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 Michael Mack
Istanbul Technical University Durham University
Istanbul, Turkey 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

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 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

v
vi Contents

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
  Contents  vii

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
viii Contents

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
x  Notes on Contributors

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).
   Notes on Contributors  xi

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 includ-
ing 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, circu-
larities, 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.
xii  Notes on Contributors

Will Long  worked for several years for a therapeutic community looking after chil-
dren 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
   Notes on Contributors  xiii

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 litera-
ture. 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 edi-
tor 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 phi-
losophy 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: Barry.Stocker@itu.edu.tr

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_1
2  B. Stocker

The volume has been constructed on the understanding that philosophy

and literature cannot be thought of just as a confrontation between philoso-
phy and literary texts or on the application of philosophical aesthetics to lit-
erature. There are various gradations of philosophy and literary studies which
must be taken into account in order to have something like a fully representa-
tive survey of the field. The chapters have very different ways of dealing with
the relation between philosophy and literature, broadly distinguished accord-
ing 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 philoso-
phy 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 phi-
losophy) 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 imagi-
nation 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.
  Introduction  3

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 philosophi-
cal 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 dia-
logue 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 divi-
sion within philosophical dialogues between the ones with more literary and
imaginative power, independent of the argument and the ones where the dia-
logue 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 adorn-
ment 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 differ-
ing 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.
4  B. Stocker

Essays

As has just been established, the essay as an aspect of philosophy and litera-
ture 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, storytell-
ing, and discursive philosophising are all explored through essays which test
the limits of coherence of writing. This approach permeates later philoso-
phy, 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 philo-
sophical 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 posi-
tions were articulated following a literary model in Montaigne of establish-
ing 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.
  Introduction  5

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 com-
municate false ideas, even while he often has narratives embedded into his dia-
logues. 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 sympa-
thetic 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 mini-
narratives, very short stories that illustrate and build up an argument. His analy-
sis 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, rein-
force, 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 phi-
losophy, 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 con-
tains 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 anal-
yse 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.
6  B. Stocker

Poetry

Philosophy before Plato was often written in verse, so we can say that phi-
losophy 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-mark-
ing 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 philosophi-
cal aspects of poetic language rather than the communication of philo-
sophical 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 experi-
ence,  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 post-
Romantic 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 par-
ticularly 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 suspi-
cion. In the more Heideggerian approach, Being reveals itself in its self-
concealment in a particularly powerful way.
  Introduction  7

Autobiography and Biography

The poetry which contains philosophy may have an autobiographical compo-

nent 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 phi-
losophy and more specifically bringing autobiography into philosophy. This is
one part of the way that a lot of philosophy, particularly of the Analytic vari-
ety, 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 autobi-
ography. Like Descartes’ Discourse, it is not strictly known as an autobiogra-
phy 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, includ-
ing 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 devel-
opment of French literature as well philosophy. Ideas about the passions in
French literature operate in close relation to philosophical, or moral, aphorisms
8  B. Stocker

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 perpetu-
ally 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 frag-
ment. Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot were the most obvious follow-
ers 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 transforma-
tions 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 revo-
lutionary 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 accom-
modate the different ways philosophy approaches different literary genres. If
philosophy and literature is about interaction, if it is about more than phi-
losophy 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
  Introduction  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 lan-
guage 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 phi-
losophy 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 philosophi-
cally. Plato’s own form of rationalism still allows the deployment of mythic in
his own philosophy. The investigation of the relation between myth and phi-
losophy 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, philoso-
phy 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 anthropologi-
cal 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
10  B. Stocker

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 begin-
ning 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 ques-
tions 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 cen-
turies 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 mar-
ginalisation 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
  Introduction  11

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 devel-
opment 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 liter-
ary 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.
12  B. Stocker

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 philoso-
phy 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 gather-
ing 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 liter-
ary 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 sym-
bolism to modernism, with regard to the limits of words and meaning, some-
times 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
  Introduction  13

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 develop-
ment 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 anthropo-
logical 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
14  B. Stocker

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 him-
self 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, suffer-
ing 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 gener-
ally 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
  Introduction  15

Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Looking at the aesthetic philosophy of the

twentieth century, work by Bakhtin and Benjamin mostly known for its rela-
tion 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 par-
ticular, 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 incor-
porated 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 phi-
losophy 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 inves-
tigation. 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
16  B. Stocker

about whether cognitive philosophy should be grouped with Analytic phi-

losophy or placed in a category of its own. The Continental-Analytic distinc-
tion 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 philosophi-
cal 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 sug-

gested 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 fol-
lowed 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 usu-
ally 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
  Introduction  17

includes many philosophers who bring literary style into their philosophy and
put aesthetics at the centre of their philosophy. Analytic aesthetics looks com-
paratively 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 qual-
ity, 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 lan-
guage. Two things distinguish it from Analytic philosophy. One is that the ana-
lytic 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 analy-
sis 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 phi-
losophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty did not organise his phenomenology and phi-
losophy 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 phi-
losophy of some kind goes back to the origins of philosophy, certainly appear-
ing 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 com-
plete theories of perception and cognition, but do constantly rely on a view of
18  B. Stocker

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, dis-
cussion of cognition in literature now combines the study of the cognitive theo-
ries 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 (seven-
teenth-century) Europe. The theory of humours is itself a mixture of psychol-
ogy 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 con-
tributions 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-­the-
world’ 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
  Introduction  19

this philosophy relates to literary ways of dealing with experience. Later philo-
sophical 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 sci-
entistic, 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 estab-
lishes 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 phil-
osophical movement is associated with Edmund Husserl, who himself claimed
Phenomenology was what philosophy had always been doing properly under-
stood. In particular, he argued that he was carrying on the approach of both
Plato and Descartes. He was more immediately building on work in psychol-
ogy and philosophy of psychology, though he was insistent that phenomenol-
ogy 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 phe-
nomenology spread to philosophers not part of the phenomenological
20  B. Stocker

inheritance, most notably Gaston Bachélard who turned to writing a poetics

of experience rather than his earlier work on the formation of science. Jean-
Paul 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 dis-
cussed 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 encom-
passing 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 phi-
losophers 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 over-
lap 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 phenom-
enology in the Austrian-German culture of the Habsburg Empire as the nine-
teenth 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
  Introduction  21

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 pres-
ent 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 exis-
tence. 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 influ-
ential in literary studies and has brought literature in to the heart of philoso-
phy 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,
22  B. Stocker

pure truth, metaphysical certainty, and so on. Deconstruction provides two

main strategies to reveal this reduction and attempt to avoid it, though com-
plete elimination of the reduction is never possible. The strategies are an affir-
mation 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 associ-
ated 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 cen-
tury 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 schol-
ars 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
  Introduction  23

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 his-
tory of literature, along with the historical context.

Literature as Theory

The dispersal of theory is partly apparent in the relatively recent field of litera-
ture 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 vio-
lence, and is made up of these traces rather than serving as a secondary repre-
sentation 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 transcenden-
talism 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 republican-
ism 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
24  B. Stocker

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 the-
ory 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 pub-
lic 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, includ-
ing 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
  Introduction  25

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 liter-
ary 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 look-
ing 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 linguis-
tic 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 litera-
ture, the study of literature overlooked and marginalised because of gender
exclusion, and the place of gender analysis in relating literature to gender rela-
tions 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 sup-
posedly limited feminine taste and even corrupted that taste. Despite the con-
straints on women writers, literature has often been a way for women to have
26  B. Stocker

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 perspec-
tive on universalist humanist assumptions about literature along with appre-
ciation 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 lit-
erary studies has been the influence of Freudianism and particularly the psy-
choanalytic 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 imagina-
tion 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 return-
ing 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
  Introduction  27

‘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 litera-
ture 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 begin-
nings 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 experi-
ence 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
28  B. Stocker

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 ori-
gins 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 wor-
thy 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 particu-
larly useful for showing what work does tend to highlight what brings phi-
losophy and literature together, along with the ways in which they are
articulated. What is particularly striking about these ways of bringing phi-
losophy 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 fic-
tions. 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 prac-
tical 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.
  Introduction  29

Law and Literature

Law and literature brings out the ways in which literature relates to judge-
ment 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 detec-
tive 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 inter-
pretation 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.
30  B. Stocker

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 lack-
ing 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 sophis-
ticated literary classics often have some kind of political partisanship, some-
times 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 lit-
erature. 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 pro-
ducing an epic which itself is full of political commentary. More recently Jean-
Paul 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 lit-
erature 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
  Introduction  31

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 poor-
est 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 belong-
ings 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 imagina-
tion 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
32  B. Stocker

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 caus-
ing harm. The moral growth may be more in terms of a kind of inner orienta-
tion 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 inter-
action with a compatible person, or become better through deserving an
object of love. What literature can also deal with are moral failures and blind-
ness in this kind of situation. Tragedies have provided particularly rich mate-
rial 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 psy-
chology 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 some-
thing 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 mate-
rial for a very aestheticised novel mourning the passing of a cultivated family,
  Introduction  33

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 men-
tioned 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 rela-
tively 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 dur-
ing 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-­
34  B. Stocker

speaking countries, that has often meant the King James Bible, accompanied
by John Bunyan’s pilgrimage story or maybe John Milton’s literary contribu-
tion in the form of epics. Sacred texts accompanied by literary texts on reli-
gious 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 lit-
erature sphere. There is high proportion of philosophy and literature which
cannot be understood without reference to religion. Enlightenment, human-
ist, 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 phi-
losophy 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 lit-
erature, 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
  Introduction  35

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 chap-
ters. 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 litera-
ture. Some compensation can be had by assembling general books in philosophi-
cal 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 num-
ber of titles in both categories is very large and contains material not strictly rel-
evant 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 rea-
son 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
36  B. Stocker

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 mate-
rial though there is a very wide array available on specific topics within phi-
losophy 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 sug-
gestions 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.
  Introduction  37

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 philosophi-
cal questions” (Hösle 2012, 45). Phrased otherwise, the genre of philosophi-
cal 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 philo-
sophical 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 can-
not 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 authorita-
tive source than she herself could ever be. If one truly wants to learn some-
thing 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: shane.ewegen@trincoll.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 41

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_2
42  S. M. Ewegen

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 philo-
sophical 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 philo-
sophical 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 dia-
logue, a speaking taking place between two people—Martin Heidegger shares,
with manifest excitement, an insight regarding the form of philosophical writ-
ing 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 work-
ing 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 under-
stood 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
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  43

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 pre-
cisely, 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 dia-
logues. 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 philo-
sophical 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 emula-
tion of it or an errant deviation from it. Thus, to truly see the form of philo-
sophical 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 con-
tent 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
44  S. M. Ewegen

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 them-
selves; 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 dimin-
ished 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 num-
ber 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 pre-
sume 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 dia-
logue 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 “philo-
sophical 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:
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  45

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 perspec-
tives 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 incom-
mensurable 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 (idiosyn-
cratic) 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 per-
spective 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 possi-
bility 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.
46  S. M. Ewegen

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 neces-
sary (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 per-
son 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 (pov-
erty 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 with-
out 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
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  47

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 pre-
cisely 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 any-
body 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 over-
coming 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 pos-
sible 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 rheto-
ric, 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,
48  S. M. Ewegen

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 else-
where12—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 noth-
ing, 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
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  49

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 speak-
ing? 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, aban-
don 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, tran-
scendent 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 aban-
doned 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 con-
versation 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)
50  S. M. Ewegen

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 effac-
ing 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 resusci-
tates 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
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  51

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 dif-
ferent [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 one-
self (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 con-
cerned 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 era-
sure or withdrawal of self that accompanies it, is the ground upon which
philosophical dialogue is based.
52  S. M. Ewegen

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 igno-
rant of that about which they feign (or genuinely believe) to have knowledge.
On the other hand, precisely through this demonstration, Socrates also reaf-
firms 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 identi-
cal 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
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  53

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 knowl-
edge 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 philo-
sophical 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 philoso-
phy (Apology, 29d–e). Only because Socrates remains embedded within a pos-
ture 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
54  S. M. Ewegen

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 philo-

sophical 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 posi-
tion 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, philo-
sophical 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 conversa-
tion 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 admit-
tedly 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 some-
thing 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.
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  55

The genre of philosophical dialogue, for its part, seems to be that genre of
philosophical writing that mimics or represents the act of philosophical dia-
logue 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 philo-
sophical 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 actu-
ally 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 repre-
sentations 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 phil-
osophical 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 fundamen-
tal meaning of the Greek word ποίησις from which the English word poetry
is derived.19 As works of ποίησις, Plato’s dialogues create something, some-
thing 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 some-
times 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 perspec-
tives, 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
56  S. M. Ewegen

something that can be determined from reading the texts. Rather, the dia-
logues, 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 dialogi-
cal 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 philo-
sophical dialogue is that form of writing that best brings the reader to a posi-
tion 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 philo-
sophical 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 philosophi-
cal questions.
Questions, perhaps, such as “what is philosophical dialogue”?
   What Is Philosophical Dialogue?  57

Notes
1. See Sallis (1975, 7): “In the dialogues philosophical activity is concretely pre-
sented, 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 philoso-
phy ‘consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’ strikes many people as an exag-
geration; 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 through-
out 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 conver-
sation, 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 under-
standing 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).
58  S. M. Ewegen

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 conversa-
tion. 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 reac-
tions 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 self-
examination” (Gordon 1999, 9).

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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 his-
tory 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 privi-
leged 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: mbw@uq.edu.au

© The Author(s) 2018 61

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_3
62  M. Boulous Walker

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 conclu-
sion’, 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 emer-
gence of the Renaissance in sixteenth-century Europe and with the ground-
breaking publication of the Essais by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays
remain an influential body of work devoted to experiment and an unmethodi-
cal 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 follow-
ing description: ‘vivid bold images; the epigrammatic word play; the meander-
ing, 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 embodi-
ment 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 tradi-
tional 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:
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  63

… the essays of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon as well as later exam-
ples by John Donne and Sir Thomas Browne—different as they are in their
formal qualities—exhibit not only similar rhetorical strategies but also a com-
mon 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 ten-
tative style. ‘[W]ithout any system’, he writes, ‘[I] present my ideas in a gen-
eral 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 confi-
dence in the reliability of systematized and impersonal approaches to knowl-
edge. (Klaus 2012, xx)

Systematized and impersonal approaches to knowledge herald the increas-

ingly 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 knowl-
edge 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 pro-
tested 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
64  M. Boulous Walker

of the positivist scientific world view. The essay, in its tentative and undisci-
plined manner, resists the systematic pretensions of totalizing modes of
thought (232). Openness and open-endedness refuse the closure of predeter-
mined thought. For Kauffmann, the essay undertakes the pressing task of a
‘critical discussion of culture in the public sphere’ (234). In the process, phi-
losophy regains its ethical vocation which, at this time, manifests as a sus-
tained 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 inter-
pretation 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 collec-
tively 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 tenta-
tively 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
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  65

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 distin-
guish it over centuries, from its late sixteenth-century inception to its more
recent post-modern examples. The essay has always been experimental, experi-
ential, exploratory, and open-ended. It is hardly ever categorical, dogmatic, sys-
tematic, 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 ‘natu-
ralness’) 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 phi-
losophy and literature. Here the essay builds bridges between the two, ensur-
ing 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,
66  M. Boulous Walker

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 perfec-
tion 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 digres-
sion and the fragment—and the special roles these play in the essay—as coun-
ters to a systematic philosophy (Benjamin 1977, 27). Benjamin goes further,
and in a different direction to Lukács, ensuring a central role for the fragmen-
tary 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 refer-
ences 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 think-
ing 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 conse-
quence of the dominance of a certain scientific methodology, one that culmi-
nates 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.
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  67

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, para-
doxically, 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 sys-
tematic 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
68  M. Boulous Walker

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 sug-
gests 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 con-
temporary 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 auton-
omy, 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 ambiv-
alent in its relation with the institution, the essay can, as Graham Good sug-
gests, ‘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
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  69

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 orienta-
tion: ‘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 ori-
entation accompany his strong commitment to critical thought more gener-
ally. 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, ten-
tative, exploratory, open-ended, reflective, meandering, rambling, spontane-
ous, 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 charac-
teristically 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
70  M. Boulous Walker

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 cen-
turies 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 sys-
tem 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 com-
plexity 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 qual-
ities 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 deter-
mine. The essay is, in effect, never done. The essay’s ambivalent relation with
the institution authorizes this uneconomical waste of time. The essay con-
dones. Niklas Luhmann describes the university as an institution that gener-
ates 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
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  71

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 knowl-
edge production.
Finally, we come to the essay’s oppositional form. Here we discover a form
that encompasses, amongst other things, provocation, meditation, and ques-
tioning. 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 pro-
vides 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 conti-
nent to be trekked, giving range to the stamina and passions of both investiga-
tion 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)
72  M. Boulous Walker

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 examina-
tion’ (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, fragmenta-
tion, 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 impor-
tant 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 dis-
ruptive 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 femi-
nist. 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 fare-
wells to conventional and more formalized philosophical forms. Such a fare-
well 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 sys-
tematic 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
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  73

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 pro-
vides philosophy with a privileged form for this engagement.28

Notes
1. Kauffmann suggests that question of whether the essay is literature or phi-
losophy takes us back to Plato’s ancient quarrel between poetry and philoso-
phy. In the contemporary context, the question breeds the following further
questions: what are the philosophical claims of the essay; what is the method-
ological 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 approxi-
mates 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 some-
thing 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 distin-
guishes 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 some-
thing 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 femi-
nine experience overlooked elsewhere: ‘whether intentionally or not,
74  M. Boulous Walker

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 audaci-
ties 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 com-
ments 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 ver-
dict. Such a judgement is transformative. He writes: ‘There is no total solu-
tion, 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 inau-
gurating 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).
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  75

15. Friedrich Nietzsche’s work should be included in any discussion of the essay.
Though his works traverse the myriad styles of aphorism, fragment, exaggera-
tion, 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 unceas-
ingly (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 ten-
sion 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 communica-
tions’ (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 concen-
tration 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
76  M. Boulous Walker

conditions for it become more widespread: a sufficient number of suitable

periodicals, a regime which tolerates criticism, an informed general reader-
ship, and writers who cultivate a distinctive, individual view of culture’ (Good
1997, xxi). In partial recognition of the fact that the essay form exists, none-
theless, 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’, espe-
cially 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—interest-
ing, active, significant—that can conceive and nourish the contemplative
essay’ (157).
25. In their introduction to The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, Ruth-
Ellen 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 patriar-
chal culture. However, by endowing the formless form of the essay with femi-
nine 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 femi-
nine (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 ana-
lytic 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).
   ‘Situating the Essay: Between Philosophy and Literature?’  77

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 inher-
ently a pluralistic and interdisciplinary genre? At once “writing” and “analy-
sis”, 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
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 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 litera-
ture, perhaps even the occasional necessity of turning to such texts in philoso-
phy, 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 peo-
ple 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 virtu-
ous 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 neverthe-
less 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, exem-
plify, test, elucidate, or complete.

