Fictional Characters, Real Problems

Fictional Characters,
Real Problems
The Search for Ethical Content
in Literature

EDITED BY

Garry L. Hagberg

1
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Notes on the Contributors ix

Introduction: Five Ethical Aspects of Literature 1

Garry L. Hagberg

Part I. Ways of Reading for Ethical Content

1. Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth—Rethinking Ethics by Reading
Literature 15
Nora Hämäläinen
2. Caring about Characters 31
Eileen John
3. Hamlet and the Problem of Moral Agency 47
Robert B. Pierce

Part II. Matters of Character

4. Othello’s Paradox: The Place of Character in Literary Experience 59
Garry L. Hagberg
5. Character, Social Information, and the Challenge of Psychology 83
Noël Carroll
6. Emma’s Extravagance: Jane Austen and the Character–Situation
Debate 102
Valerie Wainwright

Part III. Literature, Subjectivity, and Poetic Vision

7. The Question of Truth in Literature: Die poetische Auffassung
der Welt 119
Richard Eldridge
8. The Moral Relevance of Literature and the Limits of Argument:
Lessons from Heidegger, Aristotle, and Coetzee 139
J. Jeremy Wisnewski
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

9. An Endless Person: Heidegger, Breton, and Nadja at the Limits

of Language 153
Jonathan Strauss

Part IV. Language, Dialogical Identity, and

Self-Understanding
10. The Dialogic Self in Hamlet: On How Dramatic Form Transforms
Philosophical Inquiry 175
Anthony Gash
11. “The Power of Conversation”: Jane Austen’s Persuasion
and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics 194
Richard Dawson
12. Quartet: Wallace’s Wittgenstein, Moran’s Amis 209
Stephen Mulhall

Part V. Patterns and Possibilities of Moral Growth

13. Moral Development in Pride and Prejudice 237
Alan H. Goldman
14. The Breadth of Moral Character 254
Daniel Brudney
15. Learning To Be Good (or Bad) in (or Through) Literature 282
Mitchell S. Green

Part VI. Historical Genealogies of Moral-Aesthetic Concepts

16. In Praise of Aristotle’s Poetics 305
Humberto Brito
17. Shaftesbury as Virtuoso: Or, the Birth of Aesthetics
Out of a Spirit of Civility 325
Martin Donougho
18. Fate, Philology, Freud 340
Jules Brody

Bibliography 367
Index 383
Acknowledgments

Although it would be almost impossible now to recount fully, in the span of time
stretching from the initial idea of this project through to its publication, I have
had many stimulating conversations and exchanges with the contributors. With-
out these helpful interactions this collection would not be what it is and could not
have evolved and matured as it has. I am also grateful to the two anonymous
readers (one of whom turned out to be the insightful John Gibson) who quickly
saw the point of a volume of this widely exploratory and yet closely investigative
kind; their support and discerning advice were crucial to its development. Special
thanks to Dale Jacquette, who, in an earlier exchange on matters related to the
topics of this volume, used the phrase “fictional characters and their real ethical
problems”; I knew immediately that he had succinctly captured the fundamental
theme of this volume and that I would want to put these words to work in the title
of this undertaking.
Peter Momtchiloff and Eleanor Collins of Oxford University Press have
provided this project with the kind of sustained and comprehending support
that any author or editor feels so very fortunate to receive. We all remain grateful
for the meticulous copyediting of Sarah Cheeseman, and the OUP production
department has shown once again why they have the reputation that they do.
Thanks also to Penguin Random House for permission to use the line from J.M.
Coetzee as the epigraph in Chapter 1, and for the epigraphs in Chapter 14 thanks
to the Tanner Lectures for permission to use the line from Barbara Herman
(originally delivered as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford
University) and to Gale, a part of Cengage Learning Inc. for permission to use the
line from Alistair Duckworth.
I offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved for the privilege to play the
role of conductor in this cooperative, spirited, and creative ensemble.
Notes on the Contributors

HUMBERTO BRITO is an FCT Post-doctoral Fellow of the Institute for the Philoso-
phy of Language at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and assistant professor of
Literary Studies at the same university. In recent years he was a visiting professor
at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Stanford University, and the University of
Chicago. He directs the Philosophy and Literature Network, a joint venture of the
Institute for the Philosophy of Language and the Program in Literary Theory at
Universidade de Lisboa. His interests include Aristotle’s Poetics, philosophy of
action and philosophy of art, and issues of ethics that arise in literary works and
in literary theory.
JULES BRODY, at the time of his retirement in 1988, was Professor of French and
Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard University. He has
held visiting professorships at the Sorbonne, Paris VII, Stanford, the University of
Illinois, and the University of Montreal. Among his scholarly interests and fields
of publication are Greek tragedy, Michel de Montaigne, the Duc de Saint-Simon,
Jean Giraudoux, Albert Camus, psychoanalytic approaches to literature, and the
major writers of the French classical period.
DANIEL BRUDNEY is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and is on
the faculty of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of
Chicago Hospitals. He writes and teaches in political philosophy, philosophy and
literature, and bioethics. He is the author of Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy
(1998). His recent publications include “Two Differences Between Law and
Literature,” in Martha Nussbaum and Richard Strier, eds, Shakespeare and the
Law (University of Chicago Press, 2013); “Nineteenth Century Ideals: Self-
Culture and the Religion of Humanity,” in Allen W. Wood and Songsuk Susan
Hahn, eds, The Cambridge History of 19th Century Philosophy (2012); “Produ-
cing for Others,” in C. Zurn and H. Schmidt am Busch, eds, The Philosophy of
Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2010), and “Styles of Self-
Absorption,” in G. Hagberg and W. Jost, eds, The Blackwell Companion to
Philosophy of Literature (2010). He is Associate Editor of Theoretical Medicine
and Bioethics.
NOËL CARROLL is a Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Program at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a past president of the
x NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

American Society for Aesthetics and a Guggenheim Fellow. The most recent of
his numerous books are On Criticism, Art in Three Dimensions, and Humour:
A Very Short Introduction. He has also worked as a journalist and as a script-
writer for five documentaries.
RICHARD DAWSON has held lecturing positions in economics, in politics, and in
law. His most recent work is a law doctoral dissertation written at the University
of Canterbury, New Zealand on the “law-is-literature” pioneer James Boyd
White. This work in (and out of) law is continuous with his economics doctoral
dissertation, which was published under the title The Treaty of Waitangi and the
Control of Language. He has published various essays on sovereignty-talk, all of
which center on the topic of justice. He is currently completing a work that
defines a discipline-integrating activity called “transformative constitutionalism.”
MARTIN DONOUGHO teaches philosophy (now as Emeritus Professor) and com-
parative literature at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He has pub-
lished widely on the philosophy of art and on European philosophy. Forthcoming
with Oxford is a translation of Hegel’s 1823 Lectures on the Philosophy of Art.
His most recent article is “‘Melt earth to sea’: The New World of Terrence
Malick.” Current projects include a genealogy of the discourse on art, and a
study of Hegel’s aesthetics of “individuality.”
RICHARD ELDRIDGE is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy
at Swarthmore College. He has recently held visiting positions at Brooklyn
College and the University of Freiburg, where he was an External Senior Fellow
in the Freiburg Research Institute for Advanced Studies. His most recent book is
Literature, Life, and Modernity (2008); and he is the editor, most recently, of The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (2009) and, with Bernard Rhie, of
Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (2011).
ANTHONY GASH is Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama, and
Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he teaches and researches
literature in many interdisciplinary contexts. His interest in the relationship
between poetry, painting, and music led to his engagement with aesthetics and
with the theatre as an integrative art form as well as a unique one. He has written
on ‘word and image’ in the theatre and on the relationship between theatre and
ritual, and is currently researching the common ground between philosophy
and poetry, as illustrated by Plato, when regarded as a poetic philosopher, and
Shakespeare as a philosophical poet. He founded UEA’s highly regarded pro-
grammes in Drama and Theatre Directing and continues to serve as Director of
them. He has recently been working with a group of surgeons, lawyers,
 NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS xi

philosophers, and theologians on theory and practice in professional training, at

the Papay Westray Convivium.
ALAN H. GOLDMAN is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities at the
College of William & Mary. He is the author of eight books, the most recent being
Aesthetic Value, Practical Rules, and Reasons from Within, and Philosophy and
the Novel (Oxford University Press, 2013).
MITCHELL S. GREEN is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut,
and was for some years the NEH/Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching
Professor at the University of Virginia. His research is in the philosophy of
language, aesthetics, and the philosophy of mind. Major publications include
Self-Expression (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Moore’s Paradox (co-editor).
He has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation.
He is currently working on empathy, the epistemic value of literature, and the
evolution of language.
GARRY L. HAGBERG is the James H. Ottaway, Jr. Professor of Philosophy and
Aesthetics at Bard College, and has in recent years also held a Chair in the School
of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the
intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include
Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge,
and Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory. His most
recent publications include Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobio-
graphical Consciousness and an edited collection, Art and Ethical Criticism,
and, as co-editor, A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. He is Editor of
the journal Philosophy and Literature, and is presently writing a new book on the
contribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility,
Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition
of Selfhood.
NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN is post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in philosophy at the
University of Helsinki, and former Editor-in-Chief of the Helsinki-based cultural
weekly Ny Tid. She has written about ethics, literature, and the nature of
moral theory.
EILEEN JOHN is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.
She has written on art and knowledge, on moral and aesthetic value, and has a
special interest in philosophical questions arising from literature. She is co-editor
of an anthology, Philosophy and Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings.
xii NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

STEPHEN MULHALL is Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of New College,

