rise of postcolonial studies in the 1990s was partly due to the fact that by the late 1980s the world was hungry for a language to describe the diversity of cultures and the intersecting global range of cultural production. Postcolonial theory provided that language, a way of talking about the engagement of the global by the local, particularly local cultures, and, most importantly, provided a greatly nuanced view of globalization, developed from its understanding of the complexities of imperial relationships. According to critics such as Simon Gikandi, a substantial overlap existed between postcolonialism and globalization studies. … they have at least two important things in common: they are concerned with explaining forms of social and cultural organization whose ambition is to transcend the boundaries of the nation-state, and they seek to provide new vistas for understanding cultural flows that can no longer be explained by a homogenous Eurocentric narrative of development and social change (Gikandi 2001, 627)

It can be argued that the language of postcolonialism drove a cultural turn in globalization studies in the 1990s, and it did this for three reasons. First, the systematization of postcolonial theory occurred at about the same time as the rise to prominence of globalization studies in the late 1980s. Second, it was around this time that literary and cultural theorists realized that debates on globalization had become bogged down in the classical narrative of modernity. Third, it became clear, particularly after Appadurai (1996), that there were many globalizations, and that far from the homogenizing downward pressure of economic globalization and the Washington Consensus, a circulation of local alternatives could be seen to affect the nature of the global. It was through cultural practices that difference and hybridity, diffusion and the imaginary, concepts that undermined the Eurocentric narrative of modernity, were most evident. Postcolonial analysis now extends far beyond the original moment of colonization. The field has come to represent a dizzyingly broad network of cohabiting intellectual pursuits, circulating around the general idea of an ongoing engagement with imperial power in its various historical forms. Stephen Slemon surveyed the situation evocatively when he remarked in “The Scramble for Postcolonialism” that the term has been used in recent times … as a way of ordering a critique of totalising forms of Western historicism; as  a  portmanteau term for a retooled notion of “class”, as a subset of both ­postmodernism and post-structuralism (and conversely, as the condition

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from which those two structures of cultural logic and cultural critique themselves are seen to emerge); as the name for a condition of nativist longing in post-independence national groupings; as a cultural marker of non-residency for a Third-World intellectual cadre; as the inevitable underside of a fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist power; as an oppositional form of “reading practice”; and—and this was my first encounter with the term—as the name for a category of “literary” activity which sprang from a new and welcome political energy going on within what used to be called “Commonwealth” literary studies (1994, 16–17).

Clearly, the power dynamic of that originating moment and the forms of transformation it generated are still relevant to the range of areas of study in the field today. Postcolonial analysis has always intersected the study of race, gender and class, but these intersections have generated an ever-increasing range of specific interests, overlapping and cohabiting within the field. The field of postcolonial studies could now be described as a “convivial critical democracy,” after Paul Gilroy’s advocacy of a “convivial multicultural democracy” in After Empire: Melancholia of Convivial Culture (2004). The term, derived from the Latin ‘con’ (with) and ‘vivere’ (to live) underpins his aim to see whether multicultural diversity can be combined with an hospitable civic order, whether a convivial acceptance of difference might be achieved in a different kind of convivial multicultural democracy than the examples presently available, particularly in Britain. This etymologically faithful use of the term ‘convivial’ describes very aptly the present state of postcolonial studies. The determination of different approaches to ‘live with’ each other in a condition of productive debate and intermingling shows how the field may avoid becoming a Grand Theory. Conviviality does not obviate argument but neither does argument obviate cohabitation. Because postcolonial study does not refer to a particular methodology (just as it does not refer to a chronology or an ontology), this argumentativeness has been a characteristic, perhaps a necessary, characteristic of the field from the beginning. But conviviality has led to a radical expansion, an increase in what might be called postcolonial pursuits, as disciplinary boundaries become more porous, cultural and national distinctiveness more rhizomatic and the exploratory impetus of postcolonial scholars more pronounced. There has always been a range of activities ‘living with’ each other in postcolonial studies: textual criticism, historical scholarship, cultural anthropology, literary theory, translation theory. There has been a rather tight but argumentative range of approaches to the questions of postcolonial engagement, centring on issues such as resistance, decolonization and ­the-book-or-­the-barricade, on

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the one hand, and hybridity, transculturality and transformation, on the other. The future of this conviviality appears to lie in the relationship between another range of fields emerging from the fluidity and permeability of global cultural relations. Cosmopolitanism, world literature (in the Goethian mode), world literatures, transnational literatures, as well as an expanding field of diasporic studies have all been pursued either consciously or implicitly in relation to postcolonial studies. This conviviality has led to an overlapping and at times interpenetration of what might seem to be distinct fields, all of which share an aggregation of theoretical languages. This conviviality has not been, nor should it be, without argument, for this is precisely how different ways of reading can be tested and refined. But it should be without bitterness and self-righteousness, which are the signs of philosophical insecurity. This critical conviviality and recalcitrant border crossing has a strategic dimension that places postcolonial studies at the centre of contemporary developments in knowledge production. A transformation in critical scholarship in the humanities has paralleled the rise of postcolonial studies over the last 20 years. The field of social epistemology, or knowledge studies, developed from about the mid-1990s has been marked by an acknowledgement that older discipline-centred forms of scholarship were being transformed.

Problems with the ‘Post’ The prefix ‘post’ in the term continues to be a source of vigorous debate amongst critics. Arif Dirlik, while narrowing down the categories of the term, sees problems emerging from the identification of postcolonial intellectuals. The term postcolonial in its various usages carries a multiplicity of meanings that need to be distinguished for analytical purposes. Three uses of the term seem to me to be especially prominent (and significant): (a) as a literal description of conditions in formerly colonial societies, in which case the term has concrete referents, as in postcolonial societies or postcolonial intellectuals; (b) as a description of a global condition after the period of colonialism, in which case the usage is somewhat more abstract and less concrete in reference, comparable in its vagueness to the earlier term Third World, for which it is intended as a substitute; and (c) as a description of a discourse on the above-­ named conditions that is informed by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of those conditions (1996, 331–32). Others might argue that the variety of ways in which the term ‘postcolonial’ has come to be conceived is a fundamental strength. As a range of topics and approaches, all focused on the continuing historical function of European

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imperialism, it avoids becoming the Grand Theory of Everything that lies as an ever-present danger to such an increasingly wide-ranging discourse. The erroneous sense that postcolonialism refers to the situation in a society ‘after colonialism’ persisted for some time. Anne McClintock suggests that “[T]he term postcolonial… is haunted by the very figure of linear development that it sets out to dismantle” (1995, 10–11). This seems to be a ghost that refuses to be exorcised. Undoubtedly the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonialism’ must always contend with the spectre of linearity and the kind of teleological development it sets out to dismantle. But rather than being disabling, this radical instability of meaning may give the term a vibrancy, energy and plasticity—a ‘convivial’ multiplicity of foci—that have become part of its strength, as postcolonial analysis rises to engage issues and experiences which have been out of the purview of metropolitan theory, and indeed, comes to critique the assumptions of that theory. The simpler sense of the ‘post’ as meaning ‘after’ colonialism has given way to a more elaborate understanding of the working of postcolonial cultures which stresses the articulations between and across the politically defined historical periods, of pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence cultures. While classic colonialism continues in only a few countries (as annexation, countries such as Palestine, West Papua and Tibet), postcolonial readings now apply to a widespread range of engagements with imperial and global power. Thus ‘postcolonial’ is best understood as a reading practice, which analyses the continuing resistances, appropriations and transformations of dominant (i.e. ‘imperial’) discourses, institutions and methodologies by colonized and formerly colonized societies. As a result, further questions have been asked about what limits, if any, should be set round the term. Aijaz Ahmad complains, for instance, that when the term ‘colonialism’ can be pushed back to the Incas and forward to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, then it becomes ‘a transhistorical thing, always present and always in process of dissolution in one part of the world or another’ (1995, 9). It is clear, however, that postcolonialism as it has come to be employed has been primarily concerned to examine the processes and effects of, and reactions to, European colonialism from the sixteenth century up to and including the neo-colonialism of the present day.

Recent Directions ‘Postcolonialism’ is now used in wide and diverse ways to include the study and analysis of European territorial conquests, the various institutions of European colonialisms, the discursive operations of empire, the subtleties of

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subject construction in colonial discourse and the resistance of those subjects, and, most importantly perhaps, the differing responses to such incursions and their contemporary colonial legacies in both pre-and post-independence nations and communities. While its use has tended to focus on the cultural production of such communities, it is becoming widely used in historical, political, sociological and economic analyses, as these disciplines continue to engage with the impact of European imperialism upon world societies. Many of the issues and problems surrounding the topic of globalization (the place of the ‘glocal,’ the function of local agency under the pressure of global forces, the role of imperialism in globalization, the connection between imperialism and neo-liberal economics) are addressed and continue to be addressed by the postcolonial analysis of imperial power. The displacement of large numbers of people as a consequence of the thirst for development in formerly colonized countries is just one of the paradoxical consequences of the globalizing impetus in the world. Thus, although we need to be careful about falsely prescribing postcolonial theory as a panacea, and should keep in mind the firm grounding of postcolonial discourse in the historical phenomenon of colonialism, the field has provided useful strategies for a wider field of global analysis. Postcolonial literary and cultural production in particular has demonstrated the insistent reality of local agency, an agency that can address simple dualistic approaches to the local and global. One of the most persistent and controversial topics of contemporary politics is the issue of the environment. Global warming has demonstrated the devastating effects of the industrial revolution and the unfettered pursuit of capital expansion. The environment and attendant topics such as ecofeminism, ecological imperialism, environmentalism and speciesism have all taken an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial thought because it has become clear that there is a direct connection between colonialist treatment of indigenous flora and fauna and treatment of colonized and otherwise dominated subjects and societies. The devastation of colonized place (and potentially of the planet) paved the way for the devastation of societies. Until now the destruction of the physical and human environments has become the same thing. As we have seen, the rise of postcolonial ecocriticism has come about through the growing awareness of the interaction and joint oppression of people and environment. The postcolonial concern with place now intersects the environmental awareness of the fragility of the ecosystem (Huggan and Tiffin 2010). In a world of increasing mobility, the global, the cosmopolitan, the diasporic have increasingly folded into the concept of the transnational. The world has never been more mobile as millions circulate around and beyond

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the boundaries of the nation, whether as refugees, asylum seekers or migrants. The concept of boundaries and borders has been crucial in the imperial occupation and domination of indigenous space. And the question of borders and borderlands has now become a pressing issue in an age of increasingly hysterical border protection. Cultural borders are becoming recognized as a critical region of colonial and neo-colonial domination, of cultural erosion and of class and economic marginalization. The field of postcolonial studies now includes the vexed subjects of contemporary neo-colonialism: the identities and relationships of Chicano, Latino and hybrid subjectivities of various kinds. These subjects, who slip between the boundaries of the grand narratives of history and nation, are becoming an increasingly important constituency for postcolonial studies. Consequently, transnational studies have found themselves in a dilemma: the concept of an interchange between nations has been overtaken by the reality of global flows in which national borders are merely contingent, while on the other hand mobility has not stopped at national borders. Postcolonial cultural production over the last 60 years, the work of writers and artists representing themselves to the world, has prepared the way for a different conception of (inter)national mobility, one that reveals the mobility of subjects both within and across the borders of the nation state. Postcolonial literatures, which have critiqued the nation as much as the empire and neo-colonial power, point now to a different way of conceiving border crossing, one that occurs internally as well as across borders. Since its emergence in the late 1980s, postcolonialism has widened its reach to include issues such as the place of translation, of the sacred, of biopolitics, ecological theory and animal rights, and most importantly, to widen its interest in the relation between local communities and global influences. This relationship is one for which postcolonialism has long been prepared, both from its involvement in the cultural turn in globalization studies and its long interest in the relation between local differences and the broader global impact of imperialism. An aspect of this outward movement is the rapidly growing interest in the mobility of formerly colonized populations, in the movement of refugees, asylum seekers and the characteristics of diasporas of various ethnic groups. Thus the future of the field seems set to move further out of the realm of classical imperialism and its cultural and political effects, into a growing investment in globalization studies, diaspora, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The historical experience of imperial and colonial relations appears to provide valuable insights into the agency of local communities and the cultural production of subaltern, marginalized and exiled peoples in a global

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era. Whether because of the wide range of topics and approaches it now enfolds, or because of the persistent and encroaching ubiquity of imperialism and neo-colonialism, postcolonial theory and criticism continues to offer a rich mode of cultural critique, despite three decades of predictions of its imminent demise.

Bill Ashcroft Biodata Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, founding exponent of postcolonial theory and co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to offer a systematic examination of the field of postcolonial studies. He is author and co-author of seventeen books and over 180 articles and chapters, variously translated into six languages, and he is on the editorial boards of ten international journals. His latest work is Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. He teaches at the University of NSW and fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

References Achebe, C. 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York, NY: Doubleday. Ahmad, A. 1995. The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality. Race and Class 36 (3): 1–20. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, A.K. 1992. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. London: Methuen. Arteaga, A. 1994. An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Ashcroft, B. 2001. Post-colonial Transformation. London: Routledge. Ashcroft, W.D., M. Cotter, J. Docker, and S. Nandan. 1977. New Literature Review 2 ‘Special issue: Postcolonial Literature’. Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Brathwaite, E.K. 1981. English in the Caribbean: Notes on Nation Language and Poetry: An Electronic Lecture. In English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, ed. L.A. Fiedler and H.A. Baker Jr., 15–53. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dirlik, A. 1996. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. In Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Mongia. London: Arnold.

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Foucault, M. 1971. Orders of Discourse. Social Science Information 10 (2): 7–30. Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gikandi, S. 2001. Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality. The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (3): 627–658. Gilroy, P. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia of Convivial Culture. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. Horkheimer, M. 1974. Eclipse of Reason. New York, NY: Seabury Press (originally published 1947). Huggan, G., and H.  Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Kroetsch, R. 1974. Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction. Journal of Canadian Fiction 3 (3): 394–396. Cited in Ashcroft et al. (1995). Lawrence, D.H. 1915. The Rainbow. London: Methuen. Lee, D. 1974. Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space. Boundary 2 (3): 1. Macaulay, T.B. 1835. Minute on Indian Education. In Speeches, ed. G.M.  Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press (AMS Edition, 1979). McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, NY: Routledge. Nemser, W. 1971. Systems of Foreign Language Learners. IRAL (International Review of Applied Linguistics) 9 (2, May): 115–124. Ruthven, K. 1968. Yeats, Lawrence and the Savage God. Critical Quarterly 10 (1 and 2, Spring/Summer): 39–54. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage. ———. 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York, NY: Vintage. ———. 1981. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York, NY: Vintage. ———. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Selinker, L. 1972. Inter-Language. IRAL (International Review of Applied Linguistics) 10 (2, May): 209–231. Slemon, S. 1994. The Scramble for Postcolonialism. In De-scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality, ed. C. Tiffin and A. Lawson. London: Routledge. Viswanathan, G. 1987. The Beginnings of English Literary Study in India. Oxford Literary Review 9 (1 and 2): 2–26. Wittgenstein, L. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell. Young, R. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.

Part V Areas of Work Within Philosophy and Literature

25 Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance of Literature to Modern Legal Scholarship Julia J. A. Shaw

Introduction The existence conditions for legal principles, rights, and remedies can be understood as consisting of layers of consensual social practices, perpetuated by countless individual acts of compliance and acceptance by private citizens and public officials which are both interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Aesthetics, art, and literature are all signifiers engaged in the social practice of continuous interaction as they ‘enrich the spiritual experience of the individual and of the community, refine feeling, make it more flexible, more responsive … enlarge the volume of thought in advance and not through the personal method of accumulated experience, educate the individual, the social group, the class and the nation’ (Trotsky 1925). For legal scholars, such fundamental social processes as, for example, the provision of welfare, housing, food, and education are not only the subject of social initiative but comprise an endless collective creativeness which lays down new landmarks and ground rules which, in turn, shape how creative fields develop. Just as the persuasive influence of those aesthetic forms which rely on narrative and imagery—the play, the novel, poetry, music, and art—is at least partially due to their cultural embeddedness, the legal culture is itself, simultaneously, a co-producer and by-product of such cultural forms. Law is, then, not only a system of social order but also a method of creating meaning and a critical constituent of modern culture. J. J. A. Shaw (*) De Montfort University, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_25

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Many literary forms and devices have influenced the formation and development of legal concepts, without which law would arguably have lost most of its persuasive force. As a subject which belongs to both the social sciences and humanities, historically law has also encompassed the liberal arts (formerly syntax, rhetoric, and logic)—namely, those spheres of knowledge considered to be imperative to the creation of a free citizen. By engaging with law via the lens of the liberal arts, we become more aware of a diverse array of alternative perspectives and sensuous content which may be used to better inform our individual life choices. The multiplicity of images and experiences communicated in the (his-)stories of others, for example, may even significantly influence our own capacity for moral judgement, as these resonate with a personal or shared history of particular cultural traditions and practices. Furthermore, our sensate, or empathic, connection to the symbols and metaphors contained within the broader context of literature comprises a productive force, a mechanism for interpreting and ordering of the roles and duties of individuals within the wider social order which, in turn, has the capacity to inform the construction of legal principle and judgement. This chapter will explore key histories, moments, thinkers, and themes within the tradition of law and literature which continue to exert a profound influence on modern legal scholarship.

L iterature, the Narrativity of Law, and the Legal Imagination Located within the liberal arts, law is a science-humanities hybrid which contributes to the idea of the good individual and good society and seeks to better understand and enlighten the world of humankind. As a science law aims to be coherent and methodical while at the same time belonging to the humanities, it is dependent on fields of knowledge such as philosophy, rhetoric, and linguistics to achieve its objectives. A commingling of law and the social sciences since the 1960s has advanced the law and society movement along with socio-legal scholarship, yet it is impossible to see the complex and varied connections between law, culture, and society without locating legal theory within a broader and richer context (Sarat 2004, 5). The liberal arts have, in various subtly coded forms, been used throughout history not only for amusement but also to articulate significant social concerns. The overtly political plays of Shakespeare, for example, Henry VI, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, probe the unwieldy nature of law and its awesome power.

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Literature—the term we attribute to texts which have meaning for readers who are in a different setting remote from the work’s original audience—provides a unique opportunity to survey law as part of the surrounding culture and not only as a remote set of assumptions and bare technical rules. Rather, foundational legal rules and principles are revealed to be embedded within a diverse interplay of meaningful ideas, thoughts, signs, and interpretations of the world; nevertheless the nature of meaning is provisional and only fixed— albeit never completely so always remains conveniently ambivalent—through the social practice of following a rule. For Baudrillard, these interactions comprise a bare ‘symbolic sociality’, a ‘game of truth’, in which so-called facts and theories aspire to the status of truth in order to establish a rule (2001, 150). Such non-veracious facts and theories ground law’s truth, legitimise obedience to the rule and in turn demonstrate the power of illusion and the persuasive power of the language of law. Similarly, Nelken argues that law uses language to initiate and organise its own criteria of significance and in this way creates and constantly recreates its own truth (1993, 93). From this perspective, law’s truth is not a unified, reflexive, and distinctive discourse; rather it is best understood as an ongoing rhetorical achievement. As the legal community strives to organise reality through the medium of language, the application of allegorical terminology and imagistic language is of central importance to legal discourse. Storytelling, for example, is a key constituent of legal rhetoric, and the narration of competing truths in the courtroom illustrates the effective way in which ‘law may be used as a system of tension or a bridge linking a concept of reality to an imagined alternative’ (Cover 1983, 9). By means of subtle legal formulations, law endeavours to impose form and rule on a variety of aspects, such as what is deemed to be relevant narration in the courtroom, the level of detail, presumed objectivity of witness testimony, and restrictions concerning admissible and inadmissible narratives. As narratives are innate ways of understanding and structuring human experience, this makes them inherently persuasive, and so competing narratives are settled on pre-trial via the careful selection of evidence to be presented in the dramatic setting of the courtroom. Barristers in the United Kingdom are trained in voice projection, the use of character voices, deportment, the appropriate expression of emotion, and the repression of certain movements and gestures, to maximise dramatic impact. A lawyer will carefully compose their address using literary techniques such as metaphor and allusion, and plan their performance with a view to eliciting an empathic reaction from the audience or jury. As Margaret Atwood suggests, ‘…any trial—not only the kind in books—is, formally considered, a play, a morality play with set allegorical figures. The law, seen from one angle, is itself a literary

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form, for what is the giving of evidence but controlled story-telling, what is precedent but a batch of stories that have been previously told?’ (1985, 515). In Book VII of Plato’s Laws, the Athenian contemplates what reply he would give to a tragic poet who asked him for reasons as to why he and his fellow lawyers had decided to ban tragic poets from the city. The Athenian confesses, ‘Respected visitors, we are ourselves authors of a tragedy, and that the finest and best we know how to make. You are poets, and we also are poets in the same style, rival artists and rival actors, and that in the finest of all dramas, one which indeed be produced only by a code of true law’ (1961, 51). Whilst acknowledging their similarities (both poetry and law articulate the values and beliefs of the culture), he insisted there was room for only one group of performers and orators on the public stage; namely, those who would respond authoritatively and with certainty to the key practical issues of the day and, importantly, conform to the city’s purposes in the core functions and ideals of the state. Unlike ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poets, Plato failed to distinguish between a good ‘code of true law’ which can only be furnished by good interpreters of the law; and his banishment of the poets, along with the removal of literature from law, is generally considered to be one of his most loathed ideas. Still, the enduring theatricality of the courtroom emphasises the significance of the performance medium, in that law has ‘retained its pride of place as the primary and most serious form of social self-reflection upon the public stages of the West. Law has survived the various forms of legitimate theatre and not only has coexisted with the silver screen, but has benefitted from it and its innumerable portraits of the drama and excitement of legal trial’ (Goodrich 2001, 2081). In common with the finest dramatists and storytellers, lawyers are renowned for their strong predilection for legal fictions, constructions, and use of tropes and rhetorical flourishes in order to understand and better articulate the randomness of human experience. Accordingly, whilst the actor, novelist, poet, philosopher, and lawyer alike rely on their intellectual creativity and imagination, ‘all do their real work in the conversations they establish with their reader or among their readers’ (Boyd White 2008, 140). Since the initiation of ‘legal studies after the cultural turn’, law has been considered to be narratively based and culturally embedded; advocating the benefits of a narratologically literate approach to legal discourse (Moran 2012). In Robert Cover’s seminal work on the relation of narrative and community, Nomos and Narrative, he explains that everyone inhabits at least one nomos, or normative order, which contains the possibility of law according to ‘the application of human will to an extant state of affairs’ and importantly those narratives which produce and maintain it for a particular community,

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along with their ‘visions of alternative futures’ (1983, 7). He offers two ­alternatives, the first of which constitutes an ‘imperial’ nomos in which the emphasis is on the predominance of positive law, enforced by legal institutions, in which the individual plays a weaker role. Against this vision is a world-­creating ‘paideic’ universe which is based on (1) a common body of precept and narrative, (2) a common and personal way of being educated into this corpus, and (3) a sense of direction or growth that is constituted as the individual and his community work out the implications of their law (Cover 1983, 12, 13). It is this second formulation which connects most completely the individual, the ideal of the community and the law; and, most significantly, at the beginning of each social and legal process there is a literary form. For Cover, literature and literary devices are able to elucidate the broader societal context in which law operates to the extent that, ‘no set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning; for every constitution there is an epic, for each Decalogue a scripture… Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live’ (1983, 4, 5). The world of law is constituted by means of a system of rules constructed by narrative and so, for example, each adaptation of the constitution responds to the emergence of a new epic, in which the text must be rewritten to reflect this new development or be subject to further amendment. While law may have the appearance of autonomy and rationality, it is never free from the narratives that lend it meaning. Literature and history are essential elements of communal normative domains such as the law; they provide a coherent structure for the development of law’s narratives in response to a rapidly changing world. Each prescription must be situated in discourse; having a beginning, end, explanation, justification, and purpose, especially because law’s narratives have their origin as ‘the trajectories plotted upon material reality by our imagination’ (Cover 1983, 5). The central role of narrative in giving meaning and authority to legal texts and rules is, therefore, also designated by Cover as an artistic endeavour; in that ‘the discourse of law is fundamentally governed by rhetoric, metaphor, form, images and symbols’ (1983, 44). James Boyd White similarly observes that whilst from the outside law is an institution dedicated to policy formulation against a set of rules, it is at the same time an undertaking of the imagination in which individual minds engage in order to construct versions of experience which compete or cooperate with those of others. To this end, law is essentially a literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity, which he refers to as an ‘art of language’:

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…the law always begins in story: usually in the story the client tells, whether he or she comes in off the street for the first time or adds in a phone call another piece of information to a narrative with which the lawyer has been long, perhaps too long, familiar. It ends in story, too, with a decision by a court or jury, or an agreement between the parties, about what happened and what it means. (1985, 168)

Clearly, law is not fundamentally an abstract system or scheme of rules as it is often presented, neither is it a set of institutional arrangements that can be explained away in the language of social science. Rather, in a recent journal article Justice in Tension, White deduces that law is ‘an inherently unstable structure of thought and expression, built upon a distinct set of dynamic and dialogic tensions. It is not a set of rules at all, but a form of life. It is a process by which the old is made new, over and over again. If one is to talk about justice in the law, it must be in the light of this reality’ (2012, 1). These ‘tensions’ include that between ordinary and legal language; between legal language and the specialised discourses of other disciplines; between language itself and the silent world that lies beneath it; between conflicting but defensible ways of attributing meaning to legal rules and principles; between substantive and procedural positions; and between the past, present, and future. Each of the aforementioned must be tackled anew in each instance, by the exercise of an art that is defined by these tensions themselves. Consequently, doing justice in the law requires not merely the elaboration of general legal rules and principles, but the art by which the tensions characteristic of law are intelligently and sympathetically addressed. Literature is particularly proficient at disclosing the contours of our habitat according to the senses and sentiments of individuals who stand in a particular relation to each other. As a form of sentimental jurisprudence, ‘literature has the ability to imbue law with the language of feeling’, which is in turn able to ‘situate institutions such as slavery and poverty within a discourse of emotional judgement’ (Shaw 2017, 86, 94). Explaining that our lawmakers must be able to imagine pain and suffering, Martha Nussbaum associates the ethics of compassion with the politics of liberal democracy by invoking the poet Walt Whitman in his appeal to good judgement in a good society, ‘the poetic imagination is a crucial agent of democratic equality for excluded people, since only that imagination will get the facts of their lives right and see in their unequal treatment a degradation of oneself ’ (1995a, b, 1519). The corollary of which is that the poet as wordsmith, rather than the politician or even less the lawyer, has the unique ability to evoke and appeal to one’s ‘love of justice’. It is claimed, therefore, that a good judge ‘must be capable of literary ­imagining

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and sympathy. She must educate not only her technical capacities, but her capacity for humanity. This means… that literary art is an essential part of the formation of the judge—and, more generally, of the formation of citizenship and public life’ (Nussbaum 1995a, b, 1519). We live in an age of disenchantment where the obligation to measure, quantify, and prove has encroached on every area of social life, belittling intuition and impeding reform which has produced a culture in which ‘there is a lack of aesthetic appreciation, a dulling of emotional effect, and an apparent inability to understand symbolic and conventional meaning’ (Manderson 2000, 27). Meanwhile, human beings have the capacity to engage with their environment and reform it by the power of imagination expressed through the liberal arts, which are not scientifically predictable in their operation or susceptible to empirical evaluation. In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon divided the realm of human learning according to the faculties of the human intellect—‘history to his memory, poesy to his imagination and philosophy to his reason’, with the ‘divineness of poesy’ springing from the imagination which, ‘being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath joined’ (1960, 89–90). Though the sheer technicality of law’s concepts and categories often inhibits any discussion of their own premises, poetry and literature are able to illuminate the world by means of imagistic language; elucidating important moral values, legal concepts, and social ideas. Although some critics are somewhat circumspect about a field that positively delights in its interpretive indeterminacy, the legal profession has always recognised literature as one of its principal sources of sustenance (Posner 1988, 1, 17). As this chapter discloses, for the law and literature movement literature is located at the heart of law, just as language is its very essence. To this end, it is maintained that ‘good lawyers are also good readers, good play goers, good concert goers, and good patrons of the arts. Lawyers are word-mongers and recognize the great writers as the masters of the game’ (Shaw 2012, 90).

Law and Literature: A Brief History The modern evolution of law and literature scholarship is said to have gained momentum in order to provide a counterweight to the ‘law as economics’ movement of the 1970s. However, American jurist John Wigmore and Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Benjamin Cardozo are largely credited with pioneering the ‘pre-modern’ law and literature movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Both were acclaimed novelists and poets as well

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as fulfilling the wider role of primary teachers of the law. Wigmore believed that a good lawyer understands human nature, and to gain such insights is only possible by reading the work of the great writers. To this end he produced a catalogue of recommended novels in 1900, focusing on those novels with distinctly legal themes—recommending inter alia Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and other more obscure titles such as Judge Robert Grant’s Eye for an Eye (Wigmore 1908, 574). A diverse collection of fictional narratives (e.g., stories about law, lawyers, trials, and statutes) showcased the ability of literature to alert the reader, particularly the legal practitioner, to societal concerns and the imperatives of social justice. Wigmore hoped his reading list might usefully arouse in lawmakers and judges an awareness of human desires, basic human needs, and the failure of state institutions to meet those needs. Although the list of recommended legal novels was controversial and subject to much debate, it is said to have been instrumental in producing the modern expression of the Law and Literature movement. In his seminal 1925 essay on ‘law and literature’, Cardozo reflected on the literariness of law and outlined a programme for improving legal writing by treating it as literature, describing literary devices and techniques as invaluable tools for analysing the literary style and determining the quality of judicial opinions. This was on the basis that, in common with literature, law is both a producer and product of culture which reflects prevailing societal mores and conventions and, as such, a literary explication of the production of law may be useful in elucidating the way in which legal narratives (re)construct reality (1931). In addition, Cardozo claimed that although the judge or legal advocate seeks to assimilate a body of truth to a science, in so doing they are in fact practising an art, having an eye and ear for style in giving their finely honed opinions. He even suggested that the form of an opinion is not merely ornamental or ancillary but contributes to its correctness: In matters of literary style the sovereign virtue for the judge is clearness…But clearness, though the sovereign quality, is not the only on to be pursued, and even if it were, may be gained through many avenues of approach. The [judicial] opinion will need persuasive force, or the impressive virtue of sincerity and fire, or the mnemonic power of alliteration and antithesis, or the terseness and tang of the proverb, and the maxim. Neglect the help of these allies, and it may never win its way. (Cardozo 1931, 9)

By interfacing legal rules and conventions with literary narratives, law and literature scholarship is able to aptly illustrate the contingent nature of justice. The law and literature movement contains a variety of distinct approaches

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which are commonly divided between law in literature and law as literature. The law in literature approach critically engages with the representation of law and legal procedures using the alternative ethical contexts suggested by literary texts. It also attempts to make legal actors more aware of the effects of their profession on ordinary individuals. Alternatively, law as literature concentrates on methods of interpretation of legal texts and the application of literary theory to legal texts; it investigates law as rhetoric and reinterprets legal texts using a philological methodology. This approach examines the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces and in this way often generates contested meanings of ostensibly settled legal questions. James Boyd White is often referred to as initiating the modern law and literature movement because of the prolific number of distinguished books and papers he has contributed to the field. White published the ground-­ breaking The Legal Imagination in 1973 which focuses on the latter and introduces, for the first time, a distinct and self-conscious field of law as literature in which legal judgement is inseparable from rhetoric as, ideally, it has the capacity to transform the communities to which it applies. He finds that institutions in general and law in particular consider the world and its people as one-dimensional, and provides a corrective in performative legal rhetoric which attempts to reinstate an ethical grounding to law and legal education through the imaginative and transformative use of language. White observes that relating the facts of a case and relevant legal texts to a new set of circumstances or situation requires an insight into the essential distinction between the, seemingly conflicting, narrative and analytical forces of law. This is because there are two legal minds; namely, ‘the mind that tells a story’ which locates meaning in the narrative representation of actual events as they occur, and ‘the mind that gives reason’ which is given to analysis in the form of systematic or theoretical explanations (1973, 243). It is important, even necessary, for fledging lawyers to learn how to reconcile and master these often discordant thinking processes, as both discourses (narrative and analysis) are argued to be the quintessence of legal thinking. Consequently, lawyers are urged to develop the ability to integrate the literary and the conceptual on the understanding that ‘the law can best be understood and practiced when one comes to see that its language is not conceptual or theoretical—not reducible to a string of definitions—but what I call literary or poetic, by which I mean … that it is complex, many-voiced’ (1985, xi). While storytelling is a natural narrative form, White poses an interesting dialectical challenge in suggesting that, through the lens of a refined legal and literary imagination, the law and its languages might be understood from both the inside and the outside. To this end, he maintains that the lawyer is at heart a writer, one who lives by the

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power of their imagination, and that ‘the central act of the legal mind, of judge and lawyer alike, is the conversion of the raw material of life—of the actual experiences of people and the thousands of ways they can be talked about—into a story that will claim to tell the truth in legal terms’ (White 1973, 859–60). Richard Weisberg is another enthusiastic advocate of the law and literature movement whose writing is more often associated with the trajectory of law in literature—relating to how law is critiqued in fictions about law, especially narratives which focus on areas of legal conflict. He uses literature as a way of critiquing social institutions and legal norms, although his work also investigates the textural standards of legal conduct in literature (Weisberg 2011, 50). Emerging from the Critical Legal Studies movement, in Reading the Law (1986) and Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis (1987) Peter Goodrich argues against the traditional view of law as a discrete self-referential, hermeneutically closed sphere which is only subject to its own logic, because the idealised version of law as autonomous and divorced from the real world negates the passion, politics, and public resistance which are characteristic of human life. Both culture and civilisation are dependent upon the shared meanings that exist between individuals within a social space which is at the same time a political space—a necessarily contested area in which individuals organise their ‘position’ in relation to others and against dogmatic classificatory schema, via practices of self-representation, as part and parcel of their social reality (Shaw and Shaw 2015, 238). Goodrich proposes that the language of law is, therefore, essentially a social discourse which attaches to other discourses and disciplines in an attempt to control, or at least influence, meaning. By examining law as literature in legal texts, it is possible to become more aware of the form, structure, and distinctive rhetoric used in constructing legal arguments in order to generate the ‘truth’ of law and other phenomena relating to the legal culture. Such a close consideration of law’s figures, tropes, and images not only discloses the fictions that arise from law’s own language, meaning, and context but also confirms the reciprocal relationship between law and the arts, presenting law as an entirely aesthetic phenomenon. Law ‘speaks in the mode of repetition; it is dogma and so speaks in the manner of dream, through symbols, allegories, metaphors and other species of irony and dissimulation’ (Goodrich 1996, 143). In this way, law is presented as a social discourse which is bound by literature’s rhetorical embellishments and is, therefore, argued to constitute an impersonation of fiction. As a response to the conventional idea of law as simply a body of norms or a social institution that produces norms, a range of critical approaches began over 50 years ago, with the objective of representing law variously as literature,

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as discourse, as language, or as a form of consciousness. Recent decades have, however, evidenced the rise of an economic approach which applies economic principles to law that assume law is undisputedly transparent to all actors and, in doing so, it implicitly adopts some variant of legal positivism. A consequence of which has been the increasing marginalisation of other interdisciplinary approaches to law, at the very time when scholars across numerous fields have been developing a diverse range of innovative approaches to critical legal thinking and the liberal arts. These defenders of the liberal arts have been championed as the moral heart of the academy by counterbalancing the prevailing corporate mindset and scientific triumphalism (Goodrich 2007, 700). Currently the traditional law and literature landscape has expanded to include humanities research, cultural studies, and novel areas of scholarship such as comics and legal aesthetics; explicated in Thomas Giddens’ Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law (2015).  There are many other  examples, including Peter Goodrich’s scholarship on the visualisation of legal hierarchies in Legal Emblems and the Art of Law (2013); on forensic techniques based on the visual and the acoustic to rearticulate notions of public truth in Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture (2017); on bodily performativity and representation in Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015); on the inherent textuality in Ian Ward’s Law, Text, Terror (2009); and on the psychoanalytic and intertextual (legal, literal, and cultural) construction of sexual offences, offenders, and victims in David Gurnham’s Crime, Desire and Law’s Unconscious: Law, Literature and Culture (2014) and in Oren Ben-Dor’s edited collection Law and Art (2011), Desmond Manderson’s Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice (2000), and similarly, Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead’s Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (1999) in which law, justice, ethics, and aesthetics are shown to be deeply implicated in each other. Many persuasive arguments exposing and defending an often problematic legal aesthetic continue to be advanced by a variety of international legal scholars in a diverse range of aesthetic and literary articulations of the juridical, in order to reveal law as a literature which has a tendency to supress its literary character.

L aw in Literature: From Shakespeare to John Grisham The relationship between law and literature is not new as both are cultural practices and share a mutual interest in meaning-making; just as art is said to imitate life, law emulates life through invention and fiction. Consequently, like art, the creative power and imagination of law is intimately linked to the

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concept of artifice. Human relationships are arbitrarily created, quantified, and categorised, life and character are conferred upon formerly lifeless entities, and our perception of what is rightful, natural, fair, and just is changed via the art of legislation. However, those works of literature which address enduring aspects of the universal and pervasive ‘human condition’ have been of particular interest to lawmakers. Classical tragedy has provided one such useful medium in Western philosophy for the discussion of legal and relevant political theory. Nineteenth-century English lawyers often referred to the portrayals of law and the legal institutions by such writers as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens in their judgements. Along with more recent authors and essayists such as Albert Camus, Herman Melville, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka, their literary reflection on moral and political matters such as legality, governance, and justice has stood the test of time and continues to be of relevance to modern legal scholars and of particular interest to those affiliated to the law and literature movement. In many of Shakespeare’s plays, he reminds the audience that what has been artfully produced is insubstantial, simply evoked by his magic together with our imaginations. There are references to Prospero’s ‘airy charm’, and in Act V, Scene V, lines 23–28 of Macbeth, he declares, ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing’. Yet fiction serves as an invaluable repository of ideas and images about what law is, and is capable of offering an alternative vision of what law ought to be. Shakespeare’s plays were produced in an era of great economic and social transition characterised by political and religious unrest, which may go some way to explaining why his consideration of the themes of bigotry, xenophobia, alienation, racism, and the clash between religious cultures was nuanced and profound. One of his most complex plays The Merchant of Venice, for instance, provides an opportunity to examine numerous topics which are of significance to lawyers such as discrimination, inequality before the law, character, conduct, and motivation. It skilfully addresses inter alia the interpretation of particular expressions, the ability of words and actions to create meaning, the role of language in private contracts and public laws, the sanctity of oaths, the role of rhetoric or persuasive language in discovering the truth and in administering justice, the connection between law and revenge, law and fairness, and the importance of justice and mercy. Whilst The Merchant of Venice considers socio-cultural identity, native-alien conflict, and other legal obligations such as contracts and wills, offering deep insights into family and commercial law, plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, and The Tempest also explore the perennial question as to what

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extent liberty is protected by law. The Comedy of Errors addresses marital partnerships, class differences, and rights to legal participation, Cymbeline addresses the role of empire as a force of liberation and restraint as well as of cultural knowledge, whilst The Tempest documents Prospero’s quest for justice—touching on issues which are relevant to constitutional and administrative law. Each of these plays is concerned with the exercise of autonomy and personal freedom, yet all lead to the rather perturbing conclusion that only the powerful, wealthy, and white male classes are fully successful: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In spite of their historical situatedness, Shakespeare’s plays are highly relevant to the law of human rights, which is perhaps the principal modern legal arena that outlines and shapes individual liberty, and his characters present a challenge to the way in which the reader thinks about law and legal process. Not only of significance to the elucidation of what might be called ‘outsider jurisprudence’ and whether dealing with private or public law, via the Shakespearean prism law is revealed to be an inherently flawed structure in which liberty is condemned to be reduced or restricted. Shakespeare is a significant literary source for lawyers because he refers to law more than any other profession. The integration of clearly drawn legal characters, the work of lawyers, and the function of law into his plays situates them as a significant part of the cultural fabric of society. The content not only resonates with the legal realm of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century during which Shakespeare completed his major works, but also reflects contemporary legal reality in his portrayal of the legal world as enduringly complex and rooted in multiple often obscure traditions and myths. These are, importantly, imputed to be implicit and signified, rather than being overstated or embellished for dramatic effect. Plays such as Henry VI, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, which question more unequivocally the nature of law and its influence, illustrate the continuing pertinence of Shakespeare’s oeuvre to twenty-first century socio-legal scholarship. In addition to a variety of monographs, book chapters, and journal articles which have been written on the subtly coded portrayal of law and lawyers in Shakespeare’s plays, also particular emphasis has been given to the use of language and metaphor in such depictions. As a talented rhetorician, the works of Shakespeare can also be understood as a major contribution to the ancient and ongoing debate about the role of language, not least of all, in determining facts, character, and the role of legal interpretation in the search for truth and justice. As is the case with any language, particularly specialist languages, they require not only skilled interpreters but also translators and experts who

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understand how to read and decode that language. Consequently very good lawyers need to be versed in the art of reading the law. As White emphasised in his influential work, there exist only portrayals and accounts of the world which are formed and altered through text and image and that, as humans, these world-shaping accounts or stories are all we have (1999). In which case, for lawmakers to cultivate a deep and finely tuned capacity for moral reflection, they need a literary imagination and the mindset of a storyteller: We are never not in a story. History and human action only take on meaning and intelligibility within their narrative context and dramatic settings. There are many stories being imagined and enacted, but we can only listen to them and comprehend them within the vernacular contexts of other stories. Our conversations about these narratives are themselves located and scripted in deeper stories which determine their moral force and epistemological validity. (Hutchinson 1988, 13)

Lawyers are unable to remove themselves, in either ethical or jurisprudential terms, from the stories of others; which suggests the usefulness of inculcating in legal advocates a narrative empathy, by the sharing of feeling and common perspective stimulated by reading, hearing, seeing, or imagining narratives which articulate another individual’s position. At the beginning of Poetic Justice, Nussbaum claims that novels can play an important role in public reasoning because they lay the claim of another’s story. In support of the emotionally evocative narrative technique she argues, ‘I defend the literary imagination precisely because it seems to me an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’ (1995a, b, xvi). William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and modern authors such as John Grisham are renowned for foregrounding law in the moral and ethically complex stories they tell and in their sympathetic exploration of the status of the individual as legal subject. Dickens, for instance, was well regarded for his strong social conscience and used his fiction as a catalyst for debates about moral and social reform in the Victorian era. He articulated the connection between poverty, slums, and crime for a large and impressionable audience and was committed to writing novels which would ‘strip the roof of the inhabiting family like the roof of a house of cards’ in order to reveal what lay concealed within (Wiener 2004, 152). Robin West observes, in her recent essay on Literature, Culture and Law, that even ‘popular narrative fiction, television shows and films, no less than canonical literature, may, on occasion, have something true to teach us about law… its value in our lives, and the harms it can do’ (2008, 27, 28). Literature offers significant insights into the nature of law which are not easily found elsewhere. In the form of a film, play, novel, or other narrative

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fiction, literature presents an account of the lives of those who are different from ourselves, with whom we can engage empathetically through reading and at the same time acquire a critical perspective on a, perhaps previously unfamiliar, reality. Moreover, for the consciously interdisciplinary law and literature movement, the construction of law and society is essentially a reciprocal process which resides beyond legal doctrine and calls for a return to the humanities, specifically literature, in order to enliven the legal imagination and properly situate the ethical constituent of law.

Conclusion: The Enduring Literariness of Law Late modernity has witnessed the emergence of an increasingly complex and fragmented society in which the modern lawyer must be prepared to engage creatively with a diverse range of novel moral and ethical dilemmas. Acknowledging that this requires more than the bare application of technical legal expertise, contemporary legal scholarship has evolved a variety of contextual and interdisciplinary approaches, including ‘law and humanities’, ‘law and culture’, as well as ‘law and literature’. Although often treated as (es) strange(d) bedfellows, it is clear that law and literature share many characteristics; not least of all they both have expressive meaning whilst at the same time are inherently cultural traditions conditioned by institutional conventions, subject to social influences and often practical objectives. Literature, for example, is not merely a mirror to law: Peter Goodrich and Jacques Derrida have both insisted that law be treated as literature; in that the force of meaning and language work through literature and are, therefore, already embedded within law as a textual and communicative structure (Shaw 2014, 5). With the ability to encompass the entire collective cultural output of a society, literature has great importance as raw sensory data which can derive, shape and uphold the idea of both self and the other on which the legitimacy of law depends. Our comprehension of all worldly things is necessarily refracted via text and image, and only text and image. Such an understanding was at the heart of James Boyd White’s pioneering work on law and literature, in which he insisted that law must be always ‘translated’, like any language, and it is, therefore, essential that lawyers are trained in the art of reading and translating (1990, 257–68). In Sir Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering, one of the main characters Paulus Pleydell Esq. (described as a ‘good scholar, an excellent lawyer and a worthy man’) shows an acquaintance his extensive home library filled with books, maintaining, ‘a lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he

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may venture to call himself an architect’ (1954/1815, xxxvii). It is suggested that the influence of literary works on the legal imagination, and their potential to extend the human capacity for understanding and critical judgement, posits literature as a form of ethical codicil to law. A lawyer is always at best more than a lawyer, just as law is never simply law; ‘the words of the law contain more than they say… they have anima, spirit.., enigmas, things half said, references to erudition and history, plurality and invention, congeries and collections that could not and cannot be reduced to definitions, black letters, mere rules’ (Goodrich 2011, 270–71). While their interpretive strategies and focus differ, proponents of both the ‘law in literature’ and the ‘law as literature’ approaches agree that the study of literary forms and application of the legal imagination in adjudication is likely to produce better lawyers. In recent times scholars of law and literature have turned away from longstanding notions of the juridical in order to establish new extra-legal ways of discerning the law, thereby laying bare its potential, power, and internal mechanisms. The challenge is for law to be perceived as an art which can be informed by the humanistic, anti-formalistic, mind-expanding possibilities of literature. Scholars of literary jurisprudence have sought to examine law from the outside, to compare and contrast it to other intellectual pursuits, and to see what is offered by literature but absented from legal analysis and texts. They have championed a variety of literary forms as a rich source of material which both serves to expose the harshness of conventional legal doctrine and allows us to imagine a situation in advance and work out its consequences. The law and literature relationship is, therefore, a particularly valuable locus for scrutinising the wider impact of narrative on improving the cold abstractions of law, particularly in relation to its empathic response to suffering. As Robin West has pointed out, the body of narrative, imaginative literature conveys to us something that law and other forms of legal scholarship do not— about the meaning of law in the lives of its subjects, its agents, and its adjudicators, as well as the meaning of law in the lives of those that law intentionally ignores, subjugates, marginalises, or excludes (2008, 4, 5). The application of narrative empathy in legal reasoning encourages a sympathetic consideration of those circumstances which impact on socially marginalised groups, against the stereotyping and stultifying effects of arbitrary rule formalism. In Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, Weisberg proposes that only literature can reanimate the ethical dimension of law, as aesthetic integrity inevitably leads to moral integrity or in other words, ‘no bad judicial opinion can be well-written’ (1992, 81–83). From this perspective it would seem that law needs, now more than ever, a jurisprudence of good prose rather than bad principles.

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Bibliography Atwood, M. 1985. Justice in the Literary Tradition. In Justice Beyond Orwell, ed. R.S.  Abella and M.L.  Rothman, 515. Montreal: Les Editions Yvon Blais Inc. (Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice). Bacon, F. 1960. The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (The World’s Classics Series). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baudrillard, J. 2001. Impossible Exchange. London: Verso. Ben-Dor, O. 2011. Law and Art: Justice, Ethics and Aesthetics. London: Routledge. Butler, J.  2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cardozo, B.N. 1931. Law and Literature. In Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Cover, R.M. 1983. The Supreme Court 1982 Term—Foreword: Nomos and Narrative. Harvard Law Review 97 (4): 9. Douzinas, C., and L. Nead. 1999. Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giddens, T. 2015. Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law. London: Routledge. Goodrich, P. 1986. Reading the Law: Critical Introduction to Legal Method and Techniques. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1987. Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 1996. Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. Europe in America: Grammatology, Legal Studies, and the Politics of Transmission. Columbia Law Review 101 (8): 2033–2084. ———. 2007. The New Casuistry. Critical Inquiry 33 (4): 700. ———. 2011. Flores quae faciunt coronam or the Flowers of Common Law. In Law and Art: Justice, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. O. Ben-Dor. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Legal Emblems and the Art of Law: Obiter Depicta as the Vision of Governance. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Gurnham, D. 2014. Crime, Desire and Law’s Unconscious: Law, Literature and Culture. London: Routledge. Hutchinson, A.C. 1988. Dwelling on the Threshold: Critical Essays on Modern Legal Thought. Toronto: Carswell. Manderson. 2000. Songs without Words: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Moran, L.J. 2012. Legal Studies after the Cultural Turn: A Case Study of Judicial Research. In Social Research after the Cultural Turn, ed. S. Roseneil and S. Frosh, 124–143. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelken, D. 1993. The Truth about Law’s Truth. In European Yearbook for the Sociology of Law, ed. A. Febbrajo and D. Nelken, 87–163. Milan: Giuffrè.