N. Forsberg (*)
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
e-mail: Niklas.Forsberg@filosofi.uu.se; niklas.forsberg@upce.cz

© The Author(s) 2018 81

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_4
82  N. Forsberg

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 liter-
ary 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 theo-
rize 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 philo-
sophical 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 philoso-
phies, 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 phi-
losophy’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,
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  83

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 sci-
ences ‘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 litera-
ture, between the fictional and the factual, the dramatic and the argumenta-
tive, 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 fic-
tional 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 cot-
tage 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 philo-
sophical 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
84  N. Forsberg

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 com-
monly 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 narra-
tives 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 philo-
sophical 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 argu-
ment, 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
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  85

make them more ‘subjective,’ and as such a matter of interpretation, not pos-
sible to lock to one meaning. So, one may think that an argumentative narra-
tive 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 lan-
guage 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 pre-
sented. 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 desig-
nates. 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 hum-
ming, busy world of its own. Yet we still insist on treating this language as sim-
ply a variant of the economical forms of making statements about some thing.6
86  N. Forsberg

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 lan-
guage.’ 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 com-
mon 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 par-
ticular 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 state-
ment (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
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  87

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 rede-
fine 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 ges-
tures 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, interper-
sonal 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 work-
ing 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
88  N. Forsberg

misrepresents the reality of our (ordinary, everyday) language. Of course, a

fear of something is also an acknowledgment of the reality of, or the possibil-
ity of, that something which it fears. But, according to Merleau-Ponty, the
image of language as ideally and centrally an algorithm does not only misrep-
resent 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 impossi-
ble. 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 jeal-
ous 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
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  89

scientific, algorithmic, language, but to mark out important features of lan-

guage 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 con-
densed way in the following two sentences:

1. ‘In its live and creative state, language is the gesture of renewal and recov-
ery which unites me with myself and others.’17
2. ‘He who speaks enters into a system of relations which presuppose his pres-
ence and at the same time make him open and vulnerable.’18

The idea that creative language ‘is the gesture of renewal and recovery’ origi-
nates 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 lan-
guage 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 under-
stood 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 disor-
der 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
90  N. Forsberg

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 dis-
covery 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 dis-
cernable 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 mean-
ing 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 discern-
able 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 lit-
erature 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
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  91

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 knowl-
edge.’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 expli-
cable—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 par-
ticular 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
92  N. Forsberg

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 wis-
dom. Words said to particular individuals at particular times may occasion wis-
dom. 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 ‘par-
ticular 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 misunder-
standings 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 con-
cept … will be an objective definition of a certain area of activity plus a rec-
ommendation 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
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  93

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 think-
ing, 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 elu-
sive 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 con-
ception 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 pan-
sexual way of living is morally healthy’ may play important roles in such nar-
ratives. 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 lan-
guage, 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, scien-
tific 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.
94  N. Forsberg

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 inno-
vation, 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 unnat-
ural, 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 ulti-
mately 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 mea-
sured by an increased amount of tacit forms of understanding. Both of them
think that a philosophical focus on ‘statements’ and ‘judgments,’ or on a lim-
ited number of concepts that taken together is supposed to delimit a field of
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  95

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 argu-
mentative 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 investiga-
tion. 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 nar-
rative 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 fun-
damental 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
96  N. Forsberg

it seeks to omit the complexity and elasticity of everyday language. Some nar-
ratives 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 devel-
oped 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, there-
fore, 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-
   Narrativity in Variation: Merleau-Ponty and Murdoch on Literary…  97

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, lan-
guage 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 word-
users we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we live and breathe literature, we
are all literary artists, we are constantly employing language to make interest-
ing 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.
98  N. Forsberg

———. 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 dis-
covery of likenesses among ostensibly dissimilar things, as expressed in meta-
phor 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 distinc-
tively 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: jgosett1@jhu.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 99

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_5
100  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

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 expe-
rience 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 scien-
tific 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 assump-
tions 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 sug-
gests 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 philo-
sophical 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 par-
ticular works of poetry, may resist or exceed this interpretive approach, chal-
lenging the presumptions or exhaustiveness of the  phenomenological and
hermeneutic model through the generative imagination.
   On Philosophy and Poetry  101

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 con-
temporary 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 phi-
losophy, Plato establishes central tenets of poetic theory for much of the tradi-
tion 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 misrep-
resenting the gods—but also in Ion, where Homer’s exponent and, by impli-
cation, 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 philoso-
phy 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 accord-
ing 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 twen-
tieth century, with Erich Auerbach’s monumental treatment of literature as
102  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

‘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 mir-
ror neurons reveals the origin of literature.10 Yet it is precisely on the mimetic
nature of poetry which Plato’s metaphysical and epistemological critique piv-
ots 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 art-
ist 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 vari-
ous perspectives, and the literary image shares these disadvantages among oth-
ers. 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 mime-
sis 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
   On Philosophy and Poetry  103

of thought that reveals the essence of what is. Twentieth-century phenome-

nologists will reverse that assignation: while traditional philosophy has con-
structed 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 catego-
rizes 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 rec-
ognizing, 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 hap-
pen or be, or ought to happen or be. For such representations, of course, like-
ness can no longer be the evaluating criterion. Rather, such representations
should conform to the expectation of probability and convey a sense of neces-
sity. 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 presenta-
tion 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
104  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

The cathartic effect, of course, derives from the mimetic nature of the presen-
tation: 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 puri-
tanical 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 com-
ments on poetry.18 Aesthetic judgment according to Kant does not identify
beauty within the object itself, but refers to the ‘free play’ between the facul-
ties, 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, determin-
ing the latter according to a given purpose. The impact of Kant’s Critique of
   On Philosophy and Poetry  105

Judgment on aesthetics was profound, provoking the first claims for the auton-
omy 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 ordi-
nary language, Kant’s paradox dissolves. Kant allows for the suggestion that
poetic language may present aesthetic ideas while not conceptually determin-
ing, 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
106  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

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 experi-
ence—tragic poetry in particular—as the highest task  of human existence,
and, despite art’s association with illusion, as  a deeper expression  of real-
ity than the metaphysical tradition had ever grasped.
Nietzsche’s affirmation of the poetic involves rejection of ordinary assump-
tions 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 ordi-
narily 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 assump-
tions we tend to make about such cognitive agency may be based in illusion.
Poetic language, in contrast, can expose  such convention through playful
   On Philosophy and Poetry  107

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, pho-
nically 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 philo-
sophical 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.
108  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

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 lan-
guage, 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 con-
sideration, in our memory; it renders presence to fleetingness. The strangeness
of language in poetry makes us aware of this nearness, and thereby ‘bears wit-
ness to our own being.’32 This idea is echoed in Roger Scruton’s recent affirma-
tion, 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 archae-
ology of consciousness.’33 Whatever truth Scruton admits more for poetry
beyond this subjective insight, it is truth that comes to inhere in things them-
selves, 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
   On Philosophy and Poetry  109

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 day-
dream 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 momen-
tary 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 descrip-
tion, but through this metaphorical likening, the moose is familiarized for the
humans who encounter it; moreover, the image and its particular metaphori-
cal rendering evoke a rare moment of union between the divine and domestic,
the strange and the familiar.
110  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

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 analy-
sis 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 lin-
gering 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 ‘pic-
ture’ 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
   On Philosophy and Poetry  111

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 appear-
ances, 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 contem-
plation 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 nam-
ing 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 other-
wise fleeting intuitions of transcendence, or the engraving of ideas upon his-
tory. 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
112  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

­ istorical context of German nationalism.38 In this context Hölderlin is mis-

h
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 align-
ment 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 dif-
ference 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 imagin-
ing, 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
   On Philosophy and Poetry  113

trough. The speaker designates the ice ‘a pane of glass’ that induced a strange
perception of the surrounding field, the metaphor likening the natural phe-
nomenon 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 imagina-
tive generation that gives rise not only to the dreams of sleeping, but to poetry.
The strangeness of alternative seeing lasts long beyond the perceptual provo-
cation, 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 construc-
tion, 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 real-
ity 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 connec-
tions 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 vari-
ous ways of generating meaning. It has been argued that metaphor, for exam-
ple, 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
114  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

elaborates and furthers experiences not only of observation but of imagina-

tion. 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 every-
day 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 revela-
tions 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 themati-
cally 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.
   On Philosophy and Poetry  115

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 conven-
tional 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 con-
jectured, as in this rendering:

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.
116  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

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, cogni-
tive, 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 tran-
scend 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 concep-
tions 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).
   On Philosophy and Poetry  117

3. Historical affirmations of poetry will be discussed in the first part of the chap-
ter. 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 contem-
porary 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).
118  J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei

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, phi-
losophy, 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 handwrit-
ing, 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).
   On Philosophy and Poetry  119

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.

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 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 autobio-
graphical 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 sub-
jective 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 autobiogra-
phy 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 autobiogra-
phy—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: christopher.hamilton@kcl.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 123

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_6
124  C. Hamilton

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 distinc-
tion 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 invigo-
rated 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 autobiog-
raphy, 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 col-
lection on The Philosophy of Autobiography, has noted (Cowley 2014), philoso-
phers have been less interested in autobiography and a fortiori the question of
truth in (auto)biography than one might have supposed. Theoretical reflec-
tion 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 inter-
est 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 out-
standing biographies written by philosophers, such as Augustine’s Confessions
or Mill’s Autobiography.
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  125

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 cor-
rectives”, 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, reflex-
ively, 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 con-
demn the narration to falsity in any straightforward sense, but it complicates
126  C. Hamilton

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 narra-
tion must necessarily appear frustratingly elusive, at least to some extent or in
some respects. Augustine may have been especially assailed by such frustra-
tion, 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 out-
set 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, swim-
ming 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
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  127

(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 explora-
tion 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 experi-
ence 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
128  C. Hamilton

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 autobi-
ography. 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 mag-
nificent 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 con-
firmed 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 try-
ing to understand the meaning of the Holocaust: ‘even under normal condi-
tions’, 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 distin-
guishable, each ingredient being at least modified, even transformed, by later
ingredients’ (Hampshire 1989, 121).
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  129

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 cre-
ated by its author with aesthetic and moral concerns in mind, and the ele-
ments 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 per-
sonality, 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 tell-
ing 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 sharp-
ness 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)
130  C. Hamilton

It is no doubt for such reasons that, in a review of Oliver Sacks’s autobiogra-

phy, 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)biog-
raphy 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 atten-
tion 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 encoun-
ter 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 plausi-
ble—children are, after all, very often in the questions they pose born meta-
physicians—and wholly incredible, the latter impression depending in part
on the fact that it is clear that Sartre is stylising this incident from his child-
hood 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, how-
ever, to read the autobiography as tracing the sources of his philosophical
thought to the circumstances of his childhood’ (Eakin 1988, 167).
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  131

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 some-
thing 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 dis-
ease. 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 ques-
tion, 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 sto-
ries, 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 know-
ing 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 particu-
lar education system, from political and social stability, from material com-
forts, 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
132  C. Hamilton

the time and place in which I live. Further, the nature of these monumental
forces themselves and how to understand them is elusive: sociology, anthro-
pology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis give competing and often incompati-
ble 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 unedu-
cated 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 sensibil-
ity of high complexity is mistaken precisely because they cannot express them-
selves. 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 depres-
sion and seeking to draw a lesson from elsewhere: ‘[D]o we appreciate, for
example, how much Van Gogh’s inner conflicts reflected the moral contradic-
tions 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 mate-
rial 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 indi-
vidual 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
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  133

­ nderstood as it expresses the forces by which it is surrounded in its own par-

u
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 dif-
ferent 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 autobi-
ography 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, chrono-
logical 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 impres-
sionistic 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, nou-
menal reality which occupies the place of God in the Enlightenment cosmos
and manifests itself in whatever material or psychological phenomenon (moun-
tains, feelings) may be supposed to have escaped the corrupting touch of unnat-
ural 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 philosophi-
cal 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
134  C. Hamilton

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 cen-
tury 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
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  135

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 con-
verged 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 paint-
ing 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
136  C. Hamilton

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 man-
ner 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 per-
son living it.
The point I am making here is somewhat different from, though comple-
mented 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)
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  137

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 biog-
raphy 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 con-
cerns inability of the self to grasp its own mortality. They are, perhaps, differ-
ent 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 excite-
ment? 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 oth-
ers 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)
138  C. Hamilton

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 evi-
dent reason for the qualification.
It seems to me, indeed, that Warner is right: in (auto)biographies, stylisa-
tion; a responsiveness to the demands of quality of writing, or presumed audi-
ence; 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 impera-
tive 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 biog-
raphy seeks to tell will always be essentially contested. There may well be tell-
ings, 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 con-
tested interpretation thereof, and there is nothing that can be the (auto)biog-
raphy 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 simi-
larly 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
   ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography…  139

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 cen-
tre—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]utobi-
ography 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 autobi-
ography, 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 unset-
tling, drawing our attention to a maddening elusiveness in the recounting of
a human life. Most of our naïve assumptions and hopes about the (auto)bio-
graphical 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 sim-
ply 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, philosophi-
cal, 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 ques-
tion, 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 autobiog-
raphy depends ultimately on the quality of spirit of the writer’—but ­‘depending
140  C. Hamilton

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 ques-
tion, the ‘master form’, then it is indeed true that texts that we otherwise or
normally classify as being something other than autobiography might, none-
theless, 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 auto-
biographical, 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 main-
stream 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?

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 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 perspec-
tive, 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 aphoris-
tic 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 com-
municated 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: guyelgat2011@u.northwestern.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 143

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_7
144  G. Elgat

behind its use (what view about philosophy specifically informs the use of the
aphoristic form)? Can aphorisms or fragments be organized to form an inte-
grated whole? Throughout this chapter, I will contrast the aphoristic and frag-
mentary 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 cho-
sen’ (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
   Aphorisms and Fragments  145

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 dis-
tinguish 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 con-
forming 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 frag-
mentary 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 frag-
ment is by “definition” a part of something and given that ‘we can only under-
stand 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 exam-
ple (ibid., 20))—such as the section on diversions—is comprehensible even in
146  G. Elgat

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 apho-
rism the feeling of a punchline is one of the aphorism’s ‘defining characteris-
tics’ (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 writ-
ings 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 con-
tinuously 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 com-
pletely 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 impor-
tance 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 philosophi-
cal, 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
   Aphorisms and Fragments  147

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 aspira-
tion 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 out-
lines 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 rec-
ognize 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 inter-
est. 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).
148  G. Elgat

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 frag-
ments): 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 discur-
sively 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 valid-
ity’ of the aphorism or fragment ‘is to be weighed individually’ (introduction
to La Rochefoucauld 2007, xxviii). This means, of course, that one can under-
stand 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 apho-
rism 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 lan-
guage 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
   Aphorisms and Fragments  149

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 indict-
ment 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 convey-
ing 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 apho-
risms 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 con-
dition for it’ (HH 515) provides a definition neither of irrationality nor of
existence.
We can now better understand Morson’s reluctance at providing a defini-
tion 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 criss-
crosses 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 communi-
cated 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.
150  G. Elgat

 he Aphoristic/Fragmentary Form as a Means to Convey

T
Philosophical Views

As we saw above, particular fragments or aphorisms make a claim or some-

times even an argument about some specific issue or question. In this they
do not differ from the philosophical treatise. But the aphoristic or fragmen-
tary 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 disor-
der, 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 approach-
ing, still more greedily and savagely than the first…Thus live waves—thus live
we who will…. (GS 310)
   Aphorisms and Fragments  151

The format of the aphorism could be read as an attempt to imitate this meta-
physics 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 conscious-
ness’, as Stern explains:

The romantic stress on individual experience, the atomization of thought and

feelings, the absence of commonly accepted religious beliefs, metaphysical pre-
suppositions 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 apho-
rism 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 philo-
sophical 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.
152  G. Elgat

 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 foun-
dations, can provide final and ultimate answers to philosophy’s central
questions, the aphoristic and fragmentary approach is often based on a differ-
ent assumption. Here the thought is that philosophy is or should be experi-
mental and provisional since it cannot provide or presume to provide any
final, ultimate answers. To philosophize in the experimental mood is to for-
mulate 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 pre-
sented 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 ques-
tion 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 experi-
mental 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.
   Aphorisms and Fragments  153

Aphoristic experimentation can be said to be mirrored in the specific ten-

sion that according to Gerhard Neumann lies at the heart of aphoristic
­writing: the tension between the particular voice of the author and the univer-
sal 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 experi-
ments. 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 ‘indi-
vidual 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 philoso-
pher to express another important meta-philosophical claim. According to
Stern’s analysis of the aphorism, aphorisms ‘give an insight and divulge some-
thing of the way the insight has been attained’ (Stern 1959, 210)—for exam-
ple, 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 aph-
orism ‘is the most self-conscious of all literary genres’ (ibid., 214). But a more
154  G. Elgat

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 phi-
losopher’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 com-
plains, ‘are not honest enough in their work’ (BGE 5): ‘One should not con-
ceal 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 worthi-
est 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 note-
books. 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 philo-
sophical thought have for Nietzsche another important implication, namely,
that all philosophy is inescapably personal, since it is guided by and is an expres-
sion 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 confes-
sion of its author and a kind of involuntary memoir’ (BGE 6). The aphorism
   Aphorisms and Fragments  155

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 neverthe-
less 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 phi-
losopher’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 apho-
risms 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 fragmen-
tary’ (Hollingdale, xiii). Stern argues for a similar view in his study of
Lichtenberg, but nevertheless attributes to Lichtenberg what he calls a ‘doc-
trine 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 apho-
risms 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.
156  G. Elgat

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 cri-
sis’ 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 frag-
ments are a record of his “moods” or “whims” they cannot amount to a sys-
tem—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 never-
theless insist that a philosophy, even an aphoristic one, could express a per-
son’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
   Aphorisms and Fragments  157

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 rhe-
torical 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 think-
ing 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 apho-
rism 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.
158  G. Elgat

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 influ-
enced,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)—espe-
cially in the field of psychological observation which he also calls ‘moral obser-
vation’ (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 typi-
cally 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, how-
ever, 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 accus-
tomed to looking at himself in a mirror always forgets how ugly he is…This
   Aphorisms and Fragments  159

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, unex-
pected 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, quali-
fications, 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 argu-
ably 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
160  G. Elgat

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 proposi-
tion 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 apho-
rism 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 aph-
orism. 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 confi-
dently 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 pol-
ished, longer, broader in scope in terms both of content and point of view (La
Rochefoucauld focuses on contemporary ethics, but Nietzsche offers genealo-
gies) 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).
   Aphorisms and Fragments  161

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.
162  G. Elgat

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: tudor@texmar.ro

© The Author(s) 2018 165

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_8
166  T. Balinisteanu

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
  Myth  167

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-encom-
passing” (Bakhtin 1981, 286). By contrast, the language of prose, like logos, is
a language of negotiation of different perspectives in dialogic discourse con-
veying 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 har-
nessed 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 inti-
mate 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 centu-
ries. Thus, in 1880, Matthew Arnold in The Study of Poetry aligns the “supe-
rior 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, accu-
mulates 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
168  T. Balinisteanu

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 shift-
ing 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 surrepti-
tiously, 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 ratio-
nal 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.
  Myth  169

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 con-
struct 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 plu-
rality of alternative poetic worldviews as a Universal right. Instead of the
Universality of one given poetic worldview, wit, in its ironic dimension, pro-
motes 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 enthu-
siasm, 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 argu-
ably a reflection of the ideology of liberal capitalist individualism, for it pro-
claims 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
170  T. Balinisteanu

classes of the time (Arnold 1973d, 232). However, in claiming the right to
individualistic poetic self-recreation, Romantic philosophies promote at a col-
lective 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 use-
less, 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 prob-
lematic corollary that Romantic discourse echoes the ethos of logos, of seduc-
tion 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 bour-
geois 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:
  Myth  171

phrases like “beauty and manners,” “true and noble science” of politics and
economics, and “the reign of the Liberal saints”, prominent in Arnold’s dis-
course, 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 even-
tually led to envisioning myth as a constitutive “pragmatically necessary fic-
tion” (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 pre-
cision 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
172  T. Balinisteanu

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 politi-
cians 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 mili-
tarily) 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 dis-
course 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 addi-
tion 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 anthropologi-
cal 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
  Myth  173

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 nec-
essary fiction, in relation to modernism we must speak of myth as literary
structure with cognitive functions. In the literary arts, style and structure can-
not 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 high-
lights 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, “nev-
ermore” 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.
174  T. Balinisteanu

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 read-
er’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 artic-
ulations 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-to-
sense 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 dyna-
mism 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
  Myth  175

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 imagina-
tions 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 fore-
grounding 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)
176  T. Balinisteanu

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 fore-
closure 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 mod-
ulations 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 mem-
ory of co-emergence with another, a memory felt but irreproducible in dis-
course 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
  Myth  177