Oxford. He has recently worked extensively on the relations between philosophy
and the arts, with particular reference to film and literature. Among the most
recent of his numerous books are The Self and Its Shadows (Oxford University
Press, 2013) and The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality
in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2009).
ROBERT B. PIERCE is Emeritus Professor of English at Oberlin College in Ohio,
USA, having taught there for forty years until his retirement in 2004. He has
published a book on Shakespeare’s history plays and articles on Shakespeare, Early
Modern topics, literary theory, the intersection of literature and philosophy, and
various related subjects. His most recent publications include a short book on
Richard Wilbur’s hymn text, “A stable-lamp is lighted.”
JONATHAN STRAUSS is Professor of French at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He
is the author of Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel, and the Modern Self (Stanford,
1998), and Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century
Paris (Fordham University Press, 2012). He has recently completed Private Lives/
Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality (Fordham, 2013).
VALERIE WAINWRIGHT teaches English literature at the University of Florence. She
has published essays on aspects of the art and history of the Italian Renaissance,
and articles on Defoe, Austen, and George Eliot, amongst other authors. Her
most recent publications include Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to
Forster (Ashgate, 2007) and attributions to the oeuvre of Tobias Smollett (Notes
and Queries, 2010). At present she is engaged on a project entitled Evaluating the
Enlightenment: Rhetoric and Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Reviews.
J. JEREMY WISNEWSKI is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hartwick
College. He has written widely on issues in moral philosophy, applied ethics,
and phenomenology. His books include Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry
(Continuum, 2007), The Politics of Agency (Ashgate, 2008), and Understanding
Torture (EUP, 2010). He is co-editor, with Mark Sanders, of Ethics and Phenomenology
(Lexington, 2012), and Editor of the Review Journal of Political Philosophy. He has also
edited several books in Blackwell’s Philosophy and Pop Culture series.
 Introduction: Five Ethical
Aspects of Literature
Garry L. Hagberg

If, to consider for a moment a frightening thought, we were to suddenly lose all of
literature, we would, as everyone knows, lose a great deal more—indeed pro-
foundly more—than mere opportunities for entertainment or diversion. What we
would lose would be of both a magnitude and a kind that would be impossible to
state briefly; the fact that any such attempt to encapsulate the content of the loss
would of necessity fail is itself a measure of the depth and complexity of literature.
One set of aspects of this complex and expansive artform makes up literature’s
ethical dimension, and it is that dimension that the chapters presented
here explore.
Increasingly in recent years there have been helpful and illuminating discus-
sions of the relation between literature and moral value, and a number of these
have put forward general positions, often labeled with “isms”—moralism (of
strong, moderate, or weak varieties), autonomism, aestheticism (from a some-
what earlier era), etc.—concluding that ethical elements can, or cannot, be
factored into aesthetic evaluation, that ethical values always, sometimes, or
never trump aesthetic ones, that a work can be at one and the same time an
aesthetic triumph and yet warrant moral condemnation, and so forth. Although
this volume is intended to contribute to the discussion, the undertaking here is
somewhat different, and it proceeds with a different kind of philosophical
aspiration: the project is to investigate a number of literary and philosophical
cases—conceptually telling ones—that bring to light both the intricacy and the
interwoven character of ethical–aesthetic relations and how they manifest them-
selves in literary art.
Thus what this collection is designed to deliver might better be expressed in
ocular terms than in strictly argumentative ones: the eighteen chapters working
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

together here can help provide, it is hoped, not a conclusion in the form of an
“ism”, but rather a vision or way of seeing ethical considerations as they are
already inextricably intertwined, or indissolubly united with, multiple and
diverse forms of literary expression. And as such, this shows one way in which
literature is on a large scale mimetic: ethical considerations in life are not (despite
the ways some traditions in philosophy have spoken of them) a separate domain
unto themselves only contingently connected to, or related to (as one generic
kind of thing to another generic kind of thing), the rest of the facts of life. Rightly
understood, ethical perception is not added, as a dispensable adjunct, to any more
ontologically basic or physicalistic perception. As a close study of the intricacies
of particular literary and philosophical cases will show, the binding of aesthetics
to ethics does not join at a single seam. Philosophical authors from numerous
traditions, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and
more recently Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, and others
(including some contributors to this collection, notably Richard Eldridge, Alan
Goldman, and Stephen Mulhall), have said this in a mosaic of ways, and a large
number of literary authors have shown it with equal variety.
So to proceed with the ocular approach, this collection investigates five fun-
damental aspects of the ethical content of literature and literary experience, put
together so as to afford a complex and finely particularized vision of ethical
content.
In Part I, Ways of Reading for Ethical Content, we begin by looking in some
detail into a number of the ways in which we might approach a literary text in
order to give definition to its ethical content. Nora Hämäläinen opens the
conversation by putting forward some suggestions concerning how one might
best organize and categorize one’s impressions from the past few decades of
literary readings in Anglo-American moral philosophy. Hämäläinen identifies
and expounds three contemporary ways of using narrative literature for the
purposes of moral philosophy: what she calls a thin use, as in Patricia
Greenspan’s discussion of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice; a thick use, as in
Martha Nussbaum’s discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone; and an open-ended use,
as in Cora Diamond’s discussion of J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. Where
the thin use of literature hardly affects the concerns and priorities of moral
philosophical thinking (i.e., where literature is used as illustrations or examples
of ethical issues that are fully formed prior to those examples), the thick use has a
kind of content sufficient to contribute to the very formation of those ethical
issues, and the power to change our understanding of them. And then the
open-ended use marks, Hämäläinen suggests, a radical break with standard or
embedded philosophical assumptions concerning the proper nature of moral
 INTRODUCTION : FIVE ETHICAL ASPECTS 

philosophical work. The discussion of these three routes into ethical literature
will emerge time and again throughout this collection.
With three ways of undertaking the search for ethical content in clear view,
one may reasonably want to ask how and why it is that we so naturally seem to
take up a concern for literary characters. Eileen John begins an answer with the
observation that as engaged readers we clearly do care about them, and it is
tempting, John says, to say that we care about fictional characters as people. Or,
one might say, almost as people. The proposal John develops, taking caring to rest
on having interests at stake, is that we care about characters as representations
(where this is much more than the fairly simple point it may initially seem). We
have, John observes, strong interests in representational activity—as a fact of our
natural history we just are beings for whom representing and being represented
are centrally important. Fictional characters, John suggests, share with us a
dependence on representational activity, and they provide a forum for a special
form of rather ambitious representation (i.e., representation so detailed and
imaginatively engaging that we genuinely care about the characters within that
represented world). John’s account, as she develops it, argues for a better inte-
gration of the “internal” and “external” perspectives on fictional characters, that
is, a better integration of what are too often taken as divergent and incompatible
points of view: (1) the characters as witnessed from the outside, and (2) the
reader’s vicarious identification with, and thus imaginative entry into the life of,
the character from the inside.
The third chapter in this introductory section turns the spotlight on a fact that
Robert B. Pierce takes as foundational to any investigation of the relations
between ethics and literature: Most of us, most of the time, think of human
beings—including literary characters—as ethically responsible. Though critics
often find in Hamlet a stance on the reality and nature of human choice shown
within Hamlet individually but interpreted as a universal for humanity in general,
the play in fact dramatizes only the very particular, contextually situated and
nuanced experiences that can then inspire our more generalized philosophical
views about freedom, determinism, and ethical responsibility. As Pierce shows, if
Hamlet is the hero as intellectual, that is not because he arrives at an overarching
or generalized truth about human freedom, nor is he a hero because he illustrates
that truth within himself as a moral–intellectual example. Rather, he sees with
circumstantially engaged intelligence and a refined acuity of feeling what we all
encounter, that is, the particular morally intricate experiences that, as problems,
make us seek theories telling us both what to do and why we act as we do.
In Part II, Matters of Character, questions of ethical character, its value, and its
importance to human understanding are brought to the surface for closer
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

examination as those questions intersect with literary experience. Beginning with

a reconsideration of Aristotle’s conception of ethical character, Garry L. Hagberg
investigates the significance of intellectual virtue for the understanding and
appreciation of moral character, the moral importance of consistency over time
and the way we “connect the dots” of life in order to grasp that life’s moral
content, and the Aristotelian complexities found within the connections between
what a person does and what a person is. Othello is a play that closely studies the
problem of the distinction between moral appearance and moral reality (in the
character of Iago and the perception of him by those around him), and it is a play
in which we quickly come to care (connecting to issues discussed in Part I) about
the difference. Hagberg proceeds to suggest a connection between our more
general or underlying concern for truth and truthfulness and our caring about
the moral appearance/reality distinction particularly and ethical perception more
generally. And the concern for truth and truthfulness motivates and explains our
sense of the importance of ethical reflection and reflectiveness as an attribute.
Hagberg then proceeds to a discussion of the way in which we can see life through
the lens of literature, closing his chapter with a way of seeing Othello as a
character who, as a tragic self irreparably broken by his deeds, can no longer be
who he is and a discussion of the significance of this for our understanding of
ethical character.
But then what can we say about the valuable knowledge we gain from the close
study of literary characters, and what challenges has the very idea of character
recently faced? Noël Carroll begins his chapter with a reconsideration of the long-
established view of the nature of fictional characters (a view that has, as Carroll
suggests, been standard at least since Aristotle); that view, most simply stated, holds
that fictional characters in the imaginative world are sources of social information
(to use a generic term to stand for a vast swath of human knowledge) in our real
world. But a rapidly emerging school of psychology, called situationism, challenges
the explanatory value of character as such (thereby also raising a question about the
reliability of the fictional character construct in the first place—that is, is character
just a kind of myth or projection in life that we then also project onto literature, and
if so, what does this say about that alleged social information?). Carroll, through an
examination of the novel and film The Big Country, charts one convincing way in
which it remains possible for us as ethically engaged readers to derive social
information from fictional characters, despite even the strongest implications of
situationism. Literature’s value, on this score, if somewhat surprisingly, remains
intact, regardless of the outcome of the real-character debate.
This debate concerning whether a person is the possessor of an abiding
character across time and circumstance, versus a perennially changeable
 INTRODUCTION : FIVE ETHICAL ASPECTS 

individual where the circumstances of the situation and its flux determine the
changes, is taken up by Valerie Wainwright. Also descending into the details of
Jane Austen to cast light on the issue, she notes that hostile critics have
attributed Emma’s moral infractions, specifically her lack of respect for Miss
Bates and Jane Fairfax, to character defects, while enthusiasts have tended to
leave the question of why she behaves inappropriately untouched. Wainwright
shows that the distinct perspectives that emerge from the current character-
versus-situation debate in fact enable us to re-examine Austen’s intricate delin-
eation of her heroine’s conduct. Austen’s text, Wainwright argues, is not
fundamentally interested in virtues or vices. Rather, it is a novel that invites
us to identify the variety of different factors—cognitive, motivational, disposi-
tional, and situation-specific—which together contribute to the extravagant or
unreasonable behavior of Austen’s agreeable extrovert. Given these combined
influences that we are enabled to see after a synthesis of only seemingly
incompatible perspectives, just what Emma can and should modify is, in an
ethically telling fashion, limited. These forces, taken together as Wainwright
identifies them, influence ethical and unethical action, and we see them in sharp
focus in Austen’s novel.
Part III, Literature, Subjectivity, and Poetic Vision, focuses upon and further
develops the theme of moral vision as it is already in play from Part II, but now
scrutinizing it as its own subject. Richard Eldridge starts with the larger question
of truth in literature, noting that this question has several interrelated senses: can
literature present (significant) truths at all?; what does its presentation of truths
(if it exists) have to do with its manner of presentation (with literary language)?;
and is the presentation of truth a central aim of literary art? Eldridge begins by
surveying and criticizing a variety of Fregean and neo-Fregean views (Frege,
Lamarque and Olsen, Walton) that reject the very possibility of literary truth and
a variety of anti-Fregean views (Goodman, Heidegger) that endorse it. But those
endorsements, he suggests, are given in misleading terms that do not say enough
about literary language and its grip on specific actualities. To move beyond this,
Eldridge argues that Hegel, in his remarks on literary imagination in his Lectures
on Fine Art, shows illuminatingly how literary writers sometimes arrive (and
centrally aspire to arrive) at a distinctively poetic grasp of the world: die poetische
Auffassung der Welt. With this kind of poetic vision afforded by literature, the
question of literary truth is repositioned and reframed, and to show something of
the significance of these thoughts for our approach to reading literature (thus
extending the themes from Part I), the chapter concludes with a brief but potent
account of the relevance of Hegel’s conception of poetische Auffassung to the
contemporary novel.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