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Nussbaum, M.C. 1995a. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1995b. Poets as Judges: Judicial Rhetoric and the Judicial Imagination. University of Chicago Law Review 62 (4): 1477–1519. Plato. 1961. Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by E.  Hamilton and H.  Cairns. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press. Posner, R. 1988. Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sarat, A. 2004. Law in the Liberal Arts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Scott, W. 1954. Guy Mannering, 259. London and New York, NY: Dent and Dutton. Shaw, J.J.A. 2012. The Continuing Relevance of Ars Poetica to Legal Scholarship and the Modern Lawyer. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 25 (1): 71–93. ———. 2014. Introduction to the Special Issue on Law and Literature. Liverpool Law Review: A Journal of Contemporary Legal and Social Policy Issues 35 (1): 1–6. ———. 2017. Aesthetics of Law and Literary License: An Anatomy of the Legal Imagination. Liverpool Law Review: A Journal of Contemporary Legal and Social Policy Issues 38 (2): 83–105. Shaw, J.J.A., and H.J.  Shaw. 2015. The Politics and Poetics of Spaces and Places: Mapping the Multiple Geographies of Identity in a Cultural Posthuman Era. Journal of Organisational Transformation & Social Change 12 (3): 234–256. Trotsky, L. 1925. The Social Roots and the Social Function of Literature. In Literature and Revolution, trans. R. Strunsky. London: Allen & Unwin. Ward, I. 2009. Law, Text, Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weisberg, R.H. 1992. Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, 81–83. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ———. 2011. Law and Literature as Survivor. In Teaching Law and Literature, ed. A. Sarat, C.O. Frank, and M. Anderson, 40–60. New York, NY: MLA. Weizman, E. 2017. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. West, R. 2008. Literature, Culture and Law. Georgetown Law Faculty Working Papers, No. 75. White, J.B. 1973. The Legal Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1985. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1990. Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Writing and Reading in Philosophy, Law and Poetry. In Law and Literature: Current Legal Issues Volume 2, ed. M. Freeman and A. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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———. 2012. Justice in Tension: An Expression of Law and the Legal Mind. No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 9: 1–19. Accessed November 27, 2016. http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/NoFo9WHITE.html. Wiener, M.J. 2004. Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wigmore, J.H. 1908. A List of One Hundred Legal Novels. Illinois Law Review 2: 574.

26 Politics and Literature Michael Keren

Introduction In his documentary “Hypernormalization,” Adam Curtis stresses the uncertainty and confusion in the contemporary world. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control, he claims, and those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed, as are all of us. Curtis explains the paralysis by the retreat of the West into “a simplified and often completely fake version of the world.”1 The film shows how an untrue interpretation of events, spread by politicians, financiers, and technological utopians, has been willingly adopted by whole populations living in a make-believe world. The tendency to adopt simplified and fake versions of the world has been noted since the rise of mass politics. In the mid-nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard warned of neglect of the truth by the masses. Wherever the crowd is, he wrote, “there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that ‘the crowd’ received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.”2 And in 1930, José Ortega y Gasset spoke of the danger posed to European civilization by masses lacking a sense of reality. “Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it.” Ortega characterized the masses by their contentment, that is, M. Keren (*) University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_26

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an “inborn, root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, without any grave limitations.”3 Although the crowds of the interwar era have partly been contained with the defeat of Fascism in the Second World War and the fall of Communism in the revolutions of 1989–1990, the role of the masses in politics has not decreased and, as Christopher Lasch has shown in The Revolt of the Elites, corporate and professional elites have not been more devoted to the value of truth.4 These elites include academic scholars who adopted the postmodernist claim that “it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all.”5 What were once seen as facts about the world to be explored by historians and social scientists had turned into texts to be exposed for the power structures behind them. The dismissal of facts has not remained in academia; even media figures in charge of fact-checking and reporting have expressed their scepticism about reality. Consider the following announcement by CNN pundit Scottie Nell Hughes: [P]eople that say facts are facts—they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way— it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, of facts.6

The betrayal of the truth by elites and masses in recent years has been fortified by the rise of mass media and digital media encouraging a culture of ­contentment. At the turn of the millennium, politics in many countries shifted from smoke-filled rooms to open arenas where, quoting political scientist Benjamin Barber, millions of individuals are “Lolling in [their] underwear in front of an electronic screen while accessing with dancing fingers the pixels generated by anonymous strangers across the world.”7 In virtual reality, where the human mind is allowed to float away and individuals fall in love with avatars and get into family feuds with nicknames, life may indeed seem easy, plentiful, and without grave limitations. Truth, the product of restraints, limitations, and rules of inquiry, becomes the first victim of virtual reality, which is why the present era has been called “The Post-Truth Era.”8 In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries chose “Post-Truth” as the word of the year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The choice of the word has been justified by the rise of social media as a source of information leading to growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment.9 No wonder, then, that in an era in which the distinctions between real and virtual, true and untrue,

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fact and fiction are getting blurred, the world seems inexplicable and out of control. In a situation that seems out of control, humans hold on to myths, that is, imaginary tales giving structure, meaning, and purpose to an uncertain and confusing reality. And since the tales are mostly formed, inspired, and spread by those in power, and the priests, poets, and scholars serving them, they promise redemption by graceful divine forces and the political leaders embodying them. In “The Archetypes of Literature,” Northrop Frye explored the origins of myths: “In the solar circle of the day, the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life, there is a single pattern of significance, out of which myth constructs a central narrative around a figure who is partly the sun, partly vegetative fertility and partly a god or archetypical human being.”10 The great myths of creation, paradise lost, the flood, or the resurrection are literary narratives composed by multiple authors of extraordinary imagination across diverse cultures, whose fiction touched the human mind from ancient times to the present. Thus, modern national movements are making use of the myth of homecoming in Homer’s Odyssey, and contemporary political leaders present themselves as Messianic saviours. In turbulent times, such ancient myths are serving as sources of tranquillity and contentment. However, when fact and fiction become indistinct, fiction is undertaking a new task: reminding us of the constraints of reality. This task may seem paradoxical in light of the definition of fiction as imaginary literature, but as Michael Mack has shown, this is not necessarily a paradox: “Literature’s truthfulness consists precisely in its consistent inconsistency: in its persistent alertness vis-à-vis fictions of certainty. From this novel perspective, literature is not merely fictitious because it has the implicit capacity of disrupting the fictitious.”11 The role of literature in disrupting the fictitious and restoring a sense of reality becomes easier to grasp when we remember the fictitious nature of much of contemporary politics. Many political concepts prevailing in the public sphere such as “Cold War,” “Domino Theory,” “War on Terror,” or “Clash Of Civilizations” represent reality as much as any literary metaphor, a point forcefully demonstrated in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. The novel is a fictional tale of 16-year-old Pi Patel, an Indian boy finding himself with a 450-pound Bengal tiger on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean. Martel presents his tale as a statement about reality: “That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?”12 Life of Pi is a simplified model of the world, which is no more simplified than any of the concepts mentioned above. Martel admits that his tale omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others. Yet if we are to think

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s­eriously about the world and act effectively in it, he writes, “some sort of simplified map of reality, some theory, concept, model, paradigm, is necessary.”13 The novel, imagining a state of coexistence between the boy and the tiger, provides fresh insights on contemporary political reality and creative paths of action. My argument is that fiction enlightens us about political reality. In a world in which millions are fed misinformation on social media, and media-savvy politicians turn into demigods, literature, at least some of it, serves as a reminder of the real, the true, and the factual. A case in point occurred in January 2017 when Amazon announced a sudden surge in sales of George Orwell’s 1984 in the days following President Donald Trump’s Counsellor Kellyanne Conway’s use of the term “alternative facts” in a television interview. Although the sales were probably motivated by a clever advertisement campaign, they were also explained by the need of individuals to understand the implications of the new situation in which a government official offered “alternative facts,” by considering Orwell’s “Newspeak,” the language of the totalitarian state.14 To support the argument about the role of fiction in restoring a sense of reality, I analyse three literary works on the three questions that have preoccupied political philosophy ever since: who governs, on what normative base, and where society is heading. I discuss Elsa Morante’s novel History,15 José Saramago’s novel Blindness,16 and Franz Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis”17 to demonstrate the challenges posed by these powerful tales to common myths prevailing in the contemporary public sphere about these questions.

Who Governs? In his survey of the history of political ideas, Mulford Sibley emphasizes the belief prevailing from ancient to modern times in fate, fortune, and other forces beyond human control as the actual governors. The ancient Hebrews believed in the direct rule of God, Plato spoke of accident legislating, and Machiavelli, who gave all power to the prince, recognized nevertheless the overwhelming role of fortune. Political thinkers have been aware that whoever seems to govern may not be in full control. As Sibley puts it, “an ostensibly democratic assembly might be dominated by the military or by the wealthy; or formal rule by an aristocracy might be belied by the over-reaching influence of the mob.”18

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It is not easy, however, to determine who governs because those in power are also in control of how they are presented to, or hidden from, the public. Political leaders from ancient emperors to contemporary officials were always skilled in the use of myths about power. For example, in The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes a Latin American dictator known to his people only by a white glove waving at them from a motorcade, which turns him in their eyes into the master of the universe. Donald Trump coming on stage in the Republican National Convention of July 2016 within a cloud of fog backlit by blinding lights conveyed a similar image. Such techniques help turn humans into superhumans, a process supported by historians whose fascination with charisma, as Edward Shils calls it,19 made thugs like Mussolini and Hitler seem greater than life. History by Italian novelist Elsa Morante deals not with the thugs but with thuggery which exposes Mussolini for the mediocre opportunist he was, a compound of all the flotsam of the worst Italy, and Hitler as a poor maniac, viciously obsessed by death. The novel tells the saga of the mid-twentieth century from the perspective of Ida Ramundo, a mother attempting to protect her little Giuseppe during the years of the Second World War, which removes any fascination from the historical narrative. At the beginning of the book, we learn of a dream Ida had, which returned at intervals with several variations: “she saw herself running in a place gloomy with soot or with smoke (factory, or city, or slum), clutching in her bosom a little doll, naked and all a vermilion color, as if it had been dipped in red paint” (33). The mother protecting her child, who will only live to the age of 6, is not sharing in the cycles of defeat and victory around her. Even when the war ends, Ida is still clutching the child in her bosom, which provides a different perspective on the victory than found in the world leaders’ victory speeches. The Duce and his supporting cast had been buried, and the Royal Family had packed its bags; but those who pulled the strings remained backstage, even after the scenery changed. The landowners still held the land, the industrialists the machinery and the factories, the officers their ranks, the bishops their dioceses. And the rich were fed at the expense of the poor, who then aimed, in their turn, at taking the place of the rich, according to the general rule. But neither among those rich, nor among those poor was the place of Iduzza Ramundo, who belonged, truly, to a third species. It is a species that lives (perhaps endangered?) and dies, and gives no news of itself, except at times, perhaps, in the crime reports. (540)

From the third species’ perspective, the historical events of the twentieth century, recorded at the beginning of each chapter, take on a new meaning.

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For example: “1900–1905 The first scientific discoveries concerning the structure of matter mark the beginning of the atomic century…1914 Outbreak of the First World War, between the two opposing blocs of power, later joined by other allies or satellites. The new (or perfected) products of the armament industry go into action, among them tanks and gases…1919–1920 Representing the victorious Powers and their allies, seventy people are seated at the peace table…1934–1936 The long march of Mao Tse-tung across China (7,500 miles) to elude the preponderant forces of the nationalist government (Kuomintang). Of the 130,000 men of the Red Army, 30,000 survive.” The dryer the language, the clearer the irony that strips the historical events from any sign of glory. The irony becomes anything but amusing when Ida, who is partly Jewish, is confronted in 1941 in Italy by a German soldier described as “the true and recognizable face of horror” (19). The banality of evil is presented here in a forceful way. Philosopher Hannah Arendt who coined the term20 had difficulty in attributing the banality of evil to a high-ranking official like Adolf Eichmann, but the novelist uses effective literary tools to present the German soldier, who is clearly “the true and recognizable face of horror,” as a lowlife. “For example, in contrast with his martial stride, he had a desperate expression in his eyes. His face betrayed an incredible immaturity, although he was six feet tall, more or less. And his uniform—a really comical thing for a soldier of the Reich, particularly in those early days of the war—though new and fitting his thin body tightly, was short at the waist and in the sleeves, exposing his thick wrists, rough and innocent, like a worker’s or peasant’s” (13). When Ida, who returns home with her shopping bags, sees the soldier and realizes this is the terrible rendezvous preordained for her since the beginning of the world, he is offended, feeling the unknown lady’s disgust is unjust. The encounter becomes more horrifying the more the novelist turns it into a circus. Resolutely, on a gallant-bandit impulse, he took the bundles and shopping bags from her hands, and with trapeze-artist’s leap, he preceded her forthwith up the stairs. At each landing, he stopped to wait for her, like a son who, coming home with his slow mother, acts as a scout. And she followed him, stumbling at every step, like a petty thief dragging himself behind the bearers of the cross. (69)

Morante removes the glory from the mighty rulers of the universe and exposes the myths by which they control the masses, thus providing a realistic account of the origins of ideologies like Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism. As we follow the growing up of Ida’s 15-year-old son Nino, Giuseppe’s elder brother, Fascism is shown to be nothing but the expression of a teenager’s rage. To Nino, “Fatherlands and Duces, and the whole theatre of the world, were reduced to a farce, which had value only because it agreed with his rage

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to live” (112). Nino radiates arrogance, compassion, supremacy, and freedom. He is an exploiter, opportunist, and profiteer, but his behaviour is no different from that of many other teenagers asking their mothers for money to buy cigarettes. “Come on, Ma, don’t give me the same old whine! Five lousy lire won’t ruin you. Come on, cough it up, will you? You’re getting to be worse than a Jew!” (111). This anti-Semitic remark is, for Nino, just an ordinary slang expression with no real meaning, and so are the other words he shouts: “I’ll end up Chief of the Black Brigades. As soon as I’m old enough, I’m going off to fight FOR THE FATHERLAND AND FOR THE DUCE!” (112). Although fiction cannot, and should not, replace scholarly devices such as Theodore Adorno’s “F-Scale,”21 by which the propensity to follow Fascism was measured by personality variables, History draws a convincing narrative of a Fascist’s personality. The readers are introduced, for instance, to Nino’s room in which an enlarged photograph occupies a place of honour on the wall portraying “a little hoodlum of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, wrapped in sumptuous camel’s hair coat, which he wore as if it were a flag. Between the fingers of his right hand you could vaguely discern a cigarette’s whiteness, and his left foot rested on the running-board of a custom-built sports car (parked there at random by some unknown owner), with the masterful attitude of tiger hunters, in the great forests” (70). The portrayal of the Fascist as a restless teenager does not make him less violent. In Nino’s room, we find a shotgun, and he develops a quarrelsome character. Once he arrives home with the knuckles of his right hand bleeding because he had beaten up somebody who insulted the Duce. On another occasion, he gets into a fight with “two shits he’d never seen before” (165). Adorno’s study has been widely criticized for failing to predict why a person who measures high on the F-scale would necessarily follow Fascism rather than, say, Stalinism, but Morante has saved this critique because her Nino moves with no difficulty from one ideology to another. He goes to war to fight for the Duce and then becomes a devout Stalinist. After a while he realizes that Stalin is just another leader like the rest, “and wherever there are Leaders, there’s always the same stink! Ask anyone who’s been there, in the kingdom of Siberia! The people work their ass off, and he licks his lips!” (451–52). When the Second World War is over and the Cold War begins, Nino follows yet another ideology: Capitalism. Stalin and the other Big Cheeses, it’s all one system, they play footsies with each other to screw everybody else and to screw each other, too. And Nino doesn’t give a shit about them. Nino wants to live, he wants to enjoy all life and all the world, all the universe! with the suns, moons and planets!!! Now, 1946, it’s America’s great moment…. (452)

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Just as he used to beat up folks who did not respect the Duce and did not allow a bad word to be said about Stalin, now Nino wants to become a super billionaire and go off to America in an extra-deluxe plane. He can walk this path because, in this novel, the answer to the question “who governs?” is less nuanced than the answers given in the history of political ideas. Whatever the ideology they are propounding, the powerful are always those who have the skill of catering to Nino’s rage. Morante’s contribution to political philosophy lies in her approach to Political Messianism, that is, the belief that there is hope at the end of the road. A common myth advanced by both religion and politics is the faith in a state of moral perfection that would bring history, including political history marked by disputes, wars, and sufferings, to a happy ending. Jacob Talmon associated Political Messianism with Rousseau’s romantic fantasies, which nourished both the French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century and the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. But the Messianic quest exceeds totalitarianism and can also be found in such works as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, in which the notion of a paradise promised by Communism has been adopted as a model for the post-­Communist era. Giuseppe is drawn in the novel as a Messianic character. The scene of his birth resembles that of Moses found in a basket and of Christ born in a barn. “The infant was so small he could fit comfortably in the midwife’s two hands, as in a basket. And after having been proved himself by the heroic enterprise of coming into the world on his own, he hadn’t even the voice to cry. He announced his presence with a whimper so faint he seemed a little lamb, born last and forgotten in the straw” (164). Born from rape of a Jewish woman by a Nazi soldier, he goes through the horrors of the six years of his life, 1941–1947, touching-not-touching them, like a divine spirit. It begins when Ida brings the baby home in darkness, fearing his first encounter with Nino. Yet, when Nino, still wearing his Fascist uniform pants, sees the baby in the bedroom, he bends over the cot “with little peals of rejoicing laughter, which already seemed a dialogue… And there was Giuseppe, who looked at him as if he recognized him already. His gaze, till then dreamy, misted in infancy, seemed to express in this moment the first thought of his life: a thought of supreme festive understanding” (168). Throughout the novel, Giuseppe accompanies the historical events. When Nino goes out to fight for the Duce with a haughty and aggressive expression on his face, the two brothers are shaking hands “in a real pact of honor and importance” (182). In a shelter for refugees in which his mother spends the war years, we find him sleeping naked between two armed warriors. When three German soldiers are hammering violently on the door with the butts of

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their guns, the child goes towards them, pleased at receiving a visit, and offers them leftover cabbage. By describing this saintly soul, the novelist does not spare us the horrors of the Second World War. To the contrary, when a news vendor amuses the child by making a hat from a newspaper, like a Carabinieri’s headgear, and puts it on his small head, the readers are exposed to the gruesome news and pictures in the newspaper. Elsa Morante thus informs us that while theologians and political philosophers are debating the coming of the Messianic age, the Messiah has already been here, between 1941 and 1947, but made no difference. To use the concluding sentence of the novel: “…and history continues…” (734).

The Normative Base of Government Ever since the challenge posed by Thrasymachus that justice is none but the will of the mighty, as told in Plato’s Republic, political thinkers have searched for the normative base of government. Can a principle be formulated, they asked, that legitimizes the rule of government, and the obligation of its subjects, that goes beyond the power of the mighty, who impose their will and define it as just? Two main normative bases were proposed: rulers were associated either with a divine right, sanctioned by God, or with implicit consent, the product of human reason, known as the “social contract.” Although the divine right grew from religion and the social contract idea from rational calculations, both bases of legitimacy were myths, that is, fictitious narratives used and manipulated by rulers throughout history. When José Saramago’s Blindness was published in 1995, it was widely praised as a phantasmagoria. The fantastic tale of a whole society falling into a state of blindness, however, was a major step in the history of political ideas. Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner, challenges the myths of God and human reason and asks what happens to a society lacking both. In the late years of the twentieth century, he does not identify a divine power that would sanction earthly governments, and he casts doubt on the ability of humans to achieve social order by reason. Blindness thus shatters the illusion that we have somehow coped with Thrasymachus’s challenge. Although the novel is not placed in any specific country, it is rooted in a familiar urban setting. Here is how it begins: The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt…. (1)

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When the light turns to green, a car at the head of the middle lane does not move and the cars behind it frantically sound their horns. It turns out that the driver has suddenly lost his vision, as will soon the whole society. Saramago grounds this allegory firmly in our daily experience: “the drivers further back who did not know what was going on, protested at what they thought was a common accident, a smashed headlight, a dented fender, nothing to justify this upheaval. Call the police, they shouted and get that old wreck out of the way” (2). A Good Samaritan drives the blind driver home, helps him to his apartment, and steals his car. The reader is assured that this person is not a big thief but a little thief who grabbed the opportunity. Then the thief becomes blind too and soon he and his victim will find themselves in an asylum where they, and all other kind souls and petty thieves who comprise human society, will hopelessly try to construct a social contract. The hopelessness of the social contract stems not from the evil nature of humanity; the moral conscience that so many thoughtless people offended against and many more have rejected, writes Saramago, is something that exists and has always existed. It is just that with the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, “we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears” (17). In this novel, the blood and tears are not necessarily associated with the grand events of history, such as the World Wars or Hiroshima, but with the very simple experiences we go through daily, as when an eye doctor tries to report the outbreak of a blindness epidemic to a civil servant at the Ministry of Health: “after much pleading, the telephone operator had agreed to put him through. The man wanted to know more details before passing him on to his immediate superior…The man’s insolence was like a slap in the face. Only after a few minutes had passed, had he regained enough composure to tell his wife how rudely he had been treated” (31). And so it goes on, as does life, when all people, except the doctor’s wife, gradually lose their eyesight and are placed in an asylum. Saramago’s emphasis on the everyday experiences individuals go through when they are trying to reach a government office by phone or to hide their condition of blindness from a neighbour restores a sense of realism to social contract theory. He turns the consent of the governed into fiction and the difficulty to reach any consent into an unavoidable fact of life. However insecure the blind when they are pushed into the asylum, the Hobbesian notion that their insecurity may lead to a covenant becomes inconceivable. The less secure the internees, the more distant the prospects of orderly conduct, as reflected in the scene in which they are brutally pushed into the asylum:

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A number of them fell and were trampled underfoot. Confined in the narrow aisles, the new arrivals gradually began filling the spaces between the beds, and here, like a ship caught in a storm that has finally managed to reach port, they took possession of their berths, in this case their beds, insisting that there was no room for anyone else, and that latecomers should find themselves a place elsewhere. (67)

The narrative of the formation of the social contract tells of a condition of all against all which leads to the realization that some form of social order needs to be formed to restore security. This narrative is followed in Blindness up to a point. It begins with arguments about the allocation of beds: Standing there, the doctor’s wife watched the two blind men who were arguing, she noticed they made no gestures, that they barely moved their bodies, having quickly learned that only their voice and hearing now served any purpose, true, they had their arms, that they could fight, grapple, come to blows, as the saying goes, but a bed swapped by mistake was not worth so much fuss, if only all life’s deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement, Number two is mine, yours is number three, let that be understood once and for all, Were it not for the fact that we’re blind this mix-up would never have happened, You’re right, our problem is that we’re blind. The doctor’s wife said to her husband, The whole world is right here. (97)

Why aren’t the blind, who are not described by the author as evil by nature, capable of reaching a reasonable solution such as “Number two is mine, yours is number three”? The novel does not provide a firm answer but leads us through various attempts at negotiating a fair allocation of resources, as in the following quotation in which we learn that the failure of the negotiations stems from mere contingencies: After a few minutes one of the blind men said, There’s one thing that bothers me, What’s that, How are we going to distribute the food, As we did before, we know how many we are, the rations are counted, everyone receives his share, it’s the simplest and fairest way, But it didn’t work, some internees were left without any food, And there were also those who got double rations, The distribution was badly organized, It will always be badly organized unless people show some respect and discipline. (98)

The difficulties stemming from lack of respect and discipline preceding the distribution process become clear when the process is messed up by conflicting interests, as when food packages are thrown at the doorsteps of the asylum and the negotiations between the internees over the allocation of the food come to a standstill because every ward has only its own good in mind:

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As I see it, the best solution would be to share the food out in equal parts throughout the wards, then each internee can be self-sufficient. Who spoke, It was me, Who’s me, Me, which ward are you from, From ward two, Who would have believed such cunning, since ward two has fewer patients such an arrangement would be in their advantage and they would get more to eat than us, since our ward is full…What we should do is to take all the food to the refectory, each ward elects three of its inmates to do the sharing out, so that with six people counting there would be little danger of abuse and deception, And how are we to know that they are telling the truth when the others say how many there are in their ward, We are dealing with honest people…My dear fellow, I don’t know about honest but we’re certainly hungry. (99)

Contrary to social contract theories of former centuries devised by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, and John Rawls, all of whom propose a tale with a happy ending in the best tradition of literary and cinematic fiction, Saramago restores a sense of realism by describing in detail the failure of individuals in urban societies to coexist owing to the lack of an initial sense of respect and discipline. When God and reason are absent, brute force prevails. Although some freedom is allowed in the asylum, life is governed by the loudspeaker—a medium representing a form of rule that is one-­ directional, anonymous, and absolute. “At that moment, a loud, gruff voice was raised, by someone whose tone suggested he was used to giving orders. It came from a loudspeaker fixed above the door by which they had entered. The word attention was uttered three times” (42). Voices uttering “attention, attention, attention” are familiar from films about military camps and similar settings; in this novel, they are used as a literary means to highlight the consequences of the failure of society to establish a normative base of governance. As the plot develops, human behaviour becomes more and more gruesome, and it could be asked, of course, whether this is the only path that can be expected, but the scenario offered here makes it hard to imagine where the happy ending would come from. “The time has come to decide what we want to do,” says the doctor’s wife, the only one who keeps her eyesight. Having observed the increasing incidents of deceit, abuse, rape, and murder in society, she concludes that the entire population had fallen into a state of blindness, which resulted in its inability to assure personal security and supply material needs such as water and electricity. She warns that something must be done to avoid chaos. In the discussion that follows, everyone agrees that some form of government is needed, but the question comes up what use would be “a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness” (255). Reading Saramago’s Blindness in a Post-Truth

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era, this phantasmagoria restores a sense of reality by reminding us what the status quo entails: “Perhaps humanity will manage to live without eyes, but then it will cease to be humanity” (255).

Where Society Is Heading Franz Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis” about Gregor Samsa, who awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and found himself transformed into a gigantic insect, continues a long tradition of mythological tales about the transformation of humans into all sorts of creatures. The story follows the events unfolding in the Samsa household from the perspective of the family member who has lost his human body but not his consciousness, which raises fundamental questions about the relations between the body and the mind. Today, when Kafka’s allegory, written a century ago, takes shape in cyberspace, where the human mind can freely float in virtual worlds, it is useful to return to the story to question common myths about the brave new world we are entering and understand its domestic, social, and political implications. In her 1999 study, How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles discusses the changes we go through in the Internet age. Referring to the cybernetic revolution begun by Norbert Wiener and others, in which physical, biological, and social systems are viewed as information patterns, she reminds us that information, as a disembodied entity that can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components, makes it easy to equate humans and computers. Thus, the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature. As she explains it, “The posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an evitability of life… There are no longer essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanisms and biological organisms, robot technology and human goals.”22 As frightening as our transformation into some other creatures has always been, the present metamorphosis of humans into “cyborgs,” defined as persons whose functioning becomes overly dependent on silicon-based electronic components, is running rather smoothly. Glued to our digital devices, much of our daily activity is conducted in cyberspace and many of our interactions with others, be they people or robots, are virtual rather than corporeal. These developments are seen by many as a blessing. In Posthuman Metamorphosis, Bruce Clarke writes that the virtualization of the body is not

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a form of disembodiment but a re-creation. To him, “the neo-cybernetic posthuman is the human metamorphosed by reconnection to the worldly and systemic conditions of its evolutionary possibility.”23 Others are less enthusiastic. Andrew Evans admits that the Internet provides quality experiences in the virtual domain which make us bemoan their lack in real life, such as the opportunity given to people who were previously ignored to be heard. He warns, however, of the control programmers have on online interactions and its potential for brainwashing, which may lead to “techno totalitarianism.”24 Although it is early to tell whether the digital age will turn out to be a blessing or a curse, it is important to discuss the posthuman condition in separation from the myths spread either by the vendors of digital technology or by technological luddites. Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is a starting point as it provides deep insights into the consequences of the separation between body and mind. The imaginary tale of Gregor Samsa who becomes an insect makes it difficult to discuss the cyborg phenomenon, as we often do, without considering some mundane facts about reality. Kafka’s short story reminds us that dramatic transformations of the kind we go through today do not change the entire world as we know it. Gregor, still in bed, waving helplessly his numerous legs, finds out that he is within the four familiar walls of his regular human bedroom. His mood is affected by the weather, as it always was; his eyes turn to the window and the overcast sky, and raindrops beating on the window gutter make him melancholic. Moreover, his new condition does not liberate him from the hardships of life: the irritating work as a salesman, the trouble of constant travelling and worrying about train connections, the irregular meals, and the casual acquaintances that never become intimate friends. Such constraints cannot be expected to disappear when a person creates an avatar on “Second Life,” for example, or spends long nights on the Internet in virtual role playing. When Gregor wakes up, he engages in fantasies about such matters as resigning his job once he has enough money to pay back his parents’ debts, but then the alarm clock goes off and it is time to get up and face real life. Studies conducted on addicts to “Second Life” and other virtual environments have revealed symptoms like those shown by Gregor Samsa: loss of the sense of time, hazy sight, fatigue, obsession with oneself, guilt feelings, and suicidal thoughts. Internet addicts were found to be mostly unmarried young men escaping their daily lives. They were also found to be frustrated over the loss of family and friends, which is not an obvious finding as one would expect digital relationships to compensate for needs and desires that are not satisfied offline. But this is not the case, as Kafka shows in “The Metamorphosis.” The long description of Gregor’s difficulty to lift himself out of bed and walk

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down the stairs ends by his fall upon all his numerous legs. This position, natural for an insect, gives him temporary satisfaction: “Hardly was he down when he experienced for the first time this morning a sense of physical well-­ being; his legs had firm ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy; they even strove to carry him along in whatever direction he chose, and he was inclined to believe that a final relief from all his sufferings was at hand” (68). But he is immediately reminded of the real world when his mother notices him in his new appearance and cries “Help, for God’s sake, help!” (69). In other words, homo sapiens is both body and mind, and there is little promise in the separation of the two or in the subjection of one to the other. This point applies to the use of language. Gregor is shocked when he first hears his own voice, “unmistakably his own voice but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, which left the words in their clear shape only for the first moment and then rose up reverberating around them to destroy their sense, so that one could not be sure one had heard them rightly” (56). The words he utters seem clear enough to him, even clearer than before, perhaps because his ear had grown accustomed to them, as is the case with users of SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and the like, but Gregor is no longer listened to and his attempts to communicate end in disaster. Nor does it help when he tries to adjust by confining his speech to a short exchange of words. Although some linguists see some promise in Internet lingo, many question the ability of humans to communicate in the long run by such acronyms as “LOL,” “G4U,” and so on. As Lawrence Bains writes, “Losing polysyllabic words will mean a corresponding loss of eloquence and precision. Today, many of the most widely read texts emanate from blogs and social networking sites, such as Facebook. Authors of these sites may be non-readers who have little knowledge of effective writing and may have never developed an ear for language. Over the next century, a rise in “tone deaf ” writing seems certain”.25 “The Metamorphosis” may be read as a statement about the futility of communications between humans which do not involve what theologian Martin Buber had called “meeting.” In his essay, I and Thou,26 Buber defines meeting, which he sees as the essence of living, as a dialogue between humans and other humans (or between humans and nature, or humans and God), which involves their whole being. In Kafka’s story, the only family member who remains loyal to Gregor is his 17-year-old sister Grete, if only because of the “enthusiastic temperament of girls her age” (85). However, since she cannot relate to her brother’s full self, the relationship becomes cool and distant:

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His sister no longer gave a second thought now to what might especially please him, but in the morning and at noon before she went to work hurriedly pushed into his room with her foot any food that was available, and in the evening cleared it out again with one sweep of the broom, heedless of whether it had been nibbled at, or—as most frequently happened—left completely untouched. (95)

The relationship turns into tragedy when Gregor is attracted to Grete’s beautiful violin playing. Music is a universal language that Gregor can supposedly enjoy even in his new position. As the text reads: “Was he an animal since music so moved him?” (100). He thus lowers his head to the ground in the hope that his eyes would meet Grete’s eyes, but soon we learn that the desire for universal love and eternal beauty, and the meeting of souls alone, cannot substitute for the care, attention, and responsibility that bond people with their loved ones in the real world. The sister decides that Gregor can no longer be treated as a brother. “I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature,” she says, “we must try to get rid of it” (103). The lesson: the meeting between humans cannot be devoid of the corporeal and spiritual components that make up a person’s complex identity. And Gregor realizes it: He thought of his family with tenderness and love. The conviction that he must disappear was one that he held even more strongly than his sister, if that were possible. In this state of empty and peaceful meditation he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning. The first broadening of light in the world outside the window just entered his consciousness. Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath. (106)

Conclusion Elsa Morante’s History, José Saramago’s Blindness, and Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” illustrate the power of fiction in restoring a sense of reality to contemporary political philosophy. They remind us that the question “who governs?” cannot be answered by relying on the rhetoric of political leaders, that social contract theory needs updating when applied to modern urban societies, and that it is worthwhile to rethink certain notions about where society is heading. Obviously, the two novels and short story were chosen for their illustrative power and do not represent any given body of literature, but they point at an important political role of literature in the contemporary world. Despite frequent statements about the decline in reading by children and adults, it may be early to lament the death of fiction, which provides an

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anchor to hold on to when political myths are mistaken for reality. The marginalization of the value of truth in the global public sphere makes the function of fiction to disrupt the fictitious seem less paradoxical than the expression implies. It is not obvious that fiction contributes to political philosophy. The separation of philosophy and literature goes back to Plato who protected the guardians of the city he devised from legends such as those about gods warring, fighting, or plotting against one another because these legions, he claimed, were not true. Yet, Plato himself used fables and other literary forms to advance his ideas, and his model of the ideal city was itself a work of fiction. The specialization of knowledge in modern times has classified political philosophy as “non-fiction,” but, as Paul Dolan has stated, “politics cannot be understood only as the political scientist, the historian, the economist, the sociologist, the psychologist, or even the philosopher understands it. The novel provides its special kind of knowledge because it deals with the conscious and unconscious experience of politics as a human, moral, psychological and aesthetic phenomenon.”27 The novel and other literary genres not only provide a special kind of knowledge but also a sense of moderation over the knowledge we hold on to, often with great zeal. As Milan Kundera states, “Outside the novel, we’re in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge. Within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and of hypotheses. In the novel, then, reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical.”28 It is the lack of such inquiry and reflection that allows myths about who governs, on what normative basis, and where society is heading to prevail in the public sphere. It is not that citizens are fooled by political leaders all the time; many people think independently about politics and express diverse and critical political opinions. Today, blogs and other online forums have opened and widened public conversation, but it is one thing to express opinions and another to engage in a dialogue in which myths are seriously questioned and hypotheses thoroughly tested. Such a dialogue, which is crucial to political philosophy, has not been found to be encouraged by new media in the digital age,29 but, as I tried to demonstrate in this chapter, it may be enhanced by fiction. As Robert Boyers sums up the political philosopher’s relation to literature: “Just go off and be alone with it. Let it do with you what it will. You’ll see; it will release you from yourself a little, loosen your attachment to those clever ideas of yours, so that when you turn back to them again at last, as you will, they will seem to you less securely attractive or just, and your own attachment to them will perhaps seem to you less virtuous.”30

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Notes 1. Hooton, Christopher (2016). “Hypernormalization Review (Adam Curtis, BBC iPlayer): A Masterfully Dark Dive into Our Experience of Reality.” Independent, October 18. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/hypernormalisation-review-adam-curtis-bbc-iplayer-amasterfully-dark-­dive-into-our-dissociative-a7367166.html. 2. Kierkegaard, Søren (1847). The Crowd is Untruth: On the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual’. Translated by Charles K. Bellinger. https://www.ccel.org/ ccel/kierkegaard/untruth/files/untruth.html. 3. Ortega y Gasset, José (1985). The Revolt of the Masses. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. http://mgarci. aas.duke.edu/cibertextos/ediciones-bilingues/ortega-­gasset-­j/rebelion-masas. htm, p. 68. 4. Lasch, Christopher (1995). The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York, NY: Norton. 5. Windschuttle, Keith (1996). The killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. New York, NY: Free Press, p. 2. 6. Blake, Aaron, “Kellyanne Conway Says Donald Trump’s Team Has ‘Alternative Facts.’ Which Pretty Much Says It All.” The Washington Post, January 22, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-­fix/wp/2017/01/22/ kellyanne-conway-says-donald-trumps-team-has-alternate-facts-whichpretty-much-says-it-all/?utm_term=.2636bcd48d9c. 7. Barber, Benjamin R. (2003). “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” In Democracy and the New Media, eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 39. 8. Keyes, Ralph (2004). The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. 9. The Guardian, November 15, 2016. 10. Frye, Northrop (1963). “The Archetypes of Literature.” In Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, ed. Northrop Frye. New  York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, p. 16. 11. Mack, Michael (2012). How Literature Changes the Way We Think. London: Bloomsbury, p. 72. 12. Martel, Yann (2001). Life of Pi. Orlando: Harcourt, p. viii. 13. Life of Pi, p. 29. 14. de Freytas-Tamurajan, Kimiko (2017). “George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Is Suddenly a Best-Seller.” The New York Times, January 25. 15. Morante, Elsa (1977). History. Translated by William Weaver. New York, NY: Knopf. 16. Saramago, José (1997). Blindness. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.

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17. Kafka, Franz (1989). “The Metamorphosis.” In Franz Kafka: The Sons. New York, NY: Schocken. 18. Sibley, Mulford Q. (1970). Political Ideas and Ideologies: A History of Political Thought. New York, NY: Harper & Row, p. 586. 19. Shils, Edward (1973). “Intellectuals, Traditions and the Traditions of Intellectuals: Some Preliminary Considerations.” In Intellectuals and Tradition, ed. S.N. Eisenstadt and S.R. Graubard. New York, NY: Humanities Press. 20. Arendt, Hannah (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil. New York, NY: Penguin. 21. Adorno, Theodor W. et  al. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Oxford: Harpers. 22. Hayles, Katherine N. (2010). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cyberspace. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 2–3. 23. Clarke, Bruce (2008). Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, p. 196. 24. Evans, Andrew (2001). This Virtual Life: Escapism and Simulation in Our Media World. London: Fusion Press, p. 213. 25. Baines, Lawrence (2012). A Future of Fewer Words? Futurist 46.2 (March/ April), p. 46. 26. Buber, Martin (1996). I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. 27. Dolan, Paul J. (1976). Of War and War’s Alarms: Fiction and Politics in the Modern World. New York, NY: Free Press, p. 3. 28. Kundera, Milan (1988). The Art of the Novel. Translated by Linda Asher. New York, NY: Grove Press, p. 78. 29. Keren, Michael and Richard Hawkins, eds. (2015). Speaking Power to Truth: Digital Media and the Public Intellectual. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press. 30. Boyers, Robert (2005). The Dictators Dictation—The Politics of Novel and Novelists. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 3–4.

27 Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown İlhan İnan

Though not every piece of fiction is a thought experiment, a thought experiment can be taken to be a piece of fiction. There is always a story in a thought experiment, one that is merely imaginary, usually contrary to fact, or in the philosopher’s jargon a “counterfactual” story. Such a story however significantly differs from a literary one in terms of the purpose of its creation. Unlike a literary author, the primary goal of the creator of a thought experiment is not to entertain the reader, nor is it to produce a form of written art—though achieving such qualities could be a plus. Just like a real scientific experiment conducted in the physical world, a thought experiment is typically designed to test a hypothesis and is therefore intended to function as an epistemic tool to expand our knowledge on a particular topic. It differs however from a physical experiment in that it is conducted not in a laboratory or an observatory, but within the human mind—hence its name. The hypothesis that is under test within a thought experiment is usually one that cannot be settled by empirical means. If there was an easy way to construct a physical experiment to test such a hypothesis, there would have been no need for a thought experiment. One reason why a physical experiment may not be a viable option is because the hypothesis to be tested is one that is an a priori claim, rather than an empirical one. Given that philosophical hypotheses are generally regarded as being a priori claims, thought experiments have been widely utilized as instruments to put them to test. This does not imply that a thought İ. İnan (*) Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_27

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experiment always has a priori content and is thus not about physical reality. Scientists, especially physicists, have made extensive use of thought experiments to test empirical hypotheses and continue to do so. For instance, in order to argue against the Aristotelian idea that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, Galileo came up with an ingenious thought experiment, in which he asked us to imagine two balls having different weights tied to each other by a rope. Then we consider the question: if we let go of the tied balls from the top of the Pisa tower, will it fall faster or slower than the heavy ball itself? If we assume that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, then we will have to conclude that the lighter ball will slow down the heavier ball and the whole system will fall slower than the heavy ball all by itself. But then given that the whole system is heavier than the heavy ball itself, we would then have to conclude that it should fall faster. Given this contradiction, we thereby show that Aristotle was mistaken. Though the hypothesis that is being tested is not an a priori claim, Galileo’s argument based on his thought experiment can be taken to be an a priori argument in that it is aimed at revealing the internal inconsistency of the Aristotelian view. This is one way in which a thought experiment could be a useful tool not just for philosophy, but for science as well. In fact the concept of a thought experiment was first introduced not by a philosopher, but a physicist. Ernst Mach is usually credited for first coining the German term “Gedankenexperimente”, though some trace the origins of the development of the concept to the works of earlier physicists.1 Though the term is relatively new, the employment of thought experiments goes back to at least Ancient Greek philosophy. Plato makes extensive use of them in his famous dialogues. In the Republic, for instance, Plato raises the question: is it always good to be moral? While Socrates wishes to argue that the answer ought to be positive, Glaucon raises a challenge that makes use of a famous thought experiment, generally referred to as “the Ring of Gyges”. In the fictitious story, we are asked to imagine that Gyges comes across a ring that makes him invisible whenever he wears it. This gives him the power to commit immoral acts such as robbery and rape, without being caught. Is there any reason for Gyges not to commit such acts? This is the question that goes with the story, and it is what makes the story a thought experiment. Glaucon’s challenge forces Socrates to construct an argument to show that we have reason to be moral even when we have no fear of punishment. Not all famous Ancient Greek thought experiments had to do with morality; some had to do with physics. For instance, Zeno of Elea’s “paradoxes of motion” all involved stories, the most famous of which concerns a race between the athlete Achilles and a tortoise who is given a short head start. We are asked if Achilles will finally catch up with the tortoise and win the race. Zeno gives a brilliant

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a­ rgument that he can’t, from which he concluded that motion is an illusion, which is what gives the paradoxical nature to the story. Contrary to a literary story, a thought experiment is always aimed at answering a question, which is what gives its experimental character. We may even wish to identify a thought experiment with a story/question pair. This however would be putting it rather crudely; first because in order for a story/ question pair to serve as a thought experiment, its question must be generalizable. Given that a story always involves an element of specificity, the question that goes with the story will also be specific, that is, it will be about specific people, places, or objects. Galileo’s thought experiment that we just considered is specifically about two imaginary balls, from which we generalize to a universal question concerning motion: is acceleration dependent on mass? Second, a thought experiment at times will be more complex containing not one but two or more stories, aimed at raising not a single but a set of questions. For instance, a famous thought experiment that has generated a lot of discussion in contemporary ethics is the so-called Trolley Problem. The original story about the trolley which is due to Philippa Foot was then used by Judith Jarvis Thomson as a part of a more complex thought experiment that involves not one but two separate stories. Here is Thomson’s version of the first story: Suppose you are the driver of a trolley. The trolley rounds a bend, and there come into view ahead five track workmen, who have been repairing the track. The track goes through a bit of a valley at that point, and the sides are steep, so you must stop the trolley if you are to avoid running the five men down. You step on the brakes, but alas they don’t work. Now you suddenly see a spur of track leading off to the right. You can turn the trolley onto it, and thus save the five men on the straight track ahead. Unfortunately, Mrs. Foot has arranged that there is one track workman on that spur of track. He can no more get off the track in time than the five can, so you will kill him if you turn the trolley onto him. Is it morally permissible for you to turn the trolley? (Thomson 1985, 1395–96)

As Thomson notes, we are all inclined to answer this question in the positive. But then we have the second story: Now consider a second hypothetical case. This time you are to imagine yourself to be a surgeon, a truly great surgeon. Among other things you do, you transplant organs, and you are such a great surgeon that the organs you transplant always take. At the moment you have five patients who need organs. Two need one lung each, two need a kidney each, and the fifth needs a heart. If they do

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not get those organs today, they will all die; if you find organs for them today, you can transplant the organs and they will all live. But where to find the lungs, the kidneys, and the heart? The time is almost up when a report is brought to you that a young man who has just come into your clinic for his yearly check-up has exactly the right blood-type, and is in excellent health. Lo, you have a possible donor. All you need do is cut him up and distribute his parts among the five who need them. You ask, but he says, “Sorry. I deeply sympathize, but no.” Would it be morally permissible for you to operate anyway? (Thomson 1985, 1395–96)

This time almost everyone answers negatively. The question of whether we are contradicting ourselves in our answers to the two cases turns out to be a very important one that has to do with the philosophical dispute concerning whether there is a moral difference between killing someone as opposed to merely letting them die, as well as the more general problem concerning whether it is ever morally permissible to kill an innocent person. What gives this thought experiment its philosophical value is that its question can further be generalized cutting deep into foundational issues in ethics and morality on the dispute between consequentialist theories, such as utilitarianism, and deontological theories such as Kant’s duty ethics. Perhaps the best way to decide whether a thought experiment is philosophical or scientific, or a hybrid of the two, is to look at the nature of its question. If the specific question within a thought experiment is generalizable to a philosophical question, then we may categorize it as a philosophical thought experiment. To take up another famous example, consider Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine: Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? … Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening … Would you plug in? (Nozick 1999, 42–43)

The specific question that goes with the story is whether we would wish to hook up to such a machine. What gives this question—and consequently the thought experiment—its philosophical character is that in turn it can be generalized to various philosophical questions: is there a difference in value between the internal feeling of satisfying a desire and its actual satisfaction? Is

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pleasure the only intrinsic value? Does having epistemic contact with reality have intrinsic value? And so on. Given that these are taken to be philosophical questions, the thought experiment is considered to be philosophical. On the other hand, the famous story of Schrödinger’s Cat is taken to be a scientific thought experiment given that its specific question “is the cat in the box dead or alive?” generalizes to various important questions in quantum physics: One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. (Schrödinger 1935, tr. Trimmer 1980, 328)

With this thought experiment, Schrödinger wanted to demonstrate the paradoxical character of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics by showing that it has the contradictory implication that the cat is both dead and alive. Let us now put aside the use of thought experiments in science and concentrate on philosophy. Despite the extensive use of thought experiments in philosophy, various figures have given arguments casting doubt on their worth. The most common kind of objection has to do with the reliability of the answer we give to a question in a thought experiment. Given that our answer to such a question is not based on observation, we need to appeal to an internal mental skill, which may be taken to be a disposition, or a capacity, at times referred to as a “mental faculty”, or what philosophers in general call an “intuition”. The question then arises as to whether an appeal to intuitions is a credible way of doing philosophy. Philosophers have been split up in their response to this question.2 Saul Kripke, a prominent figure who has made use of thought experiments on many occasions, proclaimed that: Of course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking. (Kripke 1980, 42)

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In diametrical opposition is Hintikka who holds that the use of thought experiments in which we appeal to intuitions that have no theoretical justification ought to be banned in philosophy: Unfortunately, the vast majority of appeals to intuition by contemporary philosophers cannot be conceived as controlled thought experiments nor be justified by recasting them as such. In view of such goings-on, I am tempted to suggest, half-jokingly but only half-jokingly that the editors of philosophy journals agree to a moratorium on all papers in which intuitions are appealed to, unless the basis of those appeals is made explicit. (Hintikka 1999, 147)

Interestingly, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the idea that thought experiments are not credible argumentative instruments in philosophy given that they appeal to intuitions that are biased can be demonstrated by making use of thought experiments. One way in which this could be done is to take up a thought experiment and present it to groups belonging to different cultures, ethnicities, age groups, genders, educational backgrounds, and so on; if it turns out that the majority of the members of one group answer the question within the thought experiment in one way, and majority of the members of another group answer it in the opposite, we could then demonstrate that intuitions are biased. In fact there have been such surveys conducted by philosophers that have been utilized to argue that thought experiments are not always to be trusted in doing good philosophy. One such attempt concerns the credibility of thought experiments that have been extensively utilized within the theory of reference. This has to do with the ongoing rivalry between the descriptivist theory of reference—different versions of which have been attributed to Frege and Russell—and the causal-historical account—championed by Kripke. In an influential paper, Machery et al. (2004) used the results of their surveys that they conducted on different cultures in order to demonstrate that the thought experiments used by Kripke and others to argue against the descriptivist theory are not credible. They argued that their findings reveal that the responses of Westerners in general indicate that they are inclined toward a causal-historical account, whereas the responses of East Asians appear to favor the descriptivist theory. Many such surveys have been conducted on different thought experiments since then, and this has given rise to an emerging discipline called “experimental philosophy”. This method of doing philosophy now has many advocates, as well as many foes. What is important for our purposes here is that if we consider experimental philosophy as “good philosophy”, and if we take the arguments utilized by its proponents to have epistemic value, then we ought to conclude that making use of thought