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 fabu-
lous (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 back-
ground 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 pos-
sibility 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,
178  T. Balinisteanu

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 psychologi-
cally 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 analy-
sis, 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 per-
spectives 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 expe-
rience as a form of human cognition. But what kind of empirical evidence
may one find in favour of such a theory?
  Myth  179

Neuroscience research on religion has begun to sketch venues of investiga-

tion 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 tran-
scendence (though, clearly, not of transcendence itself ). However, two theo-
ries 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 physiologi-
cal mechanisms of motivation and reward.
Another theory supported by neuroscience research suggests that neurophysi-
ological 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 under-
stood 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 emo-
tional 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.
180  T. Balinisteanu

It would be presumptuous to advance a unifying theory of myth and litera-

ture which integrates the diversity of theories of myth. But it would be reason-
able 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 ideol-
ogy. 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 knowl-
edge 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 under-
standings 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 intro-
duce 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 imita-
tive poetry in which the poet’s voice is hidden directly in one or more speak-
ing 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 philoso-
phy and epic in its ancient and modern manifestations, focusing on how his
reworking of classical themes in political philosophy played a role in the transi-
tion 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: m.weinman@berlin.bard.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 185

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_9
186  M. Weinman

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) dis-
course 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 lit-
erature 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
  Epic  187

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 con-
cerned 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 con-
cluded, 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, espe-
cially 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 acknowl-
edge the irreducible opacity, questionability, and manifoldness of language” to
which Plato himself expressly calls attention by offering myths at critical junc-
tures 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 intro-
duces a pair of triads that correspond with one another. Namely, we have the
188  M. Weinman

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 imita-
tion: 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 diminish-
ing 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 prod-
uct of one or another kind of production, but rather in the epistemic relation-
ship 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 pos-
sible to have the epistemic relation of the imitator, who—having neither pro-
duced 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 predi-
cated on ignorance, on the absence of either truth or right opinion. This is
  Epic  189

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 increas-
ingly 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 sec-
ond versions of the “three kinds” analysis. Plato here reaffirms Book 3’s rejec-
tion of imitative poetry on grounds that are ultimately ethical, while also
epistemological and ontological, but with an innovation: he states the condi-
tion under which imitative poetry can pass ethical muster. As Baracchi (2002,
121) notes, the second expulsion of imitation “should be viewed in the con-
text 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 apolo-
gia that “it’s not only pleasant but also beneficial to regimes and human life,”
which Baracchi (2002, 124) argues, means that “properly speaking, the prob-
lem 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 asun-
der: 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
190  M. Weinman

demands that the brothers “give back to me what you borrowed in the argu-
ment,” 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 imme-
diate 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 appre-
ciating 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 exem-
plified 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 likeli-
hood predominantly if not exclusively through Averroes and Christian Scholastic
commentators,8 is integral to his own poetic expression as a response to the clas-
sical 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
  Epic  191

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 pres-
ence 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 sup-
porting 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
192  M. Weinman

overall interpretation of Dante’s project as an epic poet and (perhaps?) a phi-

losopher in his own right, against which this narrower question of his recep-
tion 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 main-
stream view. This mainstream view, as summarized by one of its main antago-
nists, 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 antiq-
uity, 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 lit-
erature on him, as we have not yet attended to his novelty in philosophy,
which was part and parcel of his poetic invention. Without necessarily follow-
ing his conclusions on the relative stress we give to Dante’s reception of
Averroes and other scholastic Aristotelians or the degree to which Dante dif-
fered 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 per-
sona 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.
  Epic  193

If this is so, then one must acknowledge Dante’s self-awareness as propagat-

ing 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 ulti-
mately 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 ques-
tion, 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 rehabilita-
tion of the pagans in Inferno 4 that Macfarland (2014) discusses provides
strong reasons to believe that Dante is at least entertaining tremendously con-
troversial 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 philoso-
pher, 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
194  M. Weinman

ruler for humans and the cosmos, is himself implicated in philosophy’s recep-
tion 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 clas-
sical 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 doc-
trines 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 discus-
sion of the contemporary intellectual influences on Goethe’s reconstruction of
the Faustus narrative, especially that of Herder, from which the volume con-
tinues 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 experimen-
tation, 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 experi-
ment 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 philosophi-
cal reception of epic and the literary reception of philosophy will close: the
work of novelist and philosopher J.M.  Coetzee and its reception in philo-
sophical discourse.
  Epic  195

 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 cre-
ation, 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 philo-
sophical 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 char-
acter 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 exter-
nal to its domain,” while “we might be better served by thinking more in
196  M. Weinman

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, not-
withstanding 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 imita-
tive 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 reflec-
tion 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 respond-
ing 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 pas-
sion 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 mis-
take, 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.
  Epic  197

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 thor-
oughgoing 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 intellectu-
ally 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 hereti-
cal” 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 compro-
mised 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) identifica-
tion 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 ani-
mals” 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
198  M. Weinman

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 phi-
losophers 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 perspec-
tival 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, fit-
tingly 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 philosophi-
cal interlocutors, as much as for Goethe in his engagement with the natural
philosophy of his time, or for Dante engaging with Aristotle and the scholas-
tic tradition, we find ourselves ever again facing the same intractable chal-
lenges 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 prob-
lems precisely from the place where we stand “in the thick of things” (what
  Epic  199

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 lit-
eratures. 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), usu-
ally 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.
200  M. Weinman

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.

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 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, repre-
senting 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 203

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_10
204  L. Levy

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 enact-
ment. 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 sto-
ries 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 con-
cealed from the individual or is scattered throughout her life while she is liv-
ing. 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 perfor-
mance, 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’ physical-
ity, 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 com-
position. 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)
   Philosophy and Drama  205

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 hor-
ror 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 asser-
tion 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 dif-
fer 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’ come-
dies and Sophocles’ tragedies fall under the dramatic mode “…since both rep-
resent 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 con-
tent 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 dif-
ferent characters engage mostly in speech, some of them also perform mean-
ingful 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 juxta-
position with both playacting and playwriting. Approaching playwriting
206  L. Levy

through playacting, she captures drama’s peculiar nature as a literary genre

lying at the intersection of two artistic forms: the textual and the performa-
tive. 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 repro-
duced 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 pro-
jected 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 perfor-
mances, 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 ques-
tion 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
   Philosophy and Drama  207

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 perfor-
mances 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 psy-
chological 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 can-
not take into account and accommodate the many different living bodies,
208  L. Levy

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 contin-
ues 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 par-
ticularity 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 per-
formed 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 restric-
tive 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 real-
ize 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 open-
ness. 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 particu-
lar and permanent presence, which is connected to the fact that it can only
   Philosophy and Drama  209

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 dif-
ferent 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 indi-
cate 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 descrip-
tions 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 seam-
lessly 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.
210  L. Levy

 ecipes and Song Lyrics as Models for Drama’s

R
Authority
Chekhov’s brief comment illustrates that the process that governs the compo-
sition 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 per-
formance. 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 direc-
tions 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 the-
atrical 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 neces-
sary 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 meticu-
lously 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 speci-
fies: “Enter Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Ferdinand, Gonzalo, and others”
   Philosophy and Drama  211

(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 lyr-
ics themselves are not authoritative with regard to their execution. Lyrics do
not contain instructions for their composition and for their eventual perfor-
mance, 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 perfor-
mance, 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
212  L. Levy

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 the-
atrical 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 met-
aphors 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 perspec-
tive 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 read-
ers—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.
   Philosophy and Drama  213

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 perfor-
mance 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 impreg-
nated with his theatrical or performative vision.
Like the recipe writer whose expertise in cooking positions her as an author-
ity on how to execute the recipe, Brecht’s expertise as a director, directly
involved in productions and performances, was not external or merely acci-
dental to his textual compositions, but rather infiltrated his writing and deter-
mined 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.
214  L. Levy

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 pro-
duce to potential performances. And besides, performers are always free to
ignore or ridicule even the most meticulous instructions that playwrights pro-
vide. 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 ele-
ments are constitutive of the theater. If, as I have argued, plays are texts writ-
ten 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
   Philosophy and Drama  215

to be written in a language that is similar to ordinary spoken language, in sen-

tences 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 suc-
cess 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 supple-
ment the narrative with information, lend the characters their voices, and,
most crucially, participate in the constitution of the text’s meaning by synthe-
sizing 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 deliv-
ered 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 perfor-
mances 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 lim-
ited interpretative freedom that audiences possess vis-à-vis the text as enacted,
which I discussed above.
216  L. Levy

For many playwrights, writing for audiences implies confronting the con-
crete 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 audi-
torium 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 abil-
ity 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 writ-
ing 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 sym-
pathy 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 priest-
hood 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 mate-
rial qualities of a speaking voice, with its tone, infliction, and diction, all
produced by a real person. Because such actions, such speech, are contempo-
raneous 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
   Philosophy and Drama  217

and time—lead the spectators to become at least minimally aware of the rela-
tionship 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 par-
ticularity 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 meaning-
ful 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
218  L. Levy

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 per-
haps is no longer extant). Although the definition of tragedy allows us to dis-
tinguish 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 per-
spective on the play/recipe analogy and its implications for the text/perfor-
mance 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, ide-
ally, they understand that their cognitive, social, and political situations as
equal to those of the spectators.
   Philosophy and Drama  219

Bibliography
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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
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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.
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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.
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Hamilton, James R. 2007. The Art of Theater. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Arup. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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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.
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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.
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Rokem, Freddie. 2010. Philosophers and Thespians. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Saltz, David Z. 2001. What Theatrical Performance Is (Not): The Interpretation
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Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1976. Sartre on Theater. Edited by Michel Contat and Michel
Rybalka. New York, NY: Random House.
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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.
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Education 43 (3): 67–79.
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Willett, John. 1977. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen.
Worthen, William B. 1998. Drama, Performativity, and Performance. PMLA 113
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———. 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 tradi-
tional 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 phi-
losophy 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 differ-
ence between poetic and philosophical expression, which pertains in particu-
lar 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 sec-
tion 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: m.abbott@federation.edu.au

© The Author(s) 2018 221

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_11
222  M. Abbott

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 with-
out 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 par-
ticular; 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
   Lyric Poetry  223

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 stu-
dent 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 (natu-
rally 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 develop-
ing 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 trans-
lation 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
224  M. Abbott

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 express-
ing 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 distin-
guish 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 ‘form-
content 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-realised-
in-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 sub-
ject 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 indepen-
dently, 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 illu-
minate much about it.
Though he appears to want to resist the idea that in poetry form and con-
tent 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 text-
books. 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
   Lyric Poetry  225

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 ‘inef-
fability 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 impos-
sible to say anything about what they say. On that interpretation of form-
content 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 resi-
dent 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 necessar-
ily 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 prob-
lem with Bradley’s apparent endorsement of the ‘strict’ (408) thesis that form
226  M. Abbott

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 allitera-
tion 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 ineffa-
ble, 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-
   Lyric Poetry  227

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 aes-
thetic assertion, such as the vulgar claim that all poets have the task of unify-
ing 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 chal-
lenged by modernist poems which foreground their formal features in delib-
erately 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 man-
nered 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 them-
selves 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 resis-
tance 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
228  M. Abbott

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 para-
phrase 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 sexual-
ity 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 sce-
nario. 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 think-
ing? We can get at this question by starting with another: what is a philosophical
poem, if philosophy is typically paraphrasable, while poems stop being them-
selves 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 dif-
ferent in kind from the ideas of Kant our student conveyed in her own words
   Lyric Poetry  229

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 sup-
port 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 phi-
losophy 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 philo-
sophical 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
230  M. Abbott

[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 think-
ing 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 philo-
sophical 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 contrib-
ute 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 con-
tent 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
   Lyric Poetry  231

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 tak-
ing 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 empha-
sis 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 some-
thing 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)
232  M. Abbott

Wordsworth’s lines have significance that resists the propositional. If ‘descrip-

tive’ 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, describ-
ing 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 philosophi-
cally attentive criticism.
In the above I have focussed on what it would be for poems to make philo-
sophical 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 spe-
cial, of course, because if poems are read as poems it must be under the assump-
tion 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 acknowl-
edges 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
   Lyric Poetry  233

(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 depend-
ing on their affinity with poetic thought.

Increasing difficulty of paraphrase

Poetic Non-poetic
thought thought

Later Nietzsche Plato Aristotle Mainstream

Heidegger analytic philosophy

Later Kierkegaard Kant Hume

Wittgenstein

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 indica-
tion 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.
234  M. Abbott

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 charac-
teristic pair of claims which make up the entirety of the fourth and final pref-
ace 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 scien-
tific, 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 experi-
ence [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
   Lyric Poetry  235

‘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 moder-
nity’ (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 appre-
ciated, 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 phi-
losophy 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 moder-
nity, 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 scien-
tific 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 lin-
guistic creatures: creatures whose rationality is always already shot through with
affectivity (an affectivity that does not thereby compromise that rationality). So
236  M. Abbott

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 con-
cerned 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 condi-
tioned 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 con-
ceive 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 para-
phrase 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 struc-
tures 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,
   Lyric Poetry  237

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 pro-
vide 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 exten-
sion 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 cog-
nition are not two different systems but [are] radically entangled’ (282). Jarvis
makes a similar point when he writes of the need for ‘a revised phenomenol-
ogy 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 fas-
cinating and provocative account of the vicissitudes of ideas of textual auton-
omy, authorial intention, and meaning in twentieth-­century poetics. She also
develops a theoretical argument that is relevant to my concerns in this chap-
ter. She distinguishes modernist ideas of textual autonomy from postmodern-
ist ideas of readerly participation in the construction of their meanings:
238  M. Abbott

Where the ‘closed text’ is imagined to have a meaning that exists indepen-
dent 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 describ-
able in terms of properties that can be understood without essential reference
to their effects on sentient beings’ (114). Alice Crary (2012) develops a simi-
lar 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 ratio-
nal 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,’ ‘aestheti-
cally 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, technologi-
cally, 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.
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———. 2002. The Age of the World Picture. In Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans.
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Hulatt, Owen. 2016. The Problem of Modernism and Critical Refusal. The Journal of
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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.
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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: Barry.Stocker@itu.edu.tr

© The Author(s) 2018 241

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_12
242  B. Stocker

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 pre-
sented 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 under-
standing 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 enor-
mously 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 philosophi-
cal 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 psychologi-
cal 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
   Philosophy of the Novel  243

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 tak-
ing 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 influ-
enced 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 philoso-
phy 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 trag-
edy. 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
244  B. Stocker

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 consid-
ered by philosophers of the novel. We can even put Rabelais together with a
group of early sixteenth-century prose writers who feed into novelistic writ-
ing, 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 subordi-
nated 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
   Philosophy of the Novel  245

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 fol-
lows 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 dis-
cussions 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 back-
ground. 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 con-
tributes, 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
246  B. Stocker

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 seven-
teenth- and very early eighteenth-century discussions of a complexity of per-
ceptual 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 pica-
resque 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 inter-
acting. There are other examples like the history of interaction between phi-
losophy 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 litera-
ture 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 disin-
tegration 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.
   Philosophy of the Novel  247

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 secondari-
ness, 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 sec-
ond 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 aes-
theticism 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 philoso-
phy 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
248  B. Stocker

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 ele-
vated 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 authori-
tative, 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 con-
tribution 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 phi-
losophy and Protestant religion (as understood in Enlightenment demytholo-
gised 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 educa-
tion—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
   Philosophy of the Novel  249

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 indi-
vidual 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 clarifi-
catory 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 sub-
jectivity 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 bet-
ter 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.
250  B. Stocker

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 criti-
cised for relying on a self-undermining version of irony, K.W.F. Solger is ele-
vated 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 philoso-
phy 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 philo-
sophical 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 philoso-
phy 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 philo-
sophical 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 litera-
ture, 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
   Philosophy of the Novel  251

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 super-
ficiality 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 associ-
ated 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 estab-
lish 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
252  B. Stocker

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 influen-
tial 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 estab-
lished 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 compari-
son 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
   Philosophy of the Novel  253

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 forma-
tion. 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 cer-
tainly 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 distanc-
ing himself from them. They are right in his account to give so much impor-
tance 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 imme-
diate 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 pos-
sibly 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
254  B. Stocker

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 outstand-
ing 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 sig-
nificance 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 revolution-
ary hopes after 1848, becomes understood through the failure of the European
Springtime of the Peoples in 1848, which is a string of national and demo-
cratic uprisings of that year. For Lukács, this is to be understood as the politi-
cal turning point in which the bourgeoisie works with the aristocracy instead
of the working class and becomes a reactionary class. It supersedes the emer-
gence 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 valu-
able to Lukács’ earlier work, as he discusses the relation of the novel to nation-
alist movements, which create a modern movement out of constructed
memories of the past. This leads Lukács to take Walter Scott as a model, refer-
ring 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 writ-
ten 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
   Philosophy of the Novel  255

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 con-
cerned 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 car-
nival. 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 begin-
nings, 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.
256  B. Stocker

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 conser-
vative political views when considering the novels, because of the many con-
testing 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 interac-
tion. 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 pre-
vious 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
   Philosophy of the Novel  257

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, accom-
panied 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 theo-
cratic 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), con-
firming 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 philologi-
cal 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 paral-
lels 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
258  B. Stocker

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 nat-
ural 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 tradi-
tional 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 writ-
ing 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
   Philosophy of the Novel  259

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 chal-
lenged by the experience of limits. Death is the obvious limit experience, but
other ways of experiencing limits of consciousness and reality at night, sleep-
lessness, 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 tradi-
tional 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 litera-
ture 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 gener-
ate some new philosophy of the novel, as well as the continuing exploration
of the fragments in a multitude of literary critical and philosophical
perspectives.
260  B. Stocker

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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 repre-
sent 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: marcol@email.unc.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 263

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_13
264  M. S. Collins

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 funda-
mentally 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 the-
ater, including a catalogue of character types and elements of epideictic ora-
tory, 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 eru-
dite 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
  Romance  265

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 acknowl-
edging 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, mysteri-
ous (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 mono-
myth, 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 empha-
sizes 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
266  M. S. Collins

franchises, along with several stellar acting careers and special effects compa-
nies based on the then emergent digital technologies.4 Star Wars and its sci-
ence 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 para-
phrase 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 sche-
matic, 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 subse-
quently 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 anat-
omy 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 ini-
tial downward plunge into danger followed by an oscillating narrative pattern
of descent and ascent, with the protagonists moving in and out of kidnap-
pings, imprisonment, and myriad, calamitous episodes and close brushes with
death before eventually assuming their true identities, almost always sanctify-
  Romance  267

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, articu-
lated 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 his-
tory. 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 devel-
oped from Latin (Romance Languages); the Spanish word romance, which
means ballad (among other things); and romance as all love stories and amo-
rous adventures, among many other definitions (Fuchs 2004, 3–4). While the
conventions of romance may thus have remained relatively stable across cen-
turies, 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 dif-
ferent 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 his-
tory 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
268  M. S. Collins

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 clas-
sical 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 imagina-
tive literature and over the romances of chivalry in particular. These first best-
sellers 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 argu-
ment went—women were even more susceptible to corruption from the sen-
sual 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 pub-
lic morality.
  Romance  269

The supposed power of romance to corrupt has remained a staple of nega-

tive 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 decid-
edly 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 inge-
nious 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 ten-
dency 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 regard-
ing 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 phi-
losophy 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
270  M. S. Collins

displays remarkably protean qualities that enable the genre to adapt to differ-
ent times, cultures, languages, and artistic mediums. Shapeshifters appear fre-
quently 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 folk-
tales, traditional (Snow White and Rose Red) and modern, and/or superficially
simple (Isak Dinesen’s Ehrengard [1962]), or intricate and conceptually com-
plex, 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 poten-
tial 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 assign-
ment of character qualities like good and evil, pushing the envelope of expec-
tations 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 gener-
ates 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, bring-
ing 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
  Romance  271