J. Jeremy Wisnewski extends the theme of poetic vision, its articulation, and its
importance, beginning with this foundational thought: both Heidegger and
Aristotle show us that the fundamental task of moral philosophy is not to
construct arguments for particular views, and it is not to offer up rules for
correctly carrying out actions. The work of these two philosophers, rather,
shows us that morality requires a kind of seeing (of precisely the kind Eldridge
articulated in connection with Hegel and that Brudney will articulate below in
connection with the move beyond Kant), and that this mode of perception
cannot be reduced to its propositional content. Changing our moral point of
view, then, is not something for which we can rely on argument alone. Wisnewski
suggests, by briefly but exactingly exploring passages in some of the novels of
Coetzee, that literature, rightly understood for its non-propositionally reduced
ethical content, provides a better source for our moral imagination than argu-
ment (thus linking directly back to issues explored in Parts I and II).
The articulation of poetic vision is one way of giving determinate content to
subjectivity, and we next move to a detailed study of the way in which a work of
philosophy can give articulate voice to a work of literature that implicitly shows
such a vision. By imagining an unconscious dialogue between two key theories of
subjectivity from the twentieth century, Jonathan Strauss shows the ways in
which Heidegger’s Being and Time powerfully illuminates the ideas of self-
identity that André Breton worked out in one of the most important texts of
the surrealist movement, his novel Nadja. In its rhetorical complexity, its fearless
ambiguities, and its embrace of unending desire, however, Breton’s novel, in an
instructive sense the container of content not wholly captured in philosophy,
develops within its imaginary world what Strauss compellingly shows to be a
distinctively literary ethics of writing that reveals the limits of Heidegger’s—and
(connecting back to the issues in Part I) perhaps all philosophical?—language.
One way of gaining clarity about ethical content in literature is to come to see
how philosophy gives that content voice; another way is to come to see how in
some cases the ethical content of literature is the kind of thing philosophy cannot
capture with any reasonable precision without literary language.
But then what forces are in play shaping selfhood in the first place, and how is
such selfhood comprehended internally (and also, with John’s point in mind, in a
sense, externally?) by the one who possesses it? Part IV, Language, Dialogical
Identity, and Self-Understanding, proceeds to an examination of such characters
as they are ethically formed and as they achieve (in the reflective process of self-
formation) self-understanding, and to an examination of the massively powerful
role that linguistic interaction or dialogue, as it unfolds with oneself and with
others, plays in the evolution of ethical selfhood. The examination of this aspect
 INTRODUCTION : FIVE ETHICAL ASPECTS 

of the ethical content of literature begins for us here with divergent ways of
reading Shakespeare.
Anthony Gash opens this theme by noting that, since the Romantics and Hegel
became enraptured by Hamlet, two philosophical assumptions have been com-
monly made about it: first, that it embodies a mimetic or representational
understanding of theatrical art by holding ‘a mirror up to nature’; and second,
that it illustrates an early modern, ‘Cartesian’ conception of a mental, interior
self. Gash brings both these assumptions into question by casting in high relief
the fact that the essential speech acts of plays are interactive, or ‘dialogic’, and that
it is by continuously refining and reflecting on this foundation of his artistic
medium that Shakespeare significantly contributes to the history of philosophy.
The dialogic self is, in short, the ethical (relationally engaged) rather than the
isolate self. In its invocation of the autonomy of the other person rather than by
any act of introspection, this dialogical understanding of selfhood indeed pro-
vides the basis for nothing less than a conception of the soul. As we see with a
close-range perspicuity here, in Hamlet this dialogic conception is further clari-
fied both by contrast with the reification of persons in a tyrannical state, and by
intensification in a person’s continuing relation to the dead. And linking back to
issues articulated in Part I, the imaginative play-world is not therefore imitative
or re-presentational, but one in which the self ’s relation to the other person is
experienced anew by both actor and audience. These detailed considerations cast
the larger question of ethical content in a new light.
Richard Dawson continues the theme of dialogical identity, but now focusing
directly upon the issue of self-understanding as dialogue makes this possible. He
begins by investigating Gadamer’s bold claim that self-understanding comes
about only and exclusively through conversation. A central principle, as Dawson
shows, in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is that of holding oneself open
in a conversation—more of an ethical challenge than one might initially realize
when one is facing, and genuinely engaging with, another person in all their
difference and complexity. From this perspective, we now return here again to
Jane Austen, where Persuasion is shown to serve extraordinarily well as a
resource for thinking carefully about this principle of ethically necessary open-
ness. Through a painful and disorientating experience (an interruption of situ-
ation, to connect back to the issues in Part II), the novel’s hero comes to newly
and more deeply appreciate the power of conversation (the nature of such an
appreciation is not as accessible or straightforward as it may seem). At first, his
prejudices, which are not recognized as such, render him unable to hear the
heroine with any care or depth. But the accident productively dislocates these
prejudices (and so the emergent situation in this case opens the way for the rapid
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

development of character and that character’s self-understanding). Dawson also

demonstrates that reading Austen and Gadamer together helps to dislocate a
different prejudice as well, one encountered in some quarters outside the text, i.e.,
that Austen did not take philosophical questions in a way sufficiently serious to
deeply contribute to ethical understanding. As we unequivocally see here, quite
the reverse.
Continuing the conversation, Stephen Mulhall combines a critical evaluation
of the nature of David Foster Wallace’s understanding and use of Wittgensteinian
philosophical themes in his fiction (both early and late) with a discussion of
Richard Moran’s use of an example from Kingsley Amis’s fiction to develop a
Wittgensteinian reading of issues of ethical selfhood. The immediate connection
between these two apparently disparate conjunctions of philosophy and literature
is the concept of sincerity or authenticity (with matters of character here now
linking directly to matters of self-understanding, i.e., with our Parts II and III
coming together), and the possibilities it introduces of acknowledging oneself in
relation to others or, as we see here of equal importance, failing to do so. The
broader connection (now connecting back to the issues in Part I) that Mulhall is
herein exploring turns on motivating, and attempting to find solutions to, the
problem of accommodating philosophy in literature and literature in philosophy
without losing something essential to the practice of either mode of textual
production.
Character, self-identity, and the scope, range, and depth of one’s moral vision
after all come from somewhere and have their histories, i.e., they have genealogies
and developmental trajectories that in part make them what they are. Thus in
Part V, Patterns and Possibilities of Moral Growth, we turn to some revealing
literary depictions and investigations of such growth. Returning once again to
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, as Alan Goldman shows, is a novel in which
Austen acutely and exactingly traces the moral development of her main char-
acters. And in doing so, she places each in telling contrast to minor characters, all
of whom remain morally defective in one way or another. In imaginatively
identifying with these characters in the recognizably ordinary circumstances
they encounter, we retrace our own moral growth and come to recognize the
complex of factors required for full moral maturity. As Goldman’s reading
unfolds, we see (here also connecting directly to themes from earlier chapters)
that these include the cognitive-perceptual ability to identify and weigh diverse
morally relevant properties, the emotional ability to empathize with people
having different values and interests, and the will to act on reflectively endorsed
moral judgments. Literary depiction, we see here, is not only that: it is also an
occasion for moral self-reflection.
 INTRODUCTION : FIVE ETHICAL ASPECTS 

Daniel Brudney opens his chapter with an examination of Barbara Herman’s

attempt to integrate the role of character in contexts of human interaction and
understanding into neo-Kantian thought, with Brudney arguing instructively
that the attempt in fact pushes us outside Kantian ethics. Herman, as Brudney
observes, stresses that a virtuous character must be capable of providing an
accurate description of the moral circumstances of action. Through a detailed
and enlightening discussion of two English novels, Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice and E. M. Forster’s Howards End, Brudney argues that the actual
provision of accurate description down on the ground of our moral practices
involves the fine-grained exercise of imaginative sympathy with other persons.
And thus, as Brudney sees it, a virtuous individual, qua accurate describer, is,
crucially (and linking to issues discussed in Part IV), someone with well-
developed non-rational capacities: this, he argues—and as he suggests literature
powerfully shows—is a condition of virtue. It is precisely such an addition to the
Kantian picture of virtue that seems to take us beyond Kant, and so literature here
becomes a prime source of a cultivated form of ethical awareness that functions
powerfully within the contemporary context of ethical theory and its arguments.
It is in any case evident that much literature portrays characters in the often-
complex processes of negotiating moral obstacles. Some of these processes, as
Mitchell Green makes clear, make these characters better persons; others (and
this has not been sufficiently addressed in philosophical and literary discussions
to this point) make them worse. As conceptually engaged readers, we can learn
from these characters’ successes and failures in ways that affect us not just
cognitively but also ethically. Because such learning is made possible by the fact
that certain literary works show us how to be good (or bad), literature, as Green
argues, can contribute to moral development or degeneracy in its readers. Green
justifies this larger claim in three stages: first, by developing an account of how it
is possible to gain knowledge from a work of fiction; second, by employing some
tools from the pragmatic theory of conversation; and third, by closely and
intricately examining two literary case studies that develop a conception of
empathy as successfully imagining how another feels, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre and Joyce Carol Oates’ Zombie.
But it is not only our characters’ identities that come from somewhere, that
have developmental trajectories: our ethical concepts themselves do as well. So
rounding out the volume, in Part VI, Historical Genealogies of Moral–Aesthetic
Concepts, we turn to a close look into three historical sources (ancient, modern,
and recent) of our way of seeing some fundamental interrelations between ethical
and aesthetic content. Aristotle’s Poetics, as Humberto Brito observes, displayed
an unambiguous interest on the part of Aristotle in poetry. Why, Brito asks, was
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