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e­ xperiments can in fact be a way of doing “good philosophy”. After all if philosophers had not created thought experiments, then the surveys used by experimental philosophers could not have taken place. We should then conclude that the findings of experimental philosophy do not show that thought experiments have no use in doing philosophy; rather what they reveal is that thought experiments do not have the power to resolve philosophical disputes, or to demonstrate the truth of at least some philosophical hypotheses, given that our intuitions concerning a certain philosophical issue are highly affected and perhaps determined by our culture, our gender, our socioeconomic status, our education, and so on.3 There is however what I believe to be a more interesting way in which a thought experiment may reveal that our intuitions are not to be trusted on a particular topic. These are cases in which the divergence of intuitions takes place not between two separate cultures, but rather within the mind of a single individual. This would require us to utilize a thought experiment that contains not one but a pair of stories posing two separate questions, and if it turns out that the intuitive answers given by an individual to the two questions are inconsistent, we could then conclude that such intuitions are not to be trusted, at least not on whatever the particular issue the stories involve. The point can be demonstrated with a simple non-philosophical example. In the year 1999, a great many people celebrated the new year on the 31st of December, believing that it was the turn of the century. They obviously also believed that a century is a period of 100 years, but what they failed to realize was that the two beliefs were in fact inconsistent. Here is a case in which our “intuition” that a transition from the year 1999 to the year 2000 marks the turn of the century is not to be trusted. The reason is clear: the intuition is simply false. Things usually are not as obvious when it comes to a pair of stories in a philosophical thought experiment which appears to bring out in us conflicting intuitions. In Thomson’s case, for instance, it may well be argued that the apparent inconsistency in our answers can be explained away. There are however more pressing cases in which such a route does not seem to suggest itself. The philosophical thought experiments I now wish to consider raise questions that give us what Wittgenstein called a “mental cramp”, or a Socratic “Stingray effect”. These involve stories to be followed by what appears to be a simple question that we have hard time dealing with, making it difficult, if not impossible, to settle the issue in one way or another. If the question is in one sense unanswerable, then one may ask what value, if any, such a thought experiment has. If one adopts what appears to be the reasonable view that the primary goal of a thought experiment is to ease our way to find an answer to

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an important question, then a thought experiment that raises an unanswerable question should have no value given that it can never achieve its goal. If one nevertheless wishes to insist that a thought experiment whose question is unanswerable still may have value, one should then give up this classical model. It is of course best to discuss this issue by making use of several examples. In what follows I will take up three thought experiments, two of them quite popular, one of them a bit less so. They have two things in common; one is that they are all about the concept of identity, and the second is that the central question in each story is mind-boggling, so much so that none of the possible answers appear to be plausible, which forces us to consider whether the question is in fact unanswerable. The oldest of the three is the famous ancient story concerning the ship of Theseus: The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. (Plutarch (75 A.C.E.), tr. Dryden 1966)

Centuries later Thomas Hobbes extended the thought experiment by adding a second story to it: For if, for example, that ship of Theseus, concerning the difference whereof made by continual reparation in taking out the old planks and putting in new, the sophisters of Athens were wont to dispute, were, after all the planks were changed, the same numerical ship it was at the beginning; and if some man had kept the old planks as they were taken out, and by putting them afterwards together in the same order, had again made a ship of them, this, without doubt, had also been the same numerical ship with that which was at the beginning; and so there would have been two ships numerically the same, which is absurd. (Hobbes 1655 Part II, Ch. 11, §7)

In the contemporary metaphysics literature on identity, authors have used this extended form of the thought experiment. First we are asked to imagine that all of the original planks of the ship of Theseus are replaced gradually with new ones, and then we consider the question of whether the resulting ship is the same as the original one. In the second story this time we are asked to imagine that the old planks from the original ship are saved, and after all

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planks have been replaced by new ones, we are told that a ship is constructed out of the old planks that looks exactly like the original ship. And then we are asked whether this ship is the same as the original ship of Theseus. If we had been asked this question without first having considered the first story, we could be inclined to answer in the positive. After all there are many artifacts we have observed whose parts are replaced by new ones in time which normally does not imply that the original entity in question ceases to exist and is supplanted by a new entity after a sufficient number of the original entity’s parts have been replaced. But once we consider the second story, we hedge. We come to realize that our answers in the two cases jointly will imply that there would be two ships occupying different parts of space, having different spatiotemporal histories that would both be identical to the original ship of Theseus, a conclusion that we have hard time swallowing. We would then have to give up our belief in a principle that appears to be a truism: if x and y are identical to z, then x and y are identical. If we choose not to give it up, the result is even worse, for then we would be forced to hold that two objects located in different parts of space and therefore having different properties can be identical. This is inconsistent with a very intuitive thesis commonly referred to as the Indiscernibility of Identicals which states that if two objects are identical, then they have the same properties. None of the options seem plausible. A similar thought experiment was constructed by Derek Parfit concerning personal identity: I enter the Teletransporter. I have been to Mars before, but only by the old method, a space-ship journey taking several weeks. This machine will send me at the speed of light. I merely have to press the green button. Like others, I am nervous. Will it work? I remind myself what I have been told to expect. When I press the button, I shall lose consciousness, and then wake up at what seems a moment later. In fact I shall have been unconscious for about an hour. The Scanner here on Earth will destroy my brain and body, while recording the exact states of all of my cells. It will then transmit this information by radio. Travelling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars. This will then create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like mine. It will be in this body that I shall wake up. (Parfit 1984, 199)

At this stage we are asked to consider the question whether the person that comes out after the teletransportation is the same person as the original person before the process. Intuitions may diverge, though it seems the majority are willing to answer in the positive. This is, for instance, indicated by the fact

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that people who watch Star Trek have no difficulty in believing that it is the same Captain Kirk we see in all the different episodes though he gets beamed to different planets on many occasions. There is however the second story: Several years pass, during which I am often Teletransported. I am now back in the cubicle, ready for another trip to Mars. But this time, when I press the green button, I do not lose consciousness. There is a whirring sound, then silence. I leave the cubicle, and say to the attendant: ‘It’s not working. What did I do wrong?’ ‘It’s working’, he replies, handing me a printed card. This reads: ‘The New Scanner records your blueprint without destroying your brain and body. We hope that you will welcome the opportunities which this technical advance offers.’ The attendant tells me that I am one of the first people to use the New Scanner. He adds that, if I stay for an hour, I can use the Intercom to see and talk to myself on Mars. ‘Wait a minute’, I reply, ‘If I’m here I can’t also be on Mars’. Someone politely coughs, a white-coated man who asks to speak to me in private. We go to his office, where he tells me to sit down, and pauses. Then he says: ‘I’m afraid that we’re having problems with the New Scanner. It records your blueprint just as accurately, as you will see when you talk to yourself on Mars. But it seems to be damaging the cardiac systems which it scans. Judging from the results so far, though you will be quite healthy on Mars, here on Earth you must expect cardiac failure within the next few days.’ The attendant later calls me to the Intercom. On the screen I see myself just as I do in the mirror every morning. But there are two differences. On the screen I am not left-right reversed. And, while I stand here speechless, I can see and hear myself, in the studio on Mars, starting to speak. (Parfit 1984, 199–200)

This time we are baffled. The ones who have the intuition that in the first story the person on Mars is the same person as the one before the teletransportation usually are forced to give up their positions after hearing the second story. Otherwise they would have to admit that there are two persons on different planets who are the “same” person. This not only sounds wrong to our ears, but there is a sense in which we find it difficult to comprehend what it actually means. Upon learning that he will soon die of cardiac arrest, the person on Earth should be expected to fear death; but there is some room for conciliation. After all the person on Mars who will survive looks exactly the same and has exactly the same memories and character traits as the person on Earth before the teletransportation takes place. Isn’t this enough for him to say “I will survive”? Does such a question have a “correct” answer? If not, then what have we learned from this thought experiment? The third thought experiment I wish to consider is due to Kripke in his classic piece “A Puzzle about Belief ”:

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Peter…may learn the name ‘Paderewski’ “with an identification of the person named as a famous pianist”. Naturally, having learnt this, Peter will assent to “Paderewski had musical talent” and we can infer—using ‘Paderewski’, as we usually do, to name the Polish musician and statesman: …Peter believes that Paderewski had musical talent. Later, in a different circle, Peter learns of someone called ‘Paderewski’ who was a Polish nationalist leader and Prime Minister. Peter is skeptical of the musical abilities of politicians. He concludes that probably two people, approximate contemporaries no doubt, were both named ‘Paderewski’. Using ‘Paderewski’ as a name for the statesman, Peter assents to ‘Paderewski had no musical talent’. (Kripke 1979, 449)

Given the story we now consider the question: does Peter believe that Paderewski had musical talent? There appears to be a strong argument that the answer should be affirmative, but then there also appears to be a strong argument that it should be in the negative. If a speaker sincerely assents to an utterance of a declarative sentence that he or she understands, we normally take that to be sufficient to conclude that the speaker believes the proposition expressed by that sentence. Peter gives his sincere assent to the sentence “Paderewski had musical talent”, and it appears that he does grasp what is being said, but then in the second context, Peter this time assents to what appears to be the logical negation of his earlier belief. If we were to ask Peter the question “do you believe that Paderewski had musical talent?”, he would say “Yes” in one context, and “No” in the other. From his affirmative answer, we would normally conclude that Peter believes that Paderewski had musical talent; but from his negative answer if we were to conclude that he fails to believe that Paderewski had musical talent, we would run into a contradiction. In all of the three thought experiments, there is a question that appears to arouse in us conflicting intuitions. Is the original ship of Theseus identical to the later one after all of the original planks have been replaced? Am I the same person after being teletransported? Does Peter believe that Paderewski had musical talent? In all three cases, when the question is asked at the end of the first story, it seems that respondents would normally answer in the positive. This is quite obvious in the Paderewski case. If all we are told is that Peter learns that Paderewski was a famous pianist, and assents to the sentence “Paderewski had musical talent”, then quite obviously we would normally conclude that Peter believes that Paderewski had musical talent. It is only after we hear the rest of the story, or better, after we hear the second story, that perplexity sets in. Concerning the ship of Theseus, my guess is that a normal adult who speaks a language close to ours would normally say that a ship

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remains as the same ship even after all of its parts are replaced gradually. It is only after they hear the second story that they hedge. Now the teletransporter story differs from the previous two in that it involves a bit of science fiction. Unlike the other two cases, the stories involved here may turn out to be impossible in some sense of impossibility. Nonetheless, it seems that people have no problem in conceiving—or at least in believing that they are conceiving—what is being told in the story. For the purposes of our discussion, it really does not matter whether teletransportation is possible or whether it violates some laws of physics. What matters is that the story appears to be one that is easily conceivable, raising questions that appear to be unanswerable. A question may be called an unanswerable question when it actually has a correct answer though it is beyond our capacity to come to know it. “What is it like to be a bat?” We don’t know, and we will never come to know, though if there is something it is like to be a bat, then the question does have an answer.4 For such questions, we may say that there is a fact of the matter that answers the question though it is a fact that is unknowable. The questions we are considering in these thought experiments do not seem to be unanswerable in this sense. It is not that we lack epistemic access to some piece of reality that would answer the question; nor is it that we are not clever and patient enough to reach the correct answer by a long-winded piece of reasoning. It may be that such questions simply do not have correct answers. Such a position immediately raises eyebrows. One reason for this is that philosophers have been reluctant to take an unanswerable question as being meaningful. For instance, Wittgenstein toward the very end of the Tractatus says: When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it. (Wittgenstein 1961, 6.5)

In the later literature on the logic of questions and answers, this has been the dominant view. An early example of this is due to Knight: We have seen that inquiry presupposes…an unknown based on fact….and faith that such knowledge exists….any question which violates one of these presuppositions of inquiry is meaningless for that purpose. (Knight 1967, 571)

It is indeed true that typically when we ask a question, we presuppose that there is an answer which we can at least in principle discover. What happens when we find out that we are mistaken in our presupposition? Well one thing that may happen is that we lose our motivation to find the correct answer. But

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why should we all of a sudden have to declare that the question before us is in fact a meaningless question? Before Euclid proved that prime numbers are infinite, it is natural to assume that some people believing that they were finite raised the question “what is the largest prime number?” and tried to find the correct answer. Upon learning that they were mistaken in their presupposition, they must have given up their inquiry. We now know that the question has no answer, though we do not thereby dismiss it as being meaningless. In fact in order to demonstrate that the question has no answer, one first needs to understand what the question is asking.5 Going back to our thought experiments, it would be quite preposterous to say that their respective questions are devoid of meaning. Just the opposite, in order for us to be baffled by such questions, first we need to understand what they ask. From this however we cannot conclude that they must have correct answers; it may be the case that there simply is no fact of the matter that answers them. What could that teach us? Well for one thing it would motivate us to try to unearth the implicit presuppositions that have failed us in these contexts. If there is any knowledge to be gained as a result of this, it would have to relate to the limits of our conceptual apparatus. We could thereby learn something, not about the world, but the concepts we use to think about the world. Such conceptual knowledge would of course have to be negative, revealing that there are contexts in which our ordinary concepts fail us. If a thought experiment can achieve this, we may say that it has “negative heuristics”. This may be the sole value of the three thought experiments we have discussed here. What they show is that our ordinary concept of identity breaks down within these unusual contexts. Such a view appears to have been endorsed by Quine with respect to the concept of personal identity: The method of science fiction has its uses in philosophy, but… I wonder whether the limits of the method are properly heeded. To seek what is ‘logically required’ for sameness of person under unprecedented circumstances is to suggest that words have some logical force beyond what our past needs have invested them with. (Quine 1972, 490)

If a thought experiment could be said to possess “positive heuristics”, then it would be a tool that enables us to discover the correct answer to a question, and when it has negative heuristics, then it allows us to discover that the question has no answer.6 Of course it will always be a matter of controversy which side a particular thought experiment falls under. For instance, in the Paderewski case, contra Kripke, one may wish to argue that the question “Does Peter believe that Paderewski had musical talent?” does have a definite correct

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answer. Given that Peter assents to the sentence “Paderewski had musical talent” in one of the contexts in which this is posed to him, some may wish to hold that this should be sufficient for us to conclude that the question should be answered affirmatively. The fact that Peter dissents from the same sentence when posed to him in the other context, they may claim, does not override the earlier belief attribution. The advocates of this view could take Peter’s dissent to imply that he disbelieves that Paderewski had musical talent, and not that he fails to believe it. Such a solution to the puzzle results in the attribution of conflicting beliefs to Peter; he simultaneously believes and disbelieves that Paderewski had musical talent. This is certainly not Kripke’s position on the matter. At the start of his paper, he explicitly says that his intention is to argue that “the puzzle is a puzzle” and that “(a)ny speculation as to solutions can be deferred”. Having said this it may be suggested that the way that Kripke sets up the thought experiment may be taken to support the “solution” mentioned above. When Peter uses “Paderewski” as a name of the statesman, we are told that he assents to the sentence “Paderewski had no musical talent”. This of course could be taken to imply that Peter disbelieves that Paderewski had musical talent. We could however slightly modify the example so as not to allow for this. Given that Peter is skeptical of the musical abilities of politicians, we may simply assume that he assents neither to the sentence “Paderewski had musical talent” nor to the sentence “Paderewski had no musical talent” (when he takes the name as the name of the statesman). If so we would not have any reason to conclude that Peter disbelieves that Paderewski had musical talent. Being skeptical does not imply disbelief. We may build it into the story that Peter does not have any particular evidence that Paderewski, when presented to him as the politician, had no musical talent. A background belief that politicians in general do not have musical talent does not provide sufficient epistemic grounds for Peter to believe this. His dissent from the sentence would then indicate, not that he disbelieves the proposition in question, but rather that he fails to believe it, and if so, the puzzle cannot be solved by attributing to Peter conflicting beliefs.7 Kripke does not go as far as claiming that “the puzzle” has no solution, but comes close to it: When we enter into the area exemplified by Jones…, we enter into an area where our normal practices of interpretation and attribution of belief are subjected to the greatest possible strain, perhaps to the point of breakdown. So is the notion of the content of someone’s assertion, the proposition it expresses. In the present state of our knowledge, I think it would be foolish to draw any conclusion, positive or negative, about substitutivity. (Kripke 1979, 269)

In fact earlier in his famous Naming and Necessity lectures, Kripke had already expressed a similar view:

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My view that the English sentence ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ could sometimes be used to raise an empirical issue while ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’ could not shows that I do not treat the sentences as completely interchangeable. Further, it indicates that the mode of fixing the reference is relevant to our epistemic attitude toward the sentences expressed. How this relates to the question what ‘propositions’ are expressed by these sentences, whether these ‘propositions’ are objects of knowledge and belief, and in general, how to treat names in epistemic contexts, are vexing questions. I have no ‘official doctrine’ concerning them, and in fact I am unsure that the apparatus of ‘propositions’ does not break down in this area. Hence, I sidestepped such questions; no firm doctrine regarding the point should be read into my words. (Kripke 1980, 20–21)

Respecting his will I do not wish to attribute to him any official doctrine. In neither of the two passages quoted does Kripke explicitly endorse the view that there is what I have called a “conceptual breakdown” in such contexts, which would make the questions of these thought experiments unanswerable. All that he says is that “perhaps” this may be the case. My concern here is not what Kripke believes, but rather what we can conclude about the use of such thought experiments in philosophy if there is indeed such a conceptual breakdown. In all these cases, there is a question such that when it is posed after the initial story, we are inclined to answer in the positive, but when the very same question is posed under a different scenario, we are inclined to answer in the negative; and once we reflect on our apparent inconsistency, this time we are inclined to enter into the twilight zone where we no longer know what to say on the matter. One reason for this may very well be that a concept that we use daily, such as identity, is not fine-grained enough to be applied to the cases in question.8 If this is the case, it is exactly what makes these thought experiments valuable and philosophically significant. We may then conclude that some thought experiments have the function of revealing the limits of our conceptual apparatus, which is what gives them negative heuristics. This could then give us the motivation to change our language in a way that would not yield such inconsistencies.9 The idea that a thought experiment can have the power to reveal the internal inconsistencies of our conceptual apparatus is true not just of philosophical discourse but is equally applicable to the scientific context as well. Galileo’s thought experiment may be taken to reveal the internal inconsistencies of the Aristotelian framework, and the same could be said about Schrödinger’s Cat. In fact Thomas Kuhn highlights this function of a thought experiment for science:

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…the new understanding produced by thought experiments is not an understanding of nature but rather of the scientist’s conceptual apparatus. On this analysis, the function of the thought experiment is to assist in the elimination of prior confusion by forcing the scientist to recognize contradictions that had been inherent in his way of thinking from the start. (Kuhn 1977, 242)

If a thought experiment can reveal the “confusions” and “contradictions” of the scientist, it can also do the same for the philosopher. What is more is that when the central concept within a philosophical thought experiment is not merely a part of the technical philosophical jargon, but is a concept that is accessible and understood by anyone who has mastered a language, then coming to realize the confusions and contradictions that are inherent in its use ought to be a concern, not just for the philosopher, but for the layman who uses that concept daily to think and communicate. Such is the case for our concept of identity. Even if the layman does not call it by that name, it is quite obvious that they employ the concept of identity in their daily routines of thinking about their own selves and other people as well as entities such as ships. Not only do they use the concept of identity, but they find themselves in contexts in which it becomes important for them whether it is the same person or the same ship that they are thinking and talking about. One need not be a philosopher to care about such issues. There can, of course, be thought experiments that have to do with not an ordinary concept such as identity, but a technical philosophical notion that only a select few understand and employ. One may, for instance, take Kripke’s famous Schmitt case to be a thought experiment concerning the notion of rigid designation, which does not appear to be a part of our daily discourse. This is a technical concept invented by Kripke primarily to argue against a descriptivist theory of reference. No doubt when the thought experiment is introduced by appealing to this notion, the laymen will have difficulty understanding it. This, however, does not imply that the layman does not have intuitions concerning whether proper names are rigid or accidental designators. That is because the story within the thought experiment can be given without having to appeal to this notion. In fact, within the original version of the story, as given by Kripke himself, the notion of rigid designation does not appear at all. In order to understand the story and answer its question, all that one needs is the notion of reference. That is why experimental philosophers have been able to conduct surveys to test the semantic intuitions of speakers from different cultures who have no training in the philosophy of language and have never heard of the notion of rigid designation in their lives. The value of a philosophical thought experiment that reveals our intuitions concerning the way in which we use a specific con-

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cept should not be sought in the narrow technical jargon of some philosophical subdiscipline. The primary and in certain cases the sole value of a thought experiment may be its power in showing us the limits of our conceptual apparatus. Coming up with stories and questions that accomplished this requires creativity. That is why it takes a good philosopher to introduce a good thought experiment. After that it becomes public property, and the non-philosopher could benefit from it. On the classical approach, “the benefit” is identified with expansion of knowledge, and the primary way in which a thought experiment could expand our knowledge is when we come to know the correct answer to its central question, but it appears that in these cases we are unable to achieve this. If these thought experiments have any benefit, it certainly does not seem to fit this classical schema. In the “normal” case, we expect and hope that there will be either a positive or a negative outcome; that is, we will either be in a position to demonstrate the truth of a philosophical hypothesis or to refute it. In the thought experiments we have considered, however, no such outcome is achieved, and this does not appear to be because the problem is too difficult and complicated for us to solve. These are thought experiments that have the Stingray effect. It may very well be the case that they raise questions that are unanswerable, not because of the limits of our epistemic capacity, but because there is no fact of the matter that answers them given that we find ourselves in an area where our conceptual apparatus breaks down. Once it is acknowledged that a thought experiment may have such a role, one may intentionally seek to create thought experiments to achieve this end. Just like in science one may construct what Popper called a “crucial experiment” to test a theory by intending to put the theory to the maximum amount of strain, one may create a thought experiment to do something similar regarding some of our basic concepts. I do not wish to generalize from what I have said concerning these three thought experiments to jump to the sweeping claim that the primary use of thought experiments in philosophy is to reveal deficiencies in our conceptual apparatus within a particular area. That would be too bold. Having said this I should admit that I am not willing to hold that these are marginal cases that have little representative value of thought experiments in philosophy in general. Acknowledgments  I presented some of the ideas in this chapter at Koç University in May 2017. I would like to thank the Philosophy Club, especially its President Selim Utku Öğüt, for the invitation and for being a great host. I am grateful to the audience for the lively discussion and to Kenneth R. Westphal, Erhan Demircioğlu, Zeynep Direk, and Zeynep Talay for their valuable feedback.

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Notes 1. See Kühne (2005). 2. There is a wide literature in defense of the utilization of thought experiments in philosophy, for example, Sorensen (1992), Miscevic (2007), Williamson (2008), Thorpe (2016). 3. In a pioneering and influential article in experimental philosophy, Weinberg et al. (2001) try to demonstrate that epistemic intuitions on certain matters can vary significantly across cultures and groups having different socioeconomic status. They make use of certain popular thought experiments that have been utilized by contemporary philosophers (such as the famous Gettier cases), but when there is a need, they make up their own thought experiments as well. If their conclusion is correct, then this would perhaps demonstrate that our raw epistemic intuitions are at times highly affected by our culture. It would not however show that thought experiments are useless vehicles in doing philosophy, given that these authors have made good use of them to arrive at their conclusions. 4. In his classic piece, Thomas Nagel (1974) argues that even if we came to know all the physical properties of bats, we still would not come to know what it is like to be a bat. Though he does not put it in these terms, it is clear that for Nagel the fact that the question is unanswerable for us does not prevent us from grasping what it asks. 5. For a more elaborate discussion on how we may express our curiosity by raising an unanswerable question, see İnan (2012), especially Chapter 11 Presuppositions of Curiosity and Chapter 12 The Limits of Curiosity and Its Satisfaction. 6. The idea that raising a philosophical question which has no answer can have epistemic merits is not a popular one. To my knowledge, there is no work that directly addresses this issue. Within the wide literature on metaphilosophy, one would at least expect to find some in-depth discussion of the nature of philosophical questions, which unfortunately is not the case. Among the very few works on the topic is a stimulating article titled “What is a Philosophical Question?” published in Mind in 1964 by Nermi Uygur, and a more recent paper by Luciano Floridi (2013) with the same title. Both papers address the issue of “unanswerability” in different ways. 7. Nathan Salmon (1995) offers a solution to the puzzle by claiming that Peter has three separate attitudes to the very same proposition: belief, disbelief, and a third one which he calls “withholding belief ”. As I have argued in the text given, we may slightly modify the story so that it would be wrong to conclude that Peter has a disbelief in the proposition. Does he withhold belief? If that amounts to failing to believe, we would then have a contradiction. Salmon finds an ingenious way to define “withholding belief ” such that it turns out that an agent may both believe a proposition and “withhold belief ” from it. It

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is quite clear to me that such a notion does not correspond to our ordinary use of the notion of belief. 8. Machery (2011) argues that within a thought experiment, our “psychological capacity” to make a judgment is “applied outside its proper domain” (p. 201) and thus becomes less credible. It is of course not easy to detect what that psychological capacity is and whether it is the same one in the three cases we have considered. It may be more accurate to say that we cannot even apply our psychological capacity to arrive at a conclusion in these three thought experiments. I should note that Machery too (2004, 2011) (just like Weinberg et al.) makes extensive use of thought experiments in his papers to shed doubt on the credibility of our intuitions, which is another good example of what I have called “the negative heuristics” of thought experiments. 9. There is of course a lot to be said about how a thought experiment can bring about conceptual revision. See Sorensen (1992), chapter 7, for a discussion of this issue.

References Floridi, Luciano. 2013. What is a Philosophical Question? Metaphilosophy 44 (3): 195–221. Hintikka, Jaakko. 1999. The Emperor’s New Intuitions. Journal of Philosophy 96 (3): 127–147. Hobbes, Thomas. 1655. De Corpere, Elements of Philosophy, New York: Abaris Books, 1981. İnan, İlhan. 2012. The Philosophy of Curiosity. London: Routledge. Knight, Thomas S. 1967. Questions and Universals. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 27: 564–576. Kripke, Saul A. 1979. A Puzzle About Belief. In Meaning and Use, ed. A. Margalit, 239–283. Dordrecht: Reidel. ———. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1977. The Essential Tension. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kühne, Ulrich. 2005. Die Methode des Gedankenexperiments. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Machery, Edouard. 2011. Thought Experiments and Philosophical Knowledge. Metaphilosophy 42 (3): 191–214. Machery, E., R. Mallon, S. Nichols, and S.P. Stich. 2004. Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style. Cognition 92 (3): B1–B12. Miscevic, Nenad. 2007. Modelling Intuitions and Thought Experiments. Croatian Journal of Philosophy VII: 181–214. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What is It Like to be a Bat? Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450. Nozick, Robert. 1999. Anarchy, State and Utopia (original published in 1974 by Basic Books) Reprint. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plutarch (75 A.C.E.). 1966. Theseus. Translated by John Dryden. New  York, NY: Biblo and Tannen. Quine, W.V. 1972. Review: Identify and Individuation by Milton K. Munitz. The Journal of Philosophy 69 (16): 488–497. Salmon, Nathan. 1995. Being of Two Minds: Belief with Doubt. Nous 29 (1): 1–20. Schrödinger, Erwin. 1935. Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik. Naturwissenschaften 23 (48): 807–812. English translation by John D. Trimmer. 1980. The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox Paper’. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (5): 323–338. Sorensen, R.A. 1992. Thought Experiments. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1985. The Trolley Problem. The Yale Law Journal 94 (6): 1395–1415. Thorpe, Lucas. 2016. Experimental Philosophy, Williamson’s Expertise Defense of Armchair Philosophy and the Value of the History of Philosophy. Yeditepe’de Felsefe: Method in Philosophy, 169–184. Uygur, Nermi. 1964. What is a Philosophical Question? Mind 73 (289): 64–83. Weinberg, J.M., S. Nichols, and S. Stich. 2001. Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions. Philosophical Topics 29 (1–2): 429–460. Williamson, Timothy. 2008. The Philosophy of Philosophy. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

28 Ethics and Literature Liesbeth Korthals Altes and Hanna Meretoja

This chapter discusses a number of approaches to the intersections of literature and ethics.1 Our focus is in literary studies, as we cannot also attempt to cover in sufficiently systematic ways the rich reflection on the topic articulated in literature itself and in philosophy proper. The chapter first provides a brief historical perspective of the kinds of debates waged in relation to literature and ethics. We then zoom in on the following interpretative approaches, characteristic of the so-called ethical turn: criticism inspired by the neo-­Aristotelian humanist tradition in moral philosophy; rhetorical criticism, which carries further this humanist tradition, integrating the analysis of narrative form; poststructuralist and deconstructive criticism; social and cultural criticism; and, finally, forms of criticism rooted in philosophical hermeneutics. A marked interest for ethics and literature can also currently be observed in the social sciences. We briefly discuss a number of sociological, cognitive, and psychological approaches that seek to support or qualify claims about literature’s ethical potential or position these within broader negotiations of value in culture. Our concluding remarks pertain among others to the question of

L. Korthals Altes (*) University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] H. Meretoja University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_28

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why the discussed  approaches themselves are—and perhaps should be— value-laden. We plead for more interdisciplinary research in this area, before ending on some suggestions for further (uses of ) research.

Literature and Ethics Through Time “There is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (1992, 607b5–6), Plato famously writes in the Republic, where he has Socrates denounce poetry on both epistemological and moral grounds (Books III and X): poetry should be banned from ideal society not only because it leads us away from the truth by imitating an empirical world of appearances that itself imitates the world of ideas, but also because poets corrupt the youth. Poetry “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue”. Plato’s own position on the topic, however, delegated to Socrates and dialogically staged, remains debated until this day. It is usually pitted against that of Aristotle (1987, 1447a), who agreed that poetry is mimetic (narrative imitates “people in action”) but argued that mimesis is not merely a matter of copying. Rather, it is a creative, imaginative process that has its own epistemological and ethical value: poetry contributes to our spiritual balance by purifying our emotions; it enlarges the range of experiences from which we can learn, be it vicariously, through imagination; the understanding of human action it offers is richer, more philosophical, than history: the latter deals with the actual, the former also with what is possible and probable (1451b4–5). Though Aristotle’s theory of mimesis focuses on the genre of tragedy, it has been highly influential in Western aesthetics more generally, as well as in narrative studies (see, e.g. Ricoeur’s [1984] theory of mimesis). In the pre-modern period, the connection between ethics and literature remained however widely understood as primarily didactic, teaching us how to live a (morally) good life through literary examples and poetry genres that cultivate disputation and deliberation. Modernity increasingly problematized the idea of evidently shared moral norms. As of the eighteenth century, in response to dramatic political and social changes, such as the impact of the ideas of the French Revolution, the rise of the middle class, the spread of literacy, and burgeoning individualism, the social and institutional conditions under which literature was produced and read substantially altered in Western society, resulting among others in an increasing autonomy for literature. This autonomy does not only refer to a literary field that was developing its own institutions for the production, consecration, and distribution of literature

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(Bourdieu 1996); in a broader sense, it also refers to the idea that artists, writers, and thinkers liberated themselves from the doxa imposed by church, state, market, and opinion or, more radically, that literature should sever its bonds with the world beyond itself (Dorleijn et al. 2007, ix–xxvi). Rather than teach moral truths established through tradition, literature was expected to allow individuals to explore uncharted experiences and meanings, the more as religion had lost much of its authority, and science was perceived as unable to answer ethical or existential questions. Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s characterization of the aesthetic sphere as that of disinterestedness, however, autonomy aesthetics often came to be conceived of as quite radically distinct from—if not opposed to—the spheres of both rational knowledge and ethics. Thus, in nineteenth-century “art for art’s sake” and decadent movements, literature’s attraction came to lie in shocking the “bourgeoisie”. In 1835, Théophile Gautier, one of the first proponents of “art for art’s sake”, famously exclaimed: “You fools, you imbeciles, you goitrous idiot, a book does not make jellied soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots nor is a sonnet a vaginal syringe; a drama is not a railway; all of these things that are essential to civilization and to the advancement of humanity along the path of progress” (Gautier 2005/1835, 20). Half a century later, Oscar Wilde quipped: “Art … is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way… . A work of art is useless as a flower is useless” (Wilde 2000/1890, 478–79). Nietzsche and Freud provided further philosophical and scientific backing to an aestheticist credo in which morality had become an object of scorn. However, the idea that writers express an ethically charged vision through their work or that they have a civic mission and a responsibility for the moral education of the “masses” never really lost its power. From Friedrich Schiller to Victor Hugo, up to Jean-Paul Sartre in the twentieth century or Dave Eggers and Michel Houellebecq in our own times, the autonomy of literature entails that writers, as a countervailing power to the powers that be, can (or should) offer their readers their distinct understanding of justice, truth, or the wellbeing of humanity. Genres such as docufiction, microhistory, utopian, or dystopian fiction are currently blossoming, which display strong ethical motivations and appeal, such as the wish to give a voice to the silenced and to open up alternative perspectives on past, present, and future. And despite literature’s diminishing prestige, figures of the writer as the one who diagnoses society’s moral ailments, as public intellectual or moral beacon of society, are still very much with us as the shock reaction of the public proves when such beacons—think of Günter Grass or Christa Wolf—are found to have been involved in ethically problematic political activities.

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Aestheticist and autonomist battles against ethics and old-fashioned “humanism” also transpired into academic literature and art studies, prominently so at the beginning of the twentieth century in what was depreciatively called Formalism, a label soon proudly adopted. But no representation of human affairs, aesthetic or otherwise, can really avoid having an ethical dimension; the question is rather how ethics and morality are defined and how central or peripheral their role is in the interpretation and evaluation of literature. The Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s (1991, 1–14) notion of art as the estrangement of perception, for instance, was devoted to the idea that people should be liberated from the deadly weight of routine and ideology. Art was to play a crucial role in reviving our senses and our imagination, with the implicit expectation that the effects of poetic imagination would spill over to the social and political realms, to the benefit of all. Building in part on the Formalist’s attention to literary form, structuralist academics as of the 1960s pledged alignment with ideals of scientificity in their ambition to develop a general theory of literature. For them, at that stage, literary theory held no place for ethical and moral concerns or for interpretation: the subjectivity and normativity involved in interpretation were two deadly sins against scientific rigour. Interpretation, however, came running back in through the back door of literary or cultural analysis and ideology criticism (as in Roland Barthes’ [1957] analysis of ideology-laden connotations of iconic cultural images, practices, and “mythologies”), rapidly joined by multiple forms of ethical criticism. As of the 1980s, the separation of aesthetics and ethics, which had gained a foothold in an increasingly specialized academic landscape fascinated by “theory”, was challenged from a number of directions, giving rise to what was called the ethical turn in literary studies (Korthals Altes 2005). Scholars of different persuasions claimed not only that literature has a special relation to ethics, but also that, like writers and critics, academics should express ethical or moral engagement in their reading and studying literature. Rather than indulging in mere abstract theorizing or formal analysis, they should allow literature to regain and fulfil its traditional task of helping us understand how to live a good life (interestingly, one of the leading voices of early structuralism in literary theory, Tzvetan Todorov [2007], bitterly attacked the legacy of Formalism, which his own earlier work helped establish). But beyond this basic agreement about the need for an ethical turn in literary studies, divergence reigns: on the kind of approach one should adopt (e.g. whether one should tend towards the “hard” sciences or towards criticism); on the understanding of ethics; on how exactly literature might be connected to ethics, and whether this holds for all literature or only

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for some genres or works; on the facets that deserve consideration (the author or the reader and their responsibility; the text; mediators, such as teachers, critics, or publishers); and on the relation between ethical and aesthetic concerns. And while there is much consensus on the relevance of core themes (attitudes towards self, others and otherness, violence, power, and suffering, justice and the common good), precise stances on these issues differ. The most prominent of these interpretative programmes are discussed in the following sections, in a thematic rather than chronological order.

 umanist Perspectives: Literature and “the Good H Life” In the same years in which structuralism dismissed “humanist” engagement with literature, the ethical relevance of literature was emphasized in (especially Anglo-American) analytic and moral philosophy. While traditionally literature was often mined by moral philosophers for examples to their theories, since the 1980s, Nora Hämäläinen argues, a reverse “literary turn” took place. As utilitarian and deontological theories were challenged by virtue ethics, feminist ethics, and various “particularisms”, moral philosophers displayed an increasing interest in the philosophical relevance of literature (Hämäläinen 2016, 6). Many moral philosophers sought out ways in which narrative fiction helps our understanding of ethics. These approaches are interested in how stories shape our moral universe; they challenge abstract, universalizing, principlist moral theories, such as deontology and utilitarianism, which tend to view the moral agent as a disembodied and decontextualized rational decision-­maker who acts on the basis of a calculus of utility or duty (Gotlib 2015). Moral philosophers like Hilde Lindemann (2014) and Margaret Urban Walker (2007) see morality as a fundamentally interpersonal and dialogical practice and explore how narratives “do moral work” (Lindemann Nelson 2001, 36), in terms of a contextual, situated ethics, emphasizing the social situatedness of moral agency (see Meretoja 2018, 26–27). The ethical relevance of literature has also been highlighted by moral philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre (1984), Charles Taylor (1989), Richard Rorty (1989), Martha Nussbaum (1986, 1990, 1997), and Paul Ricoeur (1992). At a general level, these scholars analyse narrative—especially literary fiction—as providing frameworks through which human experience is ordered and made meaningful. This idea draws on the Aristotelian view according to which it is “man’s natural propensity, from childhood onwards, to engage in mimetic

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activity” and to take pleasure in this imitatory “play” while exercising one’s understanding (Aristotle 1448b3–19). Philosophers like MacIntyre (1984, 204–55), Taylor (1989, 47–52), and Ricoeur (1992, 158) even argue that narrating our lives is inextricably entwined with our capacity to take responsibility for our actions, constituting us as moral subjects. An influential call for moral and ethical uses of literature has come from Martha Nussbaum, whose works, with eloquent titles such as The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), and Poetic Justice (1995), have received a wide audience. Nussbaum handles notions such as the good life, moral elevation, and reason as if deconstruction (which we discuss later) was no more than ripples in the pool. It is partly against deconstructive approaches that she revives Aristotle’s thinking on virtue ethics, arguing that for our everyday experience of moral issues, the Aristotelean notion of practical wisdom, phronesis, is more adequate than abstract, general, moral theories. If we wish to feel, act, and reflect morally, we need a well-developed imagination, plus moral guidelines that can be adapted to concrete situations. By engaging us in situations of value-conflict, literature fosters a kind of “experiential learning” that leads to  such practical wisdom (Nussbaum 1990, 55); it also stimulates imagination, “an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own” (Nussbaum 1995, xvi). “Good” literature teaches us “how to live the good life”, which rests on love, respect, compassion, and empathy, all of which are central to citizens’ moral and civic education in a thriving democracy (Nussbaum 1995, 2010). Unsurprisingly Nussbaum privileges literary narratives that invite deliberation and empathic identification with characters in adverse situations, mainly classic drama and realist and modernist novels, such as Henry James’, which combine “attention to particulars” and “richness of feeling” (1990, 103). Nussbaum is explicitly committed to a particular understanding of morality (see, e.g. Korthals Altes 2006; Meretoja 2015, 2018). Her adoption of the common good as a moral standard justifies her limited selection of ethically relevant writers, making aesthetic concerns subservient to the moral. Nussbaum has no use for morally ambiguous or deviant works, which may have their own ethical relevance (as will be argued in the next section): Beckett’s writing for her is too nihilistic (Nussbaum 1990, 308–09), Proust’s too solipsistic; Ann Beattie instead shows us how to overcome scepticism and solitude by loving and sharing. Nor does Nussbaum really pay attention to literary form and fictional mediation itself. Her readings concentrate on characters’ moral development, which she discusses as if they were real people.

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Nussbaum’s work, however, has done a lot to support interest in the arts and literature also on the level of national and international education and culture policies. Moreover, her insight in the importance of developing our capacity for emotions and imagination ties in with current research, which investigates how the “literary imagination” (Johnson 1993) allows us to vicariously experience emotions and strivings of other minds and bodies, in ways that are not open to us in everyday life: fiction would offer us “mental experimentation on common experiences, attitudes, and emotional responses” (Johansen 2002, 29; see Meretoja 2018 for further explorations of the intersections between narrative and ethical imagination). Many contemporary forms of humanist ethical criticism pursue Nussbaum’s interest in the socially and ethically constructive effects of literature, avoiding however the moralism, didacticism, and psychologism her work arguably displays (see our section on hermeneutics).

Rhetorical and Cultural Approaches to Narrative The neo-Aristotelean tradition has also been influential in literary studies, in narratology in particular. In line with Nussbaum, Wayne C. Booth famously argued that we read for wisdom and moral education: “stories are our major moral teachers” (1988, 20). Rhetorical narratology develops this tradition with the aim to provide concrete narratological tools for analysing the narrative strategies through which the (implied) author would communicate ethical values or an ethos to the (implied) reader (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2013; Korthals Altes 2014). The emphasis of most rhetorical approaches, as for Nussbaum, lies on the cultivation of a common sense of the good, based on shared values. This faith in a shared sense of morality appears clearly, for example, in James Phelan’s (2014) definition of narrative ethics as a concern with the question: “How should one think, judge, and act—as author, narrator, character, or audience—for the greater good?” Rhetorical approaches share with narratology its attention to textual devices (though narratology, in its original structuralist version, was not interested in real or imagined readers’ responses). Reliability and (presumed) irony of characters, narrators, and (implied) authors are central concerns and grounds for a critic’s ethical judgement, as outlined in Phelan’s 2007 title Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Author, reader, and critic are all accountable for their acts of writing and interpreting, as Phelan argues in his discussion of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces: by inventing major experiences generically framed as referential (the book was

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marketed as a “memoir”), Frey violated “the ethics of referentiality” whereby the work would lose “its reputation for being an honest confrontation of the difficulties of addiction and recovery and its status as a worthy aesthetic achievement … [T]hese inventions made the book more embarrassing than compelling” (Phelan 2007, 219). Beyond questions of (un)reliable narration, other narrative structures and devices seem particularly relevant with respect to ethics, as appears from the works of Booth, Phelan, Rabinowitz, and many others: first, the representation of action, dilemmas, and choices, as the motivation and evaluation of actions involve values and norms, and dilemmas can be described as conflicting values between which a subject, who needs to decide and act, is caught; second, the representation of speech and perception, as expressions of ways of being in the world and of negotiating the rapport between self and Other; and third, the textual rhetoric, which influences the reader’s adhesion to the represented values and attitudes: what pattern of desire, what contact and contract with the reader does a text establish? Anthropological/cultural approaches to narrative have also been interested in the ethical and rhetorical dimension of narrative structures. Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) work on the novel as a polyphonic structure, which brings together multiple perspectives and conflicting voices, for example, shows how literary form itself does ethical work, in connection to how it deals with subjects of experience and action embedded in social worlds. Bakhtin distinguishes between dialogical narration, in which no single voice dominates the others, and monological narration, in which the narrator assumes a position of authority. Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony and dialogism, as exemplified by the novel, are inextricably tied to his conception of the un-finalizability of our existence and understanding and to the idea—and ideal—of democracy: truth is irreducible to one “single mouth”; rather, it is accomplished as a temporal process, in the exchange between multiple voices.

Deconstructive Ethical Criticism While the humanist tradition promotes the cultivation of virtues and of a common sense based on shared values, deconstructive ethics, an influential strand of ethical criticism in the continental tradition, adopts a radically opposite perspective. Inspired by the postphenomenological and poststructuralist thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, deconstructive ethics calls into question all taken-for-granted value systems and takes radical alterity as its starting point. This tradition ­emphasizes

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that ethical decisions cannot be based on abstract knowledge of values: the “right” action cannot be deduced from anything prior to it. For Derrida (1994, 53, 58), the realms of the ethical and the rational exclude one another: in Kierkegaardian terms, he asserts that “the instant of decision is madness” and requires going through the “undecidable”. Deconstruction is also suspicious of any claim to understand the Other and valorizes the power of imagination to transgress pre-determined boundaries and norms. Andrew Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (1999), which is strongly influenced by Levinas and French poststructuralism, serves as an example here. Like many ethical critics, Gibson restricts his reflection (mostly) to the novel. His ethics of reading posits “the experience of plurality, radical  surprise, radical interruption of given horizons as a characteristic feature of our experience of a fictional text” (1999, 91). Gibson not only adopts Levinas’ distrust of knowing but also his—related—notion of the ethical primacy of the act of Saying over its result, the Said. For Levinas (1991) the Said is a freezing of time, a concession to generality; only the moment and the act of Saying can be ethical, as they imply the face-to-face relation between the Other and me. Gibson (1999) acknowledges that in reading there is no direct face to face. He contravenes this objection by showing how modernist literature, as in Beckett’s work, stages and problematizes the act of Saying, the origin and destination of speech, inviting the reader to join in the “event” of Saying, which can thus become an ethical experience. Unsurprisingly, where Nussbaum’s canon consists of realist and modernist writers, Gibson cherishes works performing the dissolution of the self and of the novel, valuing in Proust and Beckett what Nussbaum regrets: the experience of the fundamental strangeness of the Other and of the self, memory as dissemination instead of totalization. For his “posthumanist ethics”, the dissolution of the humanist “sphere of the common”, exile, and marginality are more ethical than any belonging to a place or centre, in which morality cannot but become static and restricted (Gibson 1999, 103). This “ethics of the negative” (76), however, stands under the Levinasian imperative of a deep commitment to the Other and the “incessant event of subjection to everything” (Levinas, quoted in Gibson 1999, 165). Greater awareness, empathy, and compassion, which Nussbaum celebrates as the ethical effects of reading literature, are for Gibson suspicious feelings, which consolidate the ego; more truly ethical is the readiness to lose one’s self in the face of radical vulnerability (Nussbaum’s images are tellingly different: literature and criticism contribute to making the world a “home”, where individuals need “sharable answers”). Rita Felski comments on the often (quasi)religious undertone of deconstructionist ethical criticism, calling it “theological criticism” (2008, 4, 12), which tends to elevate the literary text to the status of an absolute Other,

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fundamentally ungraspable and elusive. Deconstructive ethics certainly raises questions: are the distrust of morality, awareness of the multiplicity of the self, and unconditional submission to the “text as Other” always evidently ethical? And does Gibson’s (1999, 1) claim that literary texts perform “ethical work”, which turns the text into an agent, not obliterate the work of the—deconstructive—interpreter, hiding the self-fulfilling circularity of the interpretative process? For her part, schooled in the deconstructive “hermeneutics of suspicion”, Felski (2015, 174) advocates a critical theory that explores the relationship between the text and the interpreter not as a mere submission to the text or a critique of the text’s underlying ideology, but as a dialogic encounter, “a co-­ production between actors that brings new things to light”, which brings her closer to the hermeneutic approaches that we discuss later.

Social Criticism and Cultural Studies Approaches In the 1960s and 1970s, the legacy of the two World Wars, the decolonization processes, the impact of social liberation, and human rights movements created a climate in which writers and academic critics felt compelled to explore issues of politics and ethics of culture from a “critical”, sometimes outright moral stance. “Cultural studies” became the umbrella name for a major strand within ethical criticism, bringing together culturally and ethically oriented approaches, from Marxism to feminism and gay and lesbian studies, fuelling a strong counter-movement to structuralism. Ideology critique, with strong ethical and political undertones, had always been acutely present in Marxist approaches to literature, which aimed at emancipating oppressed groups and uncovering systematic connections between literary works, their societal conditions of production, processes of subject formation, and class oppression (see Louis Althusser 2001/1970; Pierre Macherey 2006/1966; for an overview, see Zima 1985). Many cultural studies approaches share with poststructuralism a distrust of European humanism and its universalizing discourses, contaminated by their use in legitimizing colonial and patriarchal systems of power. But abandoning the textual focus of poststructuralism, cultural studies emphasize that the ethical and ideological dimensions are part and parcel of how literary texts function in social and cultural worlds, in which they are inextricably embedded, as they perpetuate, shape, and challenge social webs of meaning through which we make sense of our lives. Cultural studies tend to be interested in the embodied experience of situated subjects marked by identity categories such as gender, sexual orientation, race, class, and age. They approach the ethics of literature

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from divergent perspectives, including the dynamics of reading; the conditions of production and reception of literature; the representation of gender, sexuality, race, class, or age in literature; processes of in- and exclusion; and the affective negotiation of these terms. These social and ethical concerns, which are central in cultural studies, may partly explain the moral dimension of the aura surrounding scholars such as Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak, leading theorists of postcolonialism. Engagé criticism and theories of literature, with strong ethical overtones, still flourish in the twenty-first century in multiple guises. In addition to neo-­ Marxist, postcolonial, and feminist approaches, more recently developed approaches such as LGBT, queer, intersectional, ecocritical, posthumanist, trauma, memory, and Holocaust studies aim to extend academic criticism into an active intervention in society. Ecocritical and posthumanist approaches draw attention to the need to enlarge our ethical concerns from minority rights issues to a reflection on our relationships with the non-human others. Trauma studies has as a major starting point the ethical imperative to do justice to the victims of the Holocaust and other atrocities. Cultural memory studies, in turn, is interested in the cultural dynamics of remembering, in its interplay with individual dimensions of memory (see, e.g. Rothberg 2009; Rigney 2012), in line with Ricoeur (1999), who advocated an “ethics of memory” which gives voice to the victims of history. Many contemporary scholars of cultural memory are interested in literature as a form of alternative historiography, telling the stories of those forgotten by official historiography. Some scholars problematize the dichotomy between victims and perpetrators as inadequate in acknowledging how we are implicated in intersecting histories of violence (see Rothberg 2014; Meretoja 2018). Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) notion of the precarious, vulnerable subject has become a common way of acknowledging the unequal distribution of wealth, possibilities, and agency in the globalized world; the concept of intersectionality is also widely used in the effort to acknowledge the complexity of lived experience and the “variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts” (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 76).