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 uni-
verse with long-established conventions that invite creative invention and
experimentation, and readily lend themselves to philosophical and ideologi-
cal 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 con-
cept 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 micro-
cosm 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 incompat-
ible 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 comprehen-
sion. 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 condemna-
tion the Canon of Toledo grappled with in his conflicted remarks on chivalric
romances, yet such criticism consistently mutes the importance that periodi-
cally 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
272  M. S. Collins

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 opposi-
tional 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 observa-
tion. 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, read-
ers 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 cal-
culated 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).
  Romance  273

Combined, these observations offer a metafictional wink and nudge to read-

ers, 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 sym-
bolic, 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 tes-
serae 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 wor-
ship 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 con-
ceive 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
274  M. S. Collins

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 six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, such as Sidney’s Arcadia and
Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585).14 The theme of love, for instance, figures prom-
inently 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, senti-
ments which resonate as strongly, but in a different key in the texts of
Heliodorus and Longus, whose protagonists do not waver in their pure, lov-
ing 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, over-
coming 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 the-
atrical 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 significa-
tion, 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 cele-
bration 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) with-
out overtly mentioning the parallel. The Knight with the Lion subsequently
interweaves numerous micronarratives of return and reconciliation, which
  Romance  275

echo the spiritual values identified with Pentecost in exalting love and forgive-
ness—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 medi-
eval 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 rejec-
tion also inspires the knight on his central quest to return home and be rec-
onciled 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 adulter-
ous, 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
276  M. S. Collins

(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 sociohis-
torical 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 exper-
imentation 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-
  Romance  277

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 culmi-
nates 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 legiti-
mates 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 mod-
ern (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, por-
traying 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
278  M. S. Collins

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 mar-
riage, 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 com-
posed 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 protago-
nists may be wealthy and respected ladies and gentlemen, at times with dis-
guised 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 heteroge-
neous 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 intro-
duce sociohistorical figures, events, and themes into the fictional world, maxi-
mizing 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 gentle-
man 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 cen-
turies 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
  Romance  279

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 accep-
tance as a literary genre with identifiable conventions and a long, global liter-
ary 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 ter-
rorism. 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
280  M. S. Collins

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 milita-
rism 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 audi-
ences’ awareness of Babette’s sacrifice, demonstration of love, and the transfig-
uring repercussions of those actions. Pastoral romance continues to flourish as
well, similarly lending hybrid conventions to new purposes and conversa-
tions, 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 fic-
tional 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,
  Romance  281

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 inter-
weaving oppositional voices, ideas, and actions, and the creation of images
and repetitive patterns. The fictional world of romance is, in fact, one of pat-
terned 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 play-
ground 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 nar-
ratives 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 tele-
ology 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 con-
flicts 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-
282  M. S. Collins

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 free-
dom, 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 any-
where 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 gen-
eral, 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 criti-
cism, 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.
  Romance  283

6. Doody (1996, 432–64) links the rise of romance in ancient times with reli-
gious 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, con-
sult 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 narra-
tive 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 fig-
ures 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
284  M. S. Collins

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 trans-
formed 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 strat-
agem 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 un-
Roman, 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 relation-
ship 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 six-
teenth- and seventeenth-­century fiction. She comments on Longus: ‘Longus’
story becomes almost synonymous with “pastorals” (pastoralia), and its influ-
ence 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, underscor-
ing widespread familiarity with Longus’ text. See also the description of ‘idyl-
lic 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 sym-
biotic 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,
  Romance  285

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 impor-
tance 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 ambigu-
ity 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 philo-
sophical closures that ends in a diminuendo of consolation’ (107).
18. On Tasso’s use of allegory and dramatization of Counter-Reformation ideol-
ogy 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 admi-
ratio/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, con-
sult 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.
286  M. S. Collins

21. Hogan (2003, 76–121) presents his theory of human emotions and proto-
typical 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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 Part III
Philosophical Aesthetics
 14
Analytic Aesthetics
Jukka Mikkonen

A passage from John Hospers’s Meaning and Truth in the Arts (1946) illus-
trates well the aim of the early analytic enterprise in aesthetics: the investiga-
tion 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 enter-
prise 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: jukka.mikkonen@uta.fi

© The Author(s) 2018 295

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_14
296  J. Mikkonen

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 lit-
erary aspects of philosophical works) and deals with actual works, whereas the
latter consists of systematic exploration of theoretical issues related to litera-
ture. In addition, analytic philosophers illustrating their theories with exam-
ples 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 look-
ing 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 nor-
mative 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 phil-
osophical 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 [meta-
criticism], since there is probably more art criticism being produced and
   Analytic Aesthetics  297

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 neurosci-
ence 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 illu-
minate 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 eco-
nomic and sociological studies of art consumption: yet, he thinks that
empirical research is not much worth without careful philosophical reflec-
tion of the traditional sort, and he sees the task of philosophy in formulat-
ing theoretical models to strengthen the empirical study (Currie 2013,
435–36). Currie and his colleagues (2014, 12) argue that ‘[w]hilst phe-
nomenological 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 prin-
ciple, may be the object of scientific investigation’.
3. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen propose that philosophy of lit-
erature 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 rele-
vant interactions between participants in a practice’. In this view, the phi-
losopher 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 phi-
losophy 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.
298  J. Mikkonen

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 philo-
sophical 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 ‘literari-
ness’, or some sort of psychological response to it in the audience. The consen-
sus 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 identi-
fying 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 art-
work 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 signifi-
cant degree, or
3. w falls under a predecessor concept to our concept of literature and was writ-
ten while the predecessor concept held sway, or
4. w belongs to the work of a great writer.
   Analytic Aesthetics  299

In Lamarque and Olsen’s (1994, 255–56) ‘institutional’ view, ‘[a] text is iden-
tified 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 rhe-
torical 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 multi-
ple 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 particu-
lar 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 pro-
duce 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
300  J. Mikkonen

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 fic-
tional 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 car-
ried out by metaphysicians, the ontology of ‘fictional worlds’ and the question
of ‘fictional truths’ have united aestheticians with metaphysicians and phi-
losophers 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 supple-
ment 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 gov-
erness 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 infer-
ences 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 fic-
tional; 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
   Analytic Aesthetics  301

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 atten-
tion 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 con-
tent of works of imaginative literature have greatly fascinated analytic philoso-
phers. 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 fic-
tion 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 rec-
ognize 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
302  J. Mikkonen

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 represen-
tation (narrative) is neutral between non-fiction and fiction and that imagina-
tion 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 fic-
tion. Drawing on a distinction between ‘propositional’ and ‘perceptual’ imag-
ination 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).
   Analytic Aesthetics  303

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 imagin-
ing. 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, epis-
temological, and aesthetic attention in the philosophy of literature. Yet, sev-
eral 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.
304  J. Mikkonen

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 danger-
ously close to fictional narratives, and in particular to fictional narratives of
the kind one finds in literature’. Goldie however argues that we need narra-
tives 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 banal-
ity 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 inten-
tion in art interpretation, a debate that began with William K. Wimsatt and
   Analytic Aesthetics  305

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 interpreta-
tions 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 aes-
thetic 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 sup-
port 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 ‘mod-
erate’ 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 infor-
mation, 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
306  J. Mikkonen

[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 attrib-
uted 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 inten-

tionalism 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 hypoth-
esis which is accepted provisionally, guides interpretation, and is in turn mod-
ified 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 dis-
tort 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 lan-
guage and applied concepts such as ‘speech acts’ and ‘conversation’ to litera-
ture. 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 interpreta-
tion focuses on stages beyond verbal understanding, namely, thematic inves-
tigation and aesthetic appreciation.
   Analytic Aesthetics  307

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 rela-
tion 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 ana-
lytic tradition. In addition to historical and geographical knowledge, litera-
ture is seen to provide knowledge of concepts (Gibson 2007), modal
knowledge or knowledge of possibilities (Stokes 2006), or knowledge of emo-
tions (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 prop-
ositional 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 situa-
tion (Nussbaum 1990; Gaut 2007), typically highlighting empathic identifi-
cation 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-
308  J. Mikkonen

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 inevi-
tably be for good? Little has been said of the effects which literary works actu-
ally 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 emo-
tional aspects, ‘is part of the design of the artwork’ (1998b, 520). He claims
that American Psycho, for instance, fails aesthetically because ‘the serial killings
   Analytic Aesthetics  309

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 char-
acter’. Immoralism holds that ‘imaginatively experiencing morally defective
cognitive-affective responses and attitudes in ways that are morally problem-
atic can deepen one’s understanding and appreciation’ (Kieran 2003, 72).
Kieran reminds one that artworks ‘[d]rawing on our moral judgements, reac-
tions 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 under-
stand 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 identi-
fication 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 learn-
ing 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)
310  J. Mikkonen

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 philoso-
phers have debated on the ontological status of our emotions in literary expe-
rience. 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 dis-
pleasing 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 con-
temporary discussion on the matter into six positions: (1) ‘conversion theory’
maintains that the overall experience of painful works of art is (retrospec-
tively) 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 ana-
lytic 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 pre-
cise 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-
   Analytic Aesthetics  311

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.

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 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 benevo-
lentia, 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 anno-
tate 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: jaen@pdx.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 315

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_15
316  I. Jaén

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 contin-
ues 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’ inter-
actions—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 fic-
tional 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 fol-
lows, 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
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  317

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 analy-
sis 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 devel-
opment 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 narra-
tive 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 orga-
nized 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 litera-
ture and, thus, critics needed to come up with broader notions that ­transcended
318  I. Jaén

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 hero-
ine) and to the test of the hero’s integrity and selfhood as a basic composi-
tional 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 indestruc-
tible 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 char-
acter, 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
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  319

order to attain virtue, love and justice. Furthermore, romance narratives pres-
ent 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 real-
istic 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 ordi-
nary 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 transfor-
mation 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 correc-
tive 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 per-
spectives of genre such as the one offered by Michael Sinding, who draws on
conceptual integration theory—also known as blending—as well as on cogni-
tive 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 peo-
ple” are a matter of degree’ (Sinding 2010, 475; italics in original).
320  I. Jaén

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 schol-
ars 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 pro-
totypical 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 ele-
ments 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 amor-
phous 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 indi-
vidual and time-dependent. It depends on our worldviews, mindset, personal-
ity, 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 tell-
ing a story where characters are not simply means for the narration but agents
that develop throughout that story.
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  321

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 treat-
ment 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 mod-
ern 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 explo-
ration 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
322  I. Jaén

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 occur-
rence 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 think-
ing. 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 narra-
tive representations of our consciousness, representations that become
increasingly complex as new narrative media, genres, and technologies
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  323

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 experi-
ence 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 under-
stood 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
324  I. Jaén

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 underdevel-

oped 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 devel-
opment of the human species.
In accordance with this hierarchical view of the living world—inherited
from Christian Aristotelianism and embraced by humanist moral philoso-
phers such as Vives—there are three main categories of beings with three dif-
ferent kinds of souls (or minds): plants, animals and humans. Human beings
contain the three types of soul in themselves: our vegetative soul governs func-
tions 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, con-
trolling 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, control-
ling 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
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  325

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 any-
thing. (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 judge-
ment (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 judge-
ment: ‘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 move-
ments 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 good-
ness 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 differ-
ences between animals and human beings.18 Interestingly, these differences are
viewed as a continuum, in which some animals possess some degree of cogni-
tion, whereas some humans (those who are unable to control their lower pas-
sions) 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.
326  I. Jaén

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 man-
ner 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 cogni-
tive 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 pro-
duced 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 bio-
logically deterministic (nature has given all men an unbalanced temperament
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  327

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 dry-
ness 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 cog-
nitive 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.
328  I. Jaén

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 master-
piece participates of this genre at a deeper level that has to do with its devel-
opmental 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 melan-
cholic man who spends day and night reading chivalric romances, an organ-
ism 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 litera-
ture—which often employ contemporary cognitive theories to frame the dis-
cussions—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 coex-
ists 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 materi-
alization in different types of discourse of a collective understanding of human
cognition that gradually develops since antiquity and peaks during the early
modern period.
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  329

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 char-
acters 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 philo-
sophical 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 analy-
ses 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.
330  I. Jaén

Whereas Don Quixote’s evolution is more novelistic in nature—he suffers

one disillusionment after another and develops towards the death of his ideal-
ism and of his own organism—Sancho illustrates renewal and rebirth, he rep-
resents 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, suc-
ceeds at knowing himself. His story of homecoming corresponds to the con-
ventions 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 cogni-
tive 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
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  331

exists in his master’s mind—succeeds at making him believe that an ugly peas-
ant woman on a donkey is his beloved lady.
There are several episodes such as this one throughout the book that illus-
trate Sancho’s progressive understanding and cognitive development.31
However, as I have argued, the highest point on Sancho’s developmental jour-
ney 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 protago-
nists 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 devel-
ops an elegant oral rhetoric that astonishes his listeners and even has the cog-
nitive 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 gov-
ernor. 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 pres-
sure 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)
332  I. Jaén

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 per-
formance as governor is so exemplary that it provokes his subjects’ admira-
tion, 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 orig-
inal). 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-fic-
tional 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 sce-
nario 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 con-
ventions 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 cogni-
tive philosophy of his time, of which he takes part, producing his own fic-
tional ‘treatise.’
One may wonder to what extent, in the same way some cognitive psycholo-
gists today turn to fiction33 as a model of mind for their research, early mod-
ern 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.
  Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  333

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 Martín-
Araguz 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 deci-
sion 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 decentral-
ization 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 liter-
ary characters, as it is apparent in Celestina, constitutes another line of devel-
opment 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).
334  I. Jaén

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 pro-
cediendo 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 melio-
rare 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-
   Fictions of Human Development: Renaissance Cognitive Philosophy…  335

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.

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 16
Hermeneutics
Hanna Meretoja

Hermeneutics is a field of inquiry that explores the phenomenon of interpre-

tation. It is often defined as ‘the theory of interpretation’, but instead of refer-
ring 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: hailme@utu.fi

© The Author(s) 2018 341

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_16
342  H. Meretoja

 rigins of Modern Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher

O
and Dilthey
Friedrich Schleiermacher, often considered the founder of modern hermeneu-
tics, established hermeneutics as a general theory of interpretation. While ear-
lier hermeneutics had taken the task of interpretation to arise from exceptional
texts and particularly difficult passages, Schleiermacher understood ‘herme-
neutics 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 criti-
cized 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 gen-
eral structure of interpreting verbal communication. Dilthey (1972) expanded
the scope of hermeneutics even further by arguing that the problem of inter-
pretation 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 per-
son develops in relation to a language, and the person, in turn, influences lan-
guage (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 expres-
sion, understanding each utterance ‘as a fact in the thinker’ (8).
  Hermeneutics  343

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 psy-
chology 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 under-
stand 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 under-
stand 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 con-
nected 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, dur-
ing 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 uncon-
scious of, and hence the ‘ultimate goal of the hermeneutic process is to under-
stand an author better than he understood himself ’ (244).
344  H. Meretoja

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, expres-
sion, 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 objectifica-
tions. 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 rele-
vant 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 hermeneu-
tics 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 orig-
inal 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 shap-
ing 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 understand-
ing as primarily epistemological issues concerning the methodological foun-
dations of the humanities, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argues that
  Hermeneutics  345

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 for-
mula 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 experi-
ence: we always orient ourselves to the world in a particular way and experi-
ence 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 can-
not 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 sci-
entific gaze that sees the world as measurable spatiotemporal objects is sec-
ondary 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 under-
standing and interpretative’ (140).
While in Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s work the hermeneutic circle con-
cerned primarily text interpretation, in Heidegger’s (1996, 143–44) and
Gadamer’s (1997, 266–69) thinking it characterizes experience in general. We
346  H. Meretoja

orient ourselves to the world from a historically, culturally and socially consti-
tuted interpretative horizon which makes experience possible and is trans-
formed 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 possibili-
ties: 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 hermeneu-
tics 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 attach-
ment’. As Felski acknowledges, the Heideggerian being in the world is charac-
terized 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 interac-
tion or engagement’ (20). The structure of the hermeneutic circle applies to
our whole being in the world as an affective, embodied process: our life histo-
ries 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-
  Hermeneutics  347

guished between humanities and natural sciences in terms of the dichotomy

between understanding and explanation, Gadamerian philosophical herme-
neutics 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 real-
ity 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 consti-
tuted 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 hav-
ing 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 sym-
bolically structured social reality. The notion of an ‘interpretive turn’ has also
been used in philosophy to signal the situation in which ‘the old logical divi-
sion of labor between explanation and understanding is abandoned and inter-
pretation comes to characterize the whole field of human endeavour’ (Bohman
et al. 1991, 2).
From a hermeneutic perspective, theories and methods are practices of pos-
ing 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-
348  H. Meretoja

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 preunderstand-
ings 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 rela-
tionship 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 knowl-
edge 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 danger-
ous 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 belong-
ing 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
  Hermeneutics  349

significance because only when we acknowledge that we encounter reality

through culturally and historically formed concepts, questions and perspec-
tives, 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 exis-
tence, they can be transformed and transgressed by new projections of mean-
ing’. 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 com-
mitted 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 prob-
lematic practices. While Foucault skirts the question concerning the condi-
tions 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 condi-
tions of possibility for emancipatory reflection without resorting to ahis-
torical 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 culti-
vate awareness of one’s own historical situation, but ‘the very idea of a situa-
tion 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 ‘provoca-
tion’ that makes visible presuppositions that normally affect us unconsciously
(299). He believes that self-understanding ‘always occurs through under-
standing something other than the self ’ (97).
350  H. Meretoja

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 assess-
ment ‘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 domi-
nant 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 understand-
ing’, 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 ‘inau-
thenticity’ (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 sci-
ence, 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 con-
stituted, 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 consti-
tuted 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’
  Hermeneutics  351

(1997, 402). That the ‘crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dia-
logical character’ (Taylor 1991, 32) has become a central tenet of contempo-
rary 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 under-
standing 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 gen-
uine 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 under-
standing 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 conscious-
ness 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
352  H. Meretoja

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 media-
tion (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 art-
work 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 differ-
entiation’ 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 one-
self 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, how-
ever, is a grave misunderstanding. From Gadamer’s perspective, literary stud-
ies 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
  Hermeneutics  353

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 fre-
quently overlooked, Gadamer (1987, 87) has specifically underlined this
point in his later writings, arguing against ‘an uncritical acceptance of tradi-
tion and a socio-political conservatism’ and emphasizing that a genuine con-
frontation of the historic tradition involves ‘a critical challenge of this
tradition’. This critical process of questioning is directed both at the presup-
positions underlying the text and at one’s own historical world. In interpret-
ing, 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 self-
evident. 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) under-
stands a literary work as ‘an event of being’ (Seinsvorgang) in which certain possi-
bilities 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 pos-
sibilities 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 pro-
posed 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,
354  H. Meretoja

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 sub-
versive 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-to-
­be: 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 liter-
ary 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 ‘pos-
sibilities 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-
  Hermeneutics  355

face—the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition in Anglo-American literary

theory is little short of scandalous’. The reception of French theory in particu-
lar 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 hermeneu-
tics, 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 rela-
tions 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 nar-
rative 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 relation-
ships 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 insuf-
ficient attention to the specificity of narrative forms and strategies.
While structuralist narratology influentially defined narrative as a represen-
tation of a series of events, various forms of ‘postclassical’ narratology now
emphasize the experiential aspect of narratives—that narratives convey a sense
356  H. Meretoja

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, ahis-
torical 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 becom-
ing. 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 philo-
sophical 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 frame-
work 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 bestow-
ing 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, expe-
riences, 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 present-
ing 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
  Hermeneutics  357

happened; it provides an interpretation of how certain events are/were expe-

rienced by someone, in a particular situation and from a particular perspec-
tive. 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 interpreta-
tive process in terms of an assimilation to cognitive or emotional patterns,18
but it is also important to acknowledge that precisely when narratives unset-
tle 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 illu-
sions 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 dis-
tribution of vulnerability and privilege. A narrative implies a certain under-
standing of what is possible in a particular world: narratives provide subject
positions, and in narrative worlds, subjects of experience and action seize cer-
tain 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 nar-
rative 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
358  H. Meretoja

a few recent examples: Jens Brockmeier (2015) shows how narrative herme-
neutics provides a theoretical framework for conceptualizing memory as an
interpretative process; Liesbeth Korthals Altes (2014) demonstrates the impor-
tance 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 pro-
vides 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 philo-
sophical 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 prej-
udices. 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 stud-
ies 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.
  Hermeneutics  359

In this world of increasing uncertainty about the future, imagination has

become evermore important—in politics, the human sciences and the every-
day. Hermeneutics articulates how integral to understanding as our mode of
being in the world are the ways in which we orient ourselves to our possibili-
ties, how we need imagination to find new ways of interpreting our possibili-
ties, and how literature can expand our sense of the possible.