this? Modern readers, he suggests, have been always inclined to suppose that
Aristotle meant to endorse certain kinds of rewards of dealing with mimetic
materials: paintings, plays, poems, sculptures, and so forth—representational art,
for short. Thus the Poetics has been praised (and not infrequently debunked) as
the rightful ancestor of Aesthetics as a field of inquiry, and as a philosophical
account of how art makes us smarter, morally deeper, better persons. Brito calls
this ‘injunctive Aristotelianism’, and he is concerned to break the spell it has cast
over our thinking (leading us to believe too easily that there is only one strain of
significance stemming from Aristotle’s text) by offering in its place a different
kind of praise. Indeed, if in a way initially surprising for this collection, he praises
the Poetics for its sheer philosophical merits, that is, for its particular explanatory
rewards (and what ‘explanatory’ means itself becomes an engaging issue here). In
pursuing this, however, what Brito actually does is to uncover ever more fine
threads that interrelate our thinking about art and about morality from the
earliest point in our intellectual tradition, and ever more fine ways of distin-
guishing the two precisely when they are seen side by side, i.e., when they further
define, by contrast, each other. The clarification of our origins turns out (as it
does in all three of the chapters in this final Part) to constitute as well a
clarification of where we are now.
Martin Donougho moves the discussion into an early modern context, arguing
that Shaftesbury is best understood as continuing a line that runs from fifteenth-
century Italian court society through various figures and cultural fields up to
Kant, Romanticism, and into modernism. The very category of Art—as an
independent or aesthetically isolated phenomenon and as an exemplar of wider
social value—is, Donougho suggests, established via tacit artifact-based markers
of distinction, where artistic meaning and social status intertwine. That is not,
Donougho is careful to argue, to reduce aesthetics to sociology, but rather to
explain how aesthetic value itself, as many of us now understand it, emerged from
a broadly ethical context. Shaftesbury, Donougho shows here, both describes the
model of ‘moral virtuoso’ and performs it, in a virtuoso presentation of selfhood
(using dialogue, wit, and miscellany, among other elements). Linking his chapter
to those in Part III, Donougho also shows that Shaftesbury’s practice allows not
just self-observation (a centrally important topic throughout this volume) but,
more complexly, the observation of others’ observation. And that doubled
observation takes place, as we see here, in the ‘pocket mirror’ of civility.
Jules Brody looks beneath the surface of some powerful words in our language
that hold special significance in both ethical and literary contexts; they are words
that have the power to align around them many other words, to align many other
ways of speaking and articulating our experience as we live it and as we represent
 INTRODUCTION : FIVE ETHICAL ASPECTS 

it in literature. Terms such as Fate, Necessity, and Destiny are routinely treated as
high-level philosophical and theological abstractions. Brody, by contrast, argues
in favor of viewing them in terms of their philological and etymological content.
Brody’s method in this chapter is based on the seminal work of R. B. Onians (The
Origins of European Thought, 1954), who saw in these locutions only half-dead
metaphors, which were used in the oldest texts not, as we often do, to express
abstract ideas, but, rather, to represent pseudo-scientific notions and to describe
religious convictions concerning the hidden forces that were thought to govern
human existence. The examples Brody investigates are drawn from the entire
range of ancient Greek epic and tragic literature (and so we see in some detail the
development of ethical–aesthetic language at an early stage), but he gives special
attention to the way in which they have come into our contemporary usage as
filtered through the lens of the classically educated Sigmund Freud. Like charac-
ters (as we have seen above in Parts I and II), and like concepts central to
aesthetic understanding (seen throughout this collection), words have histories
and lineages of development too, and as Brody shows, we do well to understand
those histories as they feed into our understanding of the relations connecting
ethics with literary content.
Again, this collection is hardly an exhaustive one—indeed, given the scope of
literature and the complexity of ethical life, one wonders what the very notion of
an exhaustive study might mean. But in offering a perspicuous view of a number
of the telling and instructive particularities of the ways in which ethical consid-
erations interweave themselves with literature, the eighteen pieces here also show
that philosophical progress need not be measured exclusively by the extent to
which a vast range of literary complexity can be reduced to a single overarching
“ism.” For a subject as complex and intricate as ethics, then put together with a
concept as multifarious and wide-ranging as literature (and where we on inves-
tigation discover the two to be not put together, but indeed already intertwined
down to the level of the finest detail), the danger of desensitizing oversimplifica-
tion is everywhere. The kind of conceptual clarification afforded by a philosoph-
ical awareness and critically cultivated appreciation of nuanced and layered
complexity—a degree of complexity, as Aristotle reminded us, fitting to the
subject matter at hand—is the aim of this volume. Philosophical progress can
also be measured by continually expanding, enriched, deepened, and ever more
acute, vision.
PART I

Ways of Reading for Ethical

Content
 1
Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth—
Rethinking Ethics by Reading
Literature
Nora Hämäläinen

We understand by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity.

J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (1999)

I. Examples or Something More?

For a specific group of philosophers, in the context of late twentieth-century and
recent Anglo-American moral philosophy, narrative literature has provided an
important tool for reconsidering the very fundamentals of their academic
field and object of inquiry. The nature of this reconsideration is what interests
me here.
I will discuss three different ways of using narrative literature for the purposes
of moral philosophy in contemporary ethics. The first, representing the use
of literature as example, is Patricia S. Greenspan’s discussion about William
Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice in her article “Moral Dilemmas and Guilt.”1 This
is what I will call the thin use of literature in moral philosophy. The second is
Martha Nussbaum’s discussion about Sophocles’ Antigone in her book The
Fragility of Goodness.2 It represents what I will call the thick use of literature in
moral philosophy. Both of these discussions treat questions concerning moral

1
Patricia Greenspan, “Moral Dilemmas and Guilt,” Philosophical Studies 43 (1983): 117–25.
2
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness—Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philoso-
phy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); hereafter abbreviated FG.
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

dilemmas: situations where an agent is under (at least) two conflicting moral
obligations at the same time.
My third case is more recent, and it both is and is not a natural part of the
contemporary discussion on moral dilemmas: Cora Diamond’s discussion of
J.M. Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures 1997–8 (published separately with commentaries
as The Lives of Animals and embedded in Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello).3
This text presents the character Elizabeth Costello as conflicted, wounded, and
unable to interact fully with other humans, due to the way she has come to
perceive our treatment of animals. I call Diamond’s use of Coetzee’s text an open-
ended use of literature. Each of the literary works I discuss has been or become
something of a standard text in their contexts: the first two in discussions on
moral dilemmas and the incommensurability of values, and the third in the
interesting post-Wittgensteinian discussion about “animal life,” which is a dis-
cussion of philosophical methodology as much as it is about our moral relations
to animals.4 I will not say much new about these texts as such. My aim is rather to
look at the assumptions about (moral) philosophy and literature that they exhibit
in their distinctive ways of using literature. Although I look at cases related to the
question of moral dilemmas, my intention is not here to take a stand on that
issue. Yet, my discussion has some potential consequences for the case of moral
dilemmas, which I will discuss in sections IV and V of this chapter.

II. The Thin Use—Greenspan and Sophie’s Choice

My first example, Greenspan’s use of Sophie’s Choice, centers around a scene
where the character Sophie, on entering the concentration camp at Auschwitz, is
forced to choose which one of her two children will be sent directly to death and
which one will be allowed to live.
Sophie, with an inanity poised on her tongue and choked with fear, was about to attempt a
reply when the doctor said, ‘You may keep one of your children’.
‘Bitte?’ said Sophie.

3
Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Cavell et al.,
Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); hereafter abbreviated
DR. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 2001). J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Vintage Books, 2004; first
published in 1999).
4
See also Cavell et al., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008);
Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and
Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008); Niklas Forsberg et al., eds,
Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
 RETHINKING ETHICS 

‘You may keep one of your children’, he repeated. ‘The other one will have to go. Which
one will you keep?’
‘You mean I have to choose?’
‘You are a Polack and not a Yid. That gives you a privilege—a choice.’
Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. ‘I can’t choose!
I can’t choose!’ She began to scream. Oh, how she recalled her own screams! Tormented
angels never screeched so loud above hell’s pandemonium. ‘Ich kann nicht wählen! ’
she screamed.5

Sophie eventually lets the guards take the younger child.

This scene, in all its terribleness, has been found useful in the philosophical
discussion on moral dilemmas, for it seems to be a dilemma which is very hard to
explain away, or turn through re-interpretation into a non-dilemma. No matter
how Sophie chooses she seems to make herself guilty of something terrible and
unforgivable. Also the alternative of not choosing seems to be out of the question,
as both children would in that case be killed. Indeed, Sophie, in the novel, can
never get over the guilt and remorse caused by her choice, and eventually
commits suicide together with her lover.
Greenspan (p. 117) presents Sophie’s situation of choice as providing a better
example of a real moral dilemma than Ruth Barcan Marcus’ exemplary case of a
doctor who is unable to treat two mortally ill patients and who has to choose to
treat one of them.6 Sophie is not only, due to an unlucky conflict of obligations,
forced to omit to act on one of several obligations (like the doctor), but is actively
forced to act on one of three evil options, all of which make her actually guilty of
causing the death of her own child. She is in Greenspan’s view not merely guilty
of unavoidable neglect, but is made—is forced to become—an active part in
bringing about the evil. Thus her situation is not like the case of a mother who
grabs the child nearest to her when making her way out of a burning house.
Greenspan argues that not only regret or remorse, but also feelings of moral
guilt are appropriate responses for Sophie, even if she was put in the situation
through no fault of her own. This room for appropriate guilt, due to Sophie’s
actual wrongdoing rather than mere neglect (on the assumption that all the
possible alternatives are wrong), is one of the things that set this case apart
from the doctor’s case where guilt, in Greenspan’s view, would be inappropriate.
I will not here attend to the technicalities of this case, but merely look at the
way the novel is used here. The example, as presented by Greenspan, is “thin” in
the sense that the story is, in her discussion, given mainly in a short paraphrase of