Hermeneutic Approaches From a (philosophical) hermeneutic perspective, our being in the world is inextricably entwined with ethics. In this section, we provide a brief overview of three ways in which hermeneutics contributes to understanding the relationship between literature and ethics.

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Firstly, narrative hermeneutics explores narratives not just as objects of interpretation, but as interpretative practices in their own right (see the chapter “Hermeneutics”, in this volume). It also studies the relationship between literary narratives and other culturally mediated interpretative practices that shape the ways in which we make sense of our experience. Interpretation does not only concern our engagement with texts: all experience has an interpretative structure, as we always experience “something as something” (Gadamer 1990; see also Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014). Narratives thus have the structure of a double hermeneutic, as they constitute interpretations of interpretative experiences. A triple hermeneutic is at play when we reinterpret our experiences in the light of cultural narratives (Meretoja 2014, 2018, 62). In philosophical hermeneutics, the relationship between literature and the world is considered not in terms of representation but in terms of an aesthetics of disclosure: the literary work discloses the world from certain perspectives and thereby opens up new possibilities for us (Gadamer 1990; Bowie 1997; Eaglestone 2004). Thus, as Ricoeur puts it, reading narratives can become “a provocation to be and to act differently” (1988, 249). Philosophical hermeneutics, secondly, is also a theory of reading literature, which articulates a specific ethics of reading and specific conceptual tools for exploring the ethical issues involved in the process of reading. Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, for instance, envisage reading as an encounter between the world of the reader and the world of the text. From their perspective, the main ethical challenge in reading is to encounter the text in its otherness, with as much openness and receptivity as possible, willing to let the text challenge us without appropriating it with our own conceptual framework (see the chapter “Hermeneutics”, in this volume). Several recent contributions to hermeneutic reflection on the ethics of reading place the emphasis on the complex dynamics through which we are affected by literary texts. Examples include Rita Felski’s (2015) “post-critical” affective hermeneutics and Colin Davis’s work on literature’s “potential to transform our ways of thinking” (2010, 180–81). Thirdly, we want to highlight the relevance of “metahermeneutics”. This term refers to the analysis of and reflection on pathways readers adopt in their interpretation of literary works (Korthals Altes 2014). While readers come up with their individual interpretations of a literary work, which may differ substantially in respect to the world views and values they attribute to it or to their evaluative judgements, this interpretative diversity is often overlooked in theories that address the connection between literature and ethics; on the level of criticism, it often merely triggers defences of an alternative form of ethical criticism. Interpretative diversity, however, is itself a rich object of scrutiny for anyone interested in ethics as a matter of social negotiation and contest.

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Metahermeneutic research seeks to tease out patterns in such interpretative processes and debates, beyond idiosyncratic differences: conventional pathways for reading, interpreting, and evaluating literature, and socially transmitted conceptions of literature, ethics, selves, and other such pre-understandings that affect our access to and processing of texts. This “meta-perspective”, and its use of contributions from the sociology of art and literature, forms a bridge to the social science approaches discussed in the next two sections.

Institutional Conditions of Meaning Making and Evaluation: The Sociology of Values As the previous sections should have made clear, both ethical criticism and theories about the role of ethics in literature tend to rest on competing normative conceptions of literature and ethics and on various other norms (about selfhood, communication, or the individual negotiations of responsibilities in both private and public spheres), rooted in socio-historical, institutional, and cultural contexts. Institutions such as censorship, law, educational systems, literary criticism, and—less formalized—reading groups or blogs not only create conditions within which literature is produced, distributed, interpreted, and evaluated; they also mediate conceptions of literature and corresponding conventions of reading and evaluating. There is rich sociological and historical research on how literary institutions foster particular conceptions of literature, including the connection between literature and ethics, and on ethically charged roles of writers as public intellectuals, prophets, or leaders showing the way to the people and changing grounds for their moral authority (see also Bénichou 1973; Viala 1985; Sapiro 2011). Recent research combines literature sociology, discourse analysis, and rhetoric in studying author “postures”, ethos cues, and topoi (suggesting, e.g. an author’s sincerity, authority, or authenticity) displayed by authors and mediating agents such as publishers or critics or studying social codes and conventional argumentative pathways along which such postures or ethos are attributed to authors, narrators, or characters (see Amossy 2001; Baroni 2009; Maingueneau 2004; Meizoz 2007; Korthals Altes 2014). Underlying such research on posture and ethos, arguably, is the idea that we cannot avoid performing acts of framing, using “frames”—in Erving Goffman’s sense—as tools that allow individuals and groups “to locate, perceive, identify, and label” events, occurrences, and experiences and to thereby give them meaning (Goffman 1974, 21). Important framing acts occur among others

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with respect to a text’s genre, which elicits expectations regarding the author’s adhesion to and responsibility for standpoints expressed in the work (autobiography, docufiction, an engagé or historical novel elicit stronger such expectations than other fiction genres). In this line, Boltanski and Thévenot’s value sociology offers fruitful ways to analyse and understand conflicting interpretations and evaluations of the ethical stance conveyed by literary works or their authors. Central in their approach is the idea that in disputes, but also more generally, people categorize a particular state of affairs or artefact as belonging to a particular “world”, say: that of the arts, or the private, “domestic” world, or instead, the public, “civic” worlds (Boltanski and Thévenot [1991, 201–60] distinguish six such worlds). Depending on the kind of world we believe an artefact or action to belong to, we place it under a particular “value regime”. To use the same example as in the section on rhetorical approaches: if we consider James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces to be an autobiographical memoir, so as belonging simultaneously to the world of “art” and the “domestic” world, we probably read it with strong expectations as to the author’s authenticity and sincerity, hence with the value regime of the private/domestic world prevailing; when the book turned out to be substantially fictional, it was indeed perceived not as appropriately ambiguous, or hybrid, befitting the value regime of the world of the arts, but as a breach of contract of sorts, within the private/“domestic” world, hence, almost as a personal betrayal of the reader (Korthals Altes 2014). The importance of such sociological/rhetorical perspectives is that they contextualize and nuance general claims about the connections between literature and ethics; they bring to light the complex socio-semiotic interaction and negotiation of meanings and values involved, for instance, when we attribute specific ethical relevance to literary works or their authors.

 ocial and Cognitive Psychology: Literature S as Moral Laboratory Since the 1970s a growing number of literature scholars have been seeking empirical support from the cognitive-psychological sciences for claims about the benefits of reading literature. Cognitive scientists devote increasing attention to the ethical effects of “immersion” in (reading) literature and to the ways in which literary texts stimulate readers’ cognitive capacities, such as theory of mind, empathy, sympathy, and role- and perspective-taking. The stakes are high: if it could be empirically proved that literature has cognitive,

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social, and ethical benefits for individuals and society and, more specifically, that engaging with literature cultivates critical and imaginative skills that are indispensable to well-functioning democratic societies, as Nussbaum (2010, 95–96) also  argues, this would offer substantial support for re-establishing literature’s role in education, for instance, and for such programmes that assign literary reading to a variety of target groups, from detainees and people suffering from depression to medical doctors and other care professionals. Several scientists thus have sought to substantiate claims, mostly of the “humanist” kind, which we discussed in previous sections, namely: that literature has an edifying effect on readers and stimulates their capacity for empathy (Hakemulder 2000, 158–61; Koopman 2016; van Lissa et  al. 2016) or for sympathy (Sklar 2013, who zooms in on beneficial effects of reading on adolescent development) and that literature improves readers’ social abilities, in particular their “moral imagination” (Johnson 1993), their Other-awareness, and their capacity to understand others’ mental states (theory of mind; see Oatley 2011; Mar et al. 2006; Goldstein and Winner 2012; Kidd and Castano 2013, 2016). While there is some evidence for these various effects, much of this empirical research is easy to criticize (see also Caracciolo and van Duuren 2015; Meretoja and Lyytikäinen 2015; Meretoja 2018): experiments often involve short stories, fragments of narrative, or even fictive examples, and a very limited selection of literary works: mostly narrative fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with evidently moral subjects (dilemmas, transgressive acts, interpersonal relations), excluding experimental and formally complex or ethically transgressive works. Findings cannot be extended to the whole of literature. Few among the cited researchers distinguish between literary and nonliterary, fictional and non-fictional, and high-brow or more popular literature, categories that can be expected to substantially impact research outcomes. The complexity of the long-term impact of literature makes it difficult to measure. Finally, empirical research as well often builds on “humanist” assumptions about the positive workings of reading literature, instead of conducting more open inquiries or at least including effects that might be perceived as ethically problematic (the attractions of violence, increased ego-orientation, etc.). These critiques do not diminish the importance of empirical research on ethical or pro-social effects of reading literature. But they point to the need for scholars to join forces across hermeneutic, phenomenological, and empirical-­ psychological methodologies, cultivating both rigour and a sense of the complexity of the issues at stake (see Caracciolo and van Duuren 2015; for an inspiring example, in narrative medicine, see Charon et al. 2016). In light of the sociological and metahermeneutic perspectives discussed above, it seems relevant to pay more systematic attention in such empirical

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research to the effect of the ways in which literature is processed on literature’s ethical impact: alone, in interaction with others, with or without guidance, or with intermediaries? Through what medium or situation does the processing take place (including blogs, reading groups)? It is likely that discussing a text’s meaning with others, under specific conditions, is conducive to reflecting on one’s own interpretative and evaluative pathways and to increased awareness of alternatives. Oatley himself observes: “To talk about fiction is almost as important as to engage with it in the first place” (2011, 178), while Hakemulder concedes: “it remains to be seen whether empathic effects, moral development and the enhancement of critical thinking can be achieved by reading, or whether these effects are due to a combination of reading and post-reading tasks” (2000, 49; see also Keen 2007, 92; Korthals Altes 2014).

Conclusion The ethical turn has contributed significantly to putting the existential and ethical dimensions of literature back on the agenda. In light of ongoing discussions on the legitimization of the humanities, of literary studies, and of literature itself in postmodern multicultural societies, this emphasis has increasing urgency and relevance. Effective co-operation between hermeneutic, sociological, phenomenological, and empirical-psychological approaches is needed to shed more light on the conditions that foster particular sorts of ethical—or pro-social—effects of literary reading. If interdisciplinary research would indeed substantiate some of the claims now based on introspection, informal observation, or reasoning, or on too limited empirical research, this could indeed support a systematic and intensive engagement with literature in education, something that quite a number of countries currently believe they can dispense with. But we may have to accept that literature’s long-term effects are difficult to measure, as are ethical phenomena more broadly, though much evidence can actually be gathered through a complementary range of methods. Such research, and its various applications in criticism, in education, in medical humanities, and so forth, should be conducted in lucid recognition of the value assumptions that orient these practices. If we take literature’s orientating, reflective, critical, and utopian functions seriously, if our perspective on such issues is not to be reduced to convictions already held beforehand, then the importance of two competences cannot be underrated, besides the much advocated capacity for empathy: first, the practice of respectful and reasoned debate (within oneself and between interpreters) not just about literary works themselves but also about our own interpretative frameworks,

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including our ethical convictions and biases, and second, the aesthetic competence needed for this debate, which includes an intelligent response to discursive forms as expressing world views and ethics, as well as capacities for coping with complexity, polyphony, and cognitive dissonance. Experience in the “careful teasing out of warring forces”, as Barbara Johnson (1980, 5) aptly described it, is needed if we want literature to function as a “moral laboratory”.2 Schools, universities, literary critics, and readers have a responsibility here.

Notes 1. For clarity’s sake, we will distinguish between morality/moral and ethics/ethical, a common though not systematic distinction in everyday and scholarly language use: we take moral/morality to refer to prescriptive ideas about right and wrong, based on—usually—collectively shared principles of conduct, norms, and values that are expected to underlie individual choice and responsibility in concrete situations; ethical/ethics is understood as referring to critical reflection upon moral issues. 2. This notion was coined by the Austrian writer, a master of ambivalence and ethical reflection, Robert Musil (1978, 1351).

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Booth, Wayne C. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996 [1992]. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowie, Andrew. 1997. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge. Brah, Avtar, and Ann Phoenix. 2004. Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality. Journal of International Women’s Studies 5 (3): 75–86. Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics. Storyworlds 6 (2): 1–27. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York, NY: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and New York, NY: Verso. Caracciolo, Marco, and Thom van Duuren. 2015. Changed by Literature? A Critical Review of Psychological Research on the Effects of Reading Fiction. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17 (4): 517–539. Charon, Rita, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivera Colsn, Danielle Spencer, and Maura Spiegel. 2016. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, Colin. 2010. Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Force de loi: Le ‘fondement mystique de l’autorité’. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Dorleijn, G.J., R.  Grüttemeier, and E.J.  Korthals Altes. 2007. The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de Siècles (1900 and 2000). A Critical Assessment. XXXII ed. Leuven, Paris, and Dudley, MA: Peeters. Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth. Poetics Today 25 (4): 595–608. Felski, Rita. 2008. The Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell–Wiley. ———. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Gesammelte Werke. Band 1: Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: Mohr. Gautier, Théophile. 2005. Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). Translated by Helen Constantine. London: Penguin Books. Gibson, Andrew. 1999. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Goldstein, Thalia R., and Ellen Winner. 2012. Enhancing Empathy and Theory of Mind. Journal of Cognition and Development 13 (1): 19–37. Gotlib, Anna. 2015. Feminist Ethics and Narrative Ethics. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-e-n/.

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Hakemulder, Frank. 2000. The Moral Laboratory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Hämäläinen, Nora. 2016. Literature and Moral Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Johansen, J.  Dines. 2002. Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Johnson, Barbara. 1980. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson, Mark. 1993. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. 2013. Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. Science 342 (6156): 377–380. ———. 2017. Different Stories: How Levels of Familiarity With Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalizing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11 (4): 474–486. Koopman, Eva Maria. 2016. Effects of ‘Literariness’ on Emotions and on Empathy and Reflection after Reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 10 (1): 82–98. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2005. Ethical Turn. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman et al., 142–146. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. Some Dilemmas of an Ethics of Literature. In Theology and Literature: Rethinking Reader Responsibility, ed. G. Ortiz and C. Joseph, 15–31. New York, NY and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lindemann Nelson, Hilde. 2001. Damaged Identities: Narrative Repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lindemann, Hilde. 2014. Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Lissa, Caspar J., Marco Caracciolo, et al. 2016. Difficult Empathy. The Effect of Narrative Perspective on Readers’ Engagement with a First-Person Narrator. DIEGESIS 5 (1): 517–539. Macherey, Pierre. 2006 (1966). A Theory of Literary Production. Translated by Geoffrey Wall; Rev. ed. with a new intro. Terry Eagleton and new afterword by the author. London [etc.]: Routledge. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Maingueneau, Dominique. 2004. Le Discours littéraire: Paratopie et scène d’énonciation. Paris: Armand Colin.

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Mar, Raymond A., Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, and Jordan B. Peterson. 2006. Bookworms Versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction Versus Nonfiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds. Journal of Research in Personality 40 (5): 694–712. Meizoz, Jérôme. 2007. Postures littéraires: Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur: essai. Geneva: Slatkine. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics. New Literary History 45 (1): 89–109. ———. 2015. A Sense of History—A Sense of the Possible: Nussbaum and Hermeneutics on the Ethical Potential of Literature. In Values of Literature, ed. Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, 25–46. Leiden: Rodopi Brill. ———. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Meretoja, Hanna, and Pirjo Lyytikäinen. 2015. The Plural Values of Literature. In Values of Literature, ed. Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, 1–24. Leiden: Rodopi Brill. Musil, Robert. 1978. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978 [1930/32]. Gesammelte Werke VIII: 1351. Nussbaum, Martha. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1997. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Oatley, Keith. 2011. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell. Phelan, James. 2007. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press. ———. 2014. Narrative Ethics. Living Handbook of Narratology. http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-ethics. Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. 2013. Twain, Huck, Jim, and Us: The Ethics of Progression in Huckleberry Finn. In Narrative Ethics, ed. Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn, 153–166. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Plato. 1992/n.d. Republic. Translated by G.M.A.  Grube, rev. C.D.C.  Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1 (1983). Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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———. 1988. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3 (1985). Translated by Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. Oneself as Another (1990). Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Memory and Forgetting. In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 5–11. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Rigney, Ann. 2012. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2014. Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/ Palestine. Profession. https://profession.commons.mla.org/2014/05/02/traumatheory-implicated-subjects-and-the-question-of-israelpalestine/. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2011. La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France, XIX-XXIème siècle. Paris: Seuil. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1991. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Sklar, Howard. 2013. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction. Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2007. La littérature en péril. Paris: Flammarion. Viala, Alain. 1985. Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique. Paris: Minuit. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2007. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 2000. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Fourth Estate. Zima, Peter V. 1985. Manuel de sociocritique. Paris: Picard.

29 Literature and Political Economy Aaron Kitch

Both “political economy” as the integrated and scientific study of labor, wages, trade, taxation, and monetary policy and “literature” as a category of aesthetic writing emerged around the same time in eighteenth-century England. Although “literature” in the primary sense of “learning from books” was as current in medieval England as it is today (see OED, s.v., “literature,” def. 1), it was only in the eighteenth century that the word began to define a mode of writing produced by the imagination that foregrounded elegance and aspired to aesthetic merit (see defs. 2 and 3a). It was also in the eighteenth century that “literature” began to identify national traditions, as in “Italian” or “English” literature, although the usage history provided by the Oxford English Dictionary does not include a range of earlier works that organize themselves both generically and thematically around the English state (Kitch 2009). In a similar sense, the conventional dating of “political economy” in Europe to the French school of économie politique in the seventeenth century overlooks many earlier authors—including Robert Crowley, Thomas Smith, Thomas Starkey, and Dudley Digges—who sought to understand economics in relation to the state or “commonwealth” (Hutchinson, Wood). These examples help to underscore the significance of the nation as an epistemological category in which political economy and literature have been linked together. A second category is “Man” in the sense of the Enlightenment subject constructed, for Foucault and others, through overlapping discourses, including A. Kitch (*) Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_29

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economics and the study of population  (Foucault  278–82). As David Bromwich notes, the category of literature “came to prominence around the same time as Man, and could be used in contrast with books generally, or with books whose particular worth lay in their utility” (1). Yet this Kantian claim for the uselessness of literature was not explicitly articulated in England before the writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.1 Moreover, any narrative based on the distinction between useful and useless categories of writing must also account for the ways in which both “literature” and “political economy” helped to shape the definitions of use and utility themselves as early as the sixteenth century. This would require a consideration, more broadly, of histories of labor, money, wages, and rent as the product of different types of imaginative writing. By the eighteenth century, both literature and political economy as fields of knowledge were embedded in discourses of human “passions” or “mentalities,” including the inherent passion that Smith defines in The Wealth of Nations (1776) as the need to “truck and barter” and the innate drive toward sympathy that he describes in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).2 Adam Smith’s collective writings in fact exemplify exemplify the historical confluence of literature and economics as intellectual fields. Once studied primarily  by economic historians, Smith has more recently been analyzed by scholars in relation to his aesthetics, rhetoric, and literary criticism (e.g., Chandler, Longaker, Labio, and Siraki). Building on this scholarship in the first section of this chapter, I then consider a range of historical intersections between “literature” and “political economy” from the perspective of three overlapping rubrics: nation, language, and the body.

 dam Smith and the Political Economy A of Literature Like Kant, whom he read closely from an early age, Smith wrote about matters of taste and “judgment” as well as about the forms, structures, and pleasures of a variety of literary genres. In fact, Smith developed his ideas about political economy in and through his study of rhetoric, law, the history of language, and moral philosophy—all subjects that he read at the University of Glasgow under Frances Hutchinson and later at Oxford, where he read ancient philosophy and modern Italian literature. Hired as a lecturer at Glasgow beginning in 1751 to teach natural theology, moral philosophy, and political economy, he also lectured on rhetoric, belles lettres, and the imitative arts.

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Notes recorded by his students suggest that Smith was a careful reader of a broad range of literary authors, both classical (e.g., Tacitus, Cicero, Demosthenes, and Thucydides) and contemporary (e.g., Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Pope, and Shaftesbury), while his unpublished lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres defend the virtues of eloquence and decorum. For example, Smith praises Virgil for his expert depiction of the “external” passion of Dido versus the “internal” passion of Aeneas in book 4 of The Aeneid (4:76). Elsewhere, he admires Milton for achieving a “diversity of the same affection in different characters,” particularly in relation to his treatment of Adam and Eve in book 9 of Paradise Lost (1667; 4:69). In an essay from the early 1780s on “The Affinity between Certain English and Italian Verses,” moreover, Smith addresses the distinction between syllabic and accentual versification in English and Italian poetry (3:220–28). His account of the relationship between music, dancing, and poetry in his essay on “The Imitative Arts” likewise seeks to expand the parameters of aesthetic judgment of his day, while also approaching the question of aesthetic “pleasure” derived from different types of representation (3:184–87). We know from a letter addressed to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld in 1785 that Smith planned to write a series of “great works” that he never completed, including work “a sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, Poetry, and Eloquence” (3:8).3 One theme evident in many of Smith’s lectures and writings on literature is the desire to liberate all readers, regardless of class or status, to be self-conscious and empowered consumers of aesthetic objects. A similar motivation drives The Wealth of Nations, which aims to increase the wealth not just of merchants and owners of capital but also of common laborers.4 For example, Smith urges his students to suspend preconceived hierarchies of “taste” whenever they feel the urge to look down on “out-of-fashion ornaments” such as yew trees fashioned in the shape of pyramids in gardens. Smith likewise satirizes those “rich” landowners who, in their pride and vanity, “will not admit into their gardens an[y] ornament which the meanest of the people can have as well as they” (3:184). Such sentiments anticipate his rebuke in The Wealth of Nations of certain “rich people” who desire nothing so much as to “appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves” (2.1:190). Smith’s interests in form, taste, and history of literature thus influence his more fully developed and influential account of the “wealth of nations.” Smith’s approach to rhetoric as constitutive of human nature also shaped his interests in political economy and literature. The natural propensity to truck

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and barter, which is a founding principle of the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations, differentiates mankind from animals as a “necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech” (2.1:25). In his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763), Smith describes such propensity in these terms: If we should enquire into the principle in the human mind on which this disposition of trucking is founded, it is clearly the natural inclination everyone has to persuade. The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest. (5:352)

The drive to make a “fair and deliberate exchange” of one commodity for another, which differentiates humans from animals, also brings people of otherwise disparate interests, passions, and talents together  (5:352; 5:571; 2.1:26–30). Although Smith in The Wealth of Nations stresses the inevitability of social inequality due to birth or “fortune” (2.2:713–14), he also lays out a number of recommendations for cultivating wealth and talent in a given population. For example, he produces a robust defense of public education, drawing on both the successes and failures of educational structures in classical Greece and Rome, in part to prevent the natural destruction of intellectual and military prowess by those who spend their entire lives performing “a few simple operations” due to the division of labor (2.2:781). Here Smith links political economy directly with the capacity for literature and philosophy to shape society. In his section on “Institutions for the Education of Youth,” he is particularly interested in the ways that the  moralistic writing of  Aesop’s fables and the wise sayings of Solomon act as vehicles for moral instruction (2.2:768). Smith’s descriptive method shades over into his prescriptive recommendations for systematic arrangements of moral maxims without “sophistry” and unnecessarily “speculative systems” that have sometimes overtaken both natural and moral philosophy (2.2:769). The pursuit of individual self-“interest” is also fundamentally rhetorical for Smith. Even though he notes that human desires manifest themselves differently in works of art and fiction, he incorporates the arts of rhetoric as foundational both to market transactions and the production of literature. Rhetoric for Smith thus participates in what Craig Muldrew calls the “serial sociability” of the marketplace, which was increasingly evident by the seventeenth century as England moved away from a Christian and corporate model of social organization based on commutative justice and  toward a society based on

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natural law, social contract, and distributive justice (Muldrew 1998, 48). Smith also develops several key economic ideas in The Wealth of Nations in response to his study of aesthetics, particularly in the work of Anthony Ashley  Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Although Smith criticizes Shaftesbury throughout his unpublished lectures on rhetoric for his “pompous and grand style” (3:22), his “absurd” diction (3:8), and even his feeble physical constitution (3:58), Smith also praises Shaftesbury for his “perfect” method in his “endeavors to prove that virtue is our greatest happiness” (3:142). Sharing Shaftesbury’s frustration with the seemingly egotistical political philosophy of Hobbes, Smith describes the development of the division of labor and new forms of commercial society that dislodged aristocratic “vanity” in favor of a “peddler principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got” as a “revolution” that might help to achieve “public happiness” (2.1:422). Smith’s aim in improving the circumstances of the lower orders by enhancing national “opulence” is to maximize such happiness: No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged. (2.1:96)

Smith’s examples of such “poor and miserable” members of society include servants, laborers, and impoverished women. The philosophy of sentiment in Smith’s lifetime changed the meaning of happiness from meaning general  good fortune to its more modern definition of individual well-being (Muldrew 2013, 326). Smith’s use of the word demonstrates how a personal sense of happiness weaves itself into a concept of the common good, which is made possible by material possessions as well as interpersonal relations.5 Smith’s language of happiness also draws on earlier works of political philosophy, including John Houghton’s essay on free trade, entitled England’s Great Happiness (1677), that defend luxury consumption (Slack). We might conclude, then, that happiness is yet another shared concern of literature and political economy to the degree that the pleasure of individual consumption helps to achieve the ethico-­moral imperative of political economy in a similar way that literary “pleasure” might bridge the desiring body of the reader with forms of sociability and public happiness associated with communities of taste, manners, and aesthetic judgment.

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Nation Attending to Smith’s interests in rhetoric and literature leads to the claim that his political economy, like the imaginative writing that takes the name of “literature,” depended on a notion of aesthetics that joined bodily experience with abstract ideas, including the idea of the nation (Eagleton). A long and distinguished history of writing about the state and the commonwealth made such a unification of interests possible, and Smith joined many earlier economic authors in approaching the economic health of the nation state as a natural end of commercial activity. Far from advocating the kind of laissez-faire capitalism that some associate with his name, Smith outlined many obligations that nations have to manage trade, including protecting citizens from various monopolies. As we have seen, he also acknowledged the degrading effects of the division of labor, which he regarded as a natural outcome of the development of societies. Even though Smith depicts nations more often than not as impediments to the prudent and fair distribution of “opulence” in a given nation, his work solidifies the idea of the nation as an entity charged with managing and sustaining “common” wealth. Such a “natural” fact, however, was the result of several centuries of development within both political economy and literature as categories of knowledge and practice. This is not to deny that Smith regarded the nation as a historical category throughout his writings. In The Wealth of Nations, for instance, he alludes to the “evil” influence of enclosure on agricultural production beginning with the Fall of Rome (2.1:381–82), while his account of the variation in silver prices cites a statute on bread and ale prices issued by Henry III in 1262 (2.1:196).  Moreover, in many  of his works, including The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith regards history as part of a systematic approach to knowledge, one that could also allow, as Clifford Siskin argues, Smith and his fellow Scots to write themselves into the British nation (121–23, 232). Smith also felt strongly that both poetry and history might help society to evolve in the right direction. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most important kind of history for Smith was the history of language, especially Gaelic. He argues that his own contemporary English evolved in order to serve the needs of commercial society, which he regards as the most advanced of the four stages of history.6 Smith was dedicated to the belief that Scotland belonged in Britain, yet his interest in language as a marker of national identity also anticipates more modern forms of nationalism as defined by Benedict Anderson, for example, in  Imagined Communities (1983). For Anderson, the advent of print

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t­echnology gave a certain  “fixity” to  language that inspired  new forms of national belonging (46). Although Smith lived in an age of print and coffee houses that helped to construct what Jürgen Habermas calls the “public sphere,” he does not provide a full-blown theory of nationalism in relation to shifting textual mediums. Instead, he bases his assumptions about nationhood on the same source as his explorations of political economy, namely human nature. Yet Smith’s historical understanding of language and the state fails to acknowledge how the very idea  of a British nation was itself constructed through poetry and other genres of literature on which he also lectured. Modern scholars have come to appreciate, for instance, the elaborate court masques produced by the early Stuart monarchs as vehicles of British nationalism. Featuring noble actors and singers together with elaborate sets and costumes designed by the royal architect Inigo Jones, such works staked out definitions of the nation of “Britannia”  even if the formal  political union of England, Scotland, and Wales was not realized until 1706. Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605), to take one example, situates a particular vision of the kingdom in relation to an imperial and patriarchal project of nation building (Hall 128–41). The masque was commissioned by Queen Anne so that she and other ladies of the Stuart court could perform as Africans in blackface as the “Daughters of Niger” who travel to “Britain” to be turned “fair” in complexion by the supernatural force of King James, the “sun” king of “Britannia” (Jonson 47–60). The performance of the masque ideologically incorporates the body of the King James I, who was in attendance, as a guarantee of the ambition of British imperialism (Orgel 14–17). The allegorical structure of The Masque of Blackness and other Jonsonian court masques shares some of its representational strategies with Spenser’s epic poem of The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596), which celebrated James’s predecessor Queen Elizabeth I as “Gloriana” and offered a prescient portrait of English politics, religion, and statecraft. Spenser had affiliations with a group of “hot” or forward Protestants centered around the Earl of Leicester and the Sidney family who encouraged, among other policies, strong overseas trade in order to strengthen bonds between England and other Protestant nations. One of the intellectual architects of this position was the mathematician and alchemist John Dee, whose General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (1577) contains the earliest allusion to an English (not yet British) “empire.” Spenser sympathizes with the political goals of the Leicester circle to the degree that his epic poem celebrates the heroic exploits

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of English merchants engaged in overseas adventures, inverting the predominantly anti-mercantile ethos of classical epic in Homer to Virgil Kitch 2009, 28. Specifically, The Faeire Queene takes up an interest in the proper “uses of wealth” in the Cave of Mammon episode in book 2 and in the section on Dutch trade in the siege of the Castle of Belge in book 5 in order to explore the state-building potential of English trade via the nationalistic genre of epic poetry (Kitch 2009, 26–44). Such literary nationalism can also be found in genres such as travel writing and chorology (e.g., the study of space) in the period, including the work of Spenser’s contemporary, Richard Hakluyt, who published an anthology of mercantile narratives in 1582 as the Principle Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation. Like Spenser, Hakluyt aligns England’s national interests with the proliferation and protection of trade. His earlier work, “A Discourse of the Commodity of the Taking of the Strait of Magellanus” (1580), had warned of the danger to England and other European nations of a Portuguese monopoly on trade and colonial settlement in the East Indies. Together with a range of early modern writings on similar subjects, including Shakespeare’s history plays and the “chorography” (survey book) of Michael Drayton, we might regard such literary production in terms of what Richard Helgerson has called “forms of nationhood,” meaning the imaginary modes of writing that shape a nation in both ideological and practical terms. Many early modern writers in fact defined authorship itself in terms of the horizon of national identity, an association made possible by humanism and the revival of interest in classical rhetoric. Where Stephen Gosson might claim in his antitheatrical treatise entitled The School of Abuse (1579) that poets and dramatists were parasitic “caterpillars of the Commonwealth,” the celebrated Defense of Poetry by Philip Sidney praised imaginative writing for its capacity to cultivate virtue and strengthen the bonds of civil society.7 George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589) likewise describes poets as the “first lawmakers to the people…devising all expedient means for the establishment of a commonwealth” (in Vickers ed., 195), while some years later Ben Jonson suggested that the study of the state should not be confined to politicians, but was also the province of poets who might “feign a commonwealth” in order to “govern it with counsels, strengthen it with laws, correct it with judgments, [and] inform it with religion and morals” (Vickers ed. 568). Both critics and advocates of such literary nationalism approach the nation not just as a geopolitical reality but also as a powerful idea that was constituted, in part, by fictional strategies of representation.

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Language In addition to defining a group of people who occupy the same geographical location (e.g., Scotland), the word “nation” in the sixteenth century also described an ethnically or religiously cohesive group of people (e.g., “Jewish nation” or “nation of Gentiles”) sharing a common language, culture, history, or descent (see, e.g., Kitch 2008). What Smith calls the “nation,” sixteenthcentury authors might also refer to as a “state” or “commonwealth,” as did those authors now known as the “Commonwealth men,” including Edmund Dudley, Thomas Starkey, Henry Brinklow, Thomas Becon, and Thomas Smith. One of the most significant sources for the economic treatises of such men was Thomas More’s feigned commonwealth of Utopia (1516), a work of imaginary fiction that is also one of the earliest works of political economy in England. Taking up some of the philosophical arguments of the perfect state outlined in Plato’s Republic, More’s philosophical and literary experiment also invokes contemporary travel narratives of the kind later published by Hakluyt. More defines the “happiness” of a state primarily in terms of its intertwined economic, juridical, and social practices. Utopia seems to suggest that egalitarianism requires political revolution rather than reformation, namely through the elimination of structures of private property and money. The philosopher traveler Raphael Hythloday (whose last name means “purveyor of nonsense” in Greek) informs the narrator Morus that Utopians abolish private property, look down on gold and silver as measures of value, and live in egalitarian collective farms that rotate every ten years. A passage on justice from Utopia anticipates, in fact, some of Smith’s own language in The Wealth of Nations: What kind of justice is it when a nobleman, a goldsmith, a moneylender, or someone else who makes his living by doing either nothing at all or something not especially necessary for the commonwealth, gets to live a life of luxury and grandeur, while in the meantime a laborer, a carter or a carpenter or a farmer works so hard and so constantly that even beasts of burden would scarcely endure it? Although this work of theirs is so necessary that no commonwealth could survive for a year without it, they earn so meager a living and lead such miserable lives that beasts would really seem to be better off. (104)

Hythloday’s rhetorical question shares with Smith’s Wealth of Nations a distrust of the parasitical labor of goldsmiths and merchants. More’s radical questioning anticipates a more egalitarian society, even though many contemporary European humanists, following Cicero, continued to defend nobility

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based on magnificence. As Quentin Skinner argues in his influential reading of Utopia, the “happiness” of Utopians depends on the “avoidance of mistaken beliefs about the qualities that truly deserve to be regarded as noble and praiseworthy, as opposed to the qualities that merely happen to be displayed by the so-called gentry and nobility” (142). Yet Smith critiques More’s Utopia and James Harrington’s Oceana specifically as impossible blueprints of political economy because of their failure to consider the importance of self-­interest. Despite this fact, however, Smith has more in common with More than he cares to acknowledge, including an interest in social justice as a form of civic humanism.8 Smith also shares with More a dislike for inherited wealth, a distrust of conventional Christian morals as expressed by the institution of the church, and an insistence on “happiness” as a necessary metric for a successful nation, or what More calls the optimus status reipublicae. Where More and Smith diverge most significantly, however, is in their respective modes of expression. Going beyond his philosophical source in Plato, whose dialogues often function  as vehicles for Socratic monologue, More employs dialogue and other literary strategies of questioning that challenge propositions contained in his own text. As the narrator “Morus” notes in the closing lines of the main body of the text, several of the laws and customs that Raphael has described would appear “really absurd” to an English audience, especially the “communal living and their moneyless economy” of Utopians (106), which undermine the necessary “splendor and majesty” of nobility in the commonwealth (107). A number of “paratexts” surrounding the printed edition of Utopia, including letters, maps, and witness testimonies, helped to  make the fantastical island of Utopus seem more realistic, while pervasive wordplay and irony repeatedly question the capacity of the work to tell a unified story. Such fictional strategies demonstrate how, far from generating a static picture of a perfectly rational and just state, More’s text produces its own modes of critique. More’s Utopia thus inaugurates a new genre of political economy using a mode of literary  writing that poses challenging questions about the  genre itself. Anticipating modern behavioral economics and the study of the rhetorical structures of economic theory (e.g., McCloskey), More identifies questions about the distribution of wealth in a given society in terms of problems of representation, a strategy that marks significant works of political economy in the early modern period. Consider, for instance, More’s fellow Commonwealth author Edmund Dudley, who like More was also imprisoned in the Tower and eventually executed by King Henry VIII. At odds politically with More’s egalitarianism, Dudley’s Tree of Commonwealth (1510) centers on the metaphor of a tree with five “roots” (love of god, justice, truth, concord, and peace) as a

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means of defending historic privileges of the landed aristocracy. Though each branch of the tree yields a different fruit depending on the root with which it is associated (honor of god, dignity, prosperity, tranquility, and “good example,” respectively), all roots find common “ground” in the gentle nourishment of the monarchy itself (64–65).9 Dudley’s vision of mutual support between soil, roots, tree, branch, and fruit offers a gentle correction to the ruling class in places, yet his overburdened conceit collapses of its own weight. Indeed, Dudley’s early Tudor vision of political economy joins More and later Commonwealth authors in foregrounding what we would now call “literary” devices in order to represent society. Even a far more complex work of political economy such as Thomas Smith’s De Republica (1583) relies on the metaphor of a mechanical clock, for example, to describe the fear of inflation (Wood 213–14). In both large and small ways, then, texts we might now label as political economy rely on literary devices as tools of knowledge, even as later utopias, including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666), and James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), respond to the destabilizing structure of More’s original by trying to limit the paratexts and wordplay so central to  More’s pathbreaking Utopia. Still, such works testify to the power of humanism to integrate rhetorical and literary models into the study of economics and politics. Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705) stages another  significant confluence of the literary and the economic, offering an important bridge not just between literature and philosophy as burgeoning disciplines but also between the historical phases of mercantilism and capitalism in England. The poem adapts Machiavellian political theory to argue that shame and pride are universal human desires that cannot be erased from humans by religion or education, but rather should be the foundation for understanding government and society. Where Commonwealth authors and mercantilists generally lambasted luxury consumption in arguments against excessive imports, Mandeville seeks in The Fable of the Bees to demonstrate that a successful commonwealth depended on an accurate understanding of natural human inclinations and desires. Subtitled “Private Vices, Public Benefits,” Mandeville frames his short poem with a preface, an introduction, an explanatory essay, and long-form notes numbered A through Y.  He also draws on a strain of skepticism also found in  Montaigne, Descartes, and Hobbes in rejecting Christian morality in favor of self-love as the guiding principle of social order. The speaker of The Fable of the Bees praises traditional vices such as avarice, envy, vanity, and pride as nursemaids not just to commercial “Ingenuity” and trade but also to “Justice,” medicine, “Honesty,” and accurately priced real estate (30–32). Mandeville suggests that a Hobbesian state of nature where

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“Fraud, Luxury, and Price” thrive actually produces a healthy society, inverting the central claim of Hobbes’s Leviathan that only absolute monarchy can prevent the violence and insecurity of mankind in the state of nature (34). Mandeville’s central conceit of the beehive invokes a longstanding tradition of figuring poetry in relation to bees, going back to Seneca, who urges authors to copy bees by maintaining social distinctions even as they blend together the strands of pollen that they have gathered to make honey.10 Moreover, the poem’s iambic-tetrameter couplets help Mandeville to achieve his anti-­utopian philosophy in several ways. For example, the couplets reproduce at the level of form a tension between the violence of the state of nature and the order required for civil society. Like the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope, although written in tetrameter rather than pentameter, Mandeville’s couplets establish a series of stark oppositions that can be resolved into ­normative social order. The very first stanza of the poem, for example, contrasts the  slavish “Tyranny” of absolutism with “wild Democracy,” only to resolve this binary dialectically through the appearance of the just rule of “kings” whose power is “circumscribed by Laws” (23). Quite different from Pope’s Augustan sensibility, however, the tetrameter lines of The Fable of the Bees associate Mandeville’s literary work of political economy with a popular tradition of versifying going back to medieval alliterative poetry and other primarily oral forms of poetry such as the ballad. This choice of poetic form helps his bees to represent human society more broadly as opposed to the allegorical structures that More uses in his Utopia. Mandeville indicts clergymen, moralists, politicians, and philosophers who believe that ethics and religion can educate humans into civil order. The poem demonstrates this proposition when Jove rids the hive of “fraud” in order to show that moral reform inevitably erodes justice, heightens the egotism of clergy, eliminates honor, and dissipates trade. In its form as well as its content, Mandeville’s poem joins a tradition of imaginative literature in England from Spenser’s Faerie Queene to the minor epics of Drayton and Shakespeare, from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (c. 1589) and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (c. 1595) to Milton’s Paradise Lost, that weave political economy into the fabric of their representations (Kitch 2009; Ryner; Hoxby). The Fable of the Bees acknowledges the centrality of metaphorical language to economics and situates specific genres in relation to the idea of an English nation. In this sense, Mandeville’s fable extends and refines a historical trend in English writing that constitutes genres in terms of economic and political forces. As Susan Wells argues, for example, the city comedies of Marston, Middleton, and Jonson also work to “naturalize” distortions of the festive marketplace caused

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by such activity by showing how mercantile wealth can be in “harmony with the norms” of such a marketplace, especially by staging a “celebration of the body, of the cycle of birth and death” (56). At the same time, as several scholars have shown, early mercantile treatises engage in their own language games  in response to economic problems of valuation and loss (Sullivan; Ryner 16–49). The mediation of history through forms of language thus depends less on the category of “fiction” or “nonfiction” than on the relationship with living bodies as both literary and economic subjects and producers.

Body Mandeville developed his theories of human nature in part through his reading of Descartes, especially his Passions of the Soul (1649), but unlike Descartes Mandeville does not posit a universal desire for self-interest as a means to the end of rational control and the common good. Instead, he elevates self-­ aggrandizing behavior for its own sake, making a radical claim for the benefit of studying this “invisible part of man” (Remark N). Mandeville situates the discourse of political economy specifically in relation to the natural desires of the human body. As Cleomenes states in the first dialogue of Mandeville’s Enquiry into the Origin of Honor (1732), “human nature ought to be humored as well as studied: whosever takes upon him to govern a multitude, ought to inform himself of those sentiments that are the natural result of the passions and frailties which every human creature is born with” (Hundert, ed., 202). In basing his study on human impulse rather than abstract moral principles, Mandeville suggests that any system of political economy must be attentive to everyday human activities—what some philosophers call the “bios” (Hundert, ed., xxiii). Literature and political economy thus share a joint interest in the human body as both a source of labor and an engine of desire that drives commercial activity. When Adam Smith describes the state as a secular structure designed to meet the material needs of mankind, he depends on a neo-Platonic distinction between true pleasures of the soul and false pleasures of the body (Wood 239). And yet, both Smith’s notion of self-interest in The Wealth of Nations and his concept of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments are explicitly embodied. For example, Smith defines sympathy as an internalized force of observation by the “other” (sometimes named God) that allows us to understand and appreciate how others might see us. This crucially dialectical force

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is a product of human imagination, which is ultimately grounded in human psychology, or what Smith and his contemporaries called the “passions” (see Hirschman). Sympathy also works to unify the discourses of aesthetics and “utility” in the sense that the quality of “justice” that every “commonwealth” strives for in restraining its subjects from “hurting or disturbing the happiness of one another” (1:218). Sympathy, on this account, understands bodily desire, pain, pleasure, panopticism, and imaginative acts of creation as part of moral philosophy. From the Commonwealth men to the English mercantilists, from the French Physiocrats to the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, works of political economy evaluate living bodies and their desires to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Regenia Gagnier suggests in her study of The Insatiability of Human Wants (2000) that a biological concept of aesthetics came to dominate economics, psychology, and sociology in the latter half of the nineteenth century (136). Yet, as we have seen in Smith’s lectures, the idea emerges even earlier. Smith’s notion of belles lettres depends on a theory of aesthetic production that situates the creation of art within the body and reveals the influence of Hume’s psycho-somatic description of taste. Smith goes beyond earlier labor theories of value by suggesting that the real measure of exchange value derives from the quantity of labor that a given commodity enables one to purchase from others. Where the price of a given commodity fluctuates in relation to factors such as the weather, the relative value of gold and silver, and the international balance of trade, the value of a commodity is directly related to the labor that one saves for oneself by imposing “toil and trouble” on others (2.1:47). By defining labor as “the only universal, as well as the only accurate measure of value” (2.1:54), Smith locates political economy in relation to the active laboring body of men and women. His study of the wealth of nations anticipates the elevation of demographics and the philosophy of pleasure represented most significantly  by  the works of Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham, respectively. Where Aristotle defined money as an expression of basic human needs, Smith’s account of the wealth of nations depends on the laboring body of the worker as  measured in terms of  physical health and reproductive capacity. Such reproduction famously worried Thomas Malthus, who chided Smith in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) for his failure to evaluate commodities in terms of their biological utility. In her study of Victorian novels and their relationship to the political economy of Malthus and Bentham, Catherine Gallagher identifies the relation between modes of production and

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life forms associated with Malthus as “bioeconomics,” while she defines “somaeconomics” as the “theorization of economic behavior in terms of the emotional and sensual feelings that are both causes and consequences of economic exertions” (3). Beneath the overt conflict between aesthetics and political economics perpetuated by the dismissive rhetoric of Romantic poets and Victorian aesthetes, Gallagher locates a shared concern with the “common body” as a center of public discourse in a range of poems, novels, and economic treatises (11). Considered from a different angle, however, the common-ness of this body is problematic to the degree that it is neither equally distributed nor universally acknowledged. In relation to the historical exchanges between literature and political economy, it is also ambivalent and layered. One way to appreciate these features of the common body of political economy and literature is through the well-studied history of usury, which also allows us to consider some of the intersections between wealth, biological reproduction, and representation. As any reader of Aristotle’s Politics knows, usury appears in classical texts as the unnatural “breeding” of money, a metaphor that invests commercial activity with a form of human agency that is not proper to itself. (The Greek word tokos signifies both usury and the generation of offspring.) The horror of usury is not just in its imitation of biological reproduction but also in its capacity for incestuous and infinite reproduction, which transgresses the natural as well as moral order posited by human female reproduction when harnessed to the moral hegemony of patriarchal marriage (Kibbie). The well-­documented proliferation of antiusury tracts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century England responds, in part, to the influx of new wealth caused by New World gold and silver and England’s increasing part in overseas trade, but also produces new characters and even genres of fiction in the period. Consider, for instance, that most famous of all fictional usurers, Shylock, through whom Shakespeare channels early modern anxieties about usury and Judaic otherness. The pound of flesh that Shylock proposes as collateral for the loan of 3000 ducats to Antonio makes explicit the bodily logic of usury (1.3.136–44).11 Shylock’s attempt to substitute a pound of flesh for money also causes readers and viewers to reflect on other social and economic bonds in the play. For example, Bassanio, who uses the money loaned by Shylock to finance his romantic pursuit of Portia, describes his quest as a “hazard” (1.1.151) or venture that necessitates material as well as emotional capital. Likewise, Jessica steals from her father in eloping with the Christian Lorenzo.

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These interconnected  bonds link  mercantile trade, usury, sexual desire, legal precedent, and ethnic and religious identities together in the play. The Merchant of Venice  not only figures romantic bonds in terms of economic transactions—it also registers the effects of the mercantile society of Venice on the body of its characters. Shylock’s craving for the flesh of Antonio is a material and anti-Semitic manifestation of the affective economy of the play, where the anticipated joy of the romantic couples of Portia, Bassanio, Nerissa, Graziano, Jessica, and Lorenzo is confounded by a range of feelings of sadness, anger, and fear, from Antonio’s strange melancholy in the opening lines of the play to Jessica’s inability to be “merry” in response to “sweet music” in its final scene (5.1.69). Between such bookends, Shylock, Graziano, Lancelet, and the failed suitors Morocco and Aragon all reflect on their sudden emotional changes, which at times appear to be unmotivated, suggesting that cultures of trade, like Shylock’s bond with Antonio, shape not only legal and political structures of a given society but also what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” or the quotidian existence of embodied subjectivity.