Notes
1. The term hermeneutics enters the lexicon in the Latinate form in seventeenth-
century 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).
360  H. Meretoja

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).

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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 phenomenol-
ogy.’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 sec-
ond main phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, to provide us with a very plau-
sible 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: T.Staehler@sussex.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 365

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_17
366  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 uni-
fied 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 mytholo-
gized 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 intersub-
jective 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.
  Phenomenology  367

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 incomprehen-
sible 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 mathemati-
cal 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 exam-
ple 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
368  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 spatio-
temporal shapes and plena and thus the possibility of an indirect mathemati-
zation of plena might be an important indication that there is something in
the plena which evades all mathematization or which gets lost in the reduc-
tion 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 rela-
tion 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 appear-
ance. 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
  Phenomenology  369

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 hap-
pening 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 com-
pletely 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 referen-
tial 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 ref-
erential 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 oppo-
nent 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
370  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

it there. This strife is carried out on the ground of truth as the original belong-
ing together of concealment and unconcealment. Heidegger emphasizes that
‘truth does not exist itself beforehand, somewhere among the stars, only sub-
sequently 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 con-
ception of language as a means of communication misses the essence of lan-
guage. 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 lan-
guage 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 con-
versation (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
  Phenomenology  371

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 four-
fold (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.
372  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 divini-
ties—not as the components of a structural model held together by the opera-
tions 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 mor-
tals 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 bring-
ing in ‘height,’ creating a creative openness for both the humans and the
divinities (it might be worth reminding there that divinities are also the ele-
mentals). Air fills this openness with substance. The substance can be won-
drous. 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 appear-
ance 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.
  Phenomenology  373

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 sand-
filled 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 con-
struction, 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 medio-
cre, 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 bunga-
low, 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 ter-
rifying, 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 recom-
mended rest. But there was something in Hammil’s descriptions of insomnia;
374  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 apo-
plexy, 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 suf-
focating from the lack of openness and clearing, the lack of shape and direc-
tion. 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, irri-
tated, 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 disap-
pears. 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 relation-
ship 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).
  Phenomenology  375

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 destruc-
tion 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 ele-
mentals, 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 char-
acter 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 sol-
emn; 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
376  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 pro-
duce 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 conscious-
ness, 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 welcom-
ing 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,
  Phenomenology  377

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 contin-
ued 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
378  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 exam-
ple, 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 dif-
ferent 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 disap-
peared 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.’
  Phenomenology  379

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 sip-
ping 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 atten-
tion. After a short cleansing, he waved at his carriers to take him away.
380  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 becom-
ing 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 tradi-
tional 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 ele-
ment 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
  Phenomenology  381

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 extermi-
nating 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 sepa-
rate 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 addi-
tion to fire was the ability of living together but only the mighty Zeus pos-
sessed 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 demon-
strates 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
382  A. Kozin and T. Staehler

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 con-
text that is so crucial to our existence; the world is not revealed. The experi-
ence 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 setting-
truth-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 opposi-
tions. As our existence is being-in-the-world, we have to negotiate the differ-
ent 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 ele-
ment,’ 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 phenome-
nology, but it stays important as the search for essences through variation con-
tinues, in transformed, more ‘lifeworldy,’ and thus ambiguous ways. By way of
imagination, we can ‘play’ with the phenomena and vary them, with the pur-
pose 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 par-
ticularly difficult to discern, and discerning them through overstepping them
is a useful idea. See Kearney (1998, 2002). As Jansen (2010) has shown, phan-
tasy variation by no means becomes redundant with the move to genetic phe-
nomenology. 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
  Phenomenology  383

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 open-
ness 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 tran-
szendentale 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 espe-
cially 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 desig-
nated by purely fictional terms) and broadly antirealist accounts. Understanding
what is at stake requires a brief look at the nature of fiction and fictional lan-
guage and the ways in which the latter raises ontological issues, and this is the

F. Kroon (*)
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
e-mail: f.kroon@auckland.ac.nz
A. Voltolini
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
e-mail: alberto.voltolini@unito.it

© The Author(s) 2018 385

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_18
386  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

subject of the next section, ‘Fiction and the Language of Fiction’. The domi-
nant 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 char-
acters: 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 ani-
mate 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 dis-
tinctive 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.
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  387

We begin with some quick definitions. Fictional realists think that it is liter-
ally 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 con-
forms 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 con-
tain 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.
388  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

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 autho-
rial 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 pres-
ents Watson’s recollections of Holmes, the name stands for an ordinary flesh-
and-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

   Language, Ontology, Fiction  389

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 sar-
donically’. 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 antireal-
ist 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 genu-
inely 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 gen-
uinely 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
390  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

widely accepted account of names, Millianism, the propositional contribu-

tion 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 sen-
tences 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 intelli-
gence. 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 inten-
sional 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 implic-
itly prefixed by an operator like ‘according to the story/theory of fictional
realism’. For example:
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  391

(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 inher-
its the problem of the intensionalist approach to internal metafictional sen-
tences 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 distin-
guishes 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 story-
teller). 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 oth-
ers 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
392  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

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 autho-
rized 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 intro-
duced 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
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  393

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 exis-
tentially quantified statement. For (5) to be true, there must be fictional char-
acters 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 argu-
ment; in particular, pretence antirealists like Walton cannot capture the valid-
ity of inferences involving statements about fictional characters since the
real-world truth conditions of such statements do not mention fictional char-
acters 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 real-
ists that we should supplement any semantical arguments with genuine onto-
logical 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 difficul-
ties. 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
394  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

­ 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 sug-
gested 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 antire-
alists 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 indeter-
minacies, 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 crite-
ria 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 fic-
tional 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
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  395

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 indetermi-
nacy. 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 detec-
tive called ‘Holmes’ who lives at 221B Baker St, London. These Holmes can-
didates 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 suc-
ceed 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
396  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

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 sto-
ries 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 intentional-
ity 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 rela-
tive 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
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  397

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, more-
over, 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 char-
acterized; 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 cer-
tain 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
398  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

points. Suppose we restrict our attention to properties appropriate to physi-

cal, 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 prop-
erties 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 consti-
tuted 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 character-
ized, 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 moun-
tain 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 fea-
ture 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
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  399

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 prop-
erties 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 for-
mulation 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 with-
out 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 pro-
totypical 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 exis-
tent 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
400  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

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 with-
out exemplifying existence. But the view may have other problems. Indeed,
some critics think that treating predication as ambiguous borders on the inco-
herent (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 cre-
ative 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:
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  401

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 conceiv-
ing 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 suc-
ceed 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
402  F. Kroon and A. Voltolini

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 dis-
tinctive problems of their own. Rather than take this to be cause for pessi-
mism, however, we think that the lively debate about the ontological issues in
fiction that have brought such theories and their problems to light is testa-
ment 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 fic-
tional 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).
   Language, Ontology, Fiction  403

3. Other examples include quantified sentences that seem to commit one to inde-
terminate fictional entities. (See also Yablo 1998 for a more general account of
why we shouldn’t simply read our ontological commitments off from our lan-
guage, even when it displays quantificational structure.)
4. These difficulties for possibilism do not equally affect all versions of the doc-
trine. 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).

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Rapaport, William J. 1978. Meinongian Theories and a Russellian Paradox. Noûs 12:
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Monograph. Canberra: Australian National University.
Russell, Bertrand. 1905a. On Denoting. Mind 14: 473–493.
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 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 ‘decon-
struction’ or ‘poststructuralism’ as an ethical standpoint that is seen as respon-
sible 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 entitle-
ment, to the extent that it remains mournfully preoccupied with the worst
events of the European twentieth century. This characterization of decon-
struction 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 philo-
sophical 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: S.Morganwortham@kingston.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 407

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_19
408  S. Morgan Wortham

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 exam-
ined 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 ‘poststructural-
ism’ 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 con-
tours of the terrain over which these critical disputes move.

Part One
If deconstruction is now all too frequently dismissed in terms of a mournful-
ness 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
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  409

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 mourn-
ing’. 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 unreckon-
able ‘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 state-
ment 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 obli-
gations 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 con-
stitutes 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 mourn-
ing. 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’
410  S. Morgan Wortham

­ 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 con-
text; 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, mourn-
ing’ (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 frater-
nal 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 recon-
figured—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 disor-
ganized 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
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  411

­ 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 untrans-
actable, 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 fore-
shadow them. Importantly, as Derrida acknowledges towards the end of his
essay for Lyotard, the untotalizable identities at play in such an interlocution-
ary situation—‘you’, ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘us’—do not simply hazard a sort of deconstruc-
tion 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 dis-
pensed 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, mean-
while, 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 dis-
cussion 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).
412  S. Morgan Wortham

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 mourn-
ing is decommissioned in advance by the fact that neither ‘death’ has a nego-
tiable 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 con-
trast to, as we shall see, Jacques Rancière’s dismissal of his writings as sponsor-
ing an ethical consensus instituted upon an endless work of mourning and
commemoration. Derrida’s mourning essay for Lyotard not only acknowl-
edges 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
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  413

resisted and overcome if new forms of political life are to be realized—none-

theless 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 testi-
fies 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 ‘com-
munity’ is ‘ethical’, for Rancière, insofar as it is constructed upon the sup-
posed 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
414  S. Morgan Wortham

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 aes-
thetic 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 experi-
ence fosters a common sense of the dissensual in that it powerfully under-
mines 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 distribu-
tion of the sensible. Yet if, as Rancière argues, the aesthetic (that of the beauti-
ful 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 encour-
ages 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 disap-
pearance—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 aes-
thetic, 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 power-
lessly subjected to ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, sectarian warfare, or
other forms of extreme victimization—have become ‘the absolute rights of
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  415

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’ commu-
nity, 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 clas-
sical 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 end-
lessly 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 sub-
lime in a number of major texts, Rancière’s condemnation of Lyotardian sub-
limity 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
416  S. Morgan Wortham

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 unprob-
lematically 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 com-
municability which underpins human interlocution is characterized by a cer-
tain 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 com-
munity’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 princi-
ple 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 non-
or 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
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  417

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 formu-
lation 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 deci-
sive 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 possi-
bility of human society in its modern sense, whether it be ‘the Greek politeia
or the modern republic’ (Lyotard 1993, 138), this possibility profoundly par-
takes 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 toler-
ated, compulsory multilingualism, effective multilingualism, and so on’), ulti-
mately 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 pro-
cess 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 repub-
lican 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.
418  S. Morgan Wortham

Instead, it arises on the strength of a ‘civil’ agreement between humans con-

cerning 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 ‘con-
tact’—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 poststructural-
ism’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 repub-
lican 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
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  419

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 errone-
ously 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 emancipa-
tory 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 decon-
struction can be found in a number of contemporary authors enjoying critical
success. In a way that is perhaps symptomatic of the more general discontent-
ment 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 cri-
tique 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
420  S. Morgan Wortham

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 fig-
ure 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 excep-
tional element or ‘master signifier’ to unify a ‘patchwork’ of contingent ele-
ments 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
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  421

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 reab-
sorbed 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 total-
ization 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 ‘post-
structuralist’ 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 fun-
damental 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
422  S. Morgan Wortham

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’ poeticiza-
tions 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 appear-
ance 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 con-
structs 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 expres-
sion of ‘impossible’ mastery which ‘prevent us from reverting back into the
metalinguistic position’ with which ‘poststructuralism’ itself might be associ-
ated (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 ‘revert-
ing 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 criti-
cisms 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
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  423

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 identi-
fication 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 opera-
tions 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 sev-
eral 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 criti-
cal 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).
424  S. Morgan Wortham

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 inter-
change, a ‘secret code’ with ‘transgressive value’, a practice of ‘exception’ or
‘contravention’, a ‘grammatical contraband’ that ‘left open its destinal singu-
larity’ (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 begin-
nings of education are to be found in such ‘equality’.
   Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics  425

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 our-
selves with pursuing is ‘one that would encourage … heterogeneity or “dis-
sensus”’ (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/lsere-
viewofbooks/2014/10/16/book-review-the-most-sublime-hysteric-hegel-
with-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-hysteric-
hegel-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 trustwor-
thy truth value, philosophers from Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel to con-
temporary 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 con-
ceptual but also relational and dialogical. The following two sections analyse
and critique some philosophical reductions of truth to what can be conceptu-
ally measured and assessed as declarations. The concluding chapter  to this
Handbook (“Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue”) develops a notion of truth as rela-
tionality 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: michael.mack@durham.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 429

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_20
430  M. Mack

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 repre-
sentation. 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 ‘tex-
ture’, 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 phi-
losophy that is grounded in a linguistic sphere.
Language is, however, ambiguous, even when it seems to be straightfor-
wardly declarative and conceptual as Gibson is not tired of reiterating:
‘Literary works, however, lacking declarative power, and much else in addi-
tion, 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 linguis-
tic? 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 lan-
guage. Whereas traditional, humanistic approaches to literature still presup-
posed 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
   Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths  431

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 discov-
ery 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 mir-
ror 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 estab-
lish 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 philoso-
phers of literature tend to claim but that our perceptions and interactions with
the material world of our selfhood and our environment are themselves medi-
ated 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 irre-
ducible 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.
432  M. Mack

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 par-
take 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 placehold-
ers 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 con-
stituted 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 ambigu-
ous 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 con-
tamination (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-accel-
erating 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 suc-
cessful and happy. Success and happiness are tied to the illusory ability to pro-
duce 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 con-
sumer 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 con-
sumption. Literature is in particular capable of shedding light on the com-
plexities 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:
   Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths  433

that is, the waste of the energy that is needed for production and consump-
tion 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 frame-
work of nineteenth century psychiatry’ (Shuttleworth 2010, 3). Literature’s for-
mative 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) analy-
ses 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 high-
lights 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 ‘interest-
ing’ 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 pas-
sivity 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
434  M. Mack

traditional divide between the perceptive and the active aspects of our existence
whose ‘truthful’, scientific foundations were proven by the discovery of mirror-
neurons 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 per-
ceptions, 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 con-
cepts 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 litera-
ture 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 appear-
ance 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 separa-
tions 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 contami-
nations. The following first analyses the foundation of traditional oppositions
between mimesis and truth in Plato’s and Aristotle’s ancient theories of litera-
ture. 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.
   Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths  435

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 com-
posed 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 dis-
torted 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 origi-
nal’ (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 for-
bidden, 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 behav-
ing like the first and the greatest of gods. (Plato 2010, 47)

The poets depict the gods in an inappropriate, immoral way. This is the foun-
dation of Plato’s accusation: poetry is false, because it is disrespectful of exist-
ing 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 poli-
tics, The Republic. The book calls for the public interdiction of poets to con-
tinue 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 good-
ness rather than of the passions, as Homer and other poets, he claims, immor-
ally 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
436  M. Mack

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 ter-
rifying capacity for deforming even good people. Only a few escape’ (Plato
2010, 74). This quote establishes a close connection between mimesis/repre-
sentation 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 instru-
ment not for change but for learning what we already know: ‘Representation
is natural to human beings from childhood. They differ from the other ani-
mals in this: man tends most towards representation and learns his first les-
sons 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 reproduc-
tion 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
   Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths  437

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 appropri-
ate, 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 harmo-
nizes 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 scien-
tific truths: ‘the principle of Marxist science follows directly from the literary
revolution that turned its back on the logic of actions allegedly governed by
438  M. Mack

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 inter-
preted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx
1978, 145). According to Rancière, instead of being opposed to transforma-
tion, 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, per-
ceptions, and interpretations. By transforming our approach to what is visi-
ble, literature reorganizes not only our affects but also our thoughts and
beliefs: ‘Literature is not a new name adopted by belles-lettres in the nine-
teenth 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, con-
struct “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 eigh-
teenth 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
   Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths  439

back to the eighteenth century) as the beginning of both literature and mod-
ern 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 para-
digm and an aesthetic paradigm. Benjamin’s thesis presupposes something dif-
ferent, 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 deriva-
tive 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 coor-
dinates 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 aes-
thetic-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-polit-
ical 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
440  M. Mack

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 ‘mechan-
ical reproduction’ itself within an at once aesthetic and political mode. The
new cosmos created by poetry interrupts the historical repetition of catastro-
phe 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 under-
standing of the latter is highly idiosyncratic, because it turns art into the sub-
stance and centre of the communist revolution. It is quite astonishing that we
encounter Benjamin’s poetics (his uncompromising stance on poetry as a con-
dition 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 com-
munist 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 poli-
tics (Ästhetizierung der Politik)’ and ‘communism responds with the politiciza-
tion 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 begin-
nings 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.