5
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1979), p. 483.
6
Ruth Barcan Marcus, “Moral Dilemmas and Ethical Consistency,” Journal of Philosophy
LXXVII (1980): 121–36.
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

a scene in the novel, and is then cut off from the novel itself, which is both rich
and broad in its own right. Concerning its contents the example could quite as
well have been made up for the sake of argument, stripped as it is of all the things
that distinguish a novel from a tale or an exemplary story. The novel offers an
idea and a scene, but the complexities and exact formulations of the literary text
have no role in Greenspan’s discussion. Greenspan even makes an alteration to
the scene, to make it match her point better. Whereas Sophie in the novel is faced
with a positive choice of which one of her children she is allowed to keep,
Greenspan alters it to one where the choice is put in terms of which one is
going to die. This may seem like a small alteration, but it is designed to make
Sophie’s case more unlike some examples which have been considered in earlier
discussion on the same topic, and are considered by Greenspan to be too weak for
her purpose.
It seems to me that Greenspan’s case is a rather typical use of a narrative work
as the source of a philosopher’s example. It provides a case to think about, a test
for our intuitions in a form that suits the argument and substantiates the
philosopher’s claims. The philosopher may choose how much of the original
narrative to include and may choose to alter aspects of the narrative (as long as
this is made explicit to the reader). But the literary example is here, in the
discussion, cut off from the literary work that provided the storyline. Indeed,
Greenspan does not even quote Styron (as I did), but presents the scene in her
own words.
Greenspan does say a few things about the novel and Sophie’s story, beyond
the scope of the central scene, e.g., she briefly enters what she considers to be the
novel’s point of view: “The novel suggests that her later guilt is an overreaction of
some sort; and indeed it may go on too long, from the point of view of her own
psychological health” (p. 120).
Yet, when she goes on to elaborate on this she moves discreetly over to
the abstract-universal voice of analytic ethics rather than dwelling upon the
literary text:

As an ethical reaction, though, it seems to be warranted. She knows she is responsible for
doing something wrong, something she could have avoided—even though she could not
have avoided doing wrong. The same would be true if she had chosen differently, and
allowed both children to be killed. It would be strangely insensitive for a mother in her
position not to experience guilt at either choice. (ibid.)

First she seems to be talking about Sophie, the character, the individual,
fictional case. Yet, soon she is involved in questions of what would be appropriate
for anyone, from an external “moral” point of view. The novel’s long exploration
 RETHINKING ETHICS 

of Sophie, her surrounding characters, and New York in the post World War II
era are not really interesting for Greenspan’s kind of inquiry, and Greenspan does
not invite her reader to turn to Styron’s texts for further illumination.
This kind of literary example differs thus in its way of functioning quite little
from regular philosophers’ examples or thought experiments: trolley examples,
twin earths, and fake barns in a field. What is left of the literary texts in the
example is subordinated to the purpose of the philosophical argument. Thus thin
uses of literature, of this kind, do not pose the kind of challenge to standard
analytic ways of philosophical argument that more elaborate uses of literature
have been known to do.

III. The Thick Use—Nussbaum and Antigone

My second example, Nussbaum’s discussion on Sophocles’ Antigone, is part of
her early work on moral luck in Greek tragedy and philosophy. This is a work
with many overall philosophical motivations and aims, but the ones most central
for the Antigone discussion are to show two things about moral agency. First, that
there is a plurality of equally important values that can, in concrete situations,
pose equal claims on a moral agent, and second, that failing to acknowledge the
multiplicity of demands and feel regret or remorse for those one has to com-
promise when all the demands cannot be met, are specific kinds of moral
shortcomings in their own right.
The basic narrative is the following: Antigone wants to arrange a decent burial
for her dead brother Polynices, but due to the fact that Polynices has betrayed
their city, Thebes, the king Creon prohibits this burial. Nussbaum focuses her
discussion on the moral dispositions and moral shortcomings of the characters
Creon and Antigone respectively, arguing that both of them fail to meet the
moral demands of their situations, due to the way they simplify their evaluative
commitments in the face of internal conflict.

Each of the protagonists has a vision of the world of choice that forestalls serious practical
conflict; each has a simple deliberative standard and a set of concerns neatly ordered in
terms of this. Each, therefore, approaches problems of choice with unusual confidence
and stability; each seems unusually safe from the damages of luck. And yet each, we are
made to see, is somehow defective in vision. (FG, p. 52)

Creon, in his role as the ruler, elevates the good of the polis to the only value,
and accordingly outlaws the burial of Polynices within the polis on the grounds of
his betrayal. The fact that he is related to the dead Polynices and thus would be
expected to acknowledge duties of both kinship and piety toward him seems to
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

matter little to his decision. Nussbaum underlines that the simplification of

his values even transforms his language (ibid., p. 55). His speech changes the
meaning of every word of moral praise, so that they only apply to actions that are
beneficial for the polis, and every expression of moral blame is blame for
shortcomings in relation to the polis.
Antigone on her part elevates her duty toward her dead brother to the highest
value, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of any other claims that could be
considered. Her fierce determination to have him buried does not on Nussbaum’s
reading even express the sincere signs of personal grief over the death of a loved
one, but becomes more like an all-consuming obsession with principled piety for
which she is prepared to die (ibid., pp. 64–5).
Although Nussbaum’s discussion is driven by her philosophical commitment
to plural values and the importance of acknowledging competing moral claims
even when they conflict, her discussion of Antigone is not reduced to a philo-
sopher’s example in the same sense as Greenspan’s argument before. The differ-
ence has primarily to do with the way Nussbaum builds her argument on a
substantial reading of the text, and the way she repeatedly returns to details of the
texts, such as symbols, choices of words, and portrayals of the characters, to
strengthen and substantiate her interpretation. She makes explicit her aim to base
her discussion on the texture of Sophocles’ text, emphasizing features of its moral
contribution that could not be expressed in the typical academic philosopher’s
prose. Rather than isolating a storyline, to serve as an example, she enters into
Sophocles’ text, with one eye on its original context of performance, to see how
the text itself presents what she takes to be a parallel perspective to her own.
This use of narrative literature (or narrative art, insofar as the play is seen as a
play and not just a text) is thick in the sense that the intermingled descriptive and
evaluative aspects of the original narrative are left to resonate, and made use of, in
Nussbaum’s discussion of them. She offers a philosophically streamlined reading
of the original text, focusing on intricacies of practical deliberation, but invites
simultaneously the reader to turn to that text (and earlier critical commentaries
on the text) for further reflections on the moral questions involved. The narrative
text, with its particular commitments, ambiguities, and perspectives, becomes
thus a part of the philosophical discussion. To be able to discuss the moral
contents of a narrative work Nussbaum needs to disambiguate and interpret
the narrative; yet, the interpretation does not exclude the original narrative text,
but rather actively includes it.
Thus, in short, whereas the thin user takes over a storyline or a scene, and
plants it into a moral philosophical argument, the thick user attempts to enter
into dialogue with the literary work—with all its complexities, its point of view,
 RETHINKING ETHICS 

possibly (though not necessarily) even an embedded philosophical position or

argument—in order to think better about moral or moral philosophical questions
that are difficult to get at in the regular argumentative style.
This kind of discussion poses a challenge to standard, theoretically inclined
analytic moral philosophy, insofar as it points out the limits of theoretical
discourse to express and process many of the things that we think and know
and believe about people and about moral life. But this is not necessarily a radical
challenge, as is underlined by Nussbaum, who suggests that moral theory and
narrative literature, along with texts that bring out the ethical significance of
specific narratives, are to be seen as complementary means of gaining moral and
moral philosophical insight. As Nussbaum states the case in relation to modern
literature and philosophy:
I am not proposing (as some recent attackers of traditional philosophy might) that we
replace the works of Plato, Hume, Kant, Mill and Sidgwick, in our ethics curricula, by
works of Henry James and Proust. . . . I am only modestly suggesting that we might add
the study of certain great novels to these other studies in order to be sure that we are fair to
all the alternative conceptions of goodness.7

IV. An Open-Ended Use of Literature

In my third case, Cora Diamond’s commentary on Coetzee’s The Lives of
Animals, literature enters philosophy with a somewhat more radical edge. In
the story told in these lectures we find the aging Elizabeth Costello, not torn
between two sets of evaluations or between alternative paths of conduct, but
rather squashed between two worlds. As a celebrated novelist Costello has been
invited to give a few lectures at Appleton College (an imaginary institution).
Presumably she is expected to talk about her literary work, but she decides
instead to use the opportunity to talk about what Coetzee (from the perspective
of Costello’s son) describes as “a hobbyhorse of hers, animals” (1999, p. 16).
So this is a lecture about animal rights then? This is, at least, how Costello’s
somewhat skeptical audience is inclined to interpret her efforts, and this is also
what the real-life Peter Singer takes Coetzee to be talking about.8 But Diamond
proceeds to show that this interpretation has more to do with what the com-
mentators of a certain kind tend to think is central, than with what is there in the
text. Coetzee’s text and Costello’s talk are perhaps most naturally read as pointing