Coda If the confluence of literature and political economy in early modern England entails a mutual interest in the desiring bodies of readers, laborers, and consumers, the post-Enlightenment history of such fields produces new fissures between the “bare life” of human existence and abstract systems of thought. The modern insistence on the autonomy of art as distinct from material conditions of society accompanied a greater separation between literature and political economy as fields of knowledge. The increased centering of political economy on mathematical principles beginning in the nineteenth century divorced the study of economics from the cultural and material forces that previously shaped it as a scientific discourse. Once established as a social science that favored instrumental reason over dialectical inquiry, the field of political economy  could evolve more easily into an  ideological arm of the very political structures it helped to produce. The modern discipline of political economics takes for granted an institutionalized global capitalist economy that for earlier political economists was yet a given, as the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (2006) illustrates, for example. In a series of essays on such topics as the role of government in regulating commerce; competing behavioral models of voting practices; the political, social, and economic costs of war; and social choice theory, the handbook serves the interests of governmental and non-governmental bureaucracies such as the US State

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Department and the World Bank. This kind of scholarship seeks to reform rather than to question a globalized and largely neoliberal set of economic policies that it assumes to be both natural and inevitable. At the same time, interdisciplinary studies of economics and literature since the 1970s have countered such assumptions. One example is the celebrated address by Deirdre McCloskey to the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 1991 entitled ‘The New Economics,’ in which she argued that the concept of self-interest at the center of classical political economy was also a product of fiction produced by English novelists, including Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Jane Austen.12 McCloskey and others have made a career of arguing that even dispassionate claims about economic topics such  as marginal productivity theory and the quantity theory of money depend on “literary” devices such as metaphor and modes of rhetorical persuasion. This kind of  claim echoes Marc Shell’s argument that monetary and linguistic systems are both essentially hermeneutic undertakings that inspire parallel forms of belief: “Credit, or belief, involves the very ground of aesthetic experience, and the same medium that seems to confer belief in fiduciary money (bank notes) and in scriptural money (created by the process of bookkeeping) also seems to confer it in literature” (7). In this sense, literature and political economy are always already linked as sign systems, regardless of the awareness of both authors and readers to this fact. It is significant in this regard that the French poststructuralist Jean-Joseph Goux begins his study of Symbolic Economies (1973) with the observation that the Greeks invented a phonetic alphabet, conceptual philosophy, and a money system simultaneously (10). In a somewhat forced effort to marry Marx and Freud, Goux links various forms of writing and modes of Freudian sexuality with particular modes of production. In so doing, however, Goux advocates a politics of feminist materialism that returns to the concrete complexities of earth and the body in order to resist the mounting abstractions of late capitalism. Such a gesture is radical in the literal sense of returning to the roots of political economy, though Goux does not acknowledge the role of embodied materialism in the classical political economy in Smith, Ricardo, and others. It is also radical in the sense that it aligns political economy with the same social and political forces that allow for new kinds of particularity to emerge as a source for the novel beginning in the seventeenth century. Like Smith’s own narrative of the “wealth” of nations, Goux’s insights into political economy depend on a certain historical blindness. Such historical amnesia may well be a  byproduct of the philosophical  narrowing of economic discourse that Goux himself combats—what L.M. Fraser describes in his classic study of Economic Thought and Language as a shift from  the  “philosophical” and

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“humane” theory of value to a desiccated form of “mathematical speculation” (103). It is precisely to counteract  such speculation  and to reanimate the important links between historically significant fields of knowledge that studies of the relationship between literature and political economy should continue to be written.

Notes 1. Foucault in The Order of Things defines literature as a type of “pure language” that emerges in the nineteenth century as both a useless and “enigmatic” category of writing (89). 2. All quotations in this essay have been modernized and use American spelling. 3. All citations of Smith in this chapter are to the Glasgow edition of his works published in six volumes by the Clarendon Press at Oxford between 1976 and 1983. Each of the six volumes has different editors. Volume 2, edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, reproduces The Wealth of Nations in two parts, so citations to that work will provide both volume number and part (e.g., “2.1”) before giving page numbers after the colon. 4. The labor theory of value was designed, as Craig Muldrew notes in his essay “From Commonwealth to Public Opulence,” to free “the industrious laborer to earn what the market would give him in order to buy goods whose prices had not been inflated by monopolistic manipulation” (333). 5. Smith mentions in the lines following this quote that poverty discourages marriage. 6. Michael C. Amrozowicz argues that Smith’s vision of history draws on the “stadial” theory of history introduced by Sir John Dalrymple in his An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (1757), adding language to the two criteria used to distinguish each of the four stages of history: means of subsistence and attitude toward private property (151). 7. The full title of Gosson’s work is The School of Abuse: Containing a Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and Such Like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth; Setting Up the Flag of Defiance to Their Mischievous Exercise, and Overthrowing Their Bulwarks, by Profane Writers, Natural Reason, and Common Experience. For Sidney’s defense, see Vickers, ed., 336–91. 8. As Hythloday’s valorization of Greek over Roman sources suggests, however, More’s civic humanism goes beyond Cicero to its Greek source in Plato. 9. The metaphor of a tree was also employed by both Bacon and Descartes in the seventeenth century as emblems for systematic philosophy. See, e.g., Redman, 24.

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10. See, e.g., the discussion of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales in Brian Vickers, ed., pp. 24–25. English authors from Thomas Elyot to Ben Jonson elaborate on the bee metaphor as a defense of poetry and playwriting, as Jonson says in his Notes on Literature that the poet should process raw materials like the bee in order to “draw forth out the best and choicest flowers…and turn all into honey” (Vickers ed., 586). 11. All quotations from Shakespeare are from the Norton edition edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. 12. McCloskey repeats and refines the subject of this address in Chapter 2 of her Rhetoric of Economics, which is entitled “The Literary Character of Economic Science.”

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Amrozowicz, Michael C. 2013. Adam Smith: History and Poetics. In The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith, 143–158. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bacon, Francis. 1951. The “Advancement of Learning” and “New Atlantis”. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bromwich, David. 1989. A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chandler, James. 2013. Adam Smith as Critic. In The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith, 126–142. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descartes, René. 1996. Discourse on Method and Related Writings. Translated by Desmond M. Clarke. London: Penguin. Dee, John. 1577. General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. London: John Day. Dudley, Edmund. 1859. The Tree of Commonwealth. Manchester: Charles Simms & Co. Eagleton, Terry. 2001. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. London: Wiley. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Fraser, Lindley Macnagathen. 1937. Economic Thought and Language: A Critique of Some Fundamental Economic Concepts. London: A. & C. Black. Gagnier, Regenia. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Gallagher, Catherine. 2006. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gosson, Stephen. 1579. The School of Abuse. London: Thomas Woodcocke. Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, Kim. 1995. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Helgerson, Richard. 1992. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirschman, Albert O. 1977. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hoxby, Blair. 2002. Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hutchinson, Terence Wilmot. 1988. Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776. Oxford: Blackwell. Jonson, Ben. 1969. The Complete Masques. Edited by Stephen Orgel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kibbie, Ann Louise. 1995. Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana. Publications of the Modern Language Association 110 (5): 1023–1034. Kitch, Aaron. 2008. Shylock’s Sacred Nation. Shakespeare Quarterly 59: 131–155. ———. 2009. Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England. Farnham and Surrey: Ashgate. Labio, Catherine. 2013. Adam Smith’s Aesthetics. In The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith, 105–125. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Longaker, Mark Garrett. 2014. Adam Smith on Rhetoric and Phronesis, Law and Economics. Philosophy and Rhetoric 47 (1): 25–47. Malthus, Thomas Robert. 1992. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Edited by Donald Winch and Patricia James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandeville, Bernard. 1997. The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Edited by E.J. Hundert. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. McCloskey, Deirdre N. 1998. The Rhetoric of Economics. 2nd ed. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. More, Thomas. 1989. Utopia. Translated by Robert M. Adams and edited by George M. Logan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muldrew, Craig. 1998. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York, NY: Palgrave. ———. 2013. From Commonwealth to Public Opulence: The Redefinition of Wealth and Government in Early Modern Britain. In Remaking English Society:

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Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard, and John Walter. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Orgel, Stephen. 1975. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Puttenham, George. 1589. The Art of English Poesy. London: Richard Field. Redman, Deborah A. 1997. The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Methodology and Classical Economics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ryner, Bradley D. 2014. Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2016. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Shell, Marc. 1982. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Siraki, Arby Ted. 2013. Adam Smith and the Problems of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics. PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa. Siskin, Clifford. 2016. System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Slack, Paul. 2007. The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century. The English Historical Review 122 (497): 609–631. Smith, Adam. 1976–1983. Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence. Edited by R.L.  Meek, D.D.  Raphael, Peter Stein, J.C.  Brice, et  al. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spenser, Edmund. 2006. The Faerie Queene. 2nd ed. Edited by Albert Charles Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki. New York, NY: Longmans. Sullivan, Ceri. 2002. The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing. London: Associated University Presses. Vickers, Brian, ed. 1999. English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Weingast, Barry R., and Donald A. Wittman, eds. 2006. The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wells, Susan. 1981. Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City. English Literary History 48 (1): 37–60.

30 Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern Theories Shira Wolosky

Religion and literature have been neighboring rivals since the emergence of literature itself, considered as the textual patterns and sounds and images that weave language into complex trajectories. This is the case not only in the way God or gods may people both; or divine events may make up subjects, imagery, references, plots, spaces, and scenes of both religion and literature. Nor is this only a matter of the chants and prayers, sacred narratives, blessings and curses where religion and literature are inextricably inter-engaged. Nor, furthermore, is it primarily a question of how religion makes use of literary materials in its self-explications, nor the reading of literature through religious categories—in the first case, a use of literature in non-literary ways, in the second, a reduction to doctrine. There is also the possibility of confusion, rather than reduction, between literature and religion. This happens when religious beliefs, practices, viewpoints, claims are treated as literature only or when the artwork is viewed as sacred in its autonomous constitution. These of course are not hard and fast boundaries. Indeed, they attest to the fragile borders between literature and religion. Literary forms are among religion’s foundations as well as modes, while religion is one of literature’s most vital and enduring resources. They converge not only in imagery but also structure and above all the questions literature may pose, problems it may confront. I will however claim the two differ in responses each proposes to such questions and problems and in the manner and domains in which they do so.

S. Wolosky (*) Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_30

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What I will claim is that the two are most near, but also most rivalrous, in that both offer, albeit in different ways, on different grounds, and with ­different implications, a sense of further dimensions through multiple levels of meaning opening out of any single experience and understanding. Literature is the language of figures. In it every word always means more, with further possible connotations or puns or implications or domains of reference and experience hovering into possible activity. Configurations of words take on rhetorical shapes that impact and elicit memory, emotion, senses, reason, imagination. Representations evoke or stand for or conjure other images of likeness or association or reflection or parallel or contrast. To enter a literary text is to enter an expanding echo chamber of words and phrases and structures, each interacting with the others into a multiple relationality that reaches from the text to include author and reader, context and contact, other texts and the historical and cultural settings in which they were created and in which they ongoingly continue to be received and responded to. But this is what religion offers too: contact or glimpse or hope or fear of larger, resonant meanings, and experiences echoing through and connecting any one domain of experience to others—a sense of multi-dimensional reality that opens avenues from or reframes the flattened plane of any given experience. This is not only a question of a higher metaphysical reality, but of the meanings of religious enactment through histories of their observance, as these organize time and space, sacred and profane, the depths and reaches of human personhood, and the communities in which these take place. Religions, however, and especially religious doctrine, make different sorts of claims about such multi-dimensionality than literature or art does. In literature these are provisional and relational: to past uses of images with past implications; psychological recognitions; harmonies and dissonances between experiences; historical transports that situate familiar understandings in distant contexts and distant contexts in familiar ones; philosophical challenges and propositions; in religion these emerge as truth claims—metaphysical, moral, historical, ontological. One might sum up that both religion and literature open figural dimensions extending immediate and concrete experience in multiple directions. Both open toward a variety of domains, often in conjunction with each other, including history, culture, ethics, psychology, philosophy, science, economics, politics, gender—which both literature and religion treat and address. But the claims each makes about the figures they deploy and propose differ. In this sense, literature is at once broader and narrower than religion is. It is broader in its very provisionality, including its emphasis on author and responder as persons who, however sharing cultural paradigms, remain highly individuated, although this can be flattened by

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critical methods that reduce literature’s plural senses to one plane of meaning. Religion, on the other hand, enters more fully into community participation, as enacted through praxis, material experiences including food, sex, calendar, music, ritual, and other interior and exterior acts. Yet religion narrows in turn when it sets out to rebind all experiences, figures, symbols, histories into one doctrinal authority referring to one metaphysical unity. There have been many different crossovers between religion and literature at many different times: claims that literature in its visionary power delivers religious experience, either as conduct or in its own aesthetic constitution; that literature is structured through metaphysical domains; conversely the use of doctrine to interpret literature; or a variety of philosophical approaches or existential questions that literature can pose.1 These traditional discussions, going back to classical times but surprisingly persistent through many subsequent periods, share however a fundamental commitment which has been challenged in contemporary theory. The multiple relationality proposed here as defining both literature and religion has been inherent or implicit, if not central, to discussions of both. But until contemporary theory, both art and religion have been defined through and seen to represent or derive in unitary design that incorporates and consolidates multiplicity. Perfection, harmony, integration, balance: these classical ideals persistently define both the aesthetic and the religious, as what both literature and religion represent and seek. All parts are seen to fit into a whole, itself an image and attribute of an eternal unity beyond temporal distributions and contingencies, a glimpse into a realm of stability and integration. Of course different periods recast these values and the avenues to them in different ways, both in religion and in art. Classic definitions of religion emphasize not this multiple dimensionality, but metaphysical truth, or, more sociologically, the function of making events meaningful, as in Weber, or as concern with what is ultimate, as in Tillich. The very term “aesthetics,” which emerged only in the late eighteenth century when the locations and procedures of evoking metaphysical realms changed with Kant, emphasizes the sensuous element in artistic representation, whereas Neoplatonist art theory was committed to ideational levels. But the assumption of unity as ideal, with both religion and literature as homage or access to such unity, remains fundamental and basic until very recently. Here, multiple relationality in literature, and in some contemporary theory also religion, is proposed apart from ideals of ontological, theological, and aesthetic unity of the main tradition, challenging the assumptions and values such unity entails. The desire or idealization for order itself, order as such, comes under suspicion. Order can be, as twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics and history reveal explosively, a principle of repression, murder, genocide, intolerance, and era-

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sure of whatever cannot be subsumed or absorbed into its fixed rigors—the rigor mortis, as Nietzsche said in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, of Platonic being (1962, 11). In Nietzschean terms, eternal, timeless, unitary design is a flawed and indeed dangerous model for changeable, multiple human experience. Multiple relationality instead registers and embraces the terms of human experience, opening them toward meaning in ways that do not sacrifice or erase contingency, historicity, materiality, and the multiplicity of our life in the world.

Exegesis, Typology, Historicity Multiple relationality as a textual event emerges at the most foundational intercrossing of religion and literature in the West, that is, the Bible. Practices of religious textual exegesis involve sophisticated elaboration into levels of meaning. In terms of Western exegesis, the great and decisive theorist is of course Augustine. Others before him proposed multiple levels of sacred texts, beginning with the gospel effort to both link and yet displace Hebrew Scripture in its new teachings. The first Christian centuries elaborated an exegetical relationship between Hebrew Scripture and the unfolding Christian canon by regarding the first as a foretelling of the second as its ultimate and “spiritual” sense. Whether and how to link the Christian texts to the earlier Hebrew ones and hence to prior sacred history—indeed to historicity itself— was one of the core controversies of the early church. Against gnostic trends of the turn of the first millennia that would dissect the material world and time as the work of a demonic Creator God who had enmired man’s true spiritual selfhood in the debasement of body; the early Christian fathers fought to affirm the Hebraic account of Genesis of creation as a divine act of goodness. The marriage between Hellenism and Hebraism, Greek eternity and Judaic historicity was thus consecrated, out of which Christianity was born (Auerbach 1984, 52). And this required new ways of reading and understanding Hebrew Scriptural texts. The result was the conversion of Hebrew Scripture into Old Testament. As Old Testament, it became prelude and prophecy to the New Testament, both pre-history and pre-figuration of Christian revelation in the person of Christ, while the New Testament became figural, spiritual fulfillment of Old Testament prophetic pre-figurations. A unity between Testaments is thereby asserted (Frei 1974, 3, 32). Christian revelation was thus linked to earlier divine disclosures, claiming to continue the earlier historical course but now essentially as part of a vision of eternity, revealed in Christ, encompassing and exceeding history itself. The

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most influential formulations emerge in Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine (1958), which served as a handbook of interpretation from its composition in the fourth century through the long Middle Ages and beyond. In terms of textual exegesis, Augustine codified the correlation and also supersession of Old Testament in New as pre-figuration and fulfillment, as the structure of biblical typology. Erich Auerbach in Figura and Mimesis, the foremost modern theoretical re-examinations of typology, explicates how events, images, objects, and actors of the Old Testament are affirmed as actual and historically real, but also as prophetic pre-figurations of what will and did come to pass in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. This Christic pattern is temporal and historically actual, having indeed happened in the course of time. But it opens as well a plane beyond time, revealing the design of time itself to be eternal and unchanging. This design governs the course of events for those who can properly read and interpret just this extra-temporal eternity. Augustine, whose spiritual and intellectual history spanned Neoplatonist, Manichean Gnostic, and then Christian structures, had been guided along this pathway through encounter with the textual exegetical practices of Ambrose. As Augustine recounts in his Confessions (1981), what had seemed the anathema of Hebrew images of the divine in material temporal terms, could be redeemed into spiritualized and atemporal terms through the practice of figural, typological interpretations. (V). These would not, in orthodox terminology that Augustine was instrumental in formulating, convert into pure allegory where the actuality of historical material event becomes only symbol conveying ultimate eternal truths. Allegory of this kind had been a way of redeeming the Homeric epics from indecent narrative to philosophical conceptuality. The Christian vision, however, emerged as retaining Hebraic historicity, yielding not allegory but typology, where types are atemporal, spiritual, and conceptual, but also historical and temporal, thus revealing eternal unchanging truths of the totality of divine understanding into human apprehension in ways that have both aesthetic and religious implications of a unity that justifies even negative parts (Hick 1977). Already in Augustine, these figural structures and implications became elaborated into a multi-layered schema later codified as the fourfold level of typological exegesis. The “literal-historical” confirmed the actuality of the accounts of both Old and New Testaments in time as “type” or shadow. The “figural-spiritual” marked the eternal truths revealed and fulfilled within the pattern of Christic birth, death, and resurrection as “anti-type.” A third level reaches inward, into each Christian’s spiritual state—the tropological level; a fourth, eschatologically onward to Last Things, at each person’s death and then, ultimately, to the End of the world, when, as Dante writes, the gates of

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the future will close and time will resolve in eternity. At this anagogic, apocalyptic finale, the eternal design revealed in Christ will come to final accomplishment, with the world’s birth at creation concluding in its last death and final resurrection into eternity. This religious figuration linking and subsuming time into eternal design emerges in Christian literature in, for example, Dante, whose Divine Comedy represents a crossover of religious exegetical and literary structures back and forth into each other, interweaving biblical as well as Greek and Roman mythological strata in an orchestration, as he wrote in his letter to Con Grande, of the multiple levels of figural Christic typology. The Divine Comedy is anagogic as taking place in the timeless eternities of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The literal, historicist level is inscribed through Florentine history and characters whose tropological moral states achieve marvelous eternal formation, frozen in expressive postures for ever more. Dante’s journey and the entire literary-­ metaphysical schema is structured in the pattern of Christ’s death and resurrection, including the Harrowing of Hell through which Christ himself traversed the unchanging metaphysical world whose design he made available to humanity through his sacrifice. Dante himself identifies with this pattern, although with severe distress at the suffering he witnesses, at once resisting yet ultimately affirming the Christic design. Works in English continue to pursue the echoing figurality of Dante’s Comedy. Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost each propose and pursue typological figurations, the first in the frame of the Elizabethan church settlement, the second in the terms of Puritan dissent. Spenser makes Romance plot and character figural structures of spiritual states, complicating distinctions between allegory and other forms of typological representation. The historical level registers religious controversies of Spenser’s time, while the unchanging eternity of Faerie represents an anagogic level. Characters embody in action and image internal moral and spiritual states as the poem’s tropology. Milton retells the Genesis story of the Fall, interweaving into it a rich tapestry of typological references, echoes, correlations, glosses, bringing all into the epic sweep of justifying God in history and eternity. But in early modernity, the levels of representation begin to shift, and their literary translation exposes complications in distributions and references. In the English tradition, this is tied to the Reformation and the specific Calvinist turns it took (Preus 1969). In Protestant poetics, typological figuration continues as literary skeleton. Typological figuration particularly flourishes in the American tradition that emerged out of a Puritanism unhampered by Catholic or other Old World institutional entrenchments. The New World, far from European histories and traditions, could flourish as Protestant experiment

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without hindrance. There, figural patterns extend through religion and literature into politics and civic life. Typology becomes the governing structure of history itself, as the Puritans considered themselves to be living continuation, reenactment, and also fulfillment of biblical patterns: the Puritan/Israelites crossing the Atlantic/Red Sea to the American/Promised Land, there to establish the Kingdom of God. The force of typological structure emerges in literary form in the poetry of Edward Taylor, whose work was unknown until discovered by Thomas Johnson in 1937 in the library at Yale. Taylor’s Meditations, written and never circulated, correlate with sermons, each of which takes a biblical text and then elaborates it in correlations between Old Testament and New. Christ is the center of both, yet is especially represented through Old Testament figural types such as Manna (Wolosky 2011). In this Taylor registers Protestant revisions of Christian exegetical practices, where relations and priorities shift between what was literal and what was figural and what was historical and what was ultimate and eternal (Preus 1969). What emerges, as with other aspects of early modernity, is a reassessment and reaffirmation of historicity itself. The Augustinian division, not to say opposition, between the eternal City of God and the temporal City of Man is redrawn by the Reformers. This is especially true for English Calvinists, as pursued first in Puritan England and then in Puritan America. What had been emphasized and been located in interior spirituality and the afterworld becomes in the Puritan venture also an exterior and historical venture. The Puritan project becomes not only individual salvation, but salvific community experiencing God’s providence and care within history. As Sacvan Bercovitch elucidates in Puritan Origins of the American Self, to act as community is to act in concrete history (1975). Neither Otherworldly as in earlier medieval spirituality nor this-worldly as in subsequent secularized society, Puritanism can be called both-worldly, attempting and pledged to their mutual correspondence and concomitant expression. The shifts in emphasis, and then in structure, of this reinvestment in worldly event and nature can be seen in the writings of Jonathan Edwards, remarkably in his long unpublished notes on “Images and Shadows of Divine Things.” Typology, announced in the title as shadows, continues as a re-reading of Old Testament images as figures for Christic ones. But Edwards pushes at the borders of the traditional. Calvin had tried to rein in exegetical excesses by restricting typology to biblical precedents alone. Edwards innovates, applying figural extension not only beyond biblical ones, but into nature itself as an almost Neoplatonist shadow and copy of eternal truths (Daniels).

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Hermeneutics What emerges in America is a transformation of the balance between time and eternity. Biblical typology had insisted upon history as a mirror of eternal pattern as revealed in Christ. An increasing investment in the temporal in its own right begins to emerge. Secularization, in the terms of typological figuration, is the unbinding of the temporal from the eternal. The bands of figural correlation are cut. This dismantling becomes theorized in new revolutionary terms, in the emergence of hermeneutics and then twentieth-century theory. Where before, literary interpretive norms had been mainly generated out of religious exegesis, now religion is counter-refracted through literary theory and hermeneutics, altering hierarchy and organization. Augustine in On Christian Doctrine and On the Trinity had introduced the terms “sign” and “signified” to describe how eternal metaphysical truth is signified by earthly material temporality. “Now,” he writes, when I come to discuss the subject of signs, I lay down this direction, not to attend to what they are in themselves, but to the fact that they are signs, that is, to what they signify. For a sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself. (On Christian Doctrine Book II, 1)

At the turn of the twentieth century, these terms were made into technical linguistic ones in the work of Saussure, terms which, however, as Derrida later explicated in Of Grammatology (1974), nevertheless carried with them into linguistic science their earlier metaphysical implications and structures. In the post-­Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the location of meaning in eternal Ideas, divine mind, conceptual truth as what is “signified” by “signifiers” that remain secondary, external, material, and temporal becomes destabilized. The higher reality of religious and metaphysical ontology no longer is assumed as the anchor or site of meaning, then reflected into the world of time as signs or figures of ultimate truths beyond them. Instead, meaning comes to be imagined as signifiers in association with each other, through diacritical sequences of differentiation and connection, repetition and inversion, aggregation and conflict and dissociation. Reference to a fixed idea as the anchor of meaning is replaced by relationality among material signifiers in time as generating meaning. The vertical becomes horizontal—or rather, multi-directional, since figures still open into multiple relations and dimensions, but not as a ladder or hierarchy from materiality and time to intelligibility, spirituality, or eternal truths. Traditional ontological dualism is rejected. Instead of lower and higher

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as ontological degrees measured through the changing multiple materiality beneath a constant unitary intelligibility or spirituality above it, experience becomes a refracted generative resonating trajectory radiating through prismatic meanings. What is lost in fixed stability is gained in radiant trajectory. These are twentieth-century, post-metaphysical views. Movement toward a critique of ontology as a pre-given site of meaning, however, already begins in nineteenth-century philosophical discourses tied to religious rethinking. Hermeneutics as interpretation of interpretation moved attention from exegetical practices to the frameworks in which they took place and the presuppositions they enacted. This shift from “what truths do we know” to “how do we interpret” already recasts emphasis from doctrine to self-reflective procedure. It is as if attention moved down Plato’s divided line at the end of Republic VI from pure Ideas to the imagery and shadows thought to (more or less badly) represent them. These, which had been lesser and indeed deceptive reflections of a truth beyond them, now become the center of interest and increasingly of value. It was Nietzsche who proclaimed this transvaluation. Denying ontological actuality to religious metaphysical dimensions, he dismissed religious truth claims and placed them on a par with literary figuration, only less rich and less creative. Wallace Stevens, a Nietzschean poet, complained that heaven is under-imagined. For Nietzsche heaven is worse than boring. It is betraying. Instead of truth, what the metaphysical higher world offers is denial and debasement of the realms of human experience, falsely measured as fallen time against a metaphysically invented eternity. What was true is now falsehood. Fictional like any other human account, eternal unitary ontology lacks not only truth but value, emptying experience of meaning. The phenomenal world, before seen as falsehood, is now the gateway to experience, to whatever values and authenticity and importance human worlds may have. Nietzsche had read and praised Emerson, who pursued American paths from traditional metaphysics to its revision and reweighting toward the phenomenal world. Emerson’s Divinity Address pronounces Christianity to be a marvelous poem. The essay “Nature” invests nature with revelatory powers and experiments with a language theory that hovers ambivalently between a “­signified” that inheres in a spiritual or ideational realm, and meaning as produced by the interactions and interventions between perceivers and perceived. Signs and signifieds with their traditional typological references as biblical exegesis continue to haunt American letters in the writings of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson but in destabilized and skeptical ways. Reference to eternal designs fail in these writers to account for earthly life, although what

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might replace metaphysics as either epistemological or moral guide within the relativity of history remains unclear, as is still very much the case today. Inherited figural structures change directionality and distribution of priority and emphasis. Yet all reconfirm even as they subvert the inextricability of religious and literary figurations. Walt Whitman can serve as exemplar of these figuralist and historicist trends. His radical break with traditional poetics such as rhyme and meter— unequaled even in Emily Dickinson, who still fiddled with the hymnal— effected the fuller and intenser move to figuration as what poetry and literature do and are. But religion for him is figural as well. Declaring his work to be a “New Bible,” and of course adopting biblical parallelism as his poetic mode, Whitman makes figural correlation, expansion, contest, intrication, calibration his poetic event (Wolosky 2009, 2011). From “Song of Myself ” through the great elegies “Out of the Cradle,” “As I Ebb’d,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman enacts and tests the figural presuppositions that structured the American religious imagination in its very moment of transmutation. His rendering consists in the transposition from vertical signification as referring to a pre-established and fixed signified to horizontal processions of ongoing signifiers. Section 6 of “Song of Myself ” offers the prolegomenon of his processional procedure. Whitman proposes case after case or instance after instance not of what the grass “is,”—“how can I say what the grass is? I know no more than he”—but of different figures it can take. There is no “is,” no fixed being, no unchanging essence, but only a “list” (as Whitman calls his figural chains, tied to listening) of different figures of grass from different angles, in different contexts, with different resonances. Each of these contexts can be taken as a figural dimension. As in biblical typology, one dimension is “literal” historical. Whitman inscribes through his text the land and people, events and history of the United States. This includes science, industry, the material prosperity, and development of the States. A second level, converting what had been the “spiritual” level of typology, unfolds as love, itself the interconnection between all other levels, including, emphatically, the physical. In “Song of Myself ” Section 5, Whitman declares himself the poet of soul and of body. Whitman rejects dualisms. Sexuality in Whitman is not merely (or at best) a signifier-ladder up to spirit above it, as in certain forms of mysticism, and is certainly not an ascetic means to spirit as material self-abnegation or a gnostic barrier to ascent. Meaning, value, significance inheres in Whitman in the material, the physical, the body, in its interrelationships of confirmation and love. Section 5 thus ends with Christ his brother and declares a “kelson of creation is love.”

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Whitman begins writing “Song of Myself ” in 1855, in the years leading up to the Civil War which he, as a journalist for Democratic Party newspapers, followed and examined. This is a measure that he writes not out of sheer optimism nor from ignorance, but out of prophetic strength, willing America toward its fullest realization through its many layers of promise— he calls America the “greatest poem” in the “Preface” to Leaves of Grass—in the very midst of America’s self-betrayal in slavery. Slavery interrupts Whitman’s figural correlations and extensions. Its degradation of the person betrays Whitman’s religious, civic, and poetic vision. The poem “I Sing the Body Electric” is governed by the biblical norm of man in the image of God, extended to body no less than soul, here defiled in the auction of the slave. The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred, No matter who it is, it is sacred— … All is a procession, The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion. (Section 6)

“All is procession”: this is Whitman’s declaration of a “horizontal” temporal material realization as the site and structure of meaning and value. Slavery betrays the sacred more than death does. Whitman embraces death within the ongoing transformation that is time and life. This too is carried in his figure of grass, which as Leaves of Grass is the figure of his poetry. The grass stands for political equality, a “uniform hieroglyphic, … sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white;” also material rejuvenation as “the uncut hair of graves;” also the leaves of his book as the “uttering tongues” he translates from “the roofs of mouths” at graves, showing there is really no death. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. (Song of Myself 6)

Whitman thus moves meaning from eternity to time, from the unchanging to transfiguration, in which each feature and element of experience is a figure for each other. This occurs across interruption, which the poem registers not least as invitation to every reader to become the poet/citizen who can participate in this open and challenging ongoing creativity. Whitman’s, however, in many ways remains an act of faith, punctured by skepticism.

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Post-Metaphysics Nineteenth-century “Romanticism” enacts an ambivalence or ambiguity of tradition, caught between signified and signifier, eternity and temporality, fixed pre-given truth and hermeneutic interpretations that historicize it. Modernism in turn can be called a crisis in tradition, post-modernism, the dislocation of tradition. Modernism attempts to restore, reconstruct, or substitute for what are no longer secure metaphysical structures and explanations tradition offered, in the domains of religion but also aesthetics and politics; even as the cracks in metaphysics continue to show through modernist designs. Post-modernism more radically breaks with tradition and its core assumptions, deconstructing rather than restructuring, transvaluating rather than reconstituting, thus opening radically new terms of discourse and signification. Modernism reconstructs; post-modernism deconstructs. Modernism reconstitutes; post-modernism disrupts and redistributes. Nevertheless, the categories of modern/post-modern are not chronological nor clearly bounded one from the other. They are instead waves on the same sea, the sea of Nietzsche. They represent an array of responses to the challenges Nietzsche posed and never closed or resolved, reflecting several trends in Nietzsche’s work: not in sequential or systematic or hierarchical orders, but as a deployment of positions or implications marked out in his writings: doorways Nietzsche opens into avenues that continue to penetrate and define contemporary religion, literature, philosophy, and ethics. The first trend in Nietzsche is critique. He sets out to implode Western metaphysical tradition, rejecting its ontological structures in which a higher world as signified provides reference to unchanging truth, the whole ideal world from Plato on in its various forms. This rejection entails two protests which, however, are not identical to each other. The first claims that the ideal world does not exist; the second claims that the ideal world is not ideal. Nietzsche sees the metaphysical higher world as evading and devaluing the actual conditions of human experience: time, change, materiality, multiplicity, and difference. Having burst apart the traditional frames and orders, Nietzsche was heterogeneous as to what to do next. His writings open a number of options. The one that has become the mainstream reading of Nietzsche is that the collapse of metaphysics leaves only power. Order is instituted by coercion, without appeal to any other principle. The “Wille zur Macht” is thus taken to mean power as power over—domination over others. This reading stretches from the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche on the right, to today’s Foucauldian interpretations on the left, with the two oddly in agreement that power governs

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all, all is hegemony of power. The death of metaphysics leaves a void to be filled only by imposing order which is no longer based in any metaphysical truth or design. Power is its own origin and own ground, emerging out of phenomena as contingent forces. This has its ironies. Power in effect takes the place of the metaphysical orders it rejects, itself acting as a metaphysical principle, in contradiction against its own anti-metaphysics. Ironic as well is the way the metaphysics of power is as nostalgic as are modernist religious restorations. Both see the death of metaphysics as leaving nothing but nihilistic void. In modernist religious responses, this prompts the resurrection of metaphysics. In Will to Power theories, the death of metaphysics leaves nothing but nihilistic domination with no basis for ethical distinctions. Both as forms of nostalgia agree that if metaphysics collapses, so does meaning. This second response to Nietzsche is a reconstituted metaphysics that emerges in many modernist writers. As with nihilist power, this is fed by the springs of nostalgia: that without metaphysics all meaning and values collapse. T.S. Eliot, at least in his later critical writings, pursues this course, first facing the void left by religious apostasy, then refilling it with religious reconstruction. Interestingly, such reaffirmed metaphysics in religious senses can verge into an aestheticist modernism. The whole term “aesthetics” requires and deserves much greater examination. Most often it is taken to mean a unity of parts, structure as integrated components. This is a tradition that continues through the formalism of most twentieth-century poetics as well as into the New Aestheticism of the early twenty-first century. New Criticism in the United States, seeing itself as rooted in Eliot’s poetics, entrenched such formalist idealization of art in academic practice and norms. Tensions, ironies, paradoxes are identified but then fused as representations of the integrating act of imagination “itself,” taken to be an integrating medium as Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was understood to pronounce, along with its much cited privileging of impersonality. Formalist criticism took this to erect the poem as iconic object of self-referring language structures. Yet this notion of autonomous art is not Eliot’s own professed position. He warns against the making of art into autonomous experience substituting for religion. Matthew Arnold’s view that “poetry is capable of saving us” is one Eliot scorns. He counters it with Jacques Maritain: “it is a deadly error to expect poetry to provide the super-substantial nourishment of man” (124). Eliot’s The Use of Poetry (1944) dismisses “Art for art’s sake” as a false elevation of poet to priest and a mistaken effort to “draw religious aliment” from art (26). As against such aestheticism, Eliot clarifies in “Poetry and Drama” (1950):

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For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness and reconciliation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no farther. (34)

Art is not religion. It is not a fixed iconic object in itself, revealing design as intrinsically sacred. It may reflect and depend upon religious structures—as does Eliot’s own Four Quartets—but art does not found, nor offer claims or proofs of truth for those structures, and does not take their place. Art, however religious, offers its structures provisionally, as a possible world among others, one of its multi-dimensional possibilities. Yet Eliot in the passage above continues traditions of order as a defining value in which art echoes religion: the condition of “serenity, stillness and reconciliation” as deriving in art’s “imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality.” Art retains the unity, the “stillness,” that defines traditional metaphysics, as the “order” for what appears to be changing and conditional. Eliot here approaches such modernists as Pound, Yeats, and Joyce when they appeal to myth, epic, or arcane hermeticism for aesthetic structures to take the place of metaphysical ones— although these also often display entropic impulses of the “post-modern.” The “stillness” into which words reach in Four Quartets is explicitly metaphysical, words into the Word. As Eliot writes in “Ash Wednesday,” his poem of conversion, he wishes “To restore with new verse the ancient rhyme.” To restore, however, is not the same as to inherit. Indeed, Eliot himself remarks of Baudelaire that his “business was not to practice Christianity… but to assert its necessity.” Just so, in “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot speaks of “having to construct something on which to rejoice.” From a Nietzschean point of view, once metaphysics has crashed, even metaphysics becomes but one interpretive possibility among others, constructed not revealed, without anchor beyond other signifiers arranged in other configurations. Nietzsche, as he famously declared in “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” sees truth as an “army of metaphors” (1989). That is: what is taken to be “truth” is in fact produced by ­language figures. Signifieds do not precede, but rather emerge from signifiers. In Nietzsche’s own unsystematic formulation, The “thing in itself ” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.

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Speaking of designation rather than sign, Nietzsche rejects a Kantian or Platonist “thing in itself ” as some pure, unchanging abstract truth and instead sees meaning as emerging from “the relations of things to men, expressing these relations.” Words generate meanings, rather than recording them. No signified exists before or beyond signifiers in their unfolding generation. Some argue that literature, art itself, thus becomes in Nietzsche an absolute value, a self-justifying or self-referring design. Nietzsche’s own aesthetics is too large a topic to pursue here. It is tied, I would argue however, not to aestheticist iconicity but to the theories of interpretation that fill his late notebooks, in ways more evident in newer editions of them. In these writings, Nietzsche radicalizes hermeneutics to reflect back upon the language constructions through which interpretations occur and above all the multiplicity of interpretations possible for any given set of data. Somewhat different from the “perspectivism” Nietzsche mentions, and which has been much attended with all its relativist implications regarding subjectivity of viewpoint, interpretation moves discussion from interior perception to the mediated, negotiated arena of language. Here Nietzsche points forward to twentieth-century language philosophy. Interpretation emerges as a negotiation among and within signifiers—including the humans who do the interpreting, themselves signifiers as actors, with no signified anchor above or before them constituting some total truth. Hermeneutics then would not become a set of competing, exclusive interpretive claims, but a mode of negotiating them. Instead of art signifying religious truth, religion becomes a mode and enactment of interpretative signifiers, just as art is.

Negative Theologies of the Sign One response to the collapse of metaphysics is nihilistic power. One is aesthetic sacrality. One is metaphysical rehabilitation, where, however, this becomes only one more interpretation rather than the ground for i­ nterpreting. Each of these leaves open the question of how and whether norms can be sustained within immanent experience without further metaphysical anchor or reference. The goal is to reconstitute norms without anchors in fixed, eternal truths, within the frame of a post-metaphysics that abjures nostalgia. In this attempt, religious terms reenter, not as an ontology but in the guises of negative theology—a longstanding mode within religious tradition itself that evades or complicates traditional ontologies. Discourses of negative theological sign-theory first come to prominence in the writing of Jacques Derrida. Derrida straddles literary, religious, philosophical

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fields, as well as psychoanalysis, aesthetics, political theory, and so on. Of Grammatology offers a sustained critique of sign-theory as itself theological even when apparently scientifically linguistic (13). Pursuing his critique of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, Derrida shows Saussure’s sign-theory also to incorporate and imply a metaphysics of language relying on pre-given signifieds then supposedly conveyed by signifiers, in a dualism going back to Platonic Ideas and their material copies. Derrida instead formulates a theory of meaning as signifying chains, where meaning emerges out of the inter-­relations among signifiers, as Nietzsche suggested in “Truth and Lies.” Derrida, however, invokes terms from specific trends in religious history where metaphysics is (un)situated or displaced in traditional ontological senses through languages of negativity. Derrida’s key term, “trace,” for signifiers as they unfold meaningfully in time, has specific religious echoes. Indeed, he reveals in a brief note that the term “trace” has been taken from Emmanuel Levinas, who specifically links it to the invisible passage of God when Moses asks in Exodus 33 to “see” God (70, footnote 33). Negative theology is said to have originated in the writings of Philo, then entering Western religious discourse by way of Plotinus, through the Pseudo-­ Dionysius, to, quite differently, Maimonides and Aquinas. Around these more systematic writers are other mystical visionaries using negative languages of God. Derrida takes up in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” just how to assess the metaphysical directionalities of these discourses Derrida takes up in “Speaking Denials.” There he questions to what extent Dionysius’s negative theology is in fact non-metaphysical. Nothingness in Dionysius in fact signifies a most high ontology, a “superesse,” rather than a non-ontological divine as its signified (Wolosky 1998). The effect of negating this superessential but still ontological Being, is not to invest meaning in signifiers, but further to empty them as what is truly negative compared with its totality. What is ultimately negated is not Being but signifiers, who can never equal the superessence they strive, but fail to represent. The extreme of such failure is Gnosticism as claiming humans can never experience the divine within the time/space of the created world and the language that is conducted there. The utter anchorlessness that would then ensue is captured in, for example, Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song”: God topples from the sky, Hell’s fires fade; Exit Seraphim and Satan’s men. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

Plath registers the consequences of collapse of common metaphysical reference, unleashing a subjectivism disconnected to any world beyond itself. This

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is the dark side of Romantic imagination in its post-modern development, as producing worlds unanchored outside each self, neither necessarily shared with others nor sustainable through the moods, and beyond strength or will of each author. There are other options, poetically and philosophically. These can be seen in, for example, Wallace Stevens. As he writes “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens’s is a “poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice.” What he proposes and enacts in his verse are relational meanings emerging out of chains of signifiers. “Description without place,” with direct reference to Nietzsche, both performs and theorizes how that would work. Opening with a Nietzschean anti-Platonist “to seem it is to be,” Stevens embraces phenomena as the world we inhabit—what “seems” mere appearance is in actuality what there is—and declares that we do so in the forms of language: “it is a world of words to the end of it.” Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool Of these discolorations, mastering the moving and the moving of their forms in the much-mottled motion of blank time.

So Stevens too offers forms of words moving and moving, looking into the pool that Plato had offered as an exemplar of distorted perception remote from the ‘real.’ But “much-mottled motion in blank time”—a reference both to temporality and to poetic blank verse—is Stevens’s element. “Description is revelation,” “not the thing described” as a signified outside signifiers “nor a false facsimile” as in a Platonic copy, but “the theory of the word for those for whom the word is the making of the world.” The world is indeed a made one, yet in words its forms are shared in ways that rescue it from sheer subjectivism and solipsism. Stevens’s “theory of the word” enacts inter-relations from which “forth the particulars of rapture comes,” as he writes in his oxymoronic “Notes towards Supreme Fictions” that remain both “Supreme” and yet provisional, phenomenal, and secular. Instead of unchanging unity, Stevens celebrates change. “The imperfect is our paradise,” he writes in “Poems of our Climate.” Whatever the perfect composition, “we would still want more,” the multiple meanings of words and figures that literature offers. Yet Stevens also questions whether this would be enough, whether the “Course of a Particular,” the title of another poem, would in the end “concern no one at all.” Stevens more or less abandons traditional metaphysics and its unities, leaving the orders of words to be incessantly recreated. Yet, there are other, less

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secular and aesthetic, but post-modern paths that pursue notions of transcendence in ways, however, that do not devalue temporal and conditional experience. Chief among these are echoes of negative theology as it divests metaphysical signifieds and invests in signifiers instead, yet still governed by a transcendence that regulates the signifying chains so produced. Such a negative theology is suggested by Emmanuel Levinas in his own writings, in ways that are becoming increasingly recognized and explored. Levinas offers a systematic critique of traditional metaphysics and especially the unity it elevates and privileges in, for example, Alterity and Transcendence. Unity, in Levinas, wields a dangerous erasive force, absorbing, excluding, or destroying whatever is different, multiple, and other than unity. “Universalism is imperialism,” he writes. Levinas instead proposes disunity as our condition—the different and multiple—and sustaining them as the good(s). This is a radical turn in the history of mainstream Western religion and philosophy, which since Plato, as Nietzsche laments, has held unity to be the highest good and truth. There is, instead, no overarching, unifying, eternal design to which temporal material experience refers for its meaning. Levinas accordingly critiques typology, which ultimately reintegrates the multiple levels it offers into what Hans Frei calls its “single cumulative pattern” and “cumulative unity” (33–34). A nonontological transcendence, cannot enter into or ground typological representations, extensions, or correlations. Not a signified, it is beyond all representation. No figure can contain or refer to it. As absolute transcendence, what it does is regulate and in this sense limit the concrete world, confirming inter-relations among particulars while governing, confirming, and safeguarding the value of each. Transcendence thus remains a normative force in the unfolding of signifiers, in the interaction among humans who signal one to the other. Language, discourse itself, becomes a model of interaction among multiple and different signifiers—actors and signs—within a multiple world of differences. Each particular in this sense can be said to transcend each other, in mutual respect and reverence. This is an ethical rather than an ontological negative theology. No realm of higher being is signified or crossed into. The self remains in the becoming world of change time and finitude, but respects that very finitude from being to being and particular to particular as an ethical sustaining of the multiplicity of creation. Marianne Moore is chronologically “modernist” but features differential multiplicities without unity, safeguarded by transcendent respect with negative theological traces of “post-modern” art and religion. A committed Presbyterian growing up in a family of ministers, Moore’s art, like her religion, is highly oblique and reticent. In it she celebrates unique creatures as apart and mysterious from the grasp of any other, including her own as poet.

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Her craft represents linguistic particulars, part-rhyming in resistance to complete correlations, treasuring the slightest parts of speech—suffixes, articles— in riddling chains of image and information whose figural senses and directions remain ever incomplete. Hers are not constructions nor celebrations of unifying design or iconic closure. A homage in language to what escapes its grasp is in her work both an ethic and an aesthetic. As she writes in her hymn to the hymns of “Melchior Vulpius c. 1560–1615:” We have to trust this art— This mastery which none Can understand. Yet someone has Acquired it and is able to Direct it.

Religion here provides a model for art, with “trust in art” matching what she earlier in the poem named “faith.” Here Moore’s superb craft of lineation weighs fully. “This mastery which none/can understand” line-pauses after “none.” We expect some hyperbolic assertion: which none can equal, which none can surpass. Offered after the enjambment instead is retraction. “Mastery” is not what one achieves, but what “none/can understand,” what is beyond anyone, though the artist in his field may acquire and “direct it.” As she pursues in the lineation of the next stanza, she envisions only an “Almost/ utmost absolutist.” The absolute is not utmost, but almost, never achieved, never possessed. The kaleidoscope of Moore’s poetic language, its disparities and heterogeneity, affirms art as multiplying figure and intersecting, intervening spheres of human endeavor, each amplifying or contesting, affirming or challenging, but none commanding or reducing the other. She stands in, and offers, an awe before unpossessible mystery, unfathomably beyond any determinate configuration.

Note 1. An interesting range of such traditional approaches to the question of literature and religion can be found in the collection of essays edited by Giles Gunn. There, Nathan Scott and Louis Martz offer literature as religious experience; Walter Ong as ontological contact. Anthony Wilder and Vincent Buckley refer literature to doctrine. Ricoeur and Stanley Romaine Hopper offer existential readings. C.S. Lewis and Northrop Frye, not in the collection, envision literature through metaphysical structures.