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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 interdisci-
plinary 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 reforma-
tion 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 depart-
ments (in the UK), English departments, and philosophy departments,
among others.2 The roots of literary criticism as a field can be directly ideo-
logically 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 forma-

R. Keefe (*)
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
e-mail: rkeefe@odu.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 443

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_21
444  R. Keefe

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 correspon-
dences 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 cre-
ated 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 dia-
lectic 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 persua-
sion, 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
  Rhetoric  445

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 rhet-
oric 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 inven-
tion, 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 argu-
ments, 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 eth-
ics (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 meta-
phoric 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 rheto-
ric included the invention of new ideas or simply the arrangement of existing
ideas.
Dispositio, the second overarching branch, is the art of arranging the con-
tent that one has invented or discovered for one’s argument to maximally
persuasive effect. In classical rhetorical instruction, students practiced
446  R. Keefe

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 per-
sisted 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 profes-
sional 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 con-
versant 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 pre-
cepts 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 orien-
tation 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
  Rhetoric  447

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-cen-
tury Scottish ‘new rhetoric.’ From the ancients, eighteenth-century Scottish
rhetoricians carried forward three essential assumptions about the art of elo-
quence: 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 conten-
tions 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 argu-
ments, but can be achieved through probable arguments. There is within the
communicative act room for multiple interpretations. In this sense, any argu-
ment within language necessarily consists of probable truth. Logic, on the
other hand, has often considered itself to be the guarantor of certainty. A logi-
cal argument is either true or untrue, and the proper method of demonstra-
tion 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.
448  R. Keefe

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 devo-
tee 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, proceed-
ing 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 con-
viction no less than demonstration itself does.13

Essentially, Reid’s argument that copious induction is sufficient for demon-

stration 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, rheto-
ric 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 cata-
loged 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 mediat-
ing 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.
  Rhetoric  449

Sense Perception and Rhetoric

Francis Hutcheson, Smith’s professor at Glasgow, made a systematic examina-
tion of the internal senses under this new paradigm (for this he is often con-
sidered 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 plea-
sure, 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 previ-
ously 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 hear-
ing.16 We receive aesthetic pleasure from external perception of material quali-
ties 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, har-
mony, beauty, symmetry, etc.). Taste therefore, for Hutcheson, is the develop-
ment of our natural capacity to receive pleasure from beauty. Smith will
develop this in language much more extensively, as we shall see.
450  R. Keefe

The following section will attempt to draw out the philosophical corre-
spondences 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 under-
standing 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 pro-
vides 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 neces-
sary 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 lan-
guage 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 nine-
teenth century, as philosophers and economists considered the seeming dis-
junction 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 fun-
damental 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
  Rhetoric  451

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 thor-

oughly the nineteenth-century formulation of the “Adam Smith problem” dis-
torted 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 sup-
port 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 litera-
ture,’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 lan-
guage 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
452  R. Keefe

sentiments—moral, political, intellectual and aesthetic—were acquired, devel-

oped, 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 socio-
logical view he has of human psychology and motivation. It is important to
note, when reading Smith’s moral, rhetorical, and economic works as coher-
ent and systematic, that Smith himself did not systematize his ideas. Smith’s
theories in all areas rely on the principle of correspondence.23 As the n
­ ineteenth
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 cer-
tainly 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 metaphys-
ics 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 plea-
sure 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
  Rhetoric  453

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 fea-
tures. 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, particu-
lar 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 experi-
ence, 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 capac-
ity and motivation to sympathize with others, and the second is that propriety
is the basic first virtue.
454  R. Keefe

Sympathy, for Smith, is our drive to feel along with other people. Like lan-
guage, 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 imagina-
tively 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 our-
selves 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 sensa-
tions. 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 fit-
tingness, becomes important.
  Rhetoric  455

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 ‘aes-
thetic, 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 pro-
priety 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 judg-
ment constitutes our sympathy. Thus Smith notes that to ‘approve of the pas-
sions 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, sympa-
thy 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 gener-
alized 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 weak-
ened by its formation and use. For Smith, reason itself is our ability to
456  R. Keefe

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 experi-
entially discovered truth of our moral condition informs our judgment of our
own actions, in a recursive relationship. In turn, reason directs us to the cen-
tripetal 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 situa-
tions 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 senti-
ments 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
  Rhetoric  457

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 defi-
ance 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 phe-
nomenological 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 approba-
tion 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 con-
sider 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
458  R. Keefe

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 rhe-
torical 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 com-
mon ground is whatever arguments, facts, features, assumptions, and stan-
dards 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 some-
thing we have in common with other people. The ‘common degree of excel-
lence’ 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 judg-
ment 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 prox-
imities 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 per-
suasion rather than either conviction or mere demonstration.’47 Persuasion, if
  Rhetoric  459

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 particu-
lar, from the necessity of particular evidences in the process itself, to the econ-
omy 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 function-
ing. 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 par-
ticular toward the general. Therefore, moral attention and ethical action are
best directed toward the particular. Smith’s conclusion regarding moral sci-
ence 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 experi-
ence, 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 prede-
cessors 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
460  R. Keefe

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 fea-
tures 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 col-
lectively 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 judg-
ment 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 enter-
prise 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 imag-
inatively 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 communi-
cated 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 feel-
ing. Marcelo Dascal summarizes the correlation thus: ‘just as Smith’s ethics
  Rhetoric  461

is a theory of propriety of action, his rhetoric is a theory of propriety of lin-

guistic 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 con-
tingent 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 there-
fore the greater the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. We are social beings, in
every aspect of our constitution. It should be clear from its rhetorical fea-
tures 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 liter-
ary criticism at the paramount of civilized art to the detriment of the rhe-
torical 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 eighteenth-
century ‘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 rheto-
ric 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.
462  R. Keefe

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 educa-
tion.’56 For this reason, an extensive rhetorical education with copious induc-
tion 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 reflec-
tive process, is at once socially oriented and culturally epistemic as it is per-
sonal, 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.
  Rhetoric  463

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 the-
ory 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 expla-
nations 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.
464  R. Keefe

24. ‘As it happens, the twilight of the classical rhetorical tradition in the nine-
teenth 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 interdisci-
plinary’ 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.
  Rhetoric  465

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.

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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 histori-
cal realities; to provide an outlet for unspeakable subjects; to reflect the per-
formative 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 enig-
matic 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: kstern@email.unc.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 467

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_22
468  K. J. Stern

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 ques-
tion into pieces as these adept young scholars had done. To some extent, the
responses from my students seemed to reflect the triumph of poststructural-
ism. They all seemed to have a direct or indirect understanding of ‘performa-
tivity’ 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
   Feminism and Gender  469

literary investigations into feminism and gender from the 1960s to the pres-
ent 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 sub-
stance 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 discus-
sion—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 the-
ory—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 alter-
native 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 genera-
tion 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
470  K. J. Stern

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 pos-
ited by several critics of Showalter’s work.7 In this treatise, Mill boldly stipu-
lates 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 influ-
ence 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 struc-
tures, so that ‘surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less socially accept-
able 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 wit-
nessed 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
   Feminism and Gender  471

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 con-
tinue 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 ren-
dered 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 femi-
nism 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 investi-
gation. 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-
472  K. J. Stern

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 prob-
lematization of the “woman writer” in the canon debate?’20 This is not to sug-
gest 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 writ-

ers 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
   Feminism and Gender  473

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, help-

ing 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 interro-
gate our own priorities regarding what constitutes valuable women’s writing.
We, no less than our nineteenth-century precursors, are shaped by the politi-
cal, 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 com-

pendium 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 con-

temporary methodologies and modes of scrutiny, moving beyond the celebra-
tion 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 ‘inte-
grated 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, depen-
dent upon a single-voiced narrative that obliterates the multiple and ex-centric
474  K. J. Stern

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 his-
tory, traditionally organized in terms of ethnic or linguistic groups and national-
ist identity categories, has been criticized as a dangerous hangover of the
nineteenth-century nation-state, one that perpetuates “a single, endlessly reiter-
ated 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, nonhi-
erarchical 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 intersect-
ing challenges: the infinite expansion of the known literary universe made
possible through digital technology; the challenges of accounting for differ-
ence 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 commonal-
ity.’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 dif-
fuse 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 femi-
nist 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 repre-
sented precisely the political and social principles she otherwise embraced:
   Feminism and Gender  475

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 uni-
versal, 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 impor-
tant study Ain’t I a Woman? (1981) by comparing her own generation unfa-
vorably 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 vocabular-
ies 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 ‘wom-
en’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
476  K. J. Stern

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, deconstruction-
ism, 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 under-
stood 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 vehi-
cle 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, mascu-
linity becomes not the normative center against which femininity is mea-
sured, challenged, or subdued; instead, masculinity becomes a contestatory
   Feminism and Gender  477

site, where the meaning of the terms ‘gender,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘female’ (not to
mention ‘intersex’ or ‘transgender’) can be extended and explored. By regard-
ing 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 dis-
solution 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 abso-
lutely 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 them-
selves 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 pos-
sible, over the last two decades, an efflorescence of work in the field of trans-
gender 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 any-
thing 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-
478  K. J. Stern

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 iden-

tity 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 trans-
sexual people, by seeking escape from embodiment as a woman or by actively
inhabiting a female subject position, only reinforce the normative gender cat-
egories feminists seek to upend.45 Such an approach to transgender identity
has met with passionate criticism, many noting that trans-culture is a varie-
gated 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 episte-
mological framework for reflecting on the terrain of gender studies at an his-
torical 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 inex-
tricably 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 narra-
tive approaches to gender, within both personal and political contexts:
‘Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their par-
ticipants 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
   Feminism and Gender  479

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 ‘unbe-
coming 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 gen-
der’ entails a fundamental challenge to the social and political limitations
placed on women and therefore, paradoxically, bodies forth endless possibili-
ties 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 mis-
sion of the 1970s with fresh eyes—if earlier generations sought to present an
authoritative and legible history of women’s writing, theorists have increas-
ingly 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 methodolo-
gies, so that theory too becomes a process of doing and undoing.

* * *
480  K. J. Stern

What, then, do we mean by the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’? Annette

Kolodny suggests that feminism is ‘more like a set of interchangeable strate-
gies 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 differ-
ence 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 discus-
sion. 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 plural-
ism,’ 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 con-
tradictory, 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, mem-
oirs, 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?
   Feminism and Gender  481

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 fol-
lowed her, Grand was vexed by the problem of how to speak of gender with-
out 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 cen-
turies—does not reflect the failure so much as the victory of a feminist episte-
mology. 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, high-
lighting 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 mem-
ory, but I have done my best to give them a faithful rendering here. Thanks
482  K. J. Stern

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 con-
structed—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 out-
lining 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 espe-
cially 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-
   Feminism and Gender  483

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).
484  K. J. Stern

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, respec-
tively, 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).

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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.
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Fetterley, J.  1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction.
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Gilbert Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 2000 [1979]. The Madwoman in the Attic: The
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Goodman, R.T. 2016. Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory. Cambridge:
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Grand, Sarah. 1898. Marriage Questions in Fiction. The Fortnightly Review 69 (375):
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Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
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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
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———. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston: Beacon
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 23
Psychoanalysis
Will Long

Two recent introductions to the field agree that psychoanalytic literary criti-
cism has become ‘marginal,’ even conceding that ‘most of the time’ it is con-
sidered 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 under-
stood 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: william.long@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 489

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_23
490  W. Long

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 sup-
port in Freud’s own writing for challenges to the ideal of interpretative final-
ity, 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 anoth-
er’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 subper-
sonal, 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 human-
ist 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 con-
stitute an end-oriented refinement towards ‘truth,’ but rather successive actu-
alizations 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 scien-
tific outlook and method developed in the European seventeenth century was
central to a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ characterizing modern intellectual his-
tory in the West. Modern man, writes Rycroft, ‘views reality from two uncon-
nected and incompatible standpoints, one scientific and objective, the other
imaginative and subjective.’ The difficulty of understanding Freud, he contin-
ues, ‘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,
  Psychoanalysis  491

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 philosophi-
cal 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 sub-
structure’ (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 proper-
ties of constituent inorganic material on biological organisms, introduced in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920] and developed in later work, clearly dem-
onstrates that Freud espoused a fundamentally nondualist, materialist
philosophy.
As Rycroft observes, however, Freud wrote in terms that apparently contin-
ued 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 knowl-
edge of the humanities in the training of the analyst (SE XX, 248). Though
this reflects an ongoing appreciation of the importance of culture in under-
standing 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 child-
hood’ (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, how-
ever, 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
492  W. Long

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 trau-
matic 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 com-
plexes 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 reg-
istered 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 equiva-
lent of liberation’ (1994, 25). Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, imagines a
productive oscillation between the ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’ aspects of lan-
guage, a gendered distinction between abstract masculine writing and embod-
ied feminine prosody. Mitchell, while acknowledging Freud’s patriarchal and
heteronormative assumptions, observes that psychology ‘must reflect the
  Psychoanalysis  493

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 aban-
doned and suppressed his ‘seduction theory,’ which located traumatic aetiol-
ogy 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 preva-
lence of such incidents in the Viennese society on whose patronage he
depended. This claim resonates with contemporary debates about the credi-
bility 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 traumato-
genic event, contributed to the sense that narratable conscious experience and
‘reality’ stand in opposition to one another, mediated by mental representa-
tions—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 unat-
tainable 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 over-
looked abuse, risks reintroducing idealism and normativity, limiting the scope
494  W. Long

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 sub-
ject—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 whatso-
ever 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 herme-
neutic 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 inves-
tigations follows from his nondualism: if the mind and body are one sub-
stance, essays at its ultimate or ideal nature become untenable, and its study
accomplished not via progressively reductive articulations, but by recording
  Psychoanalysis  495

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 contribu-
tion 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 corre-
sponding 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 por-
tions 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 authen-
ticity, 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.
496  W. Long

First, elaborating on Freud’s own developing interest in the role of relation-

ships 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 call-
ing 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 the-
ory of art. Some readers have interpreted psychoanalysis’ adoption of the prin-
ciple of performativity as contributing to its ongoing incompatibility with
scientific empiricism. Stephen Frosh notes a historic ‘tension between psycho-
analysis 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 neurosci-
ence 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 experi-
enced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must them-
  Psychoanalysis  497

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 psy-
choanalytic 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 authen-
ticity according to a logic similar to the one Caruth infers from trauma the-
ory: 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 dual-
ism, 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 narra-
tive 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’ repre-
sents experiences any less real than those seemingly more immediate embod-
ied 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
498  W. Long

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 sym-
bolic 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)
  Psychoanalysis  499

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 mean-
ing, 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 hermeneu-
tics 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 dis-
solve 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 recollec-
tions 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, resis-
tances, and desires’ (xiv), so that neither text nor person is any longer under-
stood 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 ‘oscil-
lation’ (1985, 100) or ‘arabesque’ (1985, 104) of narrative desire. The ‘truth’
of the narrative, its appeal to authenticity, becomes ‘[r]epetition toward recog-
nition,’ 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 sta-
bility but also, in its origin in the inorganic, transcends the boundary between
self and world.
500  W. Long

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 nar-
rowly 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 ambigu-
ity 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 ambigu-
ity’ (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 cor-
responding 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 authentic-
ity. 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 mean-
ing 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,
  Psychoanalysis  501

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 psycho-
logical 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 organiza-
tion of matter, such that the drive within that organization’s component ele-
ments 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 dis-
solves into the undifferentiated milieu from which it formed.18 Freud’s earlier
conception of polymorphous sexuality, therefore, is similar to his later con-
ception 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 con-
stitute 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 distinc-
tion 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
502  W. Long

Leo Bersani develops this conceptual blending of sexuality (or life) and
death in his concept of ‘productive masochism’ (1986, 63), in which the poly-
morphous sexuality of infancy and the destructiveness of the death drive com-
bine 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 elabora-
tion 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 ‘problema-
tizing 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 rela-
tions and forms’ (1986, 110). The aesthetic, therefore, is fundamentally rela-
tional, but this relationship is not between stable and self-identical nodes—at
the person-level critical disagreement that Felman discusses, or at more sub-
personal 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 lan-
guage’ (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 ‘dia-
logic imagination’ is not an attempt at a universal theory of human nature,
but a resolutely historical hypothesis about the material effect of proliferating
  Psychoanalysis  503

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, ele-
ments of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel
inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openended-
ness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the
openended present). (1981, 6–7)

While Brooks observes how psychoanalysis emerges from antecedent narra-

tive 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 novel-
ization 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 lan-
guage. 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 lan-
guage for dialogue: ‘It must not be forgotten,’ Bakhtin writes, ‘that monoglos-
sia 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 proce-
dures, 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 actual-
ization 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-
504  W. Long

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 the-
ory of the transference-countertransference relationship, ‘it had always been
assumed that the speaker was the patient who had formed a therapeutic alli-
ance 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 self-
hood. Although associated with the school of object relations, Winnicott dis-
tinguishes between ‘object relation’ and ‘object usage.’ The latter is a ‘more
  Psychoanalysis  505

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 peo-
ple (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 pro-
jections’ (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’ pro-
duces a ‘transformational object.’ Initially using ‘object’ in the traditional psy-
choanalytic 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 transfor-
mative psychosomatic experiences (2009, 79).
Philip Bromberg combines influences from American interpersonal psy-
choanalysis and British object relations, as well as pursuing a concerted reha-
bilitation of the theory of dissociation, proposed by Freud’s contemporary
Pierre Janet but largely rejected by Freud. ‘If one wished to read the contem-
porary 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 increas-
ing 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 interdisciplin-
ary theories of trauma (Van Der Kolk 2014; Chefetz 2015), dissociation offers
an alternative to Caruth’s largely Freudian-inspired ‘pathology of history’ in
506  W. Long

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 func-
tions 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 evolu-
tionarily derived psychodynamic that is mediated at the brain level by pro-
cesses 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 agen-
tial 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 affec-
tive 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
  Psychoanalysis  507

processes are heightened and lead to an increasingly rigid dissociative struc-

ture, Bromberg suggests that the patient’s experience comes to feel ‘inauthen-
tic 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 pro-
cessual 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 pro-
gressive 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 discov-
ery, 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 emancipa-
tion, 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
508  W. Long

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 tradition-
ally 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
  Psychoanalysis  509

proposes a ‘nonobjectivist (and at best also nonsubjectivist) approach to biol-

ogy 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 mind-
body 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 sub-
stance dualism of Descartes. Freud’s ambitions of absolute scientific objectiv-
ity 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 speci-
fication 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’)
510  W. Long

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 cen-
tral 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 cri-
tique itself betrays the influence of substance dualism, presuming as it does
the clear taxonomical separation between the text and the person to be ‘anal-
ysed,’ 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 eth-
ics 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
  Psychoanalysis  511

Lacanian Subject Is Not the “Individual” or Conscious Subject of Anglo-

American 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 dra-
matization 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-expro-
priation’ (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-ori-
ented 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 onto-
logical 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 intellec-
tual genealogy (Hume, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Deleuze) that theorizes repeti-
tion 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).
512  W. Long

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 autopoie-
sis. 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 physi-
ological 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 imme-
diately 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 con-
tribution 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 cor-
rect 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 poly-
glossia and heteroglossia but also to ‘territorial dialects, social and professional
dialects and jargons, literary language, generic languages within literary lan-
guage, 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.
  Psychoanalysis  513

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 con-
veyed 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 con-
cept of ‘use’ subverts the dualist dichotomy of the subject-­object distinction.

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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 origi-
nally 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: b.ashcroft@unsw.edu.au

© The Author(s) 2018 519

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_24
520  B. Ashcroft

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 cen-
tral 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 con-
cept 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 subse-
quently 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 the-
ory 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
  Postcolonialism  521

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 compul-
sory 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 parlia-
ment 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 genera-
tions. (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 lit-
erature 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 exploita-
tion 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 dissemi-
nation of these through education, colonial administrations would not have
been able to invoke such widespread complicity. Consequently, English litera-
ture 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
522  B. Ashcroft

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 conse-
quence 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 con-
tinuum, 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 colo-
nized—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 displace-
ment 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 conse-
quently 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
  Postcolonialism  523

­ 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 ‘interlan-
guage,’ 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 dis-
course 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 world-
liness—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 dif-
ferent practice. Indigenous theories have developed to accommodate the dif-
ferences 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.
524  B. Ashcroft

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 indepen-
dently 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 poststruc-
turalism and the sociocultural and determinist theories based in contempo-
rary 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 them-
selves, 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 sud-
den experimentation with the forms of the dominant bourgeois ideology rep-
resented 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 sup-
pressing 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 muse-
ums 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
  Postcolonialism  525

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 postmod-
ern 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 postco-
lonial. 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 par-
ticular—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 ‘cul-
tural 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 oppo-
sitional, can remain free from that cataclysmic experience. Once we deter-
mine 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 poten-
tial 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 discur-
sive 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 elabora-
tions of postmodernity, just as imperialism and enlightenment philosophy
were discursive elaborations of modernity.
526  B. Ashcroft

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 domi-
nation? These involve various forms of material experience, located in their
specific historical and political environments. Just as the experiences of colo-
nization within colonized societies have varied from the most abject suffering
to the engendering of filiative feeling, the responses of those colonized societ-
ies to colonialism have occupied a continuum from absolute complicity to
violent rebellion, all of which can be seen to be ‘postcolonial.’ If we see post-
colonial discourse in the Foucauldian sense as a system of knowledge of colo-
nized 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 sub-
ject, 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’ occa-
sion 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—material-
ity 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 material-
ist and historical reading, most recent discussions have stressed the need to
  Postcolonialism  527

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 gen-
eral 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 frame-
works 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 appropri-
ated 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 eth-
nicity 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 ‘discov-
ery’ 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
528  B. Ashcroft

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 lan-
guage, 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 repre-
sentation 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 colo-
nialism. 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 experi-
ence, colonialism brings with it a sense of dislocation between the environ-
ment 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 societ-
ies 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 with-
out 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 sever-
ance 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
  Postcolonialism  529

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 empower-
ing sense of the lack of fit between the language available and the place expe-
rienced. 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 writ-
ing 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 impor-
tant with the rise of environmentalism and ecocriticism. Postcolonial ecocriti-
cism 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.
530  B. Ashcroft

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 engage-
ment of the global by the local, particularly local cultures, and, most impor-
tantly, 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 postcolo-
nialism 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 tran-
scend 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 moder-
nity. 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 circula-
tion 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 colo-
nization. The field has come to represent a dizzyingly broad network of cohab-
iting 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
  Postcolonialism  531

from which those two structures of cultural logic and cultural critique them-
selves 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 “read-
ing 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 politi-
cal 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 democ-
racy” 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 dif-
ferent 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 meth-
odology (just as it does not refer to a chronology or an ontology), this argu-
mentativeness 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 postco-
lonial studies: textual criticism, historical scholarship, cultural anthropology,
literary theory, translation theory. There has been a rather tight but argumenta-
tive range of approaches to the questions of postcolonial engagement, centring
on issues such as resistance, decolonization and ­the-book-or-­the-barricade, on
532  B. Ashcroft

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-righteous-
ness, which are the signs of philosophical insecurity. This critical conviviality
and recalcitrant border crossing has a strategic dimension that places postcolo-
nial studies at the centre of contemporary developments in knowledge produc-
tion. A transformation in critical scholarship in the humanities has paralleled
the rise of postcolonial studies over the last 20 years. The field of social episte-
mology, or knowledge studies, developed from about the mid-1990s has been
marked by an acknowledgement that older discipline-centred forms of schol-
arship 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 mean-
ings 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 orien-
tations that are products of those conditions (1996, 331–32).
Others might argue that the variety of ways in which the term ‘postcolo-
nial’ 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
  Postcolonialism  533

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 develop-
ment 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 devel-
opment 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 post-
colonial analysis rises to engage issues and experiences which have been out of
the purview of metropolitan theory, and indeed, comes to critique the assump-
tions 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 his-
torical 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 for-
merly 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 tran-
shistorical thing, always present and always in process of dissolution in one
part of the world or another’ (1995, 9). It is clear, however, that postcolonial-
ism 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
534  B. Ashcroft

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 phenom-
enon 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 poli-
tics 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 ecofemi-
nism, 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 indig-
enous 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 dia-
sporic have increasingly folded into the concept of the transnational. The
world has never been more mobile as millions circulate around and beyond
  Postcolonialism  535

the boundaries of the nation, whether as refugees, asylum seekers or migrants.