7
Martha Nussbaum, “Response to Richard Wollheim, Patrick Gardiner, and Hilary Putnam,”
New Literary History 5, no. 1 (1983): 204.
8
Peter Singer, “Reflections,” in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1999).
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

at how discussion of “animal rights” represents a very narrow way of conceptu-

alizing the moral aspect of our relationship to animals. “Rights” talk does not
even begin to describe Costello’s position in this matter, which is one of personal
anguish, guilt, and horror over our treatment of animals: a perspective which
seems quite senselessly to separate her from her son and his family, and which is,
at the same time, deeply moral to its nature. Her daughter-in-law finds her
bullying and moralistic and lets the children eat their chicken in the nursery
when Costello is visiting. Her son, the junior academic at Appleton, is vaguely,
though warmly, embarrassed. Costello in her turn is anguished by her double
vision: “It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly
easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible,
I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying propor-
tions?” (Coetzee, p. 69, see DR, pp. 46–7).
Read against the “moral dilemmas” discussion, Costello’s situation looks
somewhat like a moral dilemma, and yet the philosophical vocabulary of
“moral dilemmas” does not quite seem to apply. The reason is not that we
don’t have a moral dilemma here, because we do: we have numerous moral
dilemmas at every juncture of Costello’s life with most other humans. It is rather
the case that the ethical weight is removed from the situations of action, where
two demands, or two worldviews, come into conflict, to a condition where two
demands are felt at one and the same time quite independently of specific
situations for action.
Diamonds, for one, is not interested in the dilemma as a dilemma. She does not
ask: What should Costello do here? How should she think? How should she
resolve the tension between what she finds to be due to animals and what is due
to her family? Diamond does not formulate any one of the “dilemmas” that
Costello might be seen as faced with because of her double perspective. Nor does
she attempt to formulate an abstract “condition of conflict” as the central subject.
She rather presents Elizabeth Costello herself—this individual, old, dry, soft, torn
person—as the real subject of Coetzee’s text.
As Diamond puts it, “She is a woman haunted by the horror of what we do to
animals. We see her as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the
knowledge of how unhaunted others are. The wound marks her and isolates her”
(DR, p. 46). There is indeed an even over-evident clue, in the text, to reading
Coetzee the way Diamond does. Costello states that she has, like most writers, “a
literal cast of mind”: “When Kafka writes about an ape, I take him to be talking in
the first place about an ape; when Nagel writes about a bat, I take him to be
writing, in the first place, about a bat” (Coetzee, p. 32). Thus, we may conclude
that this text is about Elizabeth Costello rather than about animal rights.
 RETHINKING ETHICS 

These things said, Coetzee’s text is in fact in itself, quite without explicatory
commentaries, an exquisite meta-commentary on the “animal rights” issue. It
exhibits not merely the major argumentative lines of thought in this discussion as
a “rights” discussion, but also, in Costello’s voice, the major objections to
fashioning the discussion in such terms. It also encompasses several less aca-
demic conversations about the issue: between Costello’s son and his wife,
between participants at a semi-formal academic dinner, between mother and
son. These conversations exhibit a range of voices on the matter which could not
be represented in a seminar, where specific rules of relevance and courtesy frame
the conversation. Yet, these voices are important for our understanding of
what kind of question this is—what kinds of roles it plays for the various people
who raise it.
The text is also a comment on philosophical method and the nature of
understanding. The fictive Costello sounds quite a lot like a philosopher in the
line of Diamond and Raimond Gaita when she criticizes the argumentative mode
of philosophy, how we tend to think we know what is central, how philosophy
often reduces our insights rather than enriches them. “We understand by
immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity,” she says (Coetzee,
1999, p. 62).
As philosophers we seem to know what Costello’s lectures, or indeed Coetzee’s
lectures, are about: they are, of course, about animal rights. But by suggesting that
these texts are not about animal rights in any straightforward sense, but rather
about a singular woman, Diamond manages to show that we do not necessarily
know what the question of “animal rights” is about, what kind of question it is,
and where it is at home, when we address it in the abstract, principled mode. The
theoretical/argumentative mode is not only in need of a complementary narrative
mode; it is also—however useful and illuminating—deeply problematic in its way
of delimiting relevance and determining importance. The very move of starting
to philosophize involves a transformation of our initial quandary into a philo-
sophical question or problem. Insofar as the quandary was one that really
mattered, we often need to trace the question back again to our initial question
and its place in our lives. And literature indeed often presents itself as a good
companion for doing this, although it cannot offer us ready-made answers.
Now, let us look at the use of the literary mode made in this case. An “open-
ended” use of literature in philosophy is a kind of philosophical use, but it is one
where the philosopher (or novelist, or both) refuses to cooperate in the act of
translation from literature to philosophy, from representation to argument, from
experience to explanation. Here the fictional “reality”, the imagined state of
affairs (or situation, person) stands as an exclamation mark in the face of
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

philosophical abstraction, saying: “This, here, what I am pointing at, is ethically

primary; whatever you will want to do next is secondary.” Thus, the philosopher’s
task here is not to bring back the insights of the literary work to the philosophical
discussion as some kind of answer, illustration, or argument: that is what
Nussbaum’s thick readings are about. In Diamond’s reading the task is rather
to take in those insights, scrutinize them, and let them matter for how one goes
on with asking and answering one’s philosophical questions in the future.
Finally, the picture of philosophical method and understanding suggested
by Diamond has some important bearings on the question of how we should
understand moral dilemmas.
(1) Elizabeth Costello’s quandary could easily be translated into a moral
dilemma: how should she live and choose between facing the horror and
living in friendship with people for whom the horror is nothing?
(2) Diamond does not see this as an interesting path, but highlights rather the
existential dimension of the tension.
(3) What Diamond does to the benefit of this discussion has no immediate
bearing on any regular philosophical question like the question of appro-
priate guilt (found in Greenspan’s text) or the balancing of various duties
in practical deliberation (found in Nussbaum’s text).
(4) Yet, arguably, it mines the literary texts for philosophically essential
insight by penetrating the layer of philosophically domesticated notions
like “value,” “commitment,” “conflict,” and “guilt,” and gets at the rawness
of individual experience, beyond reasoning and choice.
One could say that Diamond uses Coetzee’s text to get away from the presup-
positions of importance and relevance that are built into the pursuits of moral
philosophy, to get at that hidden node of morality: the individual human being.

V. A Different Look at Sophie

If we are inclined to think that any moral theory will fail to help us understand
Costello’s quandary, isn’t this the case also with Styron’s Sophie? Looking at
Sophie’s Choice from Diamond’s perspective may make the vocabulary of “genu-
ine moral dilemmas” and “unavoidable guilt” appear oddly detached from the
moral complexity and urgency of the novel. (Here I believe that both the fictive
Costello and the author Coetzee would agree with her.) Why would we want to
talk like that? What kind of illumination is there to be found in that kind of
universalization and simplification in this kind of case? Maybe we could learn
more about moral dilemmas, guilt, and the lot by attending to the case of
 RETHINKING ETHICS 

Sophie—generously created by Styron—rather than to the abstracted situation

of choice.
I will not attempt a full reading here, but merely point out some aspects of the
novel that invite a fuller interpretation of Sophie’s Choice for moral philosophical
illumination.
The scene of choice at the end of the novel is a scene of European Holocaust
literature, but that is not the true home or true genre of the book. The two
storylines of the novel—Sophie’s past and the late 1940s American present—
seem to come from two different novels, two totally different twentieth-century
worlds, with eons of time between them. What should we make of this gap?
We meet Sophie in Brooklyn, in the boarding house of Yetta Zimmerman,
where the narrator Stingo moves in to be able to live as cheaply as possible while
writing what he believes to be his first novel. His first encounter with Sophie is the
sound of her and her lover Nathan having loud and thorough sex on the second
floor; Nathan, the intellectual New York Jew, and Sophie, the blond Polish
Christian girl, with that terrible tattoo on her arm.
Costello’s suffering and vulnerability are shown to us and made more palpable
through the detached sympathy of her son John. In a parallel way Sophie is
presented to us through Stingo. Yet, whereas John’s concern for his mother helps
the reader to see her as vulnerable, the boy Stingo’s infatuation with the woman
Sophie both offers her to us and hides her from us in complicated ways. His (moral)
perception is both heightened and impaired by his youth and desire; these two
aspects of life that make everything in their ambit so heavy with meaning. What
should we make of Stingo’s perspective: his curiosity and love and exclusion?
What should we make of the orgy of food, sex, and music; Sophie’s elusiveness;
her apparent dependence on a man who is not what he appears to be, but rather a
fraud, a misfit, a person as wretched as herself; the strange vulnerability of her
flesh (the residue of her starvation in the camp)? Are these things just what it
takes to tell a good story, or do the deep ambivalence and opacity of Sophie-in-
America call for a more engaged interpretation?
Only later do we learn, with Stingo, the horrid details of her background,
among them that particular scene of choice. What should we make of the
revelations? And all this is framed by one of the most written about atrocities
of the bloody twentieth century. What should we make of that historical frame-
work? We may ask if Sophie falls toward her death by the weight of her guilt or
whether she perhaps is pulled along by Nathan’s destructive side. Would a proper
life have been possible: morally, existentially?
The novel is a multilayered business where all of these aspects, and many more,
interact, heavy with human interest, moral charge, and symbolic meaning. We
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

are in Costello’s/Coetzee’s words “immersed in complexity.” Maybe (as Diamond

suggested in the case of Costello) the most compelling ethical/philosophical
invention in the novel is not the dreadful dilemma, but the character Sophie,
because she can make us ask some unanswerable questions: What is the meaning
of unavoidable guilt? What is its place in a life? What is the place of this drama,
this tale, in our cultural consciousness, in history?
The novel focuses on Sophie’s life after the decision, not on the dilemma of
choice. Yet, the dilemma of choice and the moral intuitions that guide us when
looking at it are bound to look different when placed in the context of a life. In the
light of this new, fuller picture the questions of guilty or not, right or wrong, clean
or dirty hands, are transformed from moral key-issues to partial, abstracted
approximations of moral meaning.
This does not mean that Sophie’s dilemma could not be plucked out and used
for philosophical discussions like Greenspan’s. The question is rather why one
would want to do that, rather than plunging deeper into the texts, the human
psyche, and the conceptual resources that have so generously been bestowed
on us.
Sophie’s Choice invites an interpretation along the lines of Diamond’s reading
of The Lives of Animals, focusing on the experience of exposure beyond choice
and reason. Yet, of course a number of readings of Sophie’s Choice, which are
closer to the conceptual resources and concerns of contemporary moral theory,
could surely be suggested. One could, e.g., pick up the theme of moral perception
and judgment which has engaged Nussbaum, and investigate the social constel-
lation of the novel from a broadly Aristotelian perspective. And indeed, the
scope, forms, and concerns of moral theory are not fixed, once and for all, as
the recent flourishing of neo-Aristotelian forms of ethics has most vividly shown.
There is thus little reason to postulate that any truly interesting reading of this
novel must be perpetually out of reach for moral theory. But there are, as I will
suggest in the last section of this chapter, certain philosophical hazards in keeping
one’s ethical readings of literature close to moral theory.