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Bibliography Auerbach, Erich. 1984. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Augustine. 1958. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D.W. Robertson Jr. New York, NY: Bobbs-Merrill Company. ———. 1981. Confessions. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1975. Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Eliot, T.S. 1944. The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1950. Poetry and Drama. London: Faber and Faber. Frei, Hans. 1974. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hick, John. 1977. Evil and the God of Love. New York, NY: Harper. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1962. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Chicago: Gateway. ———. 1989. On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, 246–256. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Preus, James. 1969. From Shadow to Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolosky, Shira. 1998. An “Other” Negative Theology: On Derrida’s “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”. Poetics Today 19 (2, Summer): 261–280. ———. 2009. Emerson’s Figural Religion: From Poetics to Politics. Religion and Literature 41 (1, Spring): 25–48. Ed. Paul Kane. ———. 2010. Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth Century America. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2011. Edward Taylor’s American Hebraism. In Turn Around Religion, ed. Michael Kramer and Nan Goodman, 287–312. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

31 Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue Michael Mack

For there to be a discovery of truth, active inquirers are required. It is difficult to understand how philosophers can fault literature and poetry for its dependence on an audience, on readers and listeners. Can we conceive of truth as non-relational? In other words, is there a truth that is independent from those who recognize it? In a Platonic realm of ideas this might certainly be true. In our human world, however, truth is there to be shared. It is interpersonal. “Personhood only comes into being once it establishes relationships with other persons” (Person erscheint, indem sie zu andern Personen in Beziehung tritt) (Buber 1979, 76)—this is a point highlighted by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber whose work, as is discussed later in this chapter, has informed Paul Celan’s approach to the question of truth or reality in poetry and poetics. As we see in the concluding part, Celan shares with Walter Benjamin a conception of poetry as interruption and break with what we are familiar. Poetry opens up vistas of strangeness and disturbance. While not paying enough attention to Walter Benjamin, his biographer John Felstiner has emphasized how Martin Buber’s philosophical works captivated Celan: “Clearly it counted to see contradiction vouched for by the reigning Jewish philosopher, an emigrant to Jerusalem who bridged the war years with his Muttersprache. Celan ‘venerated Martin Buber to the point of rupture’, said a lifelong friend” (Felstiner 1995, 161). Felstiner describes, however, the Paris meeting of September 1960 between the philosopher of I and Thou and the poet Celan as deeply fraught: M. Mack (*) Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_31

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He [i.e. Celan] took his copies of Buber’s books to be signed and actually kneeled for a blessing from the eighty-two year old patriarch. But the homage miscarried. How had it felt (Clean wanted to know), after the catastrophe to go on writing in German and publishing in Germany? Buber evidently demurred, saying it was natural to publish there and taking a pardoning stance toward Germany. Celan’s vital need, to hear an echo of his plight, Buber could not or would not grasp. This encounter, or failed encounter, left the poet even more vulnerable. (Felstiner 1995, 161)

There might be other reasons for Buber’s demurring. Perhaps he refused to be paid homage? He might have been embarrassed by Celan’s enthusiasm for his work. Celan’s poetics are closely related to Buber’s thought that pivots around encounters that are beyond the instrumental scale of the measurable and usable. Those who lose relationality become owners. According to Buber, this sense of using and owning degrades the Thou from a living being to an object, to an It. By being one’s own, one ironically loses not only oneself but reality and thereby truth: One’s own being (Das Eigenwesen) does not participate in the true, real world and does not gain any world. It sets itself against the other and attempts to possess—through usage and experience (Erfahren und Gebrauchen)—as much as it can. This is its dynamic: the setting itself apart and the taking of possession: both exerted over the It (Es), both exerted in the unreal (beides im Unwirklichen geübt). (Buber 1979, 76)1

Celan’s poems disrupt clear, teleological destinations. In a unique and highly idiomatic way Celan’s poetry engages with Buber, who associates the teleology of travel plans and destinations with the management of usage that divests persons of personhood and demeans them to the state of usable objects. Buber’s term experience is not what it means in English. Rather, it denotes travelling (Erfahren) from one destination to another clearly defined destination, without paying attention to what lies in between. It means getting from A to B. Getting from A to B is a common to logical, causal procedures. For Buber truth departs from the causal logic of both usage and teleology. Truth here concerns what has not yet been clearly defined. As we have seen, Celan’s approach to poetry has been deeply informed by Buber’s conception of an encounter that does not reduce the other to what is “manageable” and useable but focuses on his or her irreducible strangeness. However, Buber’s notion of a Thou embraces a spiritual-religious dimension whose absence appears in Celan’s poetry as nothingness. Where Buber “traces” the “touch of the Thou” to “a breath of eternal life” (Denn durch die Berührung

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des Du rührt ein Hauch des ewigen Lebens uns an. Buber 1979, 76), Celan’s poetry paradoxically prays to the absence of any transcendent or eternal force. Here the truth of relationality is aporetic: that of nothingness. Transcendence has withered to non-existence. Buber speaks of an eternal Thou (ewiges Du. Buber 1979, 91). Celan calls an absent, eternal other “no-one”. The Biblical creation myth is just that: a myth in the sense of something non-existent that comes close to a lie, to fiction. Celan’s poetry uncovers the lie and insists that even if it were once valid, Biblical creation must have been unique, is gone, will never be repeated: “No-one forms us again out of earth and dust” (Niemand knetet uns wieder as Erde und Lehm. Celan. Vol. 1 1986, 225). Celan’s poem “Psalm”, which opens with No-one, dwells on the repetition of the name Niemand that is at once intense, despairing, and darkly humorous. It borders on irony when the second strophe picks up on the traditional psalm-like hymn to a transcendent deity, praising Buber’s du (Thou) as Niemand (No-one). The creator no-one leaves nothingness as its creation. The third strophe quasi celebrates this Nichts, this nothing out of which emerges the title for Celan’s poetry collection Niemandsrose (Rose of No-one). Celan’s rose of no-one evokes genocide and the industrial killing machine of the Holocaust. It is himmelwüst. This is one of Celan’s many neologisms. As an adjective it combines two nouns: sky (himmel) and desert (wüst). The wüst is ambiguous, because next to being a noun, it could also be read as the adjective denoting “chaotic, violent and wild”. The latter is the more likely reading. Wüst read as adjective makes grammatical sense since Celan’s neologism operates in the poem in an adjectival way. “Sky-violent” could be a possible translation of himmelwüst. The sky as the product of human violence evokes the burning of millions of corpses. Celan’s early poem Death Fugue (Todesfuge) refers to the digging of “a grave in the air where one does not lie anxiously” (wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng). The Sky and the air becomes a cemetery of the ash of killed and burned human bodies. Traditional markers (such as the sky) and metaphors (such as “air”) of transcendence are here deprived of any beneficial significance or implication. As we see in the following paragraphs, Celan’s engagement with a transcendence that has lost all spiritual or religious meaning refers back to Buber’s religious thought (and his understanding of truth as relationality), but it is ultimately grounded in Walter Benjamin’s analysis of a radically immanent world. Buber’s notion of Wirklichkeit (reality) shapes Celan’s poetry of encounters, while shedding any religious-spiritual connotations. According to Buber, reality and truth are polyvalent, denoting at once the mundane and the

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­ rofound. Here truth is a contaminated and contaminating entity embracing p purported opposites which are traditionally opposed to each other (such as the profane and the sacred). Doing justice to such a contaminated reality, Buber declares that there is a plurality rather than unity of being. His understanding of truth or reality thus arises from his appreciation of diversity. Reality and truth coincides with diversity: “In the lived reality (Wirklichkeit) there is no unity of being. Reality (Wirklichkeit) consists in the work of acting on someone or something (Wirken); here is reality’s force and depth. Inward reality too exists only if there is a mutual encounter” (In der gelebten Wirklichkeit gibt es keine Einheit des Seins. Wirklichkeit besteht nur im Wirken, ihre Kraft und Tiefe in der seinen. Auch “innere” Wirklichkeit ist nur, wenn Wechselwirkung ist. Buber 1979, 106–107). Buber’s conception of reality and truth is as much mundane as it is spiritual, as much immanent as it is transcendent. He defines truth (reality) as encounters with an everyday life that opens up vistas of the numinous, the eternal Thou. Celan’s poetics adopts Buber’s central understanding of reality and truth in terms of encounters. He shifts, however, the emphasis from the spiritual to the historical foreclosure of transcendence. His form of reality is wounded. In his Bremen speech Celan calls the stars (transcendence) a mere human production (Sternen, die Menschenwerk sind. Celan. Vol. 3 1986, 186). In this short and important speech Celan establishes the dialogical principle of his poetry, calling it a message in a bottle (Flaschenpost): The poem can be a message in a bottle (Flaschenpost), because it is an appearance of language and thereby dialogical; sent with the certainly not always optimistic belief that it could sometimes strand on land, perhaps on heartland (Herzland). In this way poems are under way: they are drifting towards something. To where? To something that is open, occupiable, to an addressable Thou (Du) perhaps to an addressable reality (Wirklichkeit). (Celan. Vol. 3 1986, 186)

As in Buber’s dialogical thought, Celan’s poetry addresses a Thou. In his famous speech on poetics “Meridian” he argues that the contemplation of art inaugurates a journey from the self to the other: “Whoever has art before one’s eye and in one’s mind … has forgotten oneself. Art creates a distance to the self. Art requests here in a certain direction, a certain distance and a certain way” (Wer Kunst vor Augen und im Sinn hat, … der ist selbstvergessen. Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne. Kunst fordert hier einer bestimmten Richtung eine bestimmte Distanz, einen bestimmten Weg. Celan. Vol. 3 1986, 193). This quote may serve as a caveat for those critics who reduce the ambiguity and complexity of Celan’s poetry to his biography as a Jew and survivor.

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The following discusses breakdowns and traumas in Celan’s poetry. While doing so, it also attempts to avoid narrowing down Celan’s poetic voice to a traumatized one. This would distort an account of Celan’s poetry and poetics, and it is worthwhile quoting Jacques Derrida’s warning about defining Celan as a Holocaust poet: “If I could prove something concerning a Celan poem, could say, as many people do, ‘See, here is what it means’—for example, it is about Auschwitz, or Celan is about the Shoah (all obviously true!)—if I could prove it is that and only that I would have destroyed Celan’s poem” (Derrida 2005, 166). Reducing a poem to what it means or to what one thinks it means is tantamount to destroying it. This is all the more true concerning Celan’s poetry which often revolves around a lack of meaning (nothingness). Celan’s poetry has a certain direction away from the self and from what we understand by ourselves and by the term human. He opens his “Meridian” speech with art as going seemingly counter to what we consider as familiarly human: “Art, you will remember, is puppet-like (marionettenhaft), is like a iambic pentameter, and is childless (kinderlos)—this characteristic is attested in mythology through the reference to Pygmalion and his creature” (Celan. Vol. 3 1986, 193). Art contaminates the human with what has traditionally been considered to be its opposite: the puppet, the robot, the mechanical, and the absence of organic reproducibility. Being childless, art resides outside the normative rules of the traditional human family. It is thus a stranger; it is other, unfamiliar, and disturbing, if not traumatic. Going back to its opening, Celan’s speech “Meridian” describes poetry’s distance to the self as a departure from what we consider to be “safely” and “normatively” human: “Perhaps—I only raise a question—perhaps poetry, like art, goes with its self-forgotten I (mit einem selbstvergessenen Ich) to that uncanniness and foreignness (zu jenem Unheimlichen und Fremden) and sets itself—but where? but on which location? but through what? but as what?— again free?” (Celan. Vol. 3 1986, 193). Forgetting selfhood here constitutes a first step on an indefinite and yet certain road towards what goes beyond any circumscribable knowledge: that of the uncanny, the strange, and the foreign. Going into this direction, poetry broadens our understanding of human truth and knowledge as being intrinsically contaminated with what it is apparently not: that of the puppet, the ape, the childless—all those entities and characteristics which our language has traditionally excluded from being qualified and defined as human. This move beyond what our traditional linguistic usage declares to be familiar and human includes not so much a religious, transcendent realm, but what has been politically excluded as being mad, traumatized, and non-­ reproductive. When Celan seeks reality it is not in terms of Buber’s eternal

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Thou but as a wounded, traumatized entity. As Celan puts it at the end of his Bremen speech, poetry is “wounded by truth/reality and seeks reality/truth” (wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend. Celan. Vol. 3 1986, 186). Buber defines truth by its effects (Wirklichkeit as wirken). The work of truth opens up vistas of eternal, spiritual life in Buber’s thought. In Celan’s poetry, however, the effects of truth are traumatic and the poem revolves around a wound-like absence. The wound of Celan’s poems is never completely closed, located in the past, but constantly re-emerging, as the repetitions of nothingness or no-one: the mechanics of digging and drinking the black milk of a killing machine on a humungous industrial scale that were the Nazi concentration camps. Celan writes his poetry under the auspices of melancholia. He refuses to make the step from melancholia to mourning. Freud first establishes a distinction between melancholia and mourning only then to contaminate these separate entities: rather than being opposed to mourning, melancholia partakes of it: According to Freud’s 1917 essay, mourning and melancholia have the same cause (loss of a cherished person, object, or concept) and they entail similar symptoms (dejection, inhibition of the capacity to love, cessation of interest in the outer world, and others), but the two responses to loss differ in the structure of the relationship established between the subject and the lost other: while melancholia “pathologically” preserves the lost object in the mourner’s ego, mourning a “normative” grief experience, dispels it. In a discourse strongly reminiscent of contemporary anthropology, Freud describes mourning-work (Trauerarbeit) as a slow, painful process of detaching oneself from the lost object through hyper-cathected reality testing. (Bahun 2014, 24)

Whereas in mourning we eventually control and attenuate our sense of loss, melancholia precludes such alleviation of symptoms. The melancholic cannot get over the experience of a loss. Celan’s poems refuse to master a past that can never be past. If there is a working through of melancholia’s grief, then it is in the breakdown of signification. Here meaning becomes contaminated with its purported opposite: the absence or nothingness of meaning. In this contamination the poem finds some attenuation of the pain it denotes. This collapse of meaning not only responds to but also outdoes the real, historical misuse of language during the Holocaust: it empties nomenclatures that implicate language in the genocide by establishing a sign system of hatred and extermination first in words then in deeds. Celan’s poetry performs a breakdown that is at once linguistic and mental. There is some release from the injustice of unprecedented historical crimes in such a breakdown that outdoes language’s signifying operations, which prepared for racist and genocidal violence (by claiming that Jews are not human

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but bacteria to be exterminated). Poetry here renders inoperative the declarative functions of language which, as we have seen in the Chap. 20, many philosophers of literature single out as privileged for the discovery of truth. The historical truth that lies at the core of Celan’s poetry is a traumatic one. As we have seen, Celan does not propose a poetics that masters or controls trauma. Rather than controlling the uncanny and the traumatic, the poem gives it free reign—walks into it, as Celan describes it in his Meridian speech— until it reaches the point of breakage and breakdown. However, this walk into the uncanny and the traumatic also accompanies a liberation of sorts; a “setting free”, as the Meridian speech puts it and as will be discussed in the following. One such breakdown of meaning strikingly occurs at the end of Celan’s poem about the mad romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin “Tübingen, January” (Tübingen, Jänner), which closes in the gibberish of (“Pallaksch. Pallaksch”). As we have seen, where Celan’s poems engage with meaning, it is that of an absence: that of nothingness and no-one or that of the infinitely meaningless as well as lethal activities liking digging one’s grave or drinking black, poisonous or deadly, milk. Poetry establishes some form of break with historical catastrophes at the point of breakdown where it renders nonsensical languages signifying operations. While pointing to some form of liberation (“setting free”), there are no vistas of transcendence in these breakages and breakdowns. This lack of any spiritually meaningful vistas establishes Celan’s distance to Buber. As we have seen, Buber’s approach to the Thou is deeply religious or spiritual. Even though Felstiner acknowledges Celan’s lack of belief apropos Nelly Sachs (“On hearing Nelly ‘Yes, I’m a believer’, he said he ‘hoped to be able to blaspheme up till the end’” Felstiner 1995, 156), he does not draw attention to Benjamin’s approach to a world without transcendence. That Benjamin plays an important role for Clean is clear from his reading of Benjamin’s essay on Kafka: “A year later, reading Walter Benjamin on Kafka’s characters who ‘have lost the Holy Writ’, Celan pencilled a note: Cf. Mandelstam, ‘They are no longer priestly’” (Felstiner 1995, 156). Benjamin’s essay on Kafka’s characters describes religious students who have lost any access to Holy Scripture. This loss of any knowledge of transcendence is part of a radically immanent world where the only avenue to redemption is through self-destruction (through the immanent annihilation of immanence). This is tantamount to suicide or suicidal ideation. Here poetic language abandons a predictable melodious flow and courts silence. As Shoshana Felman has shown, Celan’s poetry bears witness to the Shoah and its form performs the trauma: “The breakage of the verse

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enacts the breakage of the world” (italics in the original Felman 1992, 25). One of Celan’ short poems from the collection Breakage of Breath (Atemwende) opens by declaring that works of art can no more refer back to a tradition or to a spiritual or religious meaning: “No longer any sandart, no-sand-book, no masters” (Keine Sandkunst mehr, kein Sandbuch, keine Meister. Celan. Vol. 2 1986, 186). This is precisely the topic of Benjamin’s struggle with a world that has turned utterly immanent. That arts and books were made of sand indicates that the masters were working with rather unreliable materials in the first place. Sand is light, fragile, and intrinsically formless: subject to being changed by the movement of wind and water and so forth. Art is mortal. So is religion which the poem invokes through the presence of 17 mutes who are no longer able to pray: “And maybe seventeen mutes lack one for the central Eighteen Prayer of Judaic liturgy, or simply for ‘18’, which in Hebrew spells ‘alive’” (Felstiner 1995, 220). In an abrupt and highly elliptical way the poem turns from a mute, defunct spirituality to poetry (Gesang), the knowledge or truth of poetry. Truth here resides in breakdown and breakage that eventuates in the nothingness of gibberish: Your poetry; what does it know? Deep in snow Iefimnee I-i-e (Dein Gesang, was weiß er? Tiefimschnee, Iefimnee, I-i--e

Verse here literally, visibly as well as audibly performs breakage and breakdown. The lines drift away, the signifier is excessive to the point that it is difficult to establish what it signifies; the sound is one of pain, of a piercing cry of the English sound eee (transliterating the German phoneme I-i-e). As has we have seen in the short quote about Benjamin’s essay on Kafka’s characters, Celan (reading Benjamin on Kafka) associates the loss of ­transcendence with the Russian Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam died in one of Stalin’s transit camps to Siberia. Celan translated Mandelstam’s poetry from Russian into German and deeply identified with him. He dedicated the poetry collection Niemandsrose (Rose of No-one) to Mandelstam and the title of one poem in this collection evokes Mandelstam’s name. It is entitled “Mandorla” (Inside the almond):

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Inside the almond—what stands inside the almond? Nothingness (Das Nichts). Nothingness stands in the almond. It stands there and stands.

Like “Psalm”, “Mandorla” circles round nothingness, peeling it apart: In nothingness—who stands there? The king. There stands the king, the king. There he stands and stands.

The following image to a “Jewish curl” (Judenlocke) that will not turn grey may refer to Mandelstam’s early death in one of Stalin’s totalitarian camps. From there the poem returns to the almond and the eye that focuses on it: And your eye—where to stands your eye? Your eye stands towards the almond. Your eye stands towards nothingness. It stands towards the king. So it stands and stands. Human curl (Menschenlocke), you will not turn grey. Empty almond (Leere Mandel), royal blue (königsblau).

Similar to a Russian doll, “Mandorla” peels back the different layers of an almond, to investigate nothingness. What it finds there is the prime figure of traditional sovereignty as well as religious authority: the king. The king denotes a medieval meeting place of immanence and transcendence which Ernst Kantorowicz has analysed in his famous 1957 study The King’s Two Bodies. The poem reveals the king to be invested not with the aura of transcendence but of nothingness. Crucial here is the verb “stand” which grounds the poem into a point of stasis, a lack of movement, such as the one from immanence to transcendence. The eye too does not move (as it naturally does) but stands—focused on an all prevalent nothingness. The poem thus establishes a correlation between stasis and nothingness. Felstiner, however, reads the poem as being predominantly concerned with the Shoah: “Recalling the side curls of Europe’s Orthodox Jews and Celan’s mother, whose ‘hair never turned white’, a refrain says ‘Jewish curls, no gray for you’” (Felstiner 1995, 181). This reading inexplicably posits a movement in the poems—one from Jewish curl to human curl as well as one from nothingness to kingliness: “Because Nazism declared Jews Untermenschen, subhuman, Celan’s move from Juden to

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Menschen does not simply universalize the Jewish condition but works against the racist split-­off of Jews from their humanity and fills the almond with kingliness” (Felstiner 1995, 181). Is this indeed the case? Does Celan’s poem fill the empty almond with kingliness? As we have seen the poem establishes a correlation between stasis and nothingness. It does not depict movement from one entity to its supposed opposite but insists on the contamination of what the nomenclatural systems, we have become accustomed to, defines as mutually opposed characteristics or substances (such as the sovereign or king as opposed to mere nothingness). Rather than moving from nothingness towards the king, the poem’s last line reaffirms the parallelism between the almond’s emptiness or nothingness and the king (royal blue). The royal blue of the king evokes the sky, a traditional marker of transcendence. In a radically immanent world what language denotes as the negative or contaminating force (we are in the habit of vilifying) may paradoxically offer glimpses of a new transcendence within immanence. Celan’s Meridian speech describes this negativity of contamination as a “setting free”. Rather than reaffirming notions of sovereignty and transcendence, Celan’s poetry attempts to depart from traditional forms of meaning. Indeed, in his Meridian speech Celan evokes the sovereignty of the king and his supposed transcendent, second body ex negativo. It does so apropos Lucille’s seemingly counter-revolutionary slogan “Long live the King!” proclaimed in the midst of revolutionary terror towards the end of Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death. It is worthwhile citing Celan’s take on Lucille’s famous exclamation: What a word! After all those uttered words on the platform which is the platform of death (es ist das Blutgerüst). It is a counterword, it is a word that bursts the wire; it is a word which no longer bows down to the “bystanders and parade horses of history”. It is an act of freedom. It is a step (Schrittt). Certainly it sounds—and this may be no coincidence to what I dare to say to you now and therefore today—at first sight it sounds like an affirmation of the “ancien regime”. But here—please allow someone who has grown up reading the writings of Peter Kropotkins and Gustav Landauer to highlight this—here there is no homage paid to the monarchy and to a conserving of yesterday (zu konservierenden Gestern). Homage is paid here to the majesty of the absurd (Majestät des Absurden) which gives birth to as well as witnesses the presence of the human (für die Gegenwart des Menschlichen zeugenden). Ladies and Gentlemen, what has been described here does not have a stable or valid name, but I think it takes place in poetry. (Celan. Vol. 3 1986, 189–190)

Celan contaminates the human with its supposed opposite: the absurd. Why has humanity been traditionally defined in opposition to absurdity? The

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absurd denotes lack of meaning, the nothingness of meaning. There is no sense or meaning in absurdity. It is nonsensical. Traditional humanism from the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle to that of Augustine and Aquinas and then Descartes and Kant has distinguished humanity’s dignity by its capacity of making sense. The sense-making function of language has served as proof of human rationality. Celan characterizes poetry by its ability to render sense and language nonsensical. He contaminates literature and poetry with both freedom and absurdity. How can we discover freedom in the supposedly negative sphere of absurdity which denotes the absence of sense and meaning? The proclamation “Long live the King!” renders inoperative the meaning of revolutionary violence. It does so by contaminating two mutually opposed entities: monarchy (King) and revolutionary violence (in the context of which Lucille utters her declaration and it is this context which contaminates and renders any purported reactionary meaning of this declaration a mere non-sense). It is this switch from sense to senselessness which Celan conceives as poetry’s freedom and its capacity to discover new truths. The crucial point here is that it is precisely the sense-making function of language that furthered revolutionary violence as well as the violence of the ancien regime. The former establishes a meaning for violence by calling the supposed enemies of the people the source of all evil and the latter attributes all forms of negativity to the revolutionaries. Celan takes issue with language’s capacity to make sense of a complex world by targeting certain groups, classes, or people as the reason why our world is not perfect or not as perfect as it could be. Celan implicitly unmasks declarations and concepts as language’s propensity to establish fictions that then turn real in the form of revolutionary or counter-revolutionary politics and its accompanying forms of discrimination and violence. Absurdity reduces meaning to nothingness and thereby gives birth to as well as witnesses true humanity that no longer engages in discrimination against what is perceived to be non-human (certain groups of people and so forth). Poetry’s absurd sovereignty deprives the king and all forms of immanent power of their linguistic anchorage in transcendent meaning. Celan’s collection Niemandsrose pivots around a transcendence that has been reduced to absurdity, to nothingness. The nothingness of transcendence paradoxically evokes a Biblical point of reference, as the opening poem to the collection intimates: They were of earth (Es war Erde in ihnen), and they dug.

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The first line harks back to the Biblical account of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise in Genesis 3:19: “For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return.” In the Bible God charges humans with the crime of attaining knowledge of good and evil (trespassing commandments). Celan reverses the Biblical account: God is ethically questionable and as good as non-existent. Here it is an absconding, absent transcendence that the poem tries to call to account: They dug and dug, so went Their day, their night. And they did not praise God, Who, so they heard, wanted all of this, Who, so they heard, knew of all of this.

The Biblical anaphoric repetition (from dust … to dust) gives way to the monotonous “dug and dug” which recalls the adding up of “drink and drink” in Celan famous, much earlier poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”): Black Milk of day break we drink in the evening We drink midday and in the morning we drink at night We drink and drink We dig a grave in the air there you do not lie anxiously (da liegt man nicht eng). (Celan 1986, 63)

As we have seen (see Chap. 20), for Benjamin, poetry opens ups a new space where we may discover new truths about ourselves and our world. In the post-­ World War II era, Celan locates this space, where we are “set free” to discover new truths, in poetry’s rendering inoperative of meanings to which we have become accustomed and which have shaped the perpetration of violence throughout human history. Celan (here following Buber’s dialogical line of thinking) highlights the way in which a poem addresses an opposite. The opposite is not necessarily a reader or an audience. Poetry always engages in a dialogue: it could be a dialogue with itself. Literature as containing a dialogue with itself—this topic may address the concern of some contemporary philosophers of literature who posit the lack of any cognitive dimension within its empirical “texture”. They claim that the truths of poetry are not part of what is performed in a poem but what readers read into a poem. This may be true to some extent. Does it prove that there is no truth in poetry? Why should it? Why should a plurality of meanings negate the proliferation of truths? Diversity here also embraces absence or a lack. Celan’s poetry evokes an absence of meanings, concepts, and declarations wherein truth resides. Discussing Celan’s poetry, Derrida has described what I call a plurality or diversity of meanings as the “Spectral errancy of words” (Derrida 2005, 53).

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According to Derrida, the origin of meaning is itself polyvocal: that of the trace or the spectre that keeps changing its significations and appearances. For Celan language constitutes the multilayered material of poetry. Language here is more than double-edged. Celan writing in German after the Shoah is wary of the distorting, violent, and falsifying aspects of language. All of this is part of poetry and its truth. For the survivor, the language remains: “Language remained unlost (unverloren), yes, despite everything. But it now had to go through its own state of not answering (Antwortlosigkeit), had to go through its turning silent (Verstummen), had to go through the thousand darknesses of death dealing speech (totbringender Rede)” (Celan 1986 Vol. 3, 186). The language that remains incorporates the violence that was perpetrated through it: it partakes of death-dealing speech. It would, however, be wrong to narrow down language only to its capacity to promote the exertion of violence. Celan does not do so, but he is wary of the darker uses language has been put to. In keeping with Benjamin’s approach to poetry as an interruption or break, Celan highlights its liberating potential: its ability to render inoperative declarative and the same time untruthful death-dealing speech.

Note 1. All translations from the German are mine.

References Buber, Martin. 1979. Ich und Du. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider. Celan, Paul. 1986. Gesammelte Werke. Edited by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Onti Pasanen. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Felman, Sohshan. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. London: Routledge. Felstiner, John. 1995. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Author Index1

A

Achilles, 31, 245, 582 Adeimantus, 187, 434, 435 Adorno, Theodor W., 8, 9, 14, 64 Aeneas, 8, 9, 14, 64–69, 72, 74n11–14, 76n27, 100, 112, 117n5, 119n39, 242, 243, 257–259, 567 Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 513n22, 638 Allende, Isabel, 270 Althusser, Louis, 408, 520, 610 Amossy, Ruth, 613 Amrozowicz, Michael C., 640n6 Anacker, Heinrich, 306 Anderson, Benedict, 628 Anderson, James C., 250, 309 Annas, Julia, 187, 199n5 Antigone, 209 Anzieu, Didier, 511n17 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 660, 675 Archer, Isabel, 433 Ariosto, Lodovico, 10, 276

Aristotle, 3, 5, 6, 11–14, 16, 24, 25, 44, 101, 103, 104, 111, 117n7, 167, 190–193, 198, 204, 205, 214, 215, 218n2, 218n7, 222, 223, 241, 243, 245, 248, 256, 264, 272, 276, 277, 283n9, 315, 378, 434, 436, 437, 440, 444, 445, 447, 448, 458, 462n4, 582, 602, 606, 636, 637, 675 Armstrong, Nancy, 511n15 Arnold, Matthew, 167, 169–171, 400, 657 Aron, Arthur, 179 Ashton, Jennifer, 237n8, 238 Athena, 154, 272, 283n10, 381 Atwan, Robert, 154, 272, 283n10, 381 Atwood, Margaret, 543 Auerbach, Erich, 14, 17n8, 243, 245, 257–259, 648, 649 Auerbach, Nina, 443n33 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 3, 18, 42 Auschwitz, 128, 242, 411, 412, 669

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1

739

740 

Author Index

Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 190, 192, 193 Avgousti, Andreas, 186, 199n3 B

Bacon, Francis, 4, 63n6, 143, 153, 246, 333n2, 433, 547, 640n9 Badiou, Alain, 206, 355 Bahun, Sanja, 670 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 13–15, 167, 169, 244, 246, 255–257, 265–267, 282n3, 318, 333n11, 356, 502, 503, 512n20, 608 Bakunin, Mikhail, 171 Balzac, Honoré de, 278 Baracchi, Claudia, 187, 189, 198, 200n8 Barber, Benjamin R., 562 Barber, Giles, 284n14 Barker, Elton T.E., 282n1 Barnes, Jonathan, 372, 374, 378, 380, 382 Baroni, Raphaël, 613 Barroso Castro, José, 333n15 Barth, Hans, 167 Bataille, Georges, 14, 246, 252, 253, 259 Baym, Nina, 496 Bearden, Elizabeth B., 283n9, 285n19 Beardsley, Monroe C., 296, 305 Becon, Thomas, 631 Behn, Aphra, 278 Bellinger, Charles K., 578n2 Ben-Dor, Oren, 551 Bénichou, Paul, 613 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 14, 30, 64, 66, 67, 136, 243, 244, 247, 257, 258, 439, 440, 665, 671, 672, 676 Bense, Max, 21, 62, 68, 69, 75n17 Bensmaïa, Réda, 64 Bercovitch, Sacva, 651 Berg, Steven, 192

Berger, John, 132, 135, 136 Berkeley, George, 3, 42 Bersani, Leo, 494, 502–504 Berto, Francesco, 396, 400 Bible, 18, 33, 34, 341, 521, 648, 654, 676 Bishop, Elizabeth, 108, 119n35 Biven, Lucy, 510n8 Bizzell, Patricia, 459, 465n49 Blackburn, Simon, 116, 117n3 Blair, Hugh, 444 Blake, Aaron, 578n6 Blanchot, Maurice, 8, 14, 19, 22, 246, 252, 259, 608 Bloom, Harold, 199n6, 470, 482n9 Boethius, 3, 5–7, 275, 276, 285n17 Bohman, James, 347 Boiardo, Matteo, 276 Bollas, Christopher, 504, 505 Booth, Wayne C., 354, 607, 608 Boulous Walker, Michelle, 61 Bourdieu, Pierre, 603 Bowie, Andrew, 612 Bowlby, John, 492 Bowles, Paul, 375 Boyd, Brian, 375–377 Boyers, Robert, 577, 579n30 Bradley, A.C., 224, 225 Brah, Avtar, 611 Brault, Pascale-Anne, 2, 410, 423n1 Brecht, Bertolt, 208, 212, 213, 218n7 Briand, Michel, 283n10 Brinklow, Henry, 631 Brock, Stuart, 390, 391, 393, 401 Brockmeier, Jens, 315, 358, 360n16, 612 Bromberg, Philip M., 505–508 Bromwich, David, 229, 624 Brontë, Charlotte, 279 Brooks, Peter, 499, 500, 502, 503, 508, 511n15 Brown, Lee B., 483n26 Brown, Susan, 473

  Author Index 

Brownlee, Marina S., 284n16 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn, 284n16 Bryant, Jacob, 165 Buber, Martin, 575, 665–668, 670, 671 Bueno, Otavio, 396 Bulkeley, Kelly, 179 Bustamante-Martínez, C., 333n2, 334n23 Butler, Judith, 175, 176, 468, 476, 483n38, 484n42 C

Cameron, James, 266, 280 Campbell, Joseph, 14, 265, 266, 279, 282n3, 282n4, 318 Campbell, R.H., 640n3 Camus, Albert, 30, 62, 552 Caplan, Ben, 393, 394 Caracciolo, Marco, 615 Cardozo Benjamin N., 547, 548 Carlson, Marvin, 211 Carpenter, Edward, 171, 188, 631 Carroll, Noël, 210, 296–298, 305–309, 430 Caruth, Cathy, 493, 497, 505 Casanova, Giacomo, 133 Casini, Lorenzo, 334n17 Castañeda, Hector Neri, 395, 399 Castano, Emanuele, 335n32, 615 Cavell, Stanley, 8, 96n7, 196 Celan, Paul, 6, 429, 434, 665–677 Cerbone, David, 234 Cervantes, Miguel de, 11, 13, 14, 26, 244–246, 254, 263, 266, 269, 270, 274, 277–281, 284n14, 285n19, 299, 315–317, 320, 321, 323, 327–332, 333n7, 334n23 Chadbourne, Richard M., 4, 62, 73n2 Chandler, James, 624 Chapman, Alison, 179, 473, 483n25

741

Chapman, E., 179 Chariton, 264 Charon, Rita, 615 Chartier, Roger, 283n9 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 15, 275, 276, 285n17 Chefetz, Richard A., 505 Chekhov, Anton, 207, 209 Cheng’en, Wu, 268 Chesterton, G.K., 64, 75n18 Chevalier, Maxime, 283n9 Chodorow, Joan, 171, 471 Chodorow, Nancy, 471, 483n16 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3, 6, 24, 42, 625, 631n8 Cioran, Emil M., 146, 152, 156, 157, 159n6 Clark, Timothy, 358 Clarke, Bruce, 573 Clarke, Desmond M., 551 Clarke, Norma, 472, 483n19 Clements, Patricia, 473 Cleomenes, 635 Coetzee, J.M., 185, 194–199, 200n13 Cohen, Ted, 430 Cole, Toby, 215, 216 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 105, 114, 118n42, 229, 437 Collins, Marsha S. Collins, Suzanne, 279 Collobert, Catherine, 186 Connors, Robert J., 462n6 Conrad, Joseph, 378–380 Conway, Kellyanne, 564, 578n6 Corbett, Edward J., 8, 462n6 Corcoran, Steven, 8, 424n7 Couégnas, Daniel, 285n20 Cover, Robert M., 453, 545 Cowley, Christopher, 124 Crane, Mary Thomas, 321 Crary, Alice, 197, 198, 200n15, 238n8 Crimmins, Mark, 391 Crowley, Robert, 623

742 

Author Index

Crowther, Paul, 118n23 Currie, Gregory, 116n2, 117n7, 295, 297n2, 301, 302, 307, 308, 387, 403n4 Curtis, Adam, 561, 578n1 D

Damasio, Antonio, 433, 509n6 Dante, 6, 7, 10, 30, 185 Dascal, Marcelo, 6, 7, 10, 30, 185–194, 198, 199n7, 200n8, 245, 257, 649, 650, 658 Davies, Stephen, 306, 307 Davis, Bret W., 57n2, 360n16 Davis, Colin, 359n11 de Beauvoir, Simone, 20, 25, 26, 479, 482n12 de Freytas-Tamurajan, Kimiko, 578n14 de Troyes, Chrétien, 266, 269 Dean, Jeffrey T., 309 Defoe, Daniel, 639 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 408, 497, 511n16 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 21, 22, 26, 34, 359n13, 407–412, 421, 423n1–5, 430, 431, 483n37, 555, 608, 609, 652, 659, 660, 669, 676, 677 Descartes, René, 5, 7, 16, 19, 69, 74n13, 231, 254, 313, 333n2, 429, 509n6, 633, 635, 640n9, 675 Destrée, Pierre, 186 Diamond, Cora, 197, 238n11 Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo, 70 Dickens, Charles, 29, 129, 278, 552, 554 Dickinson, Emily, 653, 654 Diderot, Denis, 42 Dido, 625 Diffey, Terry, 429 Digges, Dudley, 623 Dillon, Brian, 134

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 18, 341–344, 346 Dinesen, Isak, 270 Dolan, Paul J., 577 Doležel, Lubomir, 284n11 Donovan, Josephine, 476, 483n35 Doody, Margaret Anne, 267, 268, 280, 282n2, 283n6–8, 284n10, 284n13, 284n14, 333n5 Dostal, Robert, 359n8 Douzinas, Costas, 551 Doyle, Conan, 396 Drayton, Michael, 630, 634 Dryden, John, 588 Dudley, Edmund, 632 Duggan, Joseph J., 285n16 Duke, James, 331 Dumas, Alexandre, 548 Dumézil, Georges, 166 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 64, 71, 72 d’Urfé, Honoré, 277, 278 Durkheim, Émile, 166 Durling, Robert M., 285n18 Duuren, Thom van, 615 E

Eaglestone, Robert, 612 Eagleton, Terry, 628 Eakin, Paul John, 124, 130, 133 Eco, Umberto, 271, 284n11 Edwards, Elizabeth B., 285n17, 651 Eggers, Dave, 603 Eichmann, Adolph, 566 El Saffar, Ruth S., 320 Elbow, Peter, 285n17 Eldridge, Richard, 35, 431 Elgat, Guy, 143–160 Elgin, Catherine Z., 308 Eliade, Mircea, 166, 178 Eliot, George (Mary Anne Evans) Eliot, T.S., 6, 657, 658 Elliott, Raymond Kenneth, 118n23 Ellmann, Mary, 482n3

  Author Index 

Ellmann, Maud, 489, 492, 500 Empedocles, 372, 375, 381 Epimetheus, 381 Escobar Manzano, Fernando, 334n23 Ettinger, Bracha L., 175–179 Eurydice, 174–179 Evans, Andrew, 574 Evans, Gareth, 388 Evans, Marian (Eliot, George), 32 Evensky, Jerry, 463n18 Everett, Anthony, 393, 394, 400–402 Ewegen, Shane, 57n9 Ezell, Margaret J.M., 18, 471, 472, 483n17 F

Faber, Marion, 158, 160n18 Fanon, Frantz, 20, 27, 71, 492, 494, 497, 519 Feagin, Susan L., 210, 211, 309 Febbrajo, Alberto, 485–403 Feder, Ellen, 483n37 Feinberg, Leslie, 484n43 Felman, Shoshana, 484n43 Felski, Rita, 346, 354, 609, 610 Felstiner, John, 665, 666, 671–674 Ferenczi, Sándor, 510n9 Ferrari, Alex, 282n4 Fetterley, J., 480 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 166, 438 Fielding, Henry, 168 Finello, Dominick, 485n19 Fink, Bruce, 510n11, 510n13 Floridi, Luciano, 598n6 Fludernik, Monika, 360n17 Fonagy, Peter, 493, 510n9 Foot, Philippa, 583 Forcione, Alban K., 283n9, 285n19 Forman-Barzilai, Fonna, 451, 454, 458, 463n19, 464n46 Forsberg, Niklas, 81, 96n7 Förster, Eckhart, 118n26

743

Fortin, Ernest, 192 Fotopoulou, Aikaterini, 510n8 Frank, Manfred, 349 Fraser, Lindley Macnagathen, 639 Frazer, James G., 166 Freccero, John, 192 Freccero, Yvonne, 192 Freeman, Mark, 355 Frege, Gottlieb, 4, 14, 17, 20, 21, 430, 431, 586 Frei, Hans, 648, 662 Freud, Sigmund, 26, 27, 166, 471, 490–495, 497–501, 504, 505, 507, 509n9, 510n11, 512n19, 603, 639, 670 Friend, Stacie, 302 Frosh, Stephen, 496 Frost, Robert, 119n36 Frye, Northrop, 14, 34, 266, 267n5, 318, 563, 578n10, 663n1 Fuchs, Barbara, 267, 317 Fuegi, John, 208 Fusillo, Massimo, 282n1 G

Gabora, Liane, 33n8 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 19, 49, 57n10, 108, 117n3, 345–354, 356, 359n5 Gage, Jennifer Curtiss, 99, 177n8 Gagnier, Regenia, 636 Galileo, Galilei, 368, 582 Gallagher, Catherine, 636, 637 Gardner, Sebastian, 210 Garfunkel, Art, 211 Garland, Lynda, 284n14 Gaunt, Simon, 284n16 Gaut, Berys, 307, 309 Gautier, Théophile, 603 Gendler, Tamar Szabó, 303 German, Andy, 199n4, 199n5 Gerrig, Richard J., 316

744 

Author Index

Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 285n18 Gibson, Andrew, 609 Gibson, John, 83–86, 91, 96n3, 117, 307, 430, 431, 433, 609 Giddens, Anthony, 347, 528, 551 Gilbert, Sandra, 470 Gilson, Etienne, 191 Giorgini, Massimiliano A., 334n29 Girard, René, 14, 258, 259 Glasgow, R.D.V., 449, 451, 624, 640n3 Glaucon, 187, 582 Glissant, Edouard, 71 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11, 185, 194, 198, 248, 249, 253 Goffman, Erving, 613 Goldie, Peter, 29, 304 Goldman, Alan, 305 Goldner, Virginia, 493 Gonzalez, Francisco J., 186 Good, Graham, 68, 74n9, 75n23, 76n23, 207, 279, 570 Goodman, Jeffrey, 401, 480 Goodman, Nelson, 299, 300 Goodman, R.T., 480 Goodrich, Peter, 544, 550, 551, 556 Goody, Jack, 283n9 Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer, 99, 117n8, 117n9, 119n38 Gosse, Edmund, 134 Gosson, Stephen, 630 Gotlib, Anna, 605 Gottschall, Jonathan, 281 Goux Jean-Joseph, 639 Gracia, Jorge J.E., 307 Graham, Gordon, 307 Grand, Sarah, 481, 531, 533 Grant, Ben, 144, 145, 149, 153, 155, 159n1, 159n5, 160n10 Grass, Günther, 603, 655 Greenblatt, Stephen, 641n11 Grewal, Inderpal, 483n14 Grundy, Isobel, 473 Guattari, Félix, 497

Gubar, Susan, 470, 482n10, 483 Guénon, René, 166 Guillory, John, 472 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 70, 71, 355 Gunn, Giles, 663n1 Gurnham, David, 551 Gusdorf, Georges, 123, 126, 138, 139 Gutmann, Amy, 200n13 H

Haakonssen, Knud, 453, 464n27 Habermas, Jürgen, 347, 349–350, 359n13, 629 Hägg, Tomas, 282n2 Hakemulder, Frank, 615, 616 Hakemulder, Frank (Jèmeljan), 332, 335n32, 615, 616 Halberstam, Jack J., 478, 479 Hall, Kim, 629 Hall, Michael L., 62, 63 Haller, Robert S., 285n17 Hämäläinen, Nora, 97n41, 605 Hamburger, Michael, 70 Hamlet, 211, 296, 387, 401 Hammer, Dean, 191 Hammerstein, Kai, 118n19 Hampshire, Stuart, 128 Hanley, Ryan, 458 Hanning, Robert W., 285n17 Haraway, Donna, 478 Hardin, Richard F., 284n4 Hardison, O.B., 63, 73n3, 73n4, 73n6 Harris, Sharon M., 473 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 166 Harrison, Stephen, 283n9 Hart, F. Elizabeth, 321 Hathaway, Baxter, 283n9, 285n18 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 653 Hayles, Katherine N., 573 Hegel, G.W.F., 11, 14, 16, 18, 105, 106, 118n26, 144, 167, 171, 242–244, 248–254, 420, 429

  Author Index 

Heidegger, Martin, 3, 6, 18, 19, 21, 22, 42, 43, 54, 65, 107, 108, 111, 112, 117n3, 119n38, 136, 222, 232–236, 344, 345, 350, 356, 368–382, 383n3–383n5 Heimann, Paula, 504 Helgerson, Richard, 630 Heliodorus, 264, 272, 274, 283n9 Heraclitus, 374, 375, 378–380 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 166, 194 Herman, David J., 356, 358 Herman, Judith Lewis, 493 Herzberg, Bruce, 459 Hick, John, 179, 649 Hirschman, Albert O., 636 Hitchcock, Alfred, 433 Hitler, Adolf, 565 Hobbes, Thomas, 31, 104, 572, 588, 627, 633 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 281, 286n21, 316 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 6, 105, 112, 118n26, 383n4, 439, 671 Hollingdale, R.J., 145, 146, 149, 155 Holmes, Richard, 128 Holmes, Sherlock, 386–392, 395–398, 402n1 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 451 Homer, 9–11, 29, 101, 185, 189–191, 193, 196–199, 205, 242, 243, 253, 256, 257, 280, 435, 563, 630 hooks, bell, 475 Hooton, Christopher, 578n1 Horney, Karen, 482n12 Hösle, Vittorio, 41 Hospers, John, 295 Houellebecq, Michel, 603 Howard, Donald R., 285n17 Howell, Robert, 374 Hoxby, Blair, 634 Huarte de San Juan, Juan, 316, 317, 323, 324, 326–330, 333n2

745

Hugo, Victor, 603 Hulatt, Owen, 227 Hume, David, 3, 4, 16, 42, 103, 117n13, 231, 233, 303, 452, 511n16, 636 Hundert, E.J., 635 Hunt, Tony, 282n2, 285n16 Hurley, Susan, 424n11 Hutcheson, Francis, 449, 463n14 Hythloday, Raphael, 631, 640n8 I

Ibsen, Henrik, 209, 210 Ichino, Anna, 307 Žižek, Slavoj, 27, 419–423, 425n15 Inan, Ilhan, 581 Ingarden, Roman, 19, 400 Irigaray, Luce, 372, 492 Isocrates, 446 J

Jacquette, Dale, 398, 400 Jaén (Portillo), Isabel, 315, 316 Jaeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher, 76n25 Jakobson, Roman, 166 James, Henry, 300, 433, 434, 500, 501, 508, 606 James I, King (of England, James VI of Scotland), 629 James, William, 496 Jameson, Frederic, 257 Jansen, Julia, 365, 382n2 Jarvis, Simon, 229, 230, 237n7 Jazdewska, Katarzyna, 57n8 Jeffreys, Sheila, 478 John, Eileen, 36, 429 Johnson, Barbara, 173, 174, 177, 617 Johnson, Mark, 509, 607, 615 Johnson, Samuel, 7, 128 Jones, Inigo, 629 Jones, Sir William, 165

746 

Author Index

Jonson, Ben, 630, 634, 641n10 Jove, 634 Joyce, James, 11, 22, 243 Jung, C.G., 166 K

Kafka, Franz, 29, 126, 258, 552, 564, 573–576, 671, 672 Kahn, Charles, 57n6 Kalyvas, Andreas, 463n20 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 12, 16, 18, 101, 104–106, 110, 111, 118n19, 140, 144, 154, 223, 228, 230, 231, 233, 247, 413, 429, 584, 603, 624, 647, 675 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 673 Kaplan, Caren, 395 Kardarkay, Arpad, 66 Karenina, Anna, 309, 386, 390–392, 399, 400, 402n2 Katznelson, Ira, 463n20 Kauffmann, R. Lane, 63, 64, 66, 68, 73n1, 74n8, 74n11, 77n28 Kaufman, Scott Barry, 116n2 Keane, Niall, 359n1 Kearney, Richard, 365, 382n2 Keen, Suzanne, 358, 616 Kellogg, Robert, 268 Kelly, Douglas, 284n16 Kennedy, Gavin, 463n18 Kennedy, George, 444 Keren, Michael, 579n29 Kibbie, Ann Louise, 637 Kidd, David Comer, 615 Kieran, Matthew, 309 Kierkegaard, Søren A., 3, 8, 10–12, 14, 18, 126, 233, 243, 244, 249–252, 254, 258, 511n16, 561 Kipling, Rudyard, 372–374, 383n5 Kitch, Aaaron, 623, 631 Kivy, Peter, 225, 235, 237n6, 307 Klaus, Carl H., 63, 65, 66, 68, 73n4, 74n12

Klein, Melanie, 27, 471, 483n16, 496, 510n9 Knight, Thomas S., 592 Kolodny, Annette, 480 Konstan, David, 282n2, 284n12 Koopman, Eva Maria, 615 Korthals Altes, Liesbeth, 358, 604, 606, 607, 612–614, 616 Kotsko, Adam, 513n22 Krausz, Michael, 304 Kripke, Saul A., 388, 389, 394, 395, 400, 401, 585, 586, 590, 591, 593–596 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 333n11 Kristeva, Julia, 492, 507 Kroon, Frederick, 391, 393, 396, 397, 401, 403n4 Kropotkin, Peter (Prince), 171, 674 Kuhn, Thomas S., 89, 166, 347, 595, 596 Kumar, Shiv, 194 Kundera, Milan, 577 Kurian, Alka, 471 L

La Rochefoucauld, François de, 4, 7, 8, 145–150, 158, 159n3, 159n5, 160n18, 625 Labio, Catherine, 624 Lacan, Jacques, 26, 259, 420–423, 431, 438, 471, 498, 499, 505, 507, 509n3, 510n11, 510n13, 511n14, 513n21, 520 Lacy, Norris J., 285n16 Lakoff, George, 320 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 285n19 Lane, William, 171 Lang, Andrew, 166 Lasch, Christopher, 562 Lauer, Gerald, 117n10 Lawn, Chris, 359n1 Lawrence, D.H., 107, 118n29, 524 Lee, Vernon, 474, 481

  Author Index 

Lehrer, Jonah, 433 Lennard, John, 208 Lepore, Ernie, 223, 236n5, 237n5 Leverage, Paula, 321 Levi, Primo, 128, 131 Levinas, Emmanuel, 19, 608, 609, 660, 662 Levinson, Jerrold, 298, 299, 305 Levy, Lior, 218n1 Lewis, C.S., 266, 279, 663n1 Lewis, David K., 300, 388 Leys, Ruth, 237n7 Lichtenberg, Georg C., 143, 145–149, 153, 155, 160 Lincoln, Bruce, 165, 166, 170 Lindemann Nelson, Hilde, 605 Lissa, Caspar J. van, 615 Livingston, Paisley, 303, 305 Lloyd, Genevieve, 123, 126 Locke, John, 31, 246, 400, 447, 448, 572 Longstocking, Pippa, 400 Longus, 264, 273, 274, 284, 284n14 Lopes, Dominic, 36 López-Muñoz, Francisco, 334n23 Lorca, Frederico Garcia, 216 Lowe, Nick J., 282, 282n1 Lucas, George, 265, 282n4 Luckhurst, Mary, 208 Luhmann, Niklas, 70 Lukács, Georg, 64, 74n10, 243, 252–255, 257 Lundestad, Eric, 493n18 Lyotard, Jean-François, 22, 408–419, 424n4, 424n8–424n12, 425n14, 510n10 Lyytikäinen, Pirjo, 615 M

Macé, Marielle, 346 Macfarland, Joseph C., 191, 193, 199n7, 200n8 Machery, Edouard, 586, 599n8