The concept of boundaries and borders has been crucial in the imperial occu-
pation and domination of indigenous space. And the question of borders and
borderlands has now become a pressing issue in an age of increasingly hysteri-
cal 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 con-
temporary 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 inter-
nally 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 inter-
est in the relation between local communities and global influences. This rela-
tionship is one for which postcolonialism has long been prepared, both from
its involvement in the cultural turn in globalization studies and its long inter-
est 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 eth-
nic 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 cosmo-
politanism. 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
536  B. Ashcroft

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 postco-
lonial 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 interna-
tional 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
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 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 under-
stood 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 educa-
tion are not only the subject of social initiative but comprise an endless collec-
tive 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: jshaw@dmu.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 541

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_25
542  J. J. A. Shaw

Many literary forms and devices have influenced the formation and devel-
opment 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 (for-
merly syntax, rhetoric, and logic)—namely, those spheres of knowledge con-
sidered 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 signifi-
cantly 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 meta-
phors contained within the broader context of literature comprises a produc-
tive 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 con-
tributes 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 humani-
ties, it is dependent on fields of knowledge such as philosophy, rhetoric, and
linguistics to achieve its objectives. A commingling of law and the social sci-
ences 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 con-
nections 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.
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  543

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—pro-
vides 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 com-
prise 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 obedi-
ence to the rule and in turn demonstrate the power of illusion and the persua-
sive 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 per-
spective, 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, deport-
ment, the appropriate expression of emotion, and the repression of certain
movements and gestures, to maximise dramatic impact. A lawyer will care-
fully 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
544  J. J. A. Shaw

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 dra-
mas, 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 inter-
preters 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 creativ-
ity 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 com-
munity, 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,
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  545

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 institu-
tions, 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 signifi-
cantly, 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 soci-
etal context in which law operates to the extent that, ‘no set of legal institu-
tions 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 scrip-
ture… 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 essen-
tial 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; hav-
ing 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 nar-
rative 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 cooper-
ate 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’:
546  J. J. A. Shaw

…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 ‘ten-
sions’ include that between ordinary and legal language; between legal lan-
guage and the specialised discourses of other disciplines; between language
itself and the silent world that lies beneath it; between conflicting but defen-
sible ways of attributing meaning to legal rules and principles; between sub-
stantive 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 particu-
lar 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 emo-
tional 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
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  547

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 intu-
ition 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 phi-
losophy to his reason’, with the ‘divineness of poesy’ springing from the imagi-
nation 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 prem-
ises, poetry and literature are able to illuminate the world by means of imag-
istic 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
548  J. J. A. Shaw

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 dis-
tinctly 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 stat-
utes) 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 aware-
ness of human desires, basic human needs, and the failure of state institutions
to meet those needs. Although the list of recommended legal novels was con-
troversial 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 advo-
cate 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 orna-
mental 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
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  549

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 liter-
ary texts. It also attempts to make legal actors more aware of the effects of
their profession on ordinary individuals. Alternatively, law as literature con-
centrates 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 intro-
duces, 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 insti-
tutions 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 circum-
stances 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 sys-
tematic or theoretical explanations (1973, 243). It is important, even neces-
sary, 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
550  J. J. A. Shaw

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 investi-
gates 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 construct-
ing legal arguments in order to generate the ‘truth’ of law and other phenom-
ena 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 man-
ner 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,
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  551

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 conse-
quence of which has been the increasing marginalisation of other interdisci-
plinary 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 pre-
vailing 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 repre-
sentation 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) construc-
tion 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 aes-
thetic and literary articulations of the juridical, in order to reveal law as a lit-
erature 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
552  J. J. A. Shaw

concept of artifice. Human relationships are arbitrarily created, quantified,

and categorised, life and character are conferred upon formerly lifeless enti-
ties, 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 por-
trayals 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 affili-
ated 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 noth-
ing’. 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, xeno-
phobia, 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
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  553

extent liberty is protected by law. The Comedy of Errors addresses marital part-
nerships, 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 jus-
tice—touching on issues which are relevant to constitutional and administra-
tive 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 cen-
tury 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 over-
stated 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 addi-
tion 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 lan-
guage 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
554  J. J. A. Shaw

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 reflec-
tion, 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 conver-
sations about these narratives are themselves located and scripted in deeper sto-
ries which determine their moral force and epistemological validity. (Hutchinson
1988, 13)

Lawyers are unable to remove themselves, in either ethical or jurispruden-

tial terms, from the stories of others; which suggests the usefulness of inculcat-
ing 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 pub-
lic 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
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  555

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 recip-
rocal 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 contex-
tual 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 character-
istics; not least of all they both have expressive meaning whilst at the same
time are inherently cultural traditions conditioned by institutional conven-
tions, 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 mean-
ing and language work through literature and are, therefore, already embed-
ded 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, there-
fore, 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 law-
yer 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
556  J. J. A. Shaw

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 poten-
tial 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 con-
tain 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 litera-
ture’ 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 long-
standing 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 abstrac-
tions of law, particularly in relation to its empathic response to suffering. As
Robin West has pointed out, the body of narrative, imaginative literature con-
veys 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 inten-
tionally ignores, subjugates, marginalises, or excludes (2008, 4, 5). The appli-
cation 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 for-
malism. In Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, Weisberg pro-
poses 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 perspec-
tive it would seem that law needs, now more than ever, a jurisprudence of
good prose rather than bad principles.
   Law and the Literary Imagination: The Continuing Relevance…  557

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 26
Politics and Literature
Michael Keren

Introduction
In his documentary “Hypernormalization,” Adam Curtis stresses the uncer-
tainty 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 pri-
vate, 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: mkeren@ucalgary.ca

© The Author(s) 2018 561

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_26
562  M. Keren

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 forti-
fied 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 sci-
entist Benjamin Barber, millions of individuals are “Lolling in [their] under-
wear 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 grow-
ing 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,
   Politics and Literature  563

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 embody-
ing them. In “The Archetypes of Literature,” Northrop Frye explored the ori-
gins 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 imagina-
tion 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 polit-
ical 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 para-
doxical in light of the definition of fiction as imaginary literature, but as
Michael Mack has shown, this is not necessarily a paradox: “Literature’s truth-
fulness consists precisely in its consistent inconsistency: in its persistent alert-
ness 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 selec-
tive 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
564  M. Keren

s­eriously about the world and act effectively in it, he writes, “some sort of
simplified map of reality, some theory, concept, model, paradigm, is neces-
sary.”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 inter-
view. 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 preoc-
cupied 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 influ-
ence of the mob.”18
   Politics and Literature  565

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 pro-
tect 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 pro-
tecting 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 clutch-
ing the child in her bosom, which provides a different perspective on the vic-
tory 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.
566  M. Keren

For example: “1900–1905 The first scientific discoveries concerning the struc-
ture 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 gov-
ernment (Kuomintang). Of the 130,000 men of the Red Army, 30,000 sur-
vive.” 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 rec-
ognizable face of horror,” as a lowlife. “For example, in contrast with his mar-
tial 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 inno-
cent, 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 pre-
ordained 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
   Politics and Literature  567

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 por-
traying “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 hunt-
ers, 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)
568  M. Keren

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 move-
ments of the twentieth century. But the Messianic quest exceeds totalitarian-
ism 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
   Politics and Literature  569

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 grue-
some 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 sub-
jects, 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 associ-
ated 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 cal-
culations, 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)
570  M. Keren

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 apart-
ment, 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 inse-
cure 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:
   Politics and Literature  571

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 agree-
ment, 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 nego-
tiations 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 conflict-
ing 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:
572  M. Keren

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 arrange-
ment 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 cine-
matic 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 ini-
tial sense of respect and discipline. When God and reason are absent, brute
force prevails. Although some freedom is allowed in the asylum, life is gov-
erned 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 conse-
quences 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 gov-
ernment 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
   Politics and Literature  573

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, biologi-
cal, 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 instan-
tiation, 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 differ-
ences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simu-
lation, 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 per-
sons whose functioning becomes overly dependent on silicon-based elec-
tronic components, is running rather smoothly. Glued to our digital devices,
much of our daily activity is conducted in cyberspace and many of our inter-
actions with others, be they people or robots, are virtual rather than corpo-
real. These developments are seen by many as a blessing. In Posthuman
Metamorphosis, Bruce Clarke writes that the virtualization of the body is not
574  M. Keren

a form of disembodiment but a re-creation. To him, “the neo-cybernetic post-

human is the human metamorphosed by reconnection to the worldly and
systemic conditions of its evolutionary possibility.”23 Others are less enthusi-
astic. 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 bless-
ing or a curse, it is important to discuss the posthuman condition in separa-
tion 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 con-
sidering 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 irritat-
ing 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 environ-
ments 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
   Politics and Literature  575

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 suffer-
ings 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 horri-
ble 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 acro-
nyms as “LOL,” “G4U,” and so on. As Lawrence Bains writes, “Losing poly-
syllabic 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 com-
munications 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:
576  M. Keren

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 sup-
posedly 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
   Politics and Literature  577

anchor to hold on to when political myths are mistaken for reality. The mar-
ginalization of the value of truth in the global public sphere makes the func-
tion of fiction to disrupt the fictitious seem less paradoxical than the expression
implies.
It is not obvious that fiction contributes to political philosophy. The sepa-
ration of philosophy and literature goes back to Plato who protected the
guardians of the city he devised from legends such as those about gods war-
ring, 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 phi-
losophy 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 con-
scious and unconscious experience of politics as a human, moral, psychologi-
cal 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
578  M. Keren

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-entertain-
ment/tv/reviews/hypernormalisation-review-adam-curtis-bbc-iplayer-a-
masterfully-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-which-
pretty-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.
   Politics and Literature  579

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 experi-

ment 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 signifi-
cantly 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 observa-
tory, 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 experi-
ment 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 uti-
lized as instruments to put them to test. This does not imply that a thought

İ. İnan (*)
Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: iinan@ku.edu.tr

© The Author(s) 2018 581

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_27
582  İ. İnan

experiment always has a priori content and is thus not about physical reality.
Scientists, especially physicists, have made extensive use of thought experi-
ments 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 con-
clude 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 incon-
sistency of the Aristotelian view. This is one way in which a thought experi-
ment 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 phi-
losopher, 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 ficti-
tious 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 chal-
lenge 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 sto-
ries, 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
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  583

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 generaliz-
able. 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 consid-
ered 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 ques-
tions. For instance, a famous thought experiment that has generated a lot of
discussion in contemporary ethics is the so-called Trolley Problem. The origi-
nal 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 posi-
tive. 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 trans-
plant 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
584  İ. İnan

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 pos-
sible 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 philo-
sophical 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 gen-
eralized to various philosophical questions: is there a difference in value
between the internal feeling of satisfying a desire and its actual satisfaction? Is
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  585

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 cham-
ber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct inter-
ference 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 dis-
charges 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 expres-
sion) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. (Schrödinger 1935, tr. Trimmer
1980, 328)

With this thought experiment, Schrödinger wanted to demonstrate the para-

doxical 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 concen-
trate on philosophy. Despite the extensive use of thought experiments in phi-
losophy, 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 inter-
nal 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 “intu-
ition”. The question then arises as to whether an appeal to intuitions is a cred-
ible 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)
586  İ. İnan

In diametrical opposition is Hintikka who holds that the use of thought

experiments in which we appeal to intuitions that have no theoretical justifi-
cation ought to be banned in philosophy:

Unfortunately, the vast majority of appeals to intuition by contemporary phi-

losophers cannot be conceived as controlled thought experiments nor be justi-
fied 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 jour-
nals 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 cul-
tures, ethnicities, age groups, genders, educational backgrounds, and so on; if
it turns out that the majority of the members of one group answer the ques-
tion 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 phi-
losophers 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—champi-
oned 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 demon-
strate 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 emerg-
ing discipline called “experimental philosophy”. This method of doing phi-
losophy 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
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  587

e­ xperiments can in fact be a way of doing “good philosophy”. After all if phi-
losophers had not created thought experiments, then the surveys used by
experimental philosophers could not have taken place. We should then con-
clude 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 sta-
tus, 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 sin-
gle 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 ques-
tions 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 sto-
ries 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 sug-
gest itself.
The philosophical thought experiments I now wish to consider raise ques-
tions 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
588  İ. İnan

an important question, then a thought experiment that raises an unanswer-

able 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 exam-
ples. 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
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  589

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 nor-
mally 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 iden-
tical, 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 per-
son 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
590  İ. İnan

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 concilia-
tion. 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 ”:
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  591

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 some-
one called ‘Paderewski’ who was a Polish nationalist leader and Prime Minister.
Peter is skeptical of the musical abilities of politicians. He concludes that prob-
ably 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 argu-
ment 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
592  İ. İnan

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 conceiv-
ing—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 cor-
rect 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 con-
sidering 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 immedi-
ately raises eyebrows. One reason for this is that philosophers have been reluc-
tant 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 presup-
positions 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
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  593

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 presupposi-
tion, 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 heuris-
tics”. 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 ques-
tion 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
594  İ. İnan

answer. Given that Peter assents to the sentence “Paderewski had musical tal-
ent” 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 dis-
sent 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 attribu-
tion 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” men-
tioned 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 politi-
cians, 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 musi-
cal 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 suffi-
cient 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 sub-
jected 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 con-
clusion, 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:
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  595

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 indi-
cates that the mode of fixing the reference is relevant to our epistemic attitude
toward the sentences expressed. How this relates to the question what ‘proposi-
tions’ are expressed by these sentences, whether these ‘propositions’ are objects
of knowledge and belief, and in general, how to treat names in epistemic con-
texts, 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 break-
down. 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 experi-
ments 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 inter-
nal inconsistencies of our conceptual apparatus is true not just of philosophi-
cal 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:
596  İ. İnan

…the new understanding produced by thought experiments is not an under-

standing 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 com-
ing 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-
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  597

cept should not be sought in the narrow technical jargon of some philosophi-
cal 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 creativ-
ity. 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 exper-
iment 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 ques-
tions that are unanswerable, not because of the limits of our epistemic capac-
ity, 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 con-
cerning 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.
598  İ. İnan

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 socioeco-
nomic 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 phi-
losophy, 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 philo-
sophical 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
   Thought Experiments at the Edge of Conceptual Breakdown  599

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 psy-
chological 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 experi-
ments. 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 litera-

ture 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, char-
acteristic 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 litera-
ture’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: e.j.korthals.altes@rug.nl
H. Meretoja
University of Turku, Turku, Finland
e-mail: hailme@utu.fi

© The Author(s) 2018 601

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_28
602  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

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 vir-
tue”. 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 epistemo-
logical and ethical value: poetry contributes to our spiritual balance by purify-
ing 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 nar-
rative 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 lit-
eracy, 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
   Ethics and Literature  603

(Bourdieu 1996); in a broader sense, it also refers to the idea that artists, writ-
ers, 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 reli-
gion had lost much of its authority, and science was perceived as unable to
answer ethical or existential questions. Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s charac-
terization of the aesthetic sphere as that of disinterestedness, however, auton-
omy 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 vagi-
nal 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 moti-
vations 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 litera-
ture’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.
604  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

Aestheticist and autonomist battles against ethics and old-fashioned

“humanism” also transpired into academic literature and art studies, promi-
nently 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 inter-
pretation: the subjectivity and normativity involved in interpretation were
two deadly sins against scientific rigour. Interpretation, however, came run-
ning back in through the back door of literary or cultural analysis and ideol-
ogy 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 structural-
ism 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 criti-
cism); on the understanding of ethics; on how exactly literature might
be connected to ethics, and whether this holds for all literature or only
   Ethics and Literature  605

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 aes-
thetic 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 dif-
fer. 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 litera-
ture 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 fic-
tion 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 dia-
logical 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 phi-
losophers 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
606  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

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 nar-
rating 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 ade-
quate than abstract, general, moral theories. If we wish to feel, act, and
reflect morally, we need a well-developed imagination, plus moral guide-
lines 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 democ-
racy (Nussbaum 1995, 2010). Unsurprisingly Nussbaum privileges literary
narratives that invite deliberation and empathic identification with charac-
ters 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 moral-
ity (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 char-
acters’ moral development, which she discusses as if they were real people.
   Ethics and Literature  607

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 vicar-
iously 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 experi-
mentation on common experiences, attitudes, and emotional responses”
(Johansen 2002, 29; see Meretoja 2018 for further explorations of the inter-
sections 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 dis-
plays (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 narra-
tive strategies through which the (implied) author would communicate ethi-
cal 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, narra-
tor, 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 char-
acters, 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
608  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

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 representa-
tion of action, dilemmas, and choices, as the motivation and evaluation of
actions involve values and norms, and dilemmas can be described as conflict-
ing 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 repre-
sented 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 sub-
jects of experience and action embedded in social worlds. Bakhtin distin-
guishes 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 tem-
poral 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 poststruc-
turalist 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
   Ethics and Literature  609

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 reflec-
tion (mostly) to the novel. His ethics of reading posits “the experience of plural-
ity, 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 pri-
macy 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 desti-
nation 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 “post-
humanist 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, empa-
thy, 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 decon-
structionist ethical criticism, calling it “theological criticism” (2008, 4, 12),
which tends to elevate the literary text to the status of an absolute Other,
610  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

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—decon-
structive—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 cre-
ated 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
   Ethics and Literature  611

from divergent perspectives, including the dynamics of reading; the condi-

tions 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, lead-
ing 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 jus-
tice 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 histo-
ries 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, politi-
cal, 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 rela-
tionship between literature and ethics.
612  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

Firstly, narrative hermeneutics explores narratives not just as objects of

interpretation, but as interpretative practices in their own right (see the chap-
ter “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 interpreta-
tive 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 inter-
pretative 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 litera-
ture’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 sub-
stantially 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.
   Ethics and Literature  613