VI. Climbing the Literary Ladder—Moral

Philosophy Reconsidered
For many readers with a particular philosophical interest in narrative literature,
using narrative works as mere providers of examples may appear equivalent to
not using them at all, for what is used is only a narrow slice, only faintly related to
the rich texture of the original work. Using them as “something more” implies
trying to take in the literary works in their full complexity, whether one then
 RETHINKING ETHICS 

proceeds to consider them in the thick mode of Nussbaum or in the open-ended

mode of Diamond.
Now, it should be clear that my three examples, and their respective ways of
using literature, hardly exhaust the range of ways that narrative literature can be,
and is, used in moral philosophy. They are rather three steps on a ladder of ways
of using narrative literature for moral philosophy, from the stripped-down
examples to richly textured literary discussions that are only loosely connected
to given theoretical points of moral philosophy. Some could suggest that this is a
ladder we need to climb all the way to the top and then throw away: we must be
rid of moral philosophy as we knew it. Others may resent the ladder metaphor
precisely because it suggests higher and lower stages. Why not be contented with
the fact that there are different ways of using narrative literature for the purposes
of moral philosophy?
A quick glance at recent moral philosophical readings of novels suggests that
they most commonly stand quite close to Nussbaum on that ladder, in the sense
that they seek further illumination on familiar philosophical questions, without
actually radically challenging the standard pursuits of moral philosophy. Quite
often these kinds of readings sympathize with a more or less Aristotelian or
Ancient conception of ethics, centering on virtues, character, and chance.9 These
themes were fresh and crisp some thirty years ago but have since then, once
again, become part of the main stream of moral philosophy. Although individual
philosophers in this line may like to emphasize the distinction of their own
contribution, the overall claims concerning the novelty of their take on moral
philosophy and literature are often humdrum; the practice is well established—
individual texts are often interesting, but commonplace.
Readings of this type are vulnerable to the criticism of Samuel L. Goldberg,
that philosophers writing on the ethical significance of literature (like Bernard
Williams, Nussbaum, Diamond, etc.) are, in spite of themselves, too caught up in
their own terms to get at the full ethical nature of literature.
If literature is a distinctive and irreplaceable kind of moral thinking, as I have argued, it is
because there is (to recall Hume’s observation) “a part of ethics left by nature to baffle all
the pride of philosophy”. It seems to me significant that, however widely a philosopher

9
E.g., Karen Stohr’s “Practical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and Sensibility,”
Philosophy and Literature 30, no. 2 (2006): 378–94, is a perfectly Nussbaumian discussion. Catherine
Wilson’s “Disgrace: Bernard Williams and J. M. Coetzee,” in Art and Ethical Criticism, ed. Garry L.
Hagberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), places the novel Disgrace in a context of Bernard Williams’ “neo-
Greek” frame, but shows considerable independence from this framework of moral philosophy in
the discussion of the novel’s (explicitly) ethical theme.
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

conceives the scope of the “moral”, he or she tends to think primarily of the conduct-
moral, when it comes to discussing specific works of literature.10

When first confronted with this criticism I was inclined to answer it like this:
one must keep in mind that they are texts of moral philosophy, rather than texts
of literary study. They represent a kind of use of literature, and surely, when
literature is used it is not merely contemplated in its separateness and majesty. It
is pulled down to the level of the reader’s moral and intellectual interests and
needs. But the focus on moral philosophical rather than literary or textual issues
does not mean that the literary texts are simply colonized by a philosophical
discussion which is blind to the separateness of literature. Philosophers seek (and
find) help from literature to think better: they do not reduce literature to moral
interpretations.
I would still consider this a part of the answer, a brief reply to those who are
inclined to consider any moral philosophical use of literature (indeed any use of
literature) as fundamentally problematic. Yet, there is an important insight in
Goldberg’s caution. To make the most, morally and intellectually, of the books
they read, philosophers must try to be aware of when they give priority to their
own philosophical terms and concerns, in a way that may hide the concerns and
emphases of the literary work itself. This is important in relation to literary works
as such, and in relation to a broad literary readership: philosophers are hardly
keen on being considered boorish and tendentious readers. But it is also helpful
in the moral philosophical work, as it is conductive to a sensitive attention to
morality and an intelligent development of moral philosophical discussions.
Although ethical readings both in the thick and the open-ended modes have
been around in Anglo-American ethics for at least three decades, the new
contributions do not lie idle. They rather form, en masse, an essential part of
an ongoing reconsideration of the role of moral theory, and moral generality and
universality, in the contemporary context of Anglo-American moral philosophy.
And in this broad context literature suggests itself precisely as philosophy’s other,
something independent and irreducible.
This reconsideration, visible during the past thirty to forty years in neo-
Aristotelian, post-Wittgensteinian, particularist, and literature-oriented discus-
sions within Anglo-American moral philosophy, centers around the question of
whether the work of the analytic philosophers in normative moral theory gives a

10
S. L. Goldberg, Agents and Lives—Moral Thinking in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), p. 253. By “conduct moral” considerations Goldberg means considerations
that have to do with actions and choices in specifiable situations, in contrast to considerations
concerning, e.g., moral personality, character, or the moral texture of a person’s life and relations.
 RETHINKING ETHICS 

correct and useful picture of morality, moral situations, and moral agency, or
whether it should be abandoned to the benefit of some other kind of ethical
discussion. The desire to use narrative literature as something more than
examples is here connected with a sense that the way morality is portrayed in
philosophy is somewhat disconnected from the reality of moral life, that it is
somehow uninformed by the ways moral issues enter our lives, and that it thus
fails to truly clarify what it was supposed to clarify. The difficulty involved here,
acknowledged by most writers on these topics, is how to express, in a philosoph-
ical book or article, the distinctive contributions of a literary work without
diluting them for the purpose of philosophical argument. These writers can
either do this work quite close to the terms dictated by available philosophical
outlooks, or quite purposively try to transcend those outlooks.
It is hardly surprising that Nussbaum, considering her perspective on the
usefulness of literature, takes a relatively conservative position in the reconsid-
eration of the methods and priorities of moral philosophy. On the one hand she
emphasizes, especially in her early work, the radical potential of literature in
criticizing the monistic and simplistic assumptions of much of moral theory.11
Literature, both ancient and modern, has in her readings an ability to show that
the way moral theorists present morally relevant cases in moral philosophy is too
thin to do justice to the complexities of moral life. Here literature poses an
explicit challenge to the presumptions of moral theory. But, on the other hand,
in her later work she turns against more radical implications of this position, and
against those (e.g., Diamond, Peter Winch, Richard Rorty) who embrace the
more radical implications.12 Instead she argues for a companionship between a
fairly standard analytic way of doing moral theory on the one hand, and readings
of literary works which can be used as complements to moral theory on the other.
To heed Goldberg’s caution, though, there is good reason to note that philo-
sophically guided, theoretically oriented readings of literature do not get at the
full range of moral content that complex and lively literary works can offer. To
break the conceptual spells that philosophy so often casts on us we need moral
readings that are responsive to our everyday, ordinary, inconsistent, idiosyncratic
moral ideas, conceptions, priorities, and responses in the first place, and to moral
theories in the second place. That Dickens’ Gradgrind is a parody of a certain
kind of prick is primary. That he is also a kind of utilitarian is secondary, though

11
See FG and Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
12
Martha Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics—A Misleading Category,” The Journal of Ethics 3 (1999):
163–201; Nussbaum, “Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory: Particularism, Principle and Bad
Behavior,” in Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
 NORA HÄMÄLÄINEN

this point is related to the first observation. I believe most philosophical readers
of literature can mobilize more of their moral and moral philosophical intelli-
gence when addressing a literary text directly, as “ordinary” readers—“mere”
readers—rather than philosophical interpreters. One need not worry too much
about the central concerns of, e.g., contemporary Anglo-American moral phil-
osophy, when looking for moral philosophical insight in literature. Even these
philosophical concerns are better addressed if we can—e.g., by the aid of litera-
ture, or art more generally—get to know what we think in the first place: to know
the variety of things we think, beyond the varieties that contemporary philosophy
happens to offer.
As Diamond points out, we do not necessarily know what our problems are. In
Iris Murdoch’s famous words (also quoted by Diamond13): “A narrow or partial
selection of phenomena may suggest certain particular techniques which will in
turn seem to lend support to that particular selection; and then a circle is formed
out of which it may be hard to break.”14

Acknowledgments
I thank Niklas Forsberg for patiently commenting on more than one version of
this chapter, and the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation for funding during
the time when I wrote it. A first draft of a part of this chapter was presented as
Mere examples or independent thought—the role of narratives in contemporary
moral philosophy at The 11th International Conference of Issei (International
Society for the Study of European Ideas), July 28–August 2, 2008, University of
Helsinki.

13
Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit—Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1991), p. 373.
14
Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 76.
 2
Caring about Characters
Eileen John

Do people care about fictional characters? The experience of reading fiction

suggests that we do. We seem to experience ourselves as concerned with fictional
characters, sometimes quite intensely, in the way we attend to, wonder about, and
feel in relation to them. So, at least to the extent that patterns of attention,
curiosity, speculation, and affect are indicators of what people care about, it
seems reasonable to hold that we can and often do care about fictional characters.
How is this caring to be understood?
To care about something, as I use this term, means centrally that the carer is
susceptible to loss and benefit in relation to that thing. I will sum this up by
saying that when one cares about something one has an interest at stake in it. The
interest that is the basis of caring furthermore has to be experienced as such by
the carer. I suffer and benefit in relation to things I do not know about and do not
experience as putting my interests at stake (e.g., trends in the global economy);
the things I care about have to have a presence within my experiential perspective
as things that make a difference to my well-being. This is a fairly weak notion of
caring, encompassing a wide range of relations to things which in some way
matter to the carer (so, for instance, it does not mean that one loves the thing
cared about). This use of the term emphasizes one component, the susceptibility
to benefit and loss, of Harry Frankfurt’s account of caring; it seems to me the
crucial and interesting component in relation to fictional characters.1 The ques-
tion, then, is how can I have an interest at stake, be susceptible to loss and benefit,
in relation to a fictional character?

1
Harry Frankfurt, “The Importance of What We Care About,” in The Importance of What We
Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 82–3.
 EILEEN JOHN

One way to conceive of this caring, supported by how we commonly talk about
characters, is to hold that we relate to them as people in whom we have an
interest. Wayne Booth, for instance, speaks of our “practical interests” in fiction,
which consist, basically, in wanting things to go well or ill for those we love or
hate.2 Booth takes fictional characters to trigger these practical interests:
We care, and care deeply, about Raskolnikov and Emma. . . . Our interest in the fate of
Oedipus and Lear . . . springs in part from our conviction that they are people who matter,
people whose fate concerns us not simply because of its meaning or quality, but because
we care about them as human beings (Booth, 1961, p. 130).