747

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 605, 606 Mack, Michael, 34, 35, 432, 433, 439, 563 Madariaga, Salvador de, 334n26 Madison, G.B., 353 Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), 660 Maingueneau, Dominique, 613 Mairs, Nancy, 62, 73–74n5, 76n26 Maitre, Doreen, 284n11 Makkreel, Rudolf A., 344 Malebranche, Nicolas, 42 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 166 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 636, 637 Mancing, Howard, 320, 322, 333n7, 333n15 Mandeville, Bernard, 633–635 Mao, Tse-tung, 566 Mar, Raymond A., 615 Maravall, José Antonio, 285n18 Marcus, Laura, 496 Marek, Johann, 403n5 Maritain, Jacques, 657 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 565 Marsden Jill, 145, 149, 157, 160n17 Martel, Yann, 563 Martín-Araguz, Antonio, 333n2 Marx, Karl, 33, 167, 171, 438, 639 Masson, Jeffrey, 493 Massumi, Brian, 176, 177 Maturana, Humberto, 512n18 Max Müller, Friedrich, 166 Mazzotta, Guiseppe, 192 McCarthy, John A., 75n15 McCarthy, Thomas, 350 McCloskey, Deirdre N., 24, 632, 639, 641n12 McDowell, John, 238n8 Meinong, Alexius, 20, 21, 397–400 Meizoz, Jérôme, 613 Melville, Herman, 11, 552, 653 Mentz, Steve, 282n2, 283n9 Meretoja, Hanna, 353, 355–358, 605–607, 611, 612, 615

748 

Author Index

Merkelbach, Reinhold, 284n13 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 17, 81–97, 107 Mill, John Stuart, 125, 155, 470, 481 Miller, Arthur, 209, 218n6 Miller, J. Hillis, 169 Miller, Mark, 285n17 Millet, Kate, 469, 482n3 Milton, John, 10, 11, 34 Miscevic, Nenad, 598n2 Mishara, Aaron L., 316 Mitchell, Juliet, 492, 493 Mittman, Elizabeth, 76n25 Moers, Ellen, 469, 482n4 Moi, Toril, 482n7 Montaigne, Michel de, 3, 4, 7, 16, 62–64, 66, 68, 69, 73–74n5, 73n2, 73n4, 74n6, 74n9, 74n12, 76n26, 137, 139, 244, 633 Moore, Marianne, 662, 663 Moore, Steven, 268, 283n7, 283n8 Moore Will G., 145–147, 149, 159n3 Moran, Leslie J., 544 Morante, Elsa, 564–569, 576 More, Thomas, 244, 632–634 Moretti, Franco, 268, 283n7, 283n8 Morson, Gary S., 144 Morus, 631, 632 Motoarca, Ioan-Radu, 386 Mukherjee, Ankhi, 496 Muldrew, Craig, 626, 627, 640n4 Mulhall, Stephen, 136, 137, 195–199 Müller, Agnes, 64, 69, 75n17, 75n21 Murdoch, Iris, 81–97 Murray, Penelope, 117n11 Murrin, Michael, 285n18 Muscatine, Charles, 285n17 Musil, Robert, 74n10, 75n19, 617n2 Mussolini, Benito, 565 N

Naas, Michael, 191, 410, 423n1 Nagel, Thomas, 598n4

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 22, 483n29, 483n37 Nannicelli, Ted, 212 Nead, Lynda, 551 Nehamas, Alexander, 306 Neher, Carola, 208 Neitzel, Sönke, 126 Nelken, David, 543 Newton, Isaac, 448 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 6–8, 22, 26, 32, 75n15, 100, 106, 115, 118n19, 124, 143–147, 149–151, 153–159, 159n2, 159n7, 160n13, 160n14, 160n18–160n20, 166, 171, 196, 233, 242, 244, 245, 252, 254, 345, 356, 483n29, 603, 648, 653, 656–662 Nordmann, Alfred, 153, 154, 159n7 North, Michael, 172 Norton, M.D. Herter, 641n11 Novalis, 105, 143, 247 Nozick, Robert, 31, 584 Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 117n7, 307, 308, 354, 546, 547, 554, 605–607, 609, 615 O

Oatley, Keith, 316, 615, 616 Ochsne, Kevin N., 179 Olney, James, 124 Olsen, Stein Haugom, 295, 297, 299, 306 O’Neill, Eugene, 209 Orgel, Stephen, 629 Orpheus, 174, 176–179 Ortega y Gasset, José, 561 Orwell, George, 138, 139, 552, 564 Ouellette, Fernand, 70, 75n20 Ozick, Cynthia, 75n20, 76n24 Ozon, François, 306

  Author Index  P

Palmer, Richard E., 359n13 Parfit, Derek, 589, 590 Parsons, Terence, 398, 399 Pascal, Blaise, 4, 7, 8, 16, 143, 145, 146 Pascal, Roy, 137, 139 Pater, Walter, 62, 624 Paul, Elliot Samuel, 116n2 Pavel, Thomas G., 267, 268, 271, 283n7, 283n8, 284n11, 285n19, 319 Peacock, Thomas Love, 118n17 Penley, Constance, 474 Pérez Galdos, Benito, 279 Perry, Ben Edwin, 282n2 Perry, Ralph Barton, 117n3 Peterson, Linda H., 479 Pettersson, Anders, 307 Phalereus, Demetrius, 588 Phelan, James, 607, 608 Phillips, John, 391 Phillipson, Nicholas, 451 Philo, 660 Phoenix, Ann, 611 Pihas, Gabriel, 193 Pirandello, Luigi, 399 Plath, Sylvia, 660 Plato, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11–13, 16–19, 24, 31, 32, 35, 42–44, 54–56, 57n7, 67, 73n4, 92, 99–103, 111, 117n7, 185–191, 193, 199, 222, 233, 242, 244, 245, 315, 381, 429, 434–440, 544, 564, 577, 582, 602, 632, 656, 661, 662, 675 Pleydell, Paulus, 555 Plotinus, 660 Plutarch, 73n4, 124, 588 Pöhlmann, Horst Georg, 194 Poirot, Hercule, 390, 392, 396, 397 Pollock, Benjamin, 118n26 Posner, Richard, 310, 547 Pound, Ezra, 658

749

Preus, James, 650, 651 Priest, Graham, 396, 397 Prometheus, 380–382 Prospero, 552, 553 Protagoras, 50, 380, 381 Pseudo-Dionysus, 660 Puttenham, George, 630 Pygmalion, 669 Q

Quine,Willard Van Orman, 230, 392, 393, 593 Quint, David, 285n18 R

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 508n1 Rabinowitz, Peter J., 607, 608 Rabkin, Gerald, 218n6 Radford, Colin, 310 Radway, Janice A., 283n9 Ramundo, Ida, 565 Rancière, Jacques, 218n8, 412–419, 424n7–424n10, 424n13, 424n14, 434–440 Rank, Otto, 177, 510n9 Rapaport, William J., 399 Raphael, D.D., 632 Raspa, Venanzio, 403n5 Rawls, John, 31, 572 Raymond, Janice G., 478, 484n45 Read, Rupert, 195, 196, 199, 200n13 Reardon, Bryan P., 282n2 Recanati, François, 392 Redman, Deborah A., 640n9 Reed, Cory, 333n15 Reeve, Clara, 269 Reeve, Michael, 283n9 Reginster, Bernard, 155, 156 Reid, Thomas, 448, 453, 455, 463n12, 463n13 Richards, I.A., 223

750 

Author Index

Richardson, Samuel, 278, 639 Ricks, Christopher, 236n4 Ricoeur, Paul, 19, 119n41, 350, 353–356, 602, 605, 606, 611, 612, 663n1 Rider, Jeff, 284n16 Rigney, Ann, 611 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 6, 107, 108, 114, 119n43, 383n5 Rimbaud, Arthur, 107 Ritivoi, Andrea, 358 Robinson, Jenefer, 309 Rockhill, Gabriel, 424n8 Rokem, Freddie, 218n3 Ronen, Ruth, 284n11 Roochnik, David, 199n4 Rorty, Richard, 170, 605 Rosch, Eleanor, 320, 333n8, 508n3 Rose, Jacqueline, 492–494, 507 Ross, Kristin, 424n13 Rothberg, Michael, 611 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 7, 22, 29–31, 123, 127, 128, 133, 499, 568, 572 Routley, Richard, 397, 398 Rowling, J.K., 266, 279 Russell, Bertrand, 4, 16, 17, 20, 21, 389, 398, 399, 586 Russell, George, 171 Rycroft, Charles, 490, 491, 506 Ryner, Bradley D., 634, 635 S

Safranski, Rüdiger, 194 Said, Edward W., 27, 28, 243, 245, 257, 494, 519–521, 523, 609, 611 Sallis, John, 56 Salmon, Nathan, 400, 598n7 Saltz, David, Z., 218n5 Samsa, Gregor, 573, 574

Sand, Georges (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), 278 Sandy, Gerald, 283n9 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 277 Sapiro, Gisèle, 613 Saramago, José, 564, 569, 570, 572, 576 Sarat, Austin, 542 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 20, 30, 107, 130, 137, 208, 216, 218n1, 603 Sassal, John, 132, 135 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 166, 430, 652, 660 Schellenberg, Betty A., 472 Schelling, F.W.J., 16, 105, 106, 118n26, 247 Schiffer, Samuel, 388, 390 Schiller, Friedrich, 414, 603 Schlegel, Friedrich, 7, 10, 13, 105, 143, 151, 166, 169, 244, 246–250, 254 Schlegel, Friedrich, 7, 10, 13, 105, 143, 151, 166, 169, 244, 246–250, 254 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 18, 341–345, 359n2 Schmeling, Gareth, 284n12 Schneider, Benjamin, 394 Scholes, Robert, 268, 283n8 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 12, 26, 143, 151, 160n20, 166, 242 Schrödinger, Erwin, 585 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 33 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 400 Scott, Walter, 254 Scott, William Robert, 463n21 Searle, John R., 102, 388, 400 Sebald, W.G., 238n8 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 496 Self, Will, 130 Serres, Michel, 132 Seybold, Kevin S., 179

  Author Index 

Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 7, 246, 625, 627 Shakespeare, William, 4, 114, 211, 244, 257, 266, 270, 278, 281, 401, 542, 551–555, 625, 630, 634, 637, 641n11 Shaw, H.J., 550 Shaw, Judith J.A, 546, 547, 550, 555 Shell, Marc, 639 Shikibu, Murasaki, 268 Shils, Edward, 565 Shklovsky, Viktor, 604 Showalter, Elaine, 470, 482n7 Shylock, 637, 638 Sibley, Mulford Q., 564 Sidney, Sir Philip, 270, 274, 277, 629 Sieber, Harry, 283n9 Simerka, Barbara, 319, 333n15 Simon, Julien J., 320, 333n9, 333n15 Simon, Paul, 211 Sinding, Michael, 319 Singleton, Charles, 192 Siraki, Arby Ted, 624 Siskin, Clifford, 628 Skinner, A.S., 640n3 Sklar, Howard, 615 Slack, Paul, 627 Smith, Adam, 25, 33, 443, 444, 449–462, 460n5, 463n17, 464n24, 624–629, 631, 632, 635, 636, 639, 640n3 Smith, Thomas, 623 Smith, William Robertson, 166 Smuts, Aaron, 310 Sontag, Susan, 355, 500 Sophocles, 167, 205, 209, 491, 498, 499, 511n14 Sorel, Georges, 171 Sorensen, R.A., 598n2, 599n9 Souvorin, A.S., 207, 216 Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer, 469, 482n4

751

Spengemann, William C., 133 Spenser, Edmund, 15, 629, 630, 634, 650 Spielberg, Stephen, 266 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 27, 520, 611 Starkey, Thomas, 623, 631 Starobinski, Jean, 73n2, 74n7 Statius, Publius Papinius, 275 Staves, Susan, 472 Stecker, Robert, 298, 305, 306 Steele, Danielle, 266 Steene, Birgitta, 208, 214 Steiner, Wendy, 284n15 Stelzig, Eugene L., 126 Stern, Joseph P., 144, 147–149, 151, 153, 155 Stevens, Wallace, 6, 100, 114–116, 222, 223, 226, 228, 231, 653, 661 Stewart, L.H., 174 Stock, Kathleen, 296n1, 297n2 Stocker, Barry, 242, 246, 251 Stokes, Dustin, 307 Stolnitz, Jerome, 429 Stone, Sandy, 477 Strindberg, August, 208, 214 Stuart, Francis, 125 Stuckey-French, Ned, 73n4 Sydney, Sir Philip, 104 T

Talmon, Jacob, 568 Tasso, Torquato, 10, 276, 277, 285n18 Tate, William, 118n31 Tatius, Achilles, 264, 265 Taylor, Charles, 350, 351, 605, 606 Thayer, H.S., 187 Theocritus, 274 Theseus, 275, 276, 588, 589, 591

752 

Author Index

Thom, Paul, 212 Thomasson, Amie L., 300, 390, 393, 400, 401 Thompson, Evan, 508n3 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 583, 584, 587 Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 296 Thoreau, Henry David, 72, 171 Thorpe, Lucas, 598n2 Thrasymachus, 569 Todorov, Tzvetan, 604 Tolkien, J.R.R., 14, 266, 386, 401 Tomkins, Silvan, 496 Törnqvist, Egil, 208, 214 Treip, Mindele Anne, 285n18 Trilling, Lionel, 494, 495, 507, 508, 509n5 Trimmer, John D., 585 Trotsky, Leon, 541 Trump, Donald J., 395, 564, 565 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 272 Tucker, Benjamin, 171 Turner, Lynn, 423n1 Turner, Mark, 507 U

Uygur, Nermi, 598n6 V

Van der Kolk, Bessell A., 505 Van Gogh, Vincent, 132 Van Inwagen, Peter, 392, 393, 400, 401 Varela, Francisco J., 508n3, 512n18 Varvaro, Alberto, 284n16 Viala, Alain, 613 Vickers, Brian, 630, 641n10 Vico, Giambattista, 5, 9, 16, 25, 166, 241–246, 257 Vinaver, Eugène, 285n16

Vives, Juan Luis, 316, 317, 323–329, 333n2, 334n17 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 42, 278 Voltolini, Alberto, 386, 391, 393, 394, 400, 401, 403n7 Von Hendy, Andrew, 167–169, 171 von Solodkoff, Tatjana, 394 W

Walker, Margaret Urban, 605 Walton, Kendall L., 102, 117n8, 300, 301, 303, 310, 387 Ward, Ian, 551 Warner, Martin, 125, 137–139 Warnke, Georgia, 359n10 Watson, Foster, 333n2, 388 Watt, Ian, 242 Weigel, Hélène, 208 Weinberg, Bernard, 283n9, 285n18, 598n3, 599n8 Weinman, Michael, 191, 200n12 Weisberg, Richard H., 550, 556 Weizman, Eyal, 551 Wells, Susan, 634 Welzer, Harald, 126 West, Martin Lichfield, 143 Wheeler, Kathleen, 246, 247 White, Hayden, 243, 257 Whitman, Cedric H., 282n1 Whitman, Walt, 30, 546, 653–655 Whitmarsh, Tim, 282n2 Wiegman, Robyn, 476, 477 Wigmore, John, 547, 548 Wilbur, Richard, 107 Wilde, Oscar, 603, 624 Wilder, Thornton, 209 Willett, John, 213 Williams, W.D., 160n18 Williamson, Timothy, 42 Wilm, Jan, 197

  Author Index 

Wimsatt, William K., 304 Winnicott, Donald, 27, 504, 505, 507, 510, 511n13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 154, 155, 159–160n7, 196, 227, 232, 233, 527, 587, 592 Wohlfarth, Irving, 74n14 Wolf, Christa, 603 Wolosky, Shira, 651, 654, 660 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 300 Woolf, Virginia, 33, 129, 194, 469, 470, 475, 481, 482n7 Worthen, William B., 212, 218n4 X

Xenophon, 42, 315

Y

Yablo, Stephen, 403n3 Yagisawa, Takashi, 401 Yeats, William Butler, 171, 172, 658 Z

Zaki, Jamil, 179 Zalta, Edward N., 396, 398, 399 Zeno of Elea, 31, 582 Zerilli, Linda, 237n7 Zeus, 154, 283n10, 381, 382 Zima, Peter V., 610 Zimmermann, Jens, 343 Zunshine, Lisa, 321 Zweig, Stefan, 133

753

Subject Index1

A

Actions, 11, 28–29, 31–32, 54, 81, 101, 104, 131, 198, 203–205, 207–209, 211, 213, 216, 217, 217n1, 218n5, 224, 243, 276, 280, 281, 302, 304, 306, 342, 347, 349, 351, 356, 357, 370, 408, 433, 434, 436, 437, 439, 449, 452–456, 458–461, 476, 489, 498, 552, 554, 564, 566, 602, 603, 606, 608, 609, 614, 650 Activity, 23, 24, 57n1, 92, 94, 104, 156, 188, 207, 246, 280, 302, 356, 357, 434, 502, 531, 545, 573, 606, 628, 635, 637, 646 Aesthetics, 2, 7–9, 12–17, 19, 20, 23, 35, 36, 74n10, 104–107, 112, 129, 157, 174, 175, 227, 228, 234, 235, 241, 243, 245–247, 249–251, 254, 256, 257, 271, 277, 283n9, 295–299, 301, 303, 305–308, 310, 343, 351–353,

368, 407–425, 430, 439–440, 449, 452, 453, 455, 458, 460, 461, 490, 494, 495, 500, 502, 504, 505, 522, 524, 541, 547, 550, 551, 556, 577, 602–606, 608, 612, 623–625, 627, 628, 636, 637, 639, 647, 649, 656–660, 662, 663 aestheticism, 34, 247, 657 Affection, 325, 459, 460, 625 Algorithm, 87, 88 algorithmic, 85, 87–90, 92 Allegory, 233, 268, 272, 278, 285n18, 570, 573, 649, 650 allegorical, 166, 168, 270, 319, 321, 543, 629, 634 Alterity, 107, 351, 352, 413, 417, 502, 608 Ambiguity, 111, 113, 116, 218n5, 267, 285n17, 301, 320, 432, 433, 500, 501, 507, 656, 668 Analogy, 88, 102, 135, 173, 206, 210–212, 218n5, 281, 471

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1

755

756 

Subject Index

Analytic (philosophy), 5, 15–17, 20, 21, 221, 233, 295, 304, 307, 347, 605 Ancients, 1, 5, 10–14, 18, 23–24, 29, 30, 33, 73n1, 73n4, 101, 111, 116n1, 165, 169, 171–172, 174, 185, 190–194, 225, 234–235, 242, 244, 245, 251, 264, 266–268, 270, 273, 277, 279, 280, 282n1, 283n6–10, 284n12, 284n13, 285n18, 318, 366, 367, 375, 380, 416, 417, 434, 444, 446, 447, 455, 503, 553, 563–565, 582, 588, 624 Animals, 93, 109, 177, 195, 196, 198, 242, 275, 323–325, 330, 331, 356, 358, 378, 381, 416, 431, 436, 438, 478, 535, 626 Anthropology, 19, 22, 132, 259, 464n24, 524, 531, 670 anthropological, 9, 13, 171, 172, 502, 608 Antique, 8, 15–17, 23, 24, 251, 284n13, 284n14 antiquity, 16, 57n8, 192, 241–243, 245, 246, 251, 256, 257, 264, 274, 279, 280, 282n1, 316, 322, 328 Aphorism, 7–8, 16, 75n15, 105, 143–160, 510n11 aphoristic, 8, 143, 144, 146, 149–156, 158 Archaic, 10, 14, 55, 57n3, 166, 168, 170, 173, 175–179, 180n1, 319, 333n5 Archive, 96n3, 473, 474 Argument, 3, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 30, 46, 51, 57n8, 58n21, 71, 73n4, 84, 92, 95, 96n19, 99, 129, 144, 146, 149, 150, 156, 157, 159n7, 160n18, 160n20, 171, 173, 178, 179, 186, 188–190, 197, 198, 199n4, 225, 229, 236n2, 237n8,

253, 255, 268, 295, 317, 365, 386, 388–394, 413, 415, 424n8, 434, 439, 444, 445, 447, 448, 451, 458, 459, 463n17, 479–481, 490, 531, 532, 550, 551, 564, 571, 582, 583, 585, 586, 591, 626, 631, 633, 639 argumentative, 58n21, 82–86, 95, 152, 445, 531, 586, 613 Aristotelian, 16, 24, 167, 192, 277, 437, 582, 595, 605 Art, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 17, 23, 61, 65, 66, 68–70, 72, 74n10, 75n15, 90, 103–108, 111, 112, 118n19, 119n38, 124, 144, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 188, 196, 203–206, 215, 217, 234, 235, 242–244, 248, 252, 259, 268, 269, 277, 278, 281, 283n7, 283n8, 295–299, 304–310, 342, 344, 349, 351, 352, 354, 365, 367–372, 413–414, 430, 438–440, 443–448, 450, 457, 461, 495, 496, 500, 501, 504, 510n10, 524, 541, 542, 546–548, 550–552, 554–556, 581, 603, 604, 607, 613–614, 624, 626, 629, 636, 638, 646, 647, 657–659, 662, 663, 668–669, 672 artistic, 75n17, 104, 151, 204, 206, 270–272, 277, 278, 281, 305, 309, 445, 457, 458, 545, 647 Arthurian, 14, 15, 274 Authentic authenticity, 18, 19, 258, 492–495, 497, 499, 500, 506, 507, 613, 614, 653 inauthenticity, 18, 350, 507 Autobiography, 7, 123–140, 614 Autonomy, 68, 105, 222, 237n8, 545, 553, 602, 603, 638

  Subject Index  B

Bad, 11, 151, 170, 334n30, 380, 421, 449, 494, 544, 556, 568 Beauty, 104, 175, 263, 265, 266, 449, 458, 460–462, 576 beautiful, 46, 47, 104, 127, 175, 186, 243, 263, 284n12, 375, 376, 414, 576 Being, 6, 18–22, 351–354, 433, 457, 594, 660, 669 Belief, 150, 152, 160n20, 167–169, 171–173, 175–180, 235, 236, 243, 256, 284n11, 300–302, 305, 308, 321, 322, 327, 330, 396, 438, 445, 450, 458, 468, 474, 477, 498, 512n19, 544, 562, 564, 568, 587, 589, 591, 594, 595, 598n7, 628, 632, 639, 645, 671 Biblical, 18, 159n3, 165, 274, 649–655, 667, 675, 676 Biography, 7, 123–140, 305, 668 Body, 12, 62, 69, 132, 135, 155, 157, 160n17, 173, 180, 216, 237n7, 252, 282n2, 298, 325–328, 330, 376, 378, 425n15, 431, 443, 449, 476–478, 480, 489, 491, 494, 500, 510n11, 529, 545, 548, 550, 556, 566, 573–576, 589, 590, 624, 627, 629, 632, 635–639, 648, 654, 655, 674 Brain, 17, 88, 179, 282, 322, 326, 433, 490, 496, 506, 510n8, 511n15, 584, 589, 590 C

Capitalism, 168, 243, 258, 450, 566, 567, 628, 633, 639 capitalist, 169, 258, 638 Chivalry, 263, 268, 283n9, 285n17 Christian, 14, 34, 190, 193, 250, 251, 255, 256, 274, 277, 278,

757

285n19, 315, 324, 521, 626, 632, 633, 637, 648–651 Chronotope, 256, 257 Civic, 10, 168, 170, 273, 411, 444, 447, 462, 531, 603, 606, 614, 632, 640n8, 651, 655 Classical, 6, 18, 33, 34, 73n4, 129, 185, 190, 192–194, 222, 256, 259, 264, 268, 272, 274, 279, 280, 282n1, 282n2, 283n8, 283n10, 285n18, 343, 415, 437, 443, 445–447, 464n24, 530, 535, 552, 588, 597, 625, 626, 630, 637, 639, 647 Cognition, 17, 18, 84, 95, 106, 107, 173–175, 178, 180, 230, 231, 237n7, 307–308, 316, 325, 326, 328 cognitive, 16–18, 82, 84, 91, 95, 100, 103, 106, 113, 116, 173, 180, 218n8, 222, 231, 236, 237n7, 281, 297, 298, 307, 308, 315–335, 346, 356–358, 430, 455, 490, 498, 507, 508n3, 601, 614–616, 676 Colonial, 27, 520–523, 525–529, 532–535, 610, 630 colonialism, 20, 27–28, 519, 525–528, 532–534 Comedy, 11–12, 129, 218n2, 282n2, 319 comic, 10, 101, 226, 279, 551 Communal, 11, 29, 171, 172, 179, 180, 255, 280, 381, 416, 545, 632 Communication, 2, 6, 21, 88, 90–91, 207, 234, 271, 342, 370, 417, 443, 445, 451, 575, 613 Community, 9, 11, 12, 15, 91, 172, 179, 180, 216, 251, 255, 266, 278, 285n19, 318, 381, 387, 413, 415–418, 434–435, 468,

758 

Subject Index

474, 477, 541, 543–545, 647, 651 Concepts, 4, 82, 89–92, 94, 95, 103, 105, 106, 110, 151, 166, 168, 169, 236n2, 248, 271, 272, 280, 295, 296, 298, 303, 306, 307, 310, 343, 349, 365, 369, 375, 432–434, 436, 453–455, 471, 474, 479, 492, 494, 502, 504–505, 511n15, 511n16, 512n20, 520, 528–530, 534–535, 542, 543, 547, 552, 563, 564, 582, 588, 593, 595–597, 611, 627, 635, 636, 639, 670, 675–676 Conceptual, 16, 17, 67, 82, 89–92, 94–96, 105, 116, 148, 234, 237n7, 259, 268, 297, 311, 319, 358, 414, 429, 430, 432–434, 490, 502, 549, 581–599, 612, 639, 649, 652 Consciousness, 17, 19, 70, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114, 126, 129, 137, 151, 167, 171, 173, 179, 248, 251, 253, 259, 316, 319, 321, 322, 333n15, 343, 348, 351, 376, 439, 453, 456, 475, 479, 493, 497, 502, 503, 506, 509n3, 551, 573, 576, 589, 590 Consensus, 144, 200n8, 298, 394, 401, 402, 412, 417, 444, 447, 458, 459, 462, 469, 474, 605 Consequentialist, 584 Contamination, 432, 434, 670, 674 Content, 43, 65, 81, 99, 101, 112–114, 126, 143, 146–148, 152, 153, 159, 160n18, 194, 196, 198, 205, 221, 224–233, 235, 236n2, 236n4, 299, 301, 302, 304, 344, 368, 387, 445, 450, 455, 459, 461, 471, 542, 553, 582, 585, 594, 634

Continental (philosophy), 12, 295, 310, 407 Continental European (philosophy), 15, 17 Contract, 29, 31, 418, 419, 445, 552, 608, 614 Contradiction, 132, 145, 172, 413, 471, 582, 591, 596, 598n7, 657, 665 Conventions, 45, 72, 100, 106, 129, 211, 217n1, 227, 266, 267, 269, 271, 272, 276, 278–280, 282n2, 299, 320, 323, 329, 330, 332, 410, 453, 475, 492, 548, 555, 613 Conversation, 43–46, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 57n8, 58n21, 109, 194, 195, 222, 280, 306, 350, 352, 370–371, 373, 379, 383n4, 387, 468, 469, 471, 480, 481n1, 544, 554, 577 Court, 29, 258, 265, 268, 274, 276, 546, 629, 671 Crisis, 89, 90, 258, 366, 371, 493, 656 Critic, 22, 25, 27, 69, 99, 104, 200n13, 223, 225–227, 230, 232, 263, 267, 280, 285n17, 296, 305, 310, 317, 319–320, 400, 401, 433, 469–471, 482n3, 482n7, 493, 519, 520, 522, 524, 527, 530, 532, 536, 547, 604–605, 607, 609, 610, 613, 617, 630, 668 Criticism, 4, 11, 14, 16, 17, 22–28, 32, 34, 69, 75n3, 76n23, 116n2, 168, 225, 232, 241, 242, 250, 252, 254, 259, 269, 271, 282n2, 296, 306, 309, 310, 355, 394, 400, 413, 422, 443–444, 450, 460, 461, 470, 471, 476, 478, 489, 496, 497, 523, 531, 536, 601, 604, 607–613, 616, 624, 657

  Subject Index 

Cultural, 5, 14, 22, 64, 68, 71, 112, 131–135, 139, 169, 170, 172, 174, 180, 194, 212, 215, 250, 280, 283n9, 298, 322, 334n27, 342–344, 349, 353, 355, 357, 454, 458, 467, 471, 472, 476–478, 480, 481, 491, 496, 502–504, 519–525, 527–528, 530–532, 534–536, 541, 542, 544, 551, 553, 555, 601, 604, 607–608, 610–613, 638, 646 Culture, 5, 11–15, 20, 23, 34, 63, 64, 66, 67, 71, 73, 76n25, 151, 165, 167, 170, 171, 235, 243, 253, 255, 256, 265–268, 270, 271, 276, 280, 283n10, 367, 375, 432, 450, 460, 468, 469, 476, 478, 480, 491, 509n7, 519, 521, 522, 524, 528, 530, 533, 541–544, 547, 548, 550, 552, 562, 563, 586, 587, 596, 598n3, 601, 607, 610, 631, 638 Cyborgs, 478, 573, 574 D

Death, 101, 135–137, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 226, 228, 231, 242, 243, 245, 252, 255, 259, 266, 270, 273, 276, 277, 330, 373, 374, 376, 380, 408, 411, 412, 423n1, 437, 452, 465n55, 475, 476, 478, 490, 495–497, 499, 501, 502, 504, 507, 508, 511n16, 512n18, 565, 576, 590, 635, 649, 650, 655, 657, 673, 674, 677 Deconstruction, 21–22, 407–425, 476, 606, 609 deconstructive, 21, 26, 407, 422, 601, 606, 608–610 Deontology, 605 deontological, 584, 605

759

Description, 46, 62, 72, 86, 102, 108–110, 209, 223, 230, 234, 265, 274, 284n14, 296, 300, 329, 347, 367, 373, 374, 389, 432, 508, 512n19, 528, 532, 574, 636 Descriptivism, 389, 391 Design, 129, 138, 308, 470, 480, 629, 635, 640n4, 648–650, 653, 656–659, 662, 663 Designation, 106, 659 rigid designation, 596 Desires, 15, 25–27, 46–48, 50, 51, 53, 66, 69–71, 85, 88, 127, 128, 133, 150, 154, 174, 175, 178, 197, 229, 251–253, 258, 259, 275, 276, 279, 321, 322, 325, 330, 375, 409, 414, 419, 432, 446, 449, 450, 453, 455, 457, 471, 493, 497–500, 504, 522, 523, 548, 561, 574, 576, 584, 608, 625, 626, 633, 635, 636, 638, 647 Dialectic, 151, 154, 190, 199, 444, 447, 459, 506 dialectical, 106, 199, 458, 549, 635, 638 Dialogical dialogic, 167–169, 352, 502, 546, 610 dialogism, 352, 608 Différance, 419 Difference, 8, 11, 21, 22, 25, 26, 31, 34, 42, 68, 71, 74n6, 82, 83, 100, 112, 172, 188, 206, 208, 221, 223–225, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237n5, 266, 280, 304, 325, 349, 358, 366, 367, 373, 394, 420, 424n12, 456, 458, 474, 476, 480, 497, 498, 507, 508, 512n19, 523, 526, 527, 530, 531, 535, 553, 569, 573, 584, 588, 590, 613, 656, 662

760 

Subject Index

Discourses, 16, 50, 51, 57n7, 65, 66, 74n13, 82, 84, 85, 87, 155, 165, 167, 169–172, 176, 177, 180, 186, 187, 194, 196, 198, 267, 295, 304, 306, 308, 316, 321, 322, 328, 333n11, 333n15, 334n27, 354, 385, 401, 413, 418, 422, 424n9, 432, 444–446, 460, 471, 479, 481, 492, 499, 502, 503, 519–521, 523–529, 531–534, 543–546, 549–551, 595, 596, 610, 613, 623, 624, 635–639, 653, 656, 659, 660, 662, 670 Discursive, 4, 16, 34, 35, 144, 146, 159, 175, 520, 523, 525–528, 533, 617 Disinterested/disinterestedness, 603 Dissensus, 414–416, 419, 424n8, 425n14 Dissociation, 490, 505–507, 652 Drama, 3, 5, 10–12, 71, 84, 94, 95, 190, 192, 203–218, 249, 269, 278, 298, 544, 603, 606 E

Economic, 24, 33, 171, 216, 297, 366, 432, 440, 450–453, 481, 492, 526, 529, 530, 534, 535, 551, 552, 611, 623, 624, 627, 628, 631–639, 646 Economy, 28, 32–33, 450, 451, 453, 456, 457, 459, 464n24, 623–640 Education, 28, 70, 101, 131, 248, 330, 354, 419, 424n13, 445, 462, 521, 522, 541, 549, 587, 603, 606, 607, 615, 616, 626, 633 educational, 475, 586, 613, 626 Eleatic, 6 Emotional, 58n21, 88, 95, 125, 128, 176, 179, 207, 238n8, 284n14, 302, 304, 308, 309, 346, 357,

385, 455, 546, 547, 554, 607, 637, 638 Emotions, 55, 99, 101, 103, 174, 179, 218n2, 277, 281, 286n21, 307, 309–310, 321, 322, 324, 325, 329–331, 376, 430, 433, 445, 456, 459, 461, 543, 562, 602, 607, 646 Empathy, 179, 281, 358, 554, 556, 606, 609, 614–616 Enlightenment, 5, 9, 12, 16, 24, 25, 34, 124, 133, 146, 171, 242, 248, 348, 349, 410, 415, 443, 498, 525, 623 Scottish Enlightenment, 443, 444, 446, 636 Epic, 5, 9–14, 25, 29, 30, 33, 34, 101, 116n1, 166, 185–199, 205, 213, 218n2, 241–245, 247–249, 252, 253, 257, 264, 269, 270, 276, 277, 282n2, 285n17, 298, 319, 341, 503, 545, 629, 630, 634, 649, 650, 658 Episteme, 468 Epistemology epistemic, 100, 104, 116n2, 188, 189, 225, 235, 301, 303, 306, 307, 450, 460–462, 498, 581, 585, 586, 592, 594, 595, 597, 598n3, 598n6 epistemological, 13, 45, 101, 102, 117n7, 189, 190, 303, 344, 447, 469, 476, 478, 482n2, 493, 510n10, 532, 554, 602, 623, 654 Erasmian, 278, 285n19 Essay, 3, 4, 16, 61–77, 105, 106, 108, 116n2, 117n3, 118n26, 135, 136, 143, 145, 151, 154, 157, 244, 247, 254, 258, 283n7, 327, 333n15, 368, 409–412, 422, 423n1, 438–440, 470, 476, 478, 481, 492, 494, 495, 500, 509n5, 510n10, 511n15, 548, 554, 575,

  Subject Index 

625, 627, 633, 638, 640n4, 653, 663n1, 670–672 essayistic, 16, 62, 63, 66, 71, 74n6, 75n15, 250 Eternal, 126, 146, 318, 576, 647–653, 659, 662, 666–670 Ethics, 19, 24, 28, 31, 32, 74n10, 82, 92, 140, 158, 160n18, 195, 249, 255, 256, 308, 309, 407–484, 510n11, 546, 551, 583, 584, 601–617, 634, 646, 656, 663 ethical, 12, 19, 21, 23, 28, 31, 32, 64, 134, 146, 189, 196–198, 250, 251, 253, 255, 256, 296, 303, 308, 354, 355, 358, 407, 412, 413, 415, 419, 455, 459, 461, 545, 549, 554–556, 601–617, 657, 662 Etymology, 68, 204, 205 etymological, 167, 531 European (Philosophy), 16, 17, 118n19, 407, 412 Event, 5, 9, 12, 33, 49, 85, 86, 103, 104, 107, 111, 119n38, 126–128, 136, 154, 177, 198, 205, 207, 212, 213, 216, 247, 272, 276, 278, 300–302, 322, 350, 351, 353, 355–357, 387, 407, 420, 430, 437, 491–493, 497, 521, 527, 549, 561, 565, 566, 568, 570, 573, 609, 613, 645, 647–649, 651, 654 Evil, 243, 259, 270, 279, 318, 319, 325, 415, 435, 436, 449, 566, 570, 571, 628, 675, 676 Exchange, 33, 43–45, 88, 90, 310, 371, 378, 380, 409, 453, 454, 456, 468, 570, 575, 608, 636, 637 Exegesis, 342, 645–663 exegetical, 648–651, 653 Existential, 28, 130, 136, 216, 603, 616, 647, 663n1

761

Existentialism, 130 Experience, 6, 12, 19, 20, 27, 42, 52, 63, 66, 73–74n5, 81, 90, 96n3, 97n34, 99, 100, 104–110, 112, 114, 116, 124, 127, 128, 133, 144, 147, 151, 153–155, 157, 160n16, 167, 173–180, 205, 209, 213, 216, 230, 231, 234, 235, 237n7, 238n8, 253, 259, 271, 272, 281, 297, 302, 305, 310, 320, 323, 344–346, 351, 353, 356–358, 370, 372, 376, 379, 382, 409, 410, 413, 414, 420, 430, 431, 449, 452–455, 457–460, 469–471, 474, 475, 477, 478, 481, 482n4, 482n12, 490–498, 504–507, 508n3, 519, 520, 522, 525–529, 533, 535, 541–545, 550, 570, 574, 575, 577, 584, 602, 603, 605–613, 617, 628, 639, 646–648, 653, 655–657, 659, 660, 662, 663n1, 666, 670 Experience machine, 584 Experiment experimental, 65, 66, 68–70, 75n18, 152, 153, 160n14, 211, 278, 281, 448, 583, 586, 587, 596, 598n3, 615 experimental method, 68, 153 Expression, 4, 11, 43, 55, 56, 75n20, 82, 85, 86, 88–93, 96n3, 97n19, 101, 104–108, 111, 128, 139, 150, 151, 154, 159, 176, 179, 187, 189, 190, 194, 195, 221, 226, 234, 235, 236n5, 256, 257, 271, 274, 295, 317, 319, 322, 342–344, 376, 410, 422, 460, 461, 470, 471, 481, 527, 543, 546, 548, 552, 566–568, 577, 585, 608, 632, 636, 651 Expressive, 88, 90, 106, 151, 157, 174, 555, 650

762 

Subject Index

F

Fact, 29, 42, 47, 52, 56, 65, 66, 75–76n23, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89, 103, 106, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 135–139, 147, 148, 154, 171, 172, 178, 186, 191, 193, 194, 198, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211–214, 216, 217, 217n1, 223, 226–230, 237n6, 246, 264, 271, 281, 301, 302, 317, 320, 323, 326, 327, 330, 334n29, 345, 347, 357, 368, 372, 374, 379, 381, 382n2, 383n3, 386, 389, 392, 395, 397, 401, 402, 403n4, 407, 409, 412, 413, 415, 422, 424n5, 437, 444, 450–454, 458, 461, 471, 472, 474, 475, 478, 495–497, 500, 501, 508, 510n14, 522, 524, 525, 530, 543, 546, 548, 549, 553, 562–564, 570, 571, 574, 581, 582, 586–589, 592–597, 598n4, 624, 628, 630–632, 639, 652, 658, 660 Factual, 63, 68, 82–84, 86, 95, 215, 276, 387, 564 Faith, 34, 168, 171–173, 175–180, 318, 568, 592, 607, 655, 663 Feminism, 20, 25, 26, 467–484, 610 feminist, 25, 26, 72, 76n25, 124, 468–481, 482n2, 482n7, 483n37, 492, 493, 523, 605, 611, 639 Fiction, 2, 15, 20–21, 30, 31, 55, 76n26, 82–84, 102, 124, 129, 138, 171–173, 195, 200n14, 207, 242, 259, 263, 264, 266, 268–281, 282n2, 283n8, 283n9, 284n14, 296, 298, 300–303, 305, 308–310, 315–335, 365, 385–403, 431, 497, 544, 563, 581, 603, 626, 653, 667 Fictional

metafictional, 264, 269, 273, 283n10, 389–392, 399 worlds, 18, 32, 197, 264, 265, 269–282, 284n12, 284n15, 285n16, 300, 301 Figural figuralist, 654 figurations, 650, 652–654 Figurative, 2, 186 Figure, 18, 19, 30, 50, 62, 129, 143, 160n7, 177, 178, 193, 266, 270, 274, 275, 278, 279, 283n6, 283n10, 319, 333n2, 382, 394, 415, 416, 420, 422, 471, 533, 543, 550, 562, 563, 585, 603, 638, 646, 647, 651, 652, 654, 655, 658, 661, 662, 673 Folk tales, 256, 257, 265, 268, 270 Form, 2, 42, 61, 68–73, 81, 99, 124, 143, 152–155, 171, 185, 203, 221, 241, 264, 303, 308, 318, 341, 366, 389, 407, 429, 446, 471, 491, 520, 541, 571, 581, 601, 624, 645, 668 Formalist, 14, 255, 604, 657 formalism, 19, 255, 556, 604, 657 Fragment, 4, 7–8, 66, 69, 70, 74n9, 75n15, 75n20, 140, 143–160, 175, 259, 273, 299, 383n4, 504, 512n20, 615 Freudian, 26, 175, 502, 639 Freudianism, 26 Friendship, 51, 129, 278 G

Geist, 106 Gender, 25–26, 72, 76n26, 266, 269, 467–484, 493, 531, 586, 587, 610, 611, 646 Genealogy, 265, 499, 511n16 genealogical, 165, 166, 171 Genocide, 647, 667, 670

  Subject Index 

Genres, 2, 3, 8, 10–15, 25, 29, 30, 41, 55, 64, 75n15, 77n28, 100, 144, 153, 160n10, 166, 195, 198, 205, 206, 218n2, 244, 245, 248–250, 254, 259, 264–272, 274, 276, 278–282, 283n9, 298, 302, 310, 316–323, 328, 329, 332, 333n9, 334n27, 343, 410, 443, 460, 462, 473, 480, 503, 523, 527, 577, 602, 603, 605, 614, 624, 629, 630, 632, 634, 637 Gnostic, 648, 654 Good, 11, 15, 29, 47, 49, 52, 82, 97n40, 103, 137, 138, 145, 147, 170, 178, 189–191, 200n13, 205, 207, 208, 212, 223, 225–228, 238n8, 243, 252, 255, 263, 270, 279, 297, 302, 308, 318, 323–325, 329, 332, 334n30, 380, 387, 389, 390, 393, 402, 417, 432, 436, 439, 446, 447, 449, 454, 457–461, 463n20, 489, 494, 542, 544, 546–548, 554–556, 571, 582, 586, 587, 597, 599n8, 605–607, 627, 633, 635, 640n4, 662, 676 Good life, 354, 602, 604–607 Gricean, 387 H

Hermeneutics, 5, 18–19, 34, 107, 108, 117n3, 341–360, 490, 493, 494, 496, 499, 500, 503, 511n15, 601, 607, 610–613, 615, 616, 639, 645–663 hermeneutical, 353, 356, 550 Heteroglossia, 167–170, 503, 512n20 Heteronormative, 477, 492 Heuristics, 280, 593, 595, 599n8 Historical, 9, 15, 22, 23, 25, 26, 62–64, 71, 75n23, 101, 111,

763

112, 116n1, 116n2, 117n3, 126, 131, 133, 134, 137, 139, 140, 143, 167, 172, 185, 207, 215, 216, 227, 235, 241, 245, 247, 248, 250, 252, 254, 255, 259, 266, 267, 276, 298, 299, 305–307, 310, 317, 318, 320, 323, 341, 342, 344, 348–350, 352–354, 369, 387, 400, 415, 417, 437, 438, 440, 452, 458, 467, 468, 475, 478, 493, 502, 503, 519, 521, 526, 527, 530–535, 553, 565, 566, 568, 601, 613, 614, 624, 628, 629, 633, 634, 637, 639, 646, 648–651, 654, 670, 671 History, 2, 4, 5, 9, 11–13, 19, 20, 22–26, 31, 33, 34, 42, 43, 57n8, 61, 62, 87, 89, 104, 106, 111, 131, 149, 152, 169, 185, 199, 234, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250, 251, 254, 255, 257, 259, 267, 268, 271, 279, 283n8, 297, 298, 301, 307, 317, 321, 346, 348, 369, 377, 378, 417, 436, 437, 439, 440, 443, 447, 470, 472–474, 479–481, 490, 493, 498, 503, 505, 506, 520, 521, 528, 529, 535, 542, 545, 547–551, 554–556, 562, 564, 568–570, 573, 589, 602, 611, 623–625, 628, 630, 631, 635, 637, 638, 640n6, 646–652, 654, 660, 662, 674, 676 Holocaust, 35, 71, 128, 411, 429, 611, 667, 669, 670 Human, 8, 9, 15, 18, 20, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 46, 49, 50, 55, 69, 70, 74n5, 77n28, 86, 88, 96n3, 103, 104, 106–114, 125, 128, 131–133, 135, 137–140, 143, 144, 150, 158, 169, 170, 173–175, 177–180, 188, 189,

764 

Subject Index

193, 194, 197, 198, 203, 204, 217n1, 223, 225–228, 234, 235, 241, 242, 245, 246, 251, 257, 265, 271–273, 276, 280–282, 285n17, 286n21, 304, 306, 315–332, 334n27, 342–345, 347–351, 353, 355, 356, 358, 359, 369–372, 374, 376, 378, 379, 381, 382, 383n4, 385, 386, 388, 395, 402, 415–418, 430–432, 436, 438, 443, 448–454, 457, 459, 460, 463n17, 463n23, 464n27, 475, 477, 478, 481, 490, 491, 502–504, 507, 509n6, 512n19, 529, 534, 543, 544, 547, 548, 550, 552–554, 556, 562–565, 569, 570, 572–577, 581, 602, 604, 605, 610, 624–626, 629, 633–638, 646, 648, 649, 653, 656, 659, 660, 662, 663, 665, 667–670, 673–676 Humanist, 26, 34, 84, 255, 268, 277, 324, 325, 490, 498, 511n15, 601, 605–608, 615, 631 humanism, 26, 193, 323, 480, 520, 604, 610, 630, 632, 633, 640n8, 675 Humour, 18, 304 I

Ideal, 12, 13, 19, 21, 31, 45, 76n25, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 101, 178, 188, 243, 275, 305, 318, 343, 348, 351, 397, 424n9, 434, 437, 445, 458, 490–495, 497–499, 505, 506, 511n13, 521, 544, 545, 577, 602, 604, 608, 647, 656 idealising, 13, 265, 266, 269, 271, 279, 318, 319 Idealisation, 81, 85, 243, 647, 657

Idealism, 321, 329, 330, 490, 493, 497, 498, 500, 501, 504, 512n19 idealist, 12, 248, 490 Idealism (German), 12, 18 German idealist, 14, 16, 27, 170, 249 Identity, 21, 27, 110, 124, 134, 148, 175, 224–226, 243, 264–266, 270, 273, 274, 278, 299, 300, 318, 353, 394, 400–402, 410, 411, 416, 417, 467, 472, 474, 475, 477, 478, 480, 490, 491, 494, 495, 499, 507, 511n13, 520, 528, 535, 552, 576, 588, 589, 593, 595, 596, 610, 628, 630, 638 Ideology, 63, 66, 71, 167–172, 176, 180, 277, 285n18, 333n11, 420, 422, 472, 524, 566, 567, 604, 610 ideological, 172, 256, 271, 272, 274, 280, 420, 443, 474, 523, 610, 629, 630, 638 Image, 14, 27, 28, 62, 84, 87, 88, 91, 93, 96, 101–103, 105, 106, 109, 110, 113, 115, 174, 175, 188, 189, 196, 216, 217n1, 218n1, 228, 232, 281, 322, 329, 374, 376, 377, 424n10, 431, 435, 438, 446, 508, 524, 542, 545, 550, 552, 554, 555, 565, 604, 609, 645–647, 649–651, 655, 663, 673 Imagination, 2, 7, 12, 20, 26, 31, 33, 77n28, 94, 100, 104, 105, 107–116, 168–170, 175, 215, 217, 222, 280–282, 284n11, 298, 302, 303, 353, 359, 359n5, 365, 382n2, 387, 393, 413, 454, 455, 457, 462, 502, 521, 541–556, 563, 602, 604, 606, 607, 609, 615, 623, 636, 646, 654, 657, 661

  Subject Index 

Imaginative, 3, 5, 7, 85, 100, 113, 114, 132, 168, 215–217, 221, 227, 232, 242, 245, 268, 271, 274, 276, 283n9, 299, 301, 303, 353, 387, 455, 460, 490, 506, 549, 556, 602, 615, 624, 630, 634, 636 Imitation, 54, 55, 101–103, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 203–205, 258, 322, 436, 637 Imitative, 185, 188, 189, 196, 198, 199, 204, 624 Immanence, 671, 673, 674 immanent, 23, 659, 667, 668, 671, 672, 674, 675 Inconsistency, 50, 563, 582, 587, 595 Individual, 1, 4, 8, 10, 17, 29, 30, 33, 34, 55, 76n23, 92, 106, 126, 132–134, 140, 151, 153, 155, 169, 170, 172, 175, 176, 178–180, 204, 249, 251, 253, 258, 274, 276, 320, 323, 324, 326, 327, 334n27, 342, 343, 351, 357, 366, 367, 386, 389, 391, 395, 396, 399, 417, 431, 446, 459, 500, 511n13, 511n15, 512n19, 527, 541, 542, 545, 549, 550, 553, 554, 561, 562, 564, 570, 572, 587, 603, 609, 611–613, 615, 617n1, 626, 627, 651 individuality, 132, 155, 342, 343 Industrial, 172, 534, 667, 670 Industry, 170, 566, 654 Ineffability, 225, 235 Intention, 29, 31, 133, 135, 205, 207, 210, 211, 237n8, 278, 298, 299, 301, 304–307, 321, 322, 327, 328, 330, 344, 353, 387, 408, 410, 460, 489, 491, 594 intentionalism, 305, 306 Interpretation, 18, 26, 29, 34, 64, 72, 76n27, 85, 110, 112, 115, 128,