Metahermeneutic research seeks to tease out patterns in such interpretative

processes and debates, beyond idiosyncratic differences: conventional path-
ways for reading, interpreting, and evaluating literature, and socially transmit-
ted 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 nor-
mative 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 litera-
ture, 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 litera-
ture 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
614  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

with respect to a text’s genre, which elicits expectations regarding the author’s
adhesion to and responsibility for standpoints expressed in the work (autobi-
ography, docufiction, an engagé or historical novel elicit stronger such expecta-
tions than other fiction genres). In this line, Boltanski and Thévenot’s value
sociology offers fruitful ways to analyse and understand conflicting interpreta-
tions 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 con-
sider 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 pre-
vailing; 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 lit-
erature and ethics; they bring to light the complex socio-semiotic interaction
and negotiation of meanings and values involved, for instance, when we attri-
bute 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 atten-
tion 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,
   Ethics and Literature  615

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 litera-
ture 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 adoles-
cent development) and that literature improves readers’ social abilities, in par-
ticular 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 lim-
ited 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 lit-
erature. Few among the cited researchers distinguish between literary and non-
literary, 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 com-
plexity 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
616  L. Korthals Altes and H. Meretoja

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 dis-
cussions 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 hermeneu-
tic, 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 meth-
ods. 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 seri-
ously, 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,
   Ethics and Literature  617

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 com-
plexity, 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/ethi-
cal, 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 respon-
sibility 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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 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 cur-
rent 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 generi-
cally 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 con-
structed, for Foucault and others, through overlapping discourses, including

A. Kitch (*)
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA
e-mail: akitch@bowdoin.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 623

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_29
624  A. Kitch

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 histo-
ries of labor, money, wages, and rent as the product of different types of imag-
inative writing. By the eighteenth century, both literature and political
economy as fields of knowledge were embedded in discourses of human “pas-
sions” 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 pri-
marily  by economic historians, Smith has more recently been ana-
lyzed 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 intersec-
tions 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 mat-
ters of taste and “judgment” as well as about the forms, structures, and plea-
sures 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.
   Literature and Political Economy  625

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” like-
wise 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 evi-
dent 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 litera-
ture 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
626  A. Kitch

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 dispo-
sition 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 oth-
erwise 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 pop-
ulation. For example, he produces a robust defense of public education, draw-
ing 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 recom-
mendations for systematic arrangements of moral maxims without “soph-
istry” 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 differ-
ently in works of art and fiction, he incorporates the arts of rhetoric as foun-
dational 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 cen-
tury as England moved away from a Christian and corporate model of social
organization based on commutative justice and  toward a society based on
   Literature and Political Economy  627

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 “pomp-
ous 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 polit-
ical philosophy of Hobbes, Smith describes the development of the division
of labor and new forms of commercial society that dislodged aristocratic “van-
ity” 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 gen-
eral  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 philoso-
phy, including John Houghton’s essay on free trade, entitled England’s Great
Happiness (1677), that defend luxury consumption (Slack). We might con-
clude, 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.
628  A. Kitch

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 “lit-
erature,” depended on a notion of aesthetics that joined bodily experience with
abstract ideas, including the idea of the nation (Eagleton). A long and distin-
guished 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 capi-
talism 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 develop-
ment 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 econ-
omy 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 knowl-
edge, one that could also allow, as Clifford Siskin argues, Smith and his fel-
low 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
   Literature and Political Economy  629

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 nation-
hood 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 con-
structed 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 par-
ticular 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 per-
form 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 perfor-
mance of the masque ideologically incorporates the body of the King James
I, who was in attendance, as a guarantee of the ambition of British imperi-
alism (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 pre-
decessor 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
630  A. Kitch

of English merchants engaged in overseas adventures, inverting the predomi-

nantly 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 sub-
jects, 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 prac-
tical 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 estab-
lishment 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 common-
wealth” 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 consti-
tuted, in part, by fictional strategies of representation.
   Literature and Political Economy  631

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,” sixteenth-
century 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 egali-
tarianism 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 pri-
vate 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 dis-

trust of the parasitical labor of goldsmiths and merchants. More’s radical
questioning anticipates a more egalitarian society, even though many contem-
porary European humanists, following Cicero, continued to defend nobility
632  A. Kitch

based on magnificence. As Quentin Skinner argues in his influential reading

of Utopia, the “happiness” of Utopians depends on the “avoidance of mis-
taken 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 politi-
cal 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 dis-
trust 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 chal-
lenge 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 cus-
toms 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 testimo-
nies, 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 rhetori-
cal 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 egali-
tarianism, 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
   Literature and Political Economy  633

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 exam-
ple,” 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 govern-
ment 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 com-
monwealth depended on an accurate understanding of natural human incli-
nations 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
634  A. Kitch

“Fraud, Luxury, and Price” thrive actually produces a healthy society, invert-
ing 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 tradi-
tion 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 repro-
duce 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, con-
trasts 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 clergy-
men, 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 acknowl-
edges the centrality of metaphorical language to economics and situates spe-
cific 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
   Literature and Political Economy  635

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 schol-
ars 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 relation-
ship with living bodies as both literary and economic subjects and
producers.

Body
Mandeville developed his theories of human nature in part through his read-
ing 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 distinc-
tion 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 under-
stand and appreciate how others might see us. This crucially dialectical force
636  A. Kitch

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 “common-
wealth” 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 com-
modities 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
   Literature and Political Economy  637

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 eco-
nomic exertions” (3). Beneath the overt conflict between aesthetics and politi-
cal 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 eco-
nomic 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 repro-
duction 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 fic-
tional 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.
638  A. Kitch

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 mate-
rial 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 emo-
tional changes, which at times appear to be unmotivated, suggesting that cul-
tures 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 con-
sumers, 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 con-
ditions 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 sci-
ence 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 politi-
cal 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
   Literature and Political Economy  639

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 cel-
ebrated 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 per-
suasion. 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 pro-
cess 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 capital-
ism. 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 econ-
omy 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
640  A. Kitch

“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 stud-
ies of the relationship between literature and political economy should con-
tinue 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” cat-
egory 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 his-
tory: 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.
   Literature and Political Economy  641

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.”

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 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, imag-
ery, 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, fur-
thermore, is it primarily a question of how religion makes use of literary mate-
rials 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 reli-
gion’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 struc-
ture 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 ques-
tions 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 645

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_30
646  S. Wolosky

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 struc-
tures, 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 experi-
ence. 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 lit-
erature 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 dis-
tant 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 lit-
erature open figural dimensions extending immediate and concrete experi-
ence 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 nar-
rower 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
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  647

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 reli-
gious 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 subse-
quent 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 defi-
nitions of religion emphasize not this multiple dimensionality, but metaphysi-
cal 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 loca-
tions 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 assump-
tion 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-
648  S. Wolosky

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 exe-
getical 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 under-
standing 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
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  649

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 mod-
ern 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 prac-
tice 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 eter-
nal 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
650  S. Wolosky

the future will close and time will resolve in eternity. At this anagogic, apoca-
lyptic finale, the eternal design revealed in Christ will come to final accom-
plishment, 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 myth-
ological 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 resur-
rection, 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 distinc-
tions between allegory and other forms of typological representation. The his-
torical 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 tropol-
ogy. 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 contin-
ues 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
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  651

without hindrance. There, figural patterns extend through religion and litera-
ture 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 estab-
lish the Kingdom of God. The force of typological structure emerges in literary
form in the poetry of Edward Taylor, whose work was unknown until discov-
ered 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 pri-
orities shift between what was literal and what was figural and what was histori-
cal and what was ultimate and eternal (Preus 1969). What emerges, as with
other aspects of early modernity, is a reassessment and reaffirmation of historic-
ity 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 inte-
rior spirituality and the afterworld becomes in the Puritan venture also an exte-
rior 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 subse-
quent 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 typol-
ogy 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).
652  S. Wolosky

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 figura-
tion, 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 sig-
nified 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 conse-
quence 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 imag-
ined 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
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  653

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 pris-
matic 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 exe-
getical practices to the frameworks in which they took place and the presup-
positions they enacted. This shift from “what truths do we know” to “how do
we interpret” already recasts emphasis from doctrine to self-reflective proce-
dure. 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 dis-
missed religious truth claims and placed them on a par with literary figura-
tion, 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 experi-
ments 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 con-
tinue 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
654  S. Wolosky

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 reli-
gious 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, calibra-
tion 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 signi-
fication as referring to a pre-established and fixed signified to horizontal pro-
cessions 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” histori-
cal. Whitman inscribes through his text the land and people, events and his-
tory 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 intercon-
nection 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.”
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  655

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 newspa-
pers, 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 per-
son 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.
656  S. Wolosky

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 sub-
stitute 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 reconsti-
tuting, 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 deploy-
ment of positions or implications marked out in his writings: doorways
Nietzsche opens into avenues that continue to penetrate and define contem-
porary religion, literature, philosophy, and ethics.
The first trend in Nietzsche is critique. He sets out to implode Western meta-
physical 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 hetero-
geneous 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
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  657

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 prin-
ciple, 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 metaphys-
ics leaves nothing but nihilistic domination with no basis for ethical distinc-
tions. 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 col-
lapse. 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 recon-
struction. 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):
658  S. Wolosky

For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordi-
nary 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, how-
ever 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 rec-
onciliation” as deriving in art’s “imposing a credible order upon ordinary real-
ity, 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 mod-
ernists 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 meta-
physical, 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.
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  659

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 aestheti-
cist 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 inter-
pretations 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, interpreta-
tion moves discussion from interior perception to the mediated, negotiated
arena of language. Here Nietzsche points forward to twentieth-century lan-
guage philosophy. Interpretation emerges as a negotiation among and within
signifiers—including the humans who do the interpreting, themselves signi-
fiers 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 inter-
pretative signifiers, just as art is.

Negative Theologies of the Sign

One response to the collapse of metaphysics is nihilistic power. One is aes-
thetic 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, eter-
nal 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
660  S. Wolosky

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 suppos-
edly 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 reli-
gious 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 refer-

ence, unleashing a subjectivism disconnected to any world beyond itself. This
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  661

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 pro-
poses 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, phenom-
enal, 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, leav-
ing the orders of words to be incessantly recreated. Yet, there are other, less
662  S. Wolosky

secular and aesthetic, but post-modern paths that pursue notions of transcen-
dence in ways, however, that do not devalue temporal and conditional experi-
ence. 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 nega-
tive theology is suggested by Emmanuel Levinas in his own writings, in ways
that are becoming increasingly recognized and explored. Levinas offers a sys-
tematic 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 non-
ontological transcendence, cannot enter into or ground typological represen-
tations, 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 safeguard-
ing 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 onto-
logical 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 nega-
tive theological traces of “post-modern” art and religion. A committed
Presbyterian growing up in a family of ministers, Moore’s art, like her reli-
gion, 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.
   Religion and Literature: Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Post-Modern…  663

Her craft represents linguistic particulars, part-rhyming in resistance to com-

plete 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 unify-
ing 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 heteroge-
neity, 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 litera-
ture through metaphysical structures.
664  S. Wolosky

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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-rela-
tional? In other words, is there a truth that is independent from those who recog-
nize 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 cap-
tivated 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: michael.mack@durham.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 665

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_31
666  M. Mack

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 miscar-
ried. 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 pos-
sess—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 destina-
tion, 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
   Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue  667

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 fic-
tion. 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 oper-
ates in the poem in an adjectival way. “Sky-violent” could be a possible trans-
lation 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 transcen-
dence 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 encoun-
ters, while shedding any religious-spiritual connotations. According to Buber,
reality and truth are polyvalent, denoting at once the mundane and the
668  M. Mack

­ 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 under-
standing 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 pro-
duction (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.
   Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue  669

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 charac-
teristics 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
670  M. Mack

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 distinc-
tion between melancholia and mourning only then to contaminate these sepa-
rate 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 rem-
iniscent 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 contami-
nation 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 extermi-
nation 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 pre-
pared for racist and genocidal violence (by claiming that Jews are not human
   Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue  671

but bacteria to be exterminated). Poetry here renders inoperative the declara-

tive 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 “set-
ting 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, poison-
ous 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 blas-
pheme 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
672  M. Mack

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 sand-
art, 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 noth-
ingness 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 break-
down. The lines drift away, the signifier is excessive to the point that it is dif-
ficult 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 dedi-
cated 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 enti-
tled “Mandorla” (Inside the almond):
   Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue  673

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 transcen-
dence 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 transcen-
dence. 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 read-
ing 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
674  M. Mack

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 noth-
ingness. 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 sub-
stances (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 para-
doxically 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 plat-
form 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 writ-
ings 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 konservie-
renden 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
   Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue  675

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 absur-
dity which denotes the absence of sense and meaning? The proclamation
“Long live the King!” renders inoperative the meaning of revolutionary vio-
lence. 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 pur-
ported 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 fur-
thered 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 lan-
guage’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 con-
cepts as language’s propensity to establish fictions that then turn real in
the form of revolutionary or counter-revolutionary politics and its accom-
panying forms of discrimination and violence. Absurdity reduces meaning
to nothingness and thereby gives birth to as well as witnesses true human-
ity 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.
676  M. Mack

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 phi-
losophers 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).
   Poetry’s Truth of Dialogue  677

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.

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 Author Index1

A Aristotle, 3, 5, 6, 11–14, 16, 24, 25,

Achilles, 31, 245, 582 44, 101, 103, 104, 111, 117n7,
Adeimantus, 187, 434, 435 167, 190–193, 198, 204, 205,
Adorno, Theodor W., 8, 9, 14, 64 214, 215, 218n2, 218n7, 222,
Aeneas, 8, 9, 14, 64–69, 72, 223, 241, 243, 245, 248, 256,
74n11–14, 76n27, 100, 112, 264, 272, 276, 277, 283n9, 315,
117n5, 119n39, 242, 243, 378, 434, 436, 437, 440, 444,
257–259, 567 445, 447, 448, 458, 462n4, 582,
Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 513n22, 638 602, 606, 636, 637, 675
Allende, Isabel, 270 Armstrong, Nancy, 511n15
Althusser, Louis, 408, 520, 610 Arnold, Matthew, 167, 169–171, 400,
Amossy, Ruth, 613 657
Amrozowicz, Michael C., 640n6 Aron, Arthur, 179
Anacker, Heinrich, 306 Ashton, Jennifer, 237n8, 238
Anderson, Benedict, 628 Athena, 154, 272, 283n10, 381
Anderson, James C., 250, 309 Atwan, Robert, 154, 272, 283n10, 381
Annas, Julia, 187, 199n5 Atwood, Margaret, 543
Antigone, 209 Auerbach, Erich, 14, 17n8, 243, 245,
Anzieu, Didier, 511n17 257–259, 648, 649
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 660, 675 Auerbach, Nina, 443n33
Archer, Isabel, 433 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 3, 18, 42
Ariosto, Lodovico, 10, 276 Auschwitz, 128, 242, 411, 412, 669

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 739

B. Stocker, M. Mack (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1
740  Author Index
Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 190, 192, 193
Avgousti, Andreas, 186, 199n3
B Bible, 18, 33, 34, 341, 521, 648, 654,
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
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

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 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3, 6, 24, 42,
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
  Author Index  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
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 284n13, 284n14, 333n5
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,
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

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 Frosh, Stephen, 496
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
  Author Index  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
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

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
  Author Index  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 Korthals Altes, Liesbeth, 358, 604,
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
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

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 Meizoz, Jérôme, 613
Macé, Marielle, 346
Macfarland, Joseph C., 191, 193,
199n7, 200n8
Machery, Edouard, 586, 599n8
  Author Index  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
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 Ouellette, Fernand, 70, 75n20
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
Ozick, Cynthia, 75n20, 76n24
Ozon, François, 306
   Author Index  749

P Preus, James, 650, 651

Palmer, Richard E., 359n13 Priest, Graham, 396, 397
Parfit, Derek, 589, 590 Prometheus, 380–382
Parsons, Terence, 398, 399 Prospero, 552, 553
Pascal, Blaise, 4, 7, 8, 16, 143, 145, Protagoras, 50, 380, 381
146 Pseudo-Dionysus, 660
Pascal, Roy, 137, 139 Puttenham, George, 630
Pater, Walter, 62, 624 Pygmalion, 669
Paul, Elliot Samuel, 116n2
Pavel, Thomas G., 267, 268, 271,
283n7, 283n8, 284n11, 285n19, Q
319 Quine,Willard Van Orman, 230, 392,
Peacock, Thomas Love, 118n17 393, 593
Penley, Constance, 474 Quint, David, 285n18
Pérez Galdos, Benito, 279
Perry, Ben Edwin, 282n2
Perry, Ralph Barton, 117n3 R
Peterson, Linda H., 479 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 508n1
Pettersson, Anders, 307 Rabinowitz, Peter J., 607, 608
Phalereus, Demetrius, 588 Rabkin, Gerald, 218n6
Phelan, James, 607, 608 Radford, Colin, 310
Phillips, John, 391 Radway, Janice A., 283n9
Phillipson, Nicholas, 451 Ramundo, Ida, 565
Philo, 660 Rancière, Jacques, 218n8, 412–419,
Phoenix, Ann, 611 424n7–424n10, 424n13,
Pihas, Gabriel, 193 424n14, 434–440
Pirandello, Luigi, 399 Rank, Otto, 177, 510n9
Plath, Sylvia, 660 Rapaport, William J., 399
Plato, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11–13, 16–19, 24, 31, Raphael, D.D., 632
32, 35, 42–44, 54–56, 57n7, 67, Raspa, Venanzio, 403n5
73n4, 92, 99–103, 111, 117n7, Rawls, John, 31, 572
185–191, 193, 199, 222, 233, Raymond, Janice G., 478, 484n45
242, 244, 245, 315, 381, 429, Read, Rupert, 195, 196, 199, 200n13
434–440, 544, 564, 577, 582, Reardon, Bryan P., 282n2
602, 632, 656, 661, 662, 675 Recanati, François, 392
Pleydell, Paulus, 555 Redman, Deborah A., 640n9
Plotinus, 660 Reed, Cory, 333n15
Plutarch, 73n4, 124, 588 Reeve, Clara, 269
Pöhlmann, Horst Georg, 194 Reeve, Michael, 283n9
Poirot, Hercule, 390, 392, 396, 397 Reginster, Bernard, 155, 156
Pollock, Benjamin, 118n26 Reid, Thomas, 448, 453, 455, 463n12,
Posner, Richard, 310, 547 463n13
Pound, Ezra, 658 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 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 400
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
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

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
  Author Index  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 West, Martin Lichfield, 143
Uygur, Nermi, 598n6
V Whitman, Walt, 30, 546, 653–655
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
Wheeler, Kathleen, 246, 247
White, Hayden, 243, 257
Whitman, Cedric H., 282n1
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

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 Zunshine, Lisa, 321
Xenophon, 42, 315
  Author Index  753
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
Zweig, Stefan, 133
 Subject Index1
A 368, 407–425, 430, 439–440,
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,
 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
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
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

B 285n19, 315, 324, 521, 626,
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 Communication, 2, 6, 21, 88, 90–91,
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,
  Subject Index  757
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
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

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 dialectical, 106, 199, 458, 549, 635,
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
  Subject Index  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
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 189, 225, 235, 301, 303, 306,
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,
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,

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
  Subject Index  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 metafictional, 264, 269, 273,
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
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

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 623–625, 628, 630, 631, 635,
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,
  Subject Index  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,
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 609, 645–647, 649–651, 655,
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,
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

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,
  Subject Index  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 199n4, 203, 204, 206, 216, 223,
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,
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,

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
  Subject Index  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,

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,
  Subject Index  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 647, 656–658, 661
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,
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,

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,
  Subject Index  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,

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
  Subject Index  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,

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
  Subject Index  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,

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
  Subject Index  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

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 284n11, 284n12, 284n15,
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 263, 265, 268, 269, 298, 302,
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,
  Subject Index  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,
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,
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