765

132, 138, 150, 155, 159n7, 187, 192, 207, 208, 223, 225, 232, 238n8, 267, 271, 273, 275–278, 297, 298, 301, 302, 304–307, 310, 341–349, 351, 352, 354–358, 365, 409, 413, 438, 447, 451, 476, 499, 502, 508, 513n21, 543, 549, 552, 553, 561, 585, 594, 604, 612, 614, 649, 653, 656, 659 Intuition, 29, 62, 83, 84, 104, 111, 400, 547, 585–587, 589–591, 596, 598n3, 599n8 Intuitive, 86, 394, 585, 587, 589 Ironic, 48, 86, 169, 231, 247, 250, 275, 276, 306, 316, 407, 657 Irony, 8, 14, 57n6, 169, 194, 226, 238n8, 244, 247–250, 253, 304, 473, 503, 550, 566, 607, 632, 657, 667 Islam, 277 J

Judgements, 1, 14, 24, 29, 62, 74n10, 140, 309, 325, 326, 542, 546, 549, 552, 556, 607, 612 Jurisprudence, 246, 521, 546, 553, 556 Justice, 29, 31, 187, 190, 258, 319, 352, 380–382, 415, 529, 546, 548, 551–553, 569, 603, 605, 611, 626, 627, 631–634, 636, 668 K

Kantian, 96n19, 146, 297, 410, 413, 414, 624, 659 Kierkegaardian, 609 Knowledge, 8, 17, 18, 21, 28, 31, 46–50, 52, 53, 62, 63, 68, 71, 74n10, 84, 86, 91, 101, 106, 111, 113, 139, 144, 155, 158,

766 

Subject Index

188–190, 218n8, 225, 245, 300, 307–309, 316, 352, 368, 376, 388, 407, 409, 420, 429, 430, 433, 438, 440, 445, 447, 448, 451, 457, 461, 473, 491, 502, 509n3, 509n7, 520, 526, 532, 542, 553, 555, 562, 575, 577, 581, 592–595, 597, 598n6, 603, 609, 624, 628, 633, 638, 669, 671, 672, 676 knowing, 6, 47, 48, 52, 69, 117n3, 131, 329, 330, 347, 354, 414, 457, 480, 502, 609 L

Labour, 269, 623, 624, 626–628, 631, 635, 636 Lacanian, 175, 178, 422, 423 Lacanianism, 27, 420, 421, 490 Language, 2, 4, 6, 8–10, 13, 16, 17, 20–28, 33, 49, 65, 69, 82, 84–96, 97n34, 99–102, 105–108, 110, 111, 114–116, 134, 148, 149, 155, 157, 160n16, 167, 170, 187, 196, 215, 217n1, 222, 223, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237n5, 250, 255, 256, 258, 266, 267, 270, 274, 296, 300, 306, 321, 322, 342, 343, 350, 351, 353, 370, 371, 385–403, 410, 416, 417, 419, 422, 429–433, 436, 443, 444, 446–454, 456, 458–461, 480, 490, 492, 498, 502, 503, 511n13, 512n20, 521–523, 526–530, 532, 536, 543, 546, 547, 549–555, 564, 566, 575, 576, 591, 595, 596, 617n1, 624, 627–629, 631–635, 645, 653, 657–663, 668–671, 674, 675, 677 Law, 25, 29, 67, 69, 104, 159, 176, 189, 193, 241, 246, 247, 255,

258, 276, 297n3, 308, 331, 341, 349, 394, 412–415, 417, 418, 445, 456, 459, 471, 495, 541–556, 592, 613, 624, 627, 630, 632 Legal, 29, 33, 93, 241, 256, 297, 418, 475, 481, 541–556, 638 Leibnizian, 278 Liberal, 34, 168–172, 247, 443, 444, 476, 510n12, 511n15, 542, 546, 547, 551 Life, 7, 19, 28, 47, 58n21, 65, 75n19, 81, 88, 93, 94, 101, 103, 112, 125–139, 143, 153, 172, 174–180, 187, 189–191, 198, 199n4, 203, 204, 206, 216, 223, 226–228, 235, 249, 250, 253, 255, 256, 271–273, 276, 319, 323, 325, 342, 344, 346, 350, 351, 353, 354, 357, 365–369, 376, 378–380, 382, 411, 413–417, 433, 435–438, 447, 450–453, 461, 476, 478, 489, 490, 495, 499, 501, 502, 504, 505, 508, 512n18, 512n19, 525, 542, 546, 547, 550–552, 562, 563, 565, 567, 568, 570–574, 584, 602, 604–607, 631, 637, 648, 649, 651, 653, 655, 668, 670 Linguistic, 5, 6, 9, 17, 22, 25, 58n21, 69, 86–88, 90–93, 95, 100, 106, 111, 115, 116, 165, 166, 172, 189, 228, 235, 255, 281, 297n2, 298, 304, 306, 342, 343, 370, 430–433, 461, 464n24, 474, 520, 522, 526, 542, 639, 652, 660, 663, 669, 670, 675 Literariness, 298, 548, 555–556 Literary, 2–5, 7–9, 11–36, 41, 43, 62, 73n1, 73n4, 75n18, 81–97, 102, 116n1, 124, 129, 130, 139, 143, 144, 149, 153, 167,

  Subject Index 

168, 170–174, 176–180, 185, 190, 194, 197, 205–207, 211, 218n2, 222, 234, 238n8, 241, 246–252, 254, 256–259, 264–268, 271, 278, 279, 281, 285n20, 296–301, 304–311, 319–323, 333n9, 333n15, 341, 342, 344, 351–355, 358, 371, 377, 380, 385, 400, 401, 429–431, 433, 437, 438, 443, 444, 459–461, 467–474, 477, 479, 480, 482n4, 489, 490, 493–496, 498, 500, 502, 503, 507, 512n20, 519–521, 523, 527, 530, 531, 534, 541–556, 563, 564, 566, 569, 572, 577, 581, 583, 601, 602, 604–610, 612–617, 624, 625, 627, 630–635, 639, 645, 646, 650–654 Litigation, 409, 412 Liturgy, 255, 672 Logic, 4, 8, 16, 83, 167, 178, 187, 224, 295, 353, 357, 393, 395, 412, 422, 437, 444, 447–448, 451, 455, 458, 473, 476, 478, 480, 493, 497, 531, 542, 550, 592, 637, 666 logical, 16, 17, 19, 62, 73n4, 75n19, 88, 152, 159n7, 160n7, 227, 271, 297, 347, 394, 437, 444, 445, 447, 448, 588, 591, 593, 666 Logos, 165–172, 175–177, 180n1, 187, 189, 190, 255, 444, 445, 468 Love, 32, 47, 51, 54, 88, 93, 127, 129, 148, 173, 175, 179, 251–253, 267, 270, 273–276, 278, 280, 281, 284n12, 284n14, 285n17, 317, 319, 324, 381, 457, 491, 494, 562, 576, 606, 632, 654, 670

767

Lyric, 6, 9, 12–13, 30, 101, 116n1, 205, 206, 210–214, 221–238, 269, 270, 274, 277, 503 Lyrical, 231 M

Market, 450, 603, 608, 626, 640n4 Materialist, 491, 526 materialism, 527, 639 Meaning, 6, 9, 12, 21, 23, 26, 31, 55, 56, 83, 85, 87–92, 103, 105, 107, 108, 111, 113, 126–128, 135, 137, 138, 144, 149, 180, 180n1, 211–213, 215, 223, 234, 237–238n8, 295, 296, 299, 301, 304–307, 310, 319, 342–345, 348–351, 353–357, 366–368, 370, 373, 409, 411, 412, 416, 425n14, 438, 444, 469, 470, 474, 475, 477, 478, 490, 493, 495, 498–502, 508, 511n15, 513n21, 519, 522, 532, 533, 541, 543, 545–547, 549, 550, 552, 554–556, 563, 565, 567, 593, 603, 610, 613–614, 616, 626, 627, 630, 646–648, 652–655, 657, 659–662, 667, 669–672, 674–677 Medicine, 615, 633 medical, 131, 132, 329, 380, 477, 615, 616 Medieval, 10, 15, 185, 192, 193, 199n7, 267, 274–276, 284n16, 319, 623, 634, 651, 673 Meinongian, 392, 397–399 neo-Meinongian, 397–401, 403n6 Melancholia, 670 Melancholic, 326–328, 412, 574, 670 Melancholy, 328, 412, 418, 638 Memory, 7, 70, 108, 121, 128, 131, 137, 138, 176, 177, 179, 252–254, 281, 326, 327, 330,

768 

Subject Index

331, 356–358, 377, 413, 415, 445, 446, 481n1, 547, 590, 609, 611, 646 Mental, 154, 175, 179, 280, 310, 319, 322, 440, 489, 491–493, 496, 506, 508n3, 585, 607, 615, 670 Metahermeneutic, 612, 613, 615 Metaphor, 17, 85, 93, 99, 100, 106, 107, 113, 115, 177, 194, 210, 212, 218n4, 228, 230, 232, 308, 329, 445, 527, 542, 543, 545, 550, 553, 563, 632, 633, 637, 639, 640n9, 641n10, 658, 667 metaphorical, 106, 107, 109, 634 Metaphysics metaphysical, 13, 22, 32, 101, 102, 106, 151, 227, 249, 258, 394, 507, 646, 647, 650, 652, 653, 656–660, 662, 663n1 post-metaphysical, 653 Method, 9, 15, 18, 62, 66, 68–70, 73n4, 77n28, 133, 153, 277, 296, 347, 366, 443, 445, 447, 448, 452, 457, 467, 472, 490, 508, 541, 549, 586, 589, 593, 616, 626, 627, 647 Methodology, 66, 68, 73n1, 172, 382n2, 430, 468, 472, 473, 479, 531, 533, 549, 615 Miletian, 6 Mimesis, 23, 101–103, 189, 204, 258, 259, 299, 387, 434–437, 602 Mimetic, 102, 104, 205, 258, 278, 439, 490, 496, 500, 503, 510n10, 602, 605 Mind, 7, 8, 17, 20, 28, 42, 45, 49, 55, 57n6, 62, 65, 87, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 146, 147, 151, 154, 156, 160n20, 169, 172, 180, 190, 193, 205, 208, 213, 218n8, 263, 269, 270, 276, 281, 296, 297, 301, 303, 307, 311, 316, 317, 319–325, 327–332,

334n26, 334n27, 356, 367, 377, 402, 413, 430, 433, 436, 437, 443, 446–450, 457, 460, 461, 471, 490–492, 494, 495, 504, 506, 507, 509n3, 511n15, 522, 534, 545, 549, 550, 562, 563, 571, 573, 574, 581, 587, 607, 614, 615, 626, 652, 661, 668 Model Theory, 271 Modernism, 12, 34, 172, 173, 524, 656, 657 modernist, 168, 173, 194, 222, 227, 237n8, 524, 606, 609, 656–658, 662 Money, 31, 32, 377, 567, 574, 624, 631, 636, 637, 639 Monomyth, 265, 282n3 Monument, 342 monumental, 11, 101, 132 Moral morality, 32, 91–93, 95, 144, 268, 319, 413, 436, 447, 543, 582, 584, 603–607, 609, 610, 617n1, 633 morally, 31, 93, 132, 197, 268, 303, 309, 330, 332, 436, 450, 453, 583, 584, 602, 606 Mourning, 32, 408–412, 670 Muse, 166, 177, 237n6 Myths, 2, 5, 9–10, 165–180, 186, 187, 189, 190, 193, 233, 241–243, 245, 248, 268–270, 273, 318, 380, 381, 435, 492, 497–499, 511n14, 553, 563–566, 568, 569, 573, 574, 577, 658, 667, 669 N

Narrating, 126, 499, 606 Narratives, 3, 5, 7, 9, 46, 71, 81–97, 116n1, 124, 130, 136, 171, 172, 174, 176, 179, 180, 193, 194, 197, 213, 215, 241, 242, 248,

  Subject Index 

253, 254, 259, 264–267, 270, 271, 273–275, 281, 283n8, 284n16, 286n21, 296, 298, 302–304, 316, 317, 319–323, 331, 332, 341, 346, 354–358, 375, 383n5, 399, 469–474, 477, 478, 480, 493, 497–499, 502, 503, 507, 511n15, 530, 535, 541, 543–546, 548–550, 554, 556, 563, 565, 567, 569, 571, 601, 602, 605–608, 612, 615, 624, 630, 631, 639, 645, 649 micronarratives, 274 Narratology, 23, 355, 356, 358, 607 narratological, 355, 544, 607 Nation, 13, 254, 256, 366, 417, 450, 474, 521–523, 527, 534–535, 541, 623, 624, 628–632, 634, 636, 639 National, 13, 254, 255, 512n20, 521, 526, 527, 531, 535, 563, 607, 623, 627–630 Nationalism, 112, 172, 527, 628–630 Nationalist, 172, 254, 417, 474, 566, 591 Nationhood, 629, 630 Naturalness, 65 unnaturalness, 91–94 Nature, 2, 7–10, 12, 15, 17, 24, 26, 41, 43–48, 50, 55, 63, 64, 68, 69, 71, 73n1, 74n9, 75n18, 75n20, 75n23, 77n28, 85, 89, 100, 102–105, 107, 109–111, 117n3, 124, 127, 129, 131–133, 137–139, 146, 148, 150–152, 154, 155, 158, 159, 166, 169, 173, 177, 194, 198, 206, 209, 210, 213, 217n1, 218n4, 223, 226, 227, 242, 243, 247, 248, 253, 255, 256, 258, 270, 274, 283n7, 283n8, 285n19, 295, 301, 302, 306, 316, 318, 320, 321, 323–327, 329–332, 341,

769

347, 349, 369, 372, 373, 385–387, 399, 401, 413, 420, 422, 435, 436, 444, 447, 450–453, 459, 460, 462, 468, 475, 482n12, 490, 492–495, 498, 501, 502, 509n6, 512n19, 523, 529, 530, 542, 543, 547, 548, 553, 554, 563, 570, 571, 573, 575, 583, 584, 596, 598n6, 625, 629, 633–635, 651, 653 Needs, 26, 31, 34, 47, 53, 68–70, 73n1, 82–87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 100, 105, 130, 132, 133, 139, 140, 151, 174, 180, 204, 206, 207, 214, 215, 217, 228, 230, 231, 235, 237n7, 257, 271, 275, 296, 300, 304, 311, 316, 317, 320, 324, 326, 329, 343, 354, 355, 359, 376, 381, 391, 394, 433, 443, 444, 505, 524, 526, 527, 532, 534, 548, 554, 556, 564, 571, 572, 574, 576, 581, 583–585, 593, 596, 598n3, 604, 606, 608, 609, 611, 615–617, 624, 628, 635, 636, 666 Negation, 243, 258, 591 Negativity, 258, 660, 674 Neo-Aristotelian, 601 Neurological, 102 Neurons, 102 mirror-neurons, 102, 434 Neuroscience, 179, 297, 366, 496, 505, 510n8 Neuroscientific, 433 Nietzschean, 107, 648, 653, 658, 661 post-Nietzschean, 652 Nihilism, 234, 235, 424n9 nihilistic, 258, 606, 657, 659 Normative, 296, 409, 459, 476–478, 496, 522, 544, 545, 564, 569–573, 577, 613, 634, 662, 669, 670 normativity, 493, 604

770 

Subject Index

Norms, 212, 455–458, 460, 494, 550, 608, 609, 617n1, 635, 652, 655, 657, 659 Nothingness, 572, 660, 666, 667, 669–675 Novel Byzantine novel, 264, 277, 280, 320 Greek novel, 242, 246 O

Object, 8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19–21, 32, 36, 53, 67, 85, 86, 88, 92, 94, 102–104, 107–110, 113, 115, 123, 134, 175, 177, 178, 188, 189, 205, 209, 230, 234–236, 252, 266, 296–298, 300, 310, 341, 344–347, 351–353, 355, 358, 366–369, 386, 387, 392–402, 414, 439, 454, 455, 458, 471, 490, 493, 494, 504–505, 507, 509n3, 510n9, 511n16, 582, 583, 589, 595, 603, 612, 625, 649, 657, 658, 666, 670 Objective, 84, 86, 92, 107, 123, 147, 210, 238n8, 253, 316, 342, 347, 367, 431, 455, 490, 491, 542, 550, 555, 562 Objectivity, 72, 295, 347, 489, 491, 494, 500, 506, 509n6, 543 Oedipal, 493 Ontology, 15, 18, 20–21, 130, 144, 299–301, 349, 385–403, 490, 495, 499, 501, 502, 504, 507, 508, 510n11, 511n15, 531, 652, 653, 659, 660 ontological, 21, 111, 130, 189, 235, 299, 303, 310, 344–348, 385, 386, 388, 392–395, 402, 438, 490, 497–501, 504, 507, 511n15, 646, 647, 652, 653, 656, 660, 662, 663n1

Order, 2, 29, 31–33, 41–43, 47, 50, 57n7, 61–63, 65–67, 69, 70, 84, 87, 93, 95, 100, 129, 148, 152–156, 159n7, 185, 186, 190, 193, 195, 206, 211, 215, 247, 252, 264, 267, 282, 309, 319, 329, 349, 353, 372, 377, 381, 411–415, 418, 420, 422, 423, 447, 500, 531, 541–544, 569, 571, 605, 627, 633, 634, 637, 647, 656–658, 661 disorder, 89, 90, 150, 257, 456 Ordinary language, 84–91, 93, 95, 100, 105, 107, 394 language philosophy, 95 Other, 175, 177–179, 241, 413–419, 609 otherness, 351, 352, 502, 507, 605, 612, 637 P

Paradigm, 7, 43, 85, 86, 90, 218n8, 266, 272, 283n8, 283n10, 296, 327, 413, 439, 449, 490, 496, 509n3, 524, 564, 646 Paradigmatic, 149, 174, 301, 397, 478 Paradox, 8, 67, 105, 133, 144, 263–270, 310, 420–422, 469, 471, 477, 479–481, 504, 507, 527, 534, 563, 577, 582, 583, 585, 586, 657, 667, 674, 675 Paraphrase paraphrasable, 228, 230, 233, 236n4, 390 paraphrasers, 232 Patriarchy, 476 Perception, 17, 18, 20, 50, 104, 109, 110, 112–114, 170, 175, 345, 346, 356, 408, 431, 433, 434, 438–440, 448–450, 453, 455,

  Subject Index 

461, 472, 495, 502, 505, 524, 552, 604, 608, 658, 659, 661 Performative, 8, 23, 34, 35, 206, 213, 215, 218n3, 269, 356, 420, 422, 423, 467, 479, 496, 498, 549 performativity, 409, 422, 468, 476, 496, 551 Person, 32, 44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 85, 88, 92, 93, 104, 131, 132, 136, 137, 139, 140, 150, 157, 174, 193, 197, 204, 205, 216, 224, 299, 342, 346, 356, 366, 377, 381, 389, 392, 399, 431, 435, 452–455, 457, 459, 460, 463n17, 497, 499, 505, 510n10, 567, 570, 573, 574, 584, 589–591, 593, 596, 646, 648, 655, 665, 666, 670 personhood, 478, 646, 665, 666 Phenomenology phenomenological, 19, 22, 100, 107, 194, 297, 345, 365, 371, 372, 383n3, 457, 615, 616 postphenomenological, 608 Philology, 9, 18, 25, 34, 172 philological, 257, 549 Physicist, 512n19, 582 Physics, 68, 69, 158, 238n12, 246, 247, 366, 582, 585, 592 Platonic anti-Platonist, 661 Platonist, 659 Playfulness, 56 Plot, 46, 104, 129, 203–205, 213–215, 248, 265–267, 270, 277, 279, 281, 282n1, 282n2, 283n10, 304, 323, 373, 380, 482n4, 545, 572, 577, 645, 650 Poetics, 5, 6, 19, 20, 65, 68, 71, 103, 104, 204, 205, 214, 218n2, 237n8, 241, 243, 256, 264, 272, 276, 277, 283n9, 318, 436, 440,

771

650, 654, 657, 665, 666, 668, 669, 671 Poetry, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12–13, 30, 34–35, 55, 62, 69, 70, 73n1, 75n20, 76n26, 99–119, 167, 168, 170–173, 185–187, 189, 190, 192, 195–199, 204, 205, 218n2, 221–238, 241, 242, 244, 245, 252, 269, 274, 370, 383n5, 434–437, 439, 440, 450, 452, 457, 461, 495, 505, 507, 541, 544, 547, 602, 625, 628–630, 634, 641n10, 651, 654, 655, 657, 661, 665–677 Political, 15, 21–25, 27–33, 72, 76n25, 107, 111, 131–133, 135, 171, 172, 185, 193, 194, 199n7, 216, 217n1, 218n8, 246, 247, 251, 254–256, 278, 285n17, 310, 366, 407–410, 412–414, 417, 420, 435–440, 444, 451, 452, 464n24, 467, 468, 472–476, 478, 479, 481, 483n12, 507, 519, 520, 522, 526, 527, 531, 533–535, 542, 550, 552, 562–565, 568, 569, 573, 576, 577, 602–604, 610, 611, 623–641, 655, 660, 669 Political economy, 28, 32–33, 451, 464n24, 623–641 Politics, 23, 24, 28, 30, 71, 112, 168, 171, 191, 193, 194, 247, 251, 255, 256, 350, 359, 407–425, 434–436, 438, 440, 475, 478, 480, 534, 546, 550, 561–579, 610, 629, 633, 637, 639, 646, 647, 651, 656, 675 Polyphony, 44, 56, 608, 617 Positivism (legal), 551 Postcolonial, 27, 28, 278, 519–536 postcolonialism, 27–28, 519–536 Posthuman, 496, 573, 574 Posthumanist, 611

772 

Subject Index

Post-modern, 65, 238, 524, 525, 616, 645–663 postmodrenism, 237n8, 474, 523–525, 530, 656 Post-structuralism, 407, 408, 418, 419, 421, 422, 468, 520, 523, 524, 609, 610 poststructuralist, 74n9, 413, 420–423, 523, 601, 608, 639 Power, 3, 9, 28–30, 43, 71, 95, 115, 146, 156, 166, 168–172, 174–178, 180, 185, 193, 195, 199, 211, 218n8, 230, 232, 251, 258, 269, 272, 275, 278, 279, 318, 325, 327, 349–351, 354–357, 370, 379, 380, 395, 410, 412–414, 421, 430, 431, 433, 435, 438, 446, 449, 474, 476, 477, 480, 483n12, 489, 494, 500, 519, 520, 526, 527, 530, 531, 533–535, 542, 543, 547, 548, 550, 551, 556, 561–566, 569, 576, 582, 587, 595, 597, 603, 605, 609, 610, 633, 634, 647, 653, 656, 657, 659, 675 Pragmatics, 509n3 Pragmatism, 4, 110, 409, 410 Pre-Socratics, 6, 143, 235, 512n19 Privacy, 323 Private, 132, 145, 146, 264, 447, 541, 552, 553, 561, 590, 613, 614, 631, 633, 640n6 Produce, 51, 70, 114, 171, 205, 214, 222, 243, 299, 301, 344, 357, 370, 376, 432, 435, 447, 449, 470, 478, 495, 503, 544, 556, 562, 581, 627, 638 Production, 71, 102, 103, 183, 188, 208, 212, 213, 218n6, 306, 333n7, 369, 432, 433, 440, 457, 470, 473, 477, 500, 503, 511n16, 523, 525, 530, 532,

534, 535, 548, 602, 610, 611, 626, 628, 630, 636, 639, 668 Profane, 177, 178, 315, 646, 668 Prosaic, 168, 169, 172, 242, 418 Prose, 3, 7, 13, 61, 66, 69, 116n1, 167, 226, 228–232, 236n4, 241, 242, 244, 254, 257, 264, 269, 273, 274, 279, 283n9, 284n16, 295, 556 Psychoanalysis, 18, 22, 23, 26–28, 132, 173, 175, 178, 252, 489–513, 660 psychoanalytic, 26, 71, 166, 174–176, 470, 471, 482n12, 489, 490, 493, 496–500, 502, 505, 508, 511n17, 551 Psychology, 17–19, 32, 139, 143, 154, 158, 160n20, 174, 270, 297, 319, 321, 330, 333n2, 342, 343, 355, 452, 457, 464n24, 491, 492, 636, 646 psychological, 18, 103, 124, 133, 150, 158, 174, 178, 190, 207, 242, 298, 309, 317, 322, 342–344, 449, 500, 501, 504, 505, 507, 577, 601, 646 Public sphere, 64, 264, 411, 563, 564, 577, 613, 629 R

Rationality, 197, 198, 235, 236, 243, 436, 545, 675 rationalism, 9, 234, 489, 675 Reader, 1, 2, 14, 35, 41, 55, 56, 76n26, 90, 99, 100, 108, 110–112, 114, 125, 127, 145, 148, 150–153, 156, 157, 159n5, 169, 173–175, 180, 189, 192, 197, 205, 207, 209, 212, 214, 215, 222, 237n8, 238n8, 249, 250, 253, 267, 268, 272, 273, 275, 277, 280, 281, 283n9, 300, 303, 307–310, 315,

  Subject Index 

316, 320, 323, 326, 329, 332, 333n9, 353, 379, 387, 388, 409, 423n1, 430, 448, 457, 460, 490, 491, 494, 496, 500, 501, 508, 543, 544, 547, 548, 553, 567, 569, 570, 581, 603, 605, 607–609, 612, 614, 615, 617, 625, 627, 637–639, 646, 655, 665, 676 Reading, 1, 12, 14, 22, 34–36, 56, 71, 75n16, 82, 84, 139, 168, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197–199, 207, 215, 218n3, 223, 227, 230, 232, 238n8, 245, 257, 271, 272, 280, 283n9, 297, 302, 323, 328, 332, 343, 353–355, 383n4, 388–391, 396, 400, 409, 410, 415, 431, 439, 450–452, 461, 473, 496, 498–503, 508, 513n21, 519, 526, 531–533, 548, 550, 554, 555, 572, 576, 584, 604, 606, 609, 611–616, 632, 635, 645, 648, 651, 656, 663n1, 667, 671–674 Real, 16, 23, 26, 30, 50, 82–84, 88, 95, 100, 112, 114, 115, 129, 151, 166, 178, 188, 189, 198, 216, 217n1, 230, 241, 249, 250, 271, 272, 300, 301, 304, 309, 319, 352, 354, 359n5, 375, 386, 393, 399, 402, 420, 431, 438, 469, 475, 476, 490, 492, 495, 497, 504, 505, 507, 527, 529, 544, 550, 562, 564, 567, 568, 574–576, 581, 606, 607, 633, 636, 649, 661, 666, 670, 675 Realism (literary), 32, 100, 257, 259, 388–395, 402, 524, 570, 572 realist, 15, 129, 385, 386, 390, 392, 394, 400, 402, 606, 609 Realism (metaphysical) anti-realist, 385, 386 realist, 386, 390

773

Reality, 5, 9, 13, 16, 20, 21, 23, 30, 66, 83, 90, 96n3, 99, 100, 102, 105–107, 110–114, 116, 118n17, 123, 129, 133, 150, 151, 167, 178, 188, 196–198, 207, 216, 242, 258, 259, 269, 278, 281, 284n11, 295, 309, 328, 330, 343, 345, 347, 349, 354, 356, 358, 401, 431, 435–438, 440, 467, 476, 490, 493, 494, 498, 500, 503, 505–508, 519, 522, 524, 527, 534, 535, 543, 545, 546, 548, 550, 553, 555, 561–564, 573, 574, 576, 577, 582, 585, 592, 626, 630, 646, 652, 658, 665–670 Reason, 9–11, 14, 20, 35, 53, 64, 66, 67, 71, 77n28, 82, 86, 92, 96, 102, 127, 130, 131, 133–138, 145, 151, 153, 170, 175, 180, 185, 186, 192–194, 197, 198, 207, 217n1, 223, 236, 241, 243, 253, 256, 276, 306, 324, 325, 329, 348–350, 372, 373, 380, 392, 413, 420, 424n5, 433, 436, 444–446, 449, 450, 452, 455, 456, 459, 462, 528, 530, 544, 547, 549, 569, 572, 581, 582, 587, 592, 594, 595, 606, 626, 638, 646, 666, 675 Reference, 16, 17, 21, 26, 28, 34, 66, 83, 87, 92, 104, 107, 108, 111, 130, 166, 176, 188, 193, 205, 224, 238n8, 243, 249, 253, 264, 300, 301, 390, 391, 410, 413, 415, 420, 491, 512n19, 528, 532, 552, 556, 586, 595, 596, 645, 646, 650, 652, 653, 656, 659–661, 669, 675 Religion, 9, 10, 15, 33–34, 106, 108, 144, 179, 191, 193, 248, 568, 569, 603, 629, 630, 633, 634, 645–663, 672

774 

Subject Index

Remembrance, 136 Renaissance, 10, 12, 14, 16, 62, 63, 193, 208, 284n10, 284n14, 315–332, 527 Repetition, 15, 174, 204, 242, 249, 298, 407, 440, 476, 499, 511n16, 550, 652, 667, 670, 676 Representation, 22–24, 27, 55, 66, 87, 101–105, 124, 203–205, 217n1, 242, 243, 247, 284n12, 302, 304, 308, 310, 317, 319, 321, 322, 355, 424n10, 430, 433–440, 493, 519, 520, 522, 524, 528, 529, 549–551, 604, 608, 611, 612, 625, 629, 630, 632, 634, 637, 646, 647, 650, 657, 662 Rhetoric, 12, 24–25, 33, 47, 48, 173, 264, 331, 411, 443–465, 481, 542, 543, 545, 549, 550, 552, 576, 613, 624–626, 630, 637 rhetorical, 3, 6, 63, 65, 157, 190, 299, 357, 358, 444–448, 450–452, 455, 458–462, 463n17, 463n20, 464n24, 543–545, 550, 601, 607–608, 614, 626, 631–633, 639, 646 Ritual, 172, 174, 267, 271, 476, 647 Romances Byzantine romance, 264, 277, 280 Greek romance, 265, 266, 269, 272, 273, 282n2, 282n3, 284n12, 284n14, 318 Romantic, 6, 8, 10, 12–14, 34, 101, 104, 151, 166, 169–171, 173, 194, 246, 247, 249, 250, 253, 281, 342, 343, 568, 637, 638, 661, 671 romanticism, 18, 34, 169, 172, 173, 194, 249, 279, 343, 656

S

Sacred, 34, 177, 178, 325, 535, 645, 646, 648, 655, 658, 668 sacral, 255, 659 Scepticism sceptic, 69 sceptical, 62, 68, 72, 401, 562 Scholastic, 74n12, 191, 192, 198, 245, 443, 447 scholasticism, 66, 185 Schrödinger’s cat, 585, 595 Science, 4, 5, 9, 17, 18, 20, 63, 65, 67, 68, 73, 74n10, 75n15, 89, 158, 167–169, 179, 223, 235, 242, 247, 266, 271, 279, 347, 348, 350, 359n5, 366–368, 370, 430, 437, 448, 452, 457, 459, 467, 490, 491, 495, 497, 508n3, 509n7, 512, 542, 546, 548, 582, 585, 592, 593, 595, 597, 603, 613, 638, 646, 652, 654 scientific, 26, 63, 64, 66–68, 85, 89, 90, 93, 100, 110, 223, 225, 234, 235, 297, 307, 316, 334n27, 345, 368, 383, 433, 434, 437, 439, 440, 443, 448, 489–491, 494, 496, 497, 509, 510, 551, 566, 581, 584, 585, 595, 603, 604, 623, 638 Scientist, 153, 490, 562, 577, 596 Scripture, 192, 545, 648, 671 Self, 50–52, 111, 123–126, 130, 133, 134, 137, 176, 249, 251, 325, 452, 456, 457, 459, 477, 490, 495, 499, 504, 506, 508, 555, 575, 605, 608–610, 661, 662, 669 Selfhood, 124, 318, 431, 490, 504, 511, 613, 648, 669 Senseless/senselessness, 675 Senses, 2, 11, 24, 28–30, 32, 35, 48, 56, 68, 69, 72, 74–76, 83–90, 92, 94–96, 102, 103, 105, 107,

  Subject Index 

110, 112, 115, 116, 125–139, 143–147, 155, 156, 159n5, 167, 171, 174–176, 179, 187, 206, 208, 210, 212, 215, 216, 223, 225–227, 229, 231, 232, 236n4, 237n6, 238, 247, 248, 251–254, 258, 259, 267, 271, 272, 280, 295, 298, 308, 318, 345, 346, 351, 353, 355, 358, 359, 365, 368–370, 376–379, 386, 387, 393, 395, 396, 398–400, 403, 407, 409, 411, 412, 414, 416–418, 421, 423, 431, 435, 438, 444, 446–450, 454, 456, 460–462, 473, 474, 477, 479, 481, 493, 495, 499, 501, 505, 507, 525, 526, 528, 529, 533, 545, 546, 561–564, 570, 572–577, 587, 590, 592, 603, 604, 607, 608, 610, 612, 613, 615, 623, 627, 634, 636, 639, 646–648, 652, 657, 660, 662, 663, 666, 667, 670, 675 Sensibility, 34, 105, 132, 157, 175, 208, 256, 346, 408, 450, 634 Sensitivity, 92, 116, 123, 352, 461 Sensus communis, 458 Sentences, 21, 69, 83, 84, 86, 89, 92, 93, 136, 145, 153, 191, 215, 228, 237, 301, 303, 387–392, 396, 400, 402, 403, 446, 454, 510, 511, 569, 591, 594, 595 Sentiment, 113, 151, 230, 270, 274, 409, 450–461, 491, 497, 546, 625, 627, 635 Ship problem, 589, 591, 592 Shoah, 669, 671, 673, 677 Signs, 87, 90, 151, 232, 376, 379, 438, 447, 470, 500, 526, 532, 543, 566, 569, 639, 652, 653, 659–663, 670 Simulation, 573

775

Social, 9, 11, 15, 18, 22, 24, 28, 29, 32, 69, 71, 103, 117n7, 130–135, 168, 171, 173, 179, 216, 217n1, 218n8, 246, 251, 256, 258, 259, 267, 270, 275, 278, 281, 282, 301, 310, 316, 317, 322, 328–331, 346, 347, 356, 357, 382, 410, 415–417, 431, 436, 437, 440, 444, 456–458, 460–462, 467, 468, 470, 472, 474–479, 481, 502, 507, 512n20, 519, 520, 524, 527, 529, 530, 532, 541–548, 550, 552, 554–556, 562, 564, 569–573, 575, 576, 601, 602, 604–608, 610–611, 613–616, 626, 627, 631–634, 637–639 Social science, 9, 18, 22, 24, 117n7, 347, 350, 355, 452, 464n24, 542, 546, 601, 613, 638 Sociology, 132, 252, 464n24, 613–614, 636 sociological, 166, 297n2, 452, 534, 601, 613–616, 647 Soma, 478 Somatic, 176, 177, 179 Space spatialisation, 417, 529 spatiotemporal, 92, 300, 345, 367, 368, 395, 397, 398, 589 Speech, 3, 11, 12, 24, 57n7, 69, 87, 89, 93, 97, 131, 166, 168–170, 172, 173, 176, 180n1, 186, 189, 190, 193, 199, 203–205, 208, 209, 216, 217, 276, 343, 370, 375, 416, 418, 429, 444, 446, 460, 575, 608, 609, 626, 663, 668, 669, 677 Spiritual, 3, 64, 158, 272–275, 280, 344, 368, 541, 576, 602, 648–654, 667, 668, 670–672 Stasis, 673, 674

776 

Subject Index

Statements, 45, 48, 49, 83, 85–87, 91–94, 102, 112, 147, 228, 347, 393, 401, 402n2, 409, 422, 461, 474, 475, 494, 502, 520, 526, 563, 575–577 Story, 26, 34, 46, 57n7, 91, 94, 97n34, 131, 133, 135, 139, 168, 173, 174, 204, 206, 215, 217n1, 247, 265, 273–276, 284n14, 298n1, 299, 316, 318–320, 322, 327, 329, 330, 372, 373, 377, 378, 388–391, 399, 471, 502, 511n14, 546, 550, 554, 573–576, 581–585, 588–592, 594–596, 598n7, 632 Story-telling, 4, 7, 268, 269, 282n1, 283n8, 319, 323, 543, 544, 549 Structural, 172, 265, 344, 372, 421 Structuralism, 604, 605, 610 structuralist, 166, 266, 355, 604, 607 Structure, 1, 2, 9, 18, 65, 67, 104, 111, 139, 152, 173, 174, 197, 204, 244, 246, 253, 255, 267, 270, 281, 282, 304, 342, 343, 345, 346, 351, 356, 357, 382, 393, 403, 409, 414, 417, 432, 499, 506, 507, 545, 546, 549, 550, 553, 555, 563, 566, 608, 612, 629, 633, 635, 645, 649, 651, 655, 657, 670 Style, 2–4, 7–9, 17, 21, 43, 48, 62, 63, 74n7, 76n27, 101, 103, 129, 139, 149, 153, 154, 158, 167, 171–174, 176–178, 180, 200n13, 233, 236n4, 263, 264, 315, 445, 446, 451, 455, 461, 494, 523, 544, 548 Subjective, 6, 10, 12, 85, 104, 108, 123, 146, 154, 178, 238n8, 248, 250, 253, 254, 352, 490, 499, 505, 508n3, 509n8, 611 subjectivism, 660, 661

Sublime, 413–415, 419, 424n10, 456 Symbolic, 26, 175–179, 270, 273–275, 278, 319, 349, 431–433, 438, 492, 493, 497, 498, 547 Symbols, 88, 97, 191, 431, 432, 438, 542, 550, 647, 649 Sympathy, 32, 195, 196, 207, 216, 325, 329, 330, 376, 450, 452, 454, 455, 460, 461, 547, 614, 615, 624, 635, 636 T

Tales, 168, 189, 190, 199, 199n4, 256, 257, 264–266, 269, 275, 278, 279, 298, 315, 552, 563, 564, 569, 572–574 Techne, 478 Technology, 179, 235, 266, 282n1, 322, 370, 434, 439, 474, 529, 573, 574, 629 Teleology, 281, 470, 666 teleological, 473, 533, 666 Temporal, 70, 193, 204, 356, 476, 608, 647, 649, 651, 652, 655, 662 temporality, 71, 126, 304, 478, 652, 656, 661 Text, 2, 3, 5–7, 9, 11–12, 17–19, 22–24, 26–29, 33, 34, 41, 45–47, 52, 54–56, 71, 81–82, 84, 95–96, 97n41, 105, 117n7, 124, 129, 135–136, 139–140, 145, 174–176, 178, 197, 198, 204–217, 218n5–218n6, 222–223, 237–238n8, 237n6, 249, 250, 252, 254–256, 264, 267, 268, 271, 273–275, 281, 284n14, 298–299, 303, 305, 307, 319, 341–343, 345, 352–354, 358, 387, 391, 402n1, 408–410, 415, 424n8, 430, 433, 444–445, 470, 472–473, 480,

  Subject Index 

481, 482n7, 489–491, 493, 495, 499–503, 508, 510n10, 520, 521, 523, 524, 526, 536, 543, 545, 549, 550, 554–556, 562, 575, 576, 598n7, 605, 608–610, 612–614, 632, 633, 637, 646, 648, 651, 654 Theatre, 5, 23, 544, 566 Theology, 10, 14, 18, 33, 34, 192, 193, 199n7, 255, 256, 259, 624 negative theology, 659–663 Theorize, 82, 321, 511n16, 661 Theory, 2, 14, 17, 18, 22–28, 31, 35, 36, 64–71, 74n9, 81–83, 95, 101, 111, 123, 125, 140, 152, 167, 178–180, 217n1, 237n7, 249, 252, 257, 259, 271, 296, 300, 301, 303–310, 317, 319–322, 325, 328–330, 333n15, 342, 343, 347, 354, 355, 357, 358, 386, 389–392, 395, 400–402, 429–440, 443–446, 449–453, 455, 458–461, 464n24, 467–469, 471, 472, 475–480, 489–502, 504–507, 509n6, 510n9, 510n10, 511n15, 511n16, 512n19, 519, 520, 523–526, 529–531, 533–536, 542, 543, 549, 552, 564, 570, 576, 584, 586, 596, 597, 602, 604–606, 610–615, 629, 632, 633, 635, 636, 638–640, 645–663 theoretical, 18, 24, 28, 69, 81, 86, 93, 95, 124, 207, 237, 259, 277, 296, 297, 341, 342, 344, 355, 358, 419, 445, 464n24, 467, 468, 471–473, 480, 481, 490, 494, 495, 508–509n3, 520, 523, 526, 527, 532, 549, 586, 649 Thou, 666–668, 670, 671 I and thou, 429, 575, 665

777

Thought, 2, 7, 10, 13, 22, 49, 52, 56, 62–67, 69, 70, 72, 75n15, 81, 87, 91, 92, 95, 99, 100, 103–105, 107, 109, 110, 113–115, 118n26, 127, 130, 140, 143, 144, 146, 148, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 159, 167, 171, 191, 197, 221, 222, 230, 232–236, 242–244, 247, 249–251, 284n12, 307, 316, 342–344, 347, 351–353, 365, 370, 371, 378, 382n2, 390, 393, 396–398, 401, 407, 408, 413, 415, 418–420, 422, 430, 443, 451, 461, 462, 468, 475, 477, 481, 482n7, 494, 498, 502, 509n7, 512n19, 524, 534, 541, 546, 568, 570, 576, 581–599, 638, 639, 653, 666–668, 670 Thought experiment, 30–31, 307, 365, 382–383n2, 581–599 Time, 4, 6, 8–10, 13–16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 30, 33, 62, 64, 67–73, 74n8, 75n20, 82, 85, 89, 92, 100, 126, 127, 130–132, 134, 145, 147, 151, 165, 166, 168, 170–172, 177, 178, 186, 189, 192–194, 196, 198, 199n6, 205, 208, 215–217, 222–224, 227, 237–238n8, 242, 247, 251–258, 263, 265, 266, 268–270, 272, 274, 276, 278–281, 283n10, 284n12, 296, 299, 302, 304, 316, 318, 320, 321, 324, 325, 332, 334n26, 342, 349, 356, 366, 370, 373, 376–378, 380, 381, 392, 400, 408, 414, 433, 443, 444, 450, 451, 454, 455, 457, 468, 474, 475, 479–481, 499, 501, 506, 512n19, 524, 528, 530, 532, 533, 542, 545, 546, 549–552, 555, 556, 563–565, 570, 572, 574, 575,

778 

Subject Index

577, 583–585, 587–591, 595, 598, 602–605, 609, 623, 624, 635, 638, 639, 646–650, 652, 653, 655, 656, 660–662, 677 Trace, 23, 43, 100, 133, 166, 175, 176, 197, 242, 245, 251, 264, 271, 321, 419, 432, 472, 511n15, 582, 660, 662, 666, 677 Trade, 378, 521, 623, 627–630, 633, 634, 636–638 Tradition, 1, 7, 8, 10–13, 17, 19–22, 24, 29, 31, 43, 67, 100, 101, 106, 107, 117n7, 132, 146, 165, 171, 187, 190, 192–194, 198, 211, 235, 248, 255–257, 259, 268, 276, 280, 285n17, 298, 304, 307, 343–345, 348, 353, 355, 356, 373, 410, 419, 440, 444, 447, 459, 464n24, 470–474, 476, 478, 482n4, 490, 523, 542, 553, 555, 572, 573, 601, 603, 607, 608, 623, 634, 647, 650, 656–659, 672 traditional, 10, 62, 66, 103, 107, 144, 145, 150, 152, 154, 157, 170–172, 211, 221, 236, 237n7, 258, 259, 270, 297, 307, 308, 317, 323, 368, 380, 417, 430, 434, 439, 440, 445, 464n24, 469, 472, 477, 505, 522, 550, 551, 604, 633, 647, 651–654, 656, 658–663, 667, 669, 673–675 Tragedy, 10–12, 30, 32, 88, 101, 103, 129, 190, 205, 215, 218n2, 241, 243–245, 251, 257, 258, 264, 282n2, 319, 436, 452, 503, 544, 552, 576, 602 tragic, 5, 10, 32, 101, 103, 104, 106, 128, 186, 214, 226, 270, 544 Transcendence, 24, 35, 110, 111, 179, 191, 193, 280, 662, 667, 668, 671–676

Transcendent, 23, 49, 133, 270, 662, 667–669, 674, 675 Transcendental, 23, 180, 249, 253, 440 Transgender, 477, 478 Trolley problem, 583 Truth, 6, 21–24, 26, 34–35, 45–49, 53, 54, 56, 62, 83, 87, 91, 97n34, 99–102, 104, 106–116, 116n2, 117n3, 118n17, 118n31, 123–126, 128, 130, 131, 135–140, 145–150, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159, 165–168, 170, 171, 177, 180, 188, 189, 235, 236, 237n5, 263, 270–280, 295, 300, 301, 304, 316, 327, 329, 352, 366, 368–370, 387–389, 391–393, 402n1, 402n2, 422, 429–440, 446, 447, 456–459, 490, 497, 499, 504, 510n10, 543, 548, 550–553, 561, 562, 572, 577, 587, 597, 602, 603, 608, 632, 646, 647, 649, 651–653, 656–659, 662, 665–677 truth-seeking, 94 U

Uncanny, 372, 669, 671 Unity, 9, 42, 43, 104, 123, 156, 190, 204, 216, 224–229, 232, 237n6, 243, 246, 253, 257, 259, 277, 344, 357, 452, 480, 499, 647–649, 657, 658, 661, 662, 668 Universals, 5, 17, 26, 32, 104, 153, 159, 169, 173, 174, 245, 254, 270, 278, 281, 318, 319, 323, 343, 350, 367, 368, 475, 490, 491, 498, 502, 506, 523, 552, 576, 583, 633, 635 uncanniness, 669 Utilitarian, 82, 327, 605 Utilitarianism, 584, 605

  Subject Index 

Utopia, 30, 171, 258, 633 Utopian, 171, 561, 603, 616, 631, 632 Utterance, 52, 88, 92, 93, 96n8, 101, 212, 301, 306, 342, 387, 422, 423, 468, 512n20, 591 V

Verse, 6, 11, 101, 213, 229–231, 237n6, 248, 249, 269, 274, 625, 658, 661, 672 Violence, 23, 42, 235, 241, 259, 273, 276, 279, 285n17, 357, 440, 469, 471, 605, 611, 615, 634, 667, 670, 675–677 Virtue, 50, 72, 82, 95, 96n3, 102, 128, 144, 150, 190, 193, 226, 230, 276, 308, 309, 318, 319, 321, 323–327, 329, 331, 332, 380, 391, 402, 446, 447, 453, 456, 457, 459, 461, 548, 602, 605, 606, 608, 625, 627, 630 Voice, 3, 13, 26, 44, 50, 55, 71, 99, 102, 153, 173, 174, 176, 177, 185, 189, 193, 195, 197, 208, 209, 215, 216, 244, 267, 275, 280, 281, 304, 316, 374, 376, 407, 469, 471, 473, 502, 504, 512n20, 543, 549, 568, 571, 572, 575, 603, 604, 608, 611, 669 Void, 174, 177, 401, 657 W

Will, 415 Will to power, 150, 156, 500, 657 Wisdom, 10, 46, 47, 51, 52, 54, 92, 146, 168, 186, 194, 255, 324–326, 332, 354, 447, 459, 606, 607 World, 5–9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 23, 28–33, 52, 55, 64, 66, 75n23, 82–86,

779

90–93, 95, 96n3, 99, 100, 104, 107, 108, 110–115, 126, 129, 131–134, 137, 143, 144, 146–148, 150, 156, 158, 167, 169, 171, 180, 197, 203, 211, 217, 217n1, 238n8, 241–243, 245, 246, 249, 251, 253, 255–258, 263–267, 269–282, 284n11, 284n12, 284n15, 285n16, 297, 300, 301, 303, 319, 324, 329, 330, 342, 344–346, 348–359, 365–382, 386, 387, 391, 395–397, 413, 414, 430–432, 434–439, 454, 470, 471, 475, 476, 480, 482n2, 495, 498, 499, 503, 506, 507, 519–524, 529, 530, 532–535, 542, 543, 545–547, 549, 550, 553, 554, 561–568, 571, 573–576, 581, 593, 602, 603, 608–612, 614, 648–650, 652, 653, 656, 658, 660–662, 665–667, 670–672, 674–676 worldliness, 352, 523 Writing, 2–4, 8, 10–12, 14, 16, 17, 19–21, 24–26, 28, 33–35, 42–44, 55, 56, 62–68, 70–72, 73n4, 74n9, 75n17, 75n18, 77n28, 84, 91, 95, 112, 123, 125, 126, 128, 131, 133, 135–139, 144–146, 150, 151, 153–155, 157, 158, 199, 203–209, 214–217, 218n3, 229, 242, 244, 245, 247, 249, 250, 252, 254, 255, 257–259, 263, 265, 268, 269, 298, 302, 353, 372, 408, 410–412, 420, 423n1, 437, 462, 470–473, 475, 479, 490, 492, 494, 497, 502, 510n12, 523–526, 529, 548, 550, 554, 575, 584, 606, 607, 623–626, 628, 630, 632, 634, 639, 651, 653, 655–657, 659, 660, 662, 666, 674, 677