Similarly, Jenefer Robinson sees emotional response to fiction as resting on the

sense that we have interests at stake in what the characters undergo.
If I am going to respond emotionally to the character Anna Karenina, what happens to
her has to be important to me in some way. When I read Anna Karenina I find myself
deeply caring about the fate of the characters, especially Anna herself: I don’t want her to
fall under that train . . . . I react to the characters in a way that suggests I feel my own wants
and interests to be at stake in what happens to them.3

Booth and Robinson acknowledge that caring about characters as people is

distinguishable in various ways from the caring that attaches us to actual people.
Our desires for characters can diverge from what we would want for similarly
situated real people, as, for instance, our aesthetic interests in how a work
develops can lead us better to accept the suffering of a character (Booth, 1961,
p. 130). And both point out that we seem able to engage sympathetically with
characters displaying traits we would find unbearable or appalling in a real
person (ibid.; Robinson, 2005, p. 141). Their discussions are not directly con-
cerned, however, with how we can have interests at stake in characters in the first
place. Robinson indirectly addresses this issue by accounting for how we can
respond emotionally to fictional characters. On her theory of emotion, emotional
response is initiated prior to cognitive appraisal of such things as metaphysical
status: “It does not matter to my emotion systems . . . whether I am responding to
the real, the merely imagined, the possible, or the impossible” (ibid., p. 145; see
also pp. 41–5). What matters rather is whether a literary work is able to make us
“expand the list of those with whom we can sympathize”—the novel that prompts
my emotional response to a character has allowed me to experience that character
as “one of ‘my own’” (ibid., p. 110). To account for emotionally sympathetic
responses to seemingly unsympathetic characters, Robinson grants that as a

2
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 125.
3
Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 114.
 CARING ABOUT CHARACTERS 

reader, “my interests, wants, and goals might indeed differ from those I have
when I am not reading.” Our emotions are then engaged as they normally would
not be because a fictional situation “is presented to us as either thwarting or
facilitating what at the time are our goals, wants, and interests” (ibid., p. 141).
This suggests an answer to the general question about caring about characters:
what readers care about is radically open. It hangs on whatever each work
presents as “to be cared about” and the work’s success in getting us to care
accordingly. If successful, a reader is likely to experience a work’s characters as
putting the reader’s interests at stake.
This is not the answer I want to pursue here, in part because I do not think the
evidence of emotional response can serve straightforwardly as evidence of caring.
Perhaps emotion can be triggered by awareness that an interest is at stake without
identifying that interest as one’s own. If emotion could track a less self-indexed
awareness of interests, emotional response to characters would not settle the
question of whether and how we care about them. But further, if we take the
potential for caring about characters to hang only on the particular content and
successful affiliating impact of each work, we seem to have avoided the basic
question of whether we can have interests at stake in fictional characters. We
would simply be asserting that works of fiction, or some of them, have the power
to give us these interests. Further, the notion of an interest itself, as the ground of
caring, becomes more elusive and insubstantial the more we allow interests to
materialize and evaporate in relation to experience with fiction. So I want to try
for an answer that has some general explanatory force, not appealing only to the
special power of individual works, and that does not take our interests as readers
to be so radically open (and shallow). However, in thinking about engagement
with fiction, there is also something right about seeing us as less fixed, more open,
with respect to interests. I would cast this as openness to inquiry about our
interests, within the experience of fiction. As readers of fiction, we can carry
ourselves with less certainty about what we care about and can feel more free to
consider alternatives and challenges to our interests than we ordinarily can.
The initially plausible idea, that we care about fictional characters as people in
whom we have an interest, remains puzzling. Caring requires the carer to
experience the thing cared for as a source of potential loss and benefit, and, as
Booth notes, “we are not in a position to profit from or be harmed by a fictional
character” (Booth, p. 130). It seems to be a live option that our sense of caring
about fictional characters requires an “error theory” of sorts, with talk of caring
about characters being properly understood as referring, say, to a pretense within
which we care about characters. As Kendall Walton, an anti-realist about char-
acters, puts it, “We don’t [care about Anna Karenina]; it is only fictional that
 EILEEN JOHN

Anna’s fate matters to us.” On his view what needs to be explained is why we care
“about the experience of fictionally caring.”4
Although pretense and caring about pretense are in play in this context, and
are needed to explain some of what we experience as readers, I think we also care
about what we really encounter in works of fiction. My way of putting this is to
say that we care about characters as representations, not as people. We really
encounter representations in a work of fiction, specifically verbal representations
in the case of literary works of fiction, and readers have interests at stake in
projects of representation. This may sound like an overly intellectualizing way of
construing our relations to fictional characters. We do not, it seems, cheer for or
worry about them as representations. Let me admit that, on the one hand, this
view is a way of insisting on the intellectual aspect of engagement with literature.
Roman Ingarden speaks of the “moment of reason” that “resonates” in every
literary work, as we register and understand the units of meaning on offer: “there
is always, in the aesthetic perception of the work, a phase in which we pass
through, as it were, the atmosphere of the rational, since we must first ‘compre-
hend’ the work, and indeed ‘comprehend’ it in the sense in which only the
meaning units are comprehensible.”5 To say that we care about characters as
representations is, in part, to echo this idea and to say that the “moment of
reason,” when we experience words and sentences as offered for our compre-
hension, matters to us as readers. I will try to flesh out this idea, and to say why
the sentences and larger representing units that sustain characters matter to us.
On the other hand, there is also something misleading in saying that we care
about characters as representations but not as people. The point is perhaps better
stated by saying that, in caring about characters as representations, we bring to
the fore an aspect of ourselves, something we have in common with fictional
characters. We too depend on representation, not as extremely as characters do,
but enough to make representational effort and achievement quite crucial to us.
To the extent that we encounter fictional characters as manifesting this kind of
effort and achievement, we engage with them as involved in projects that we
participate in and that make us susceptible to benefit and loss.
In treating literary characters as the products of representation, I use the
notion of representation in one sense minimally. In the literary context, it refers
both to an activity, of using words intentionally in their semantic function to pick

4
Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990),
p. 271.
5
Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973), p. 211.
 CARING ABOUT CHARACTERS 

out or point toward sentences, and to the products of that activity, the structures
of words that manifest these intentions. Fictional characters, then, are complex
products of representational activity, where this activity typically includes repre-
senting the characters themselves as representers (beings who pick out sentences
verbally in thought and speech).6 This notion of representation requires that a
representation be deliberately made, so there are intentions behind the repre-
senting use of words, but it does not specify the point of picking out sentences in
this way (so, for instance, it is open for representations to be intended to function
as fiction or nonfiction).7
This is a minimal notion in relation to conceptions of representation that
specify richer intentions and functions. Walton’s account of artistic representa-
tion defines it in terms of the imaginative activity asked of the audience:
“Representations . . . are things possessing the social function of serving as props
in games of make-believe. . . . A prop is something which . . . mandates imagin-
ings” (Walton, 1990, p. 69). Representation on Walton’s account is (with some
qualifications) equivalent to fiction, as a representation by definition establishes
fictional truths. Walton fears that a category of representation that includes both
fiction and nonfiction, such as my “class of things that ‘pick out’ or ‘specify’”
sentences is “too big to be illuminating” (ibid., p. 103). I agree that the category
itself is not so illuminating, but it seems to me that we need its breadth to capture
the continuity of what we can care about in fictional and nonfictional represen-
tation. Whether or not a representation functions to mandate imagining will not
necessarily make a crucial difference to whether we have an interest at stake in its
representing activity.
Another richer conception takes verbal representations to have the essential
function of using words to connect us to the world. John Gibson argues on this
basis against making representation central to explaining our engagement with
literature: if representations attempt to cross a gap between words and the world,
in order to describe or mirror what is real, but literary works commonly fail to
represent the world in this sense, we risk having no way to conceive of literature
as being about the real.8 If we take literary fiction to be a matter of representation,

6
This chapter will not provide a developed metaphysics of fictional characters; it follows most
closely Amie Thomasson’s view of them as cultural artifacts, as “created by being represented in a
work of literature,” “dependent on the real activities and intentional representations of the author
who created them” (Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 13,
140)). I attempt to draw out the resources of that theory slightly differently, to weaken the distinction
between internal and external perspectives on characters.
7
See Ingarden’s discussion of the “sentence-forming operation” which serves many functions,
not limited to coordination with something real (Ingarden, 1973, pp. 110–11).
8
John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 50–4.
 EILEEN JOHN

“we appear to be left with mere language, words without any worldly point of
contact” (Gibson, 2007, p. 56). This looks to be a problem if you want to conceive
of literature, as Gibson and I both do, as engaging our real interests as thinkers
and social agents.9 I grant Gibson’s worry that it is a mistake to saddle literary
works with world-tracking representational function. But we can still use a
notion of representation that does not retreat into “mere language” with no
“worldly point of contact.” If we emphasize that literary works offer representing
activity, in which sentences are intentionally picked out for any number of
purposes (including world-mirroring or describing, prompting and prescribing
imagining, expressing, arguing, wondering, making fun of, etc.), then we have a
point of worldly contact in the assumption that this representing activity is
supposed to have a purpose. Picking out this sentence from a given perspective
in some context of choice and action is supposed to be an intelligible thing to do.
Readers have the job of grasping whether a given stretch of representing activity
achieves intelligibility of this kind. In fiction, readers are often given layered tasks
of this kind, because a given stretch of language, say, of dialogue or represented
thought, can achieve different kinds of intelligibility simultaneously (when the
representational activity of an author offers the representations of narrators and
characters). While this is a minimal notion of representation in not specifying
the intentions and functions that give point to representational effort, it is a
demanding one in emphasizing representation as something done, an activity
that draws on complex resources. The “labor” of representing reflects the
experience, the conceptual and linguistic repertoire, and the purposes and values
of representers, and that rich basis is relevant to understanding the representa-
tions produced.
Here’s a sketch of what such an encounter can be like, taking a brief passage
from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as a starting point. This single-sentence,
full paragraph comes early on in the novel, as the title character, Jude Fawley,
teaches himself Latin and Greek from used textbooks, while delivering bread on a
horse-drawn cart:
While he was busied with these ancient pages, which had already been thumbed by hands
possibly in the grave, digging out the thoughts of these minds so remote yet so near, the
bony old horse pursued his rounds, and Jude would be aroused from the woes of Dido by

9
Gibson develops a non-representational alternative, with literary language constituting criteria
or standards of representation. A literary narrative “marks the moment of cultural production
through which an aspect of our world is given form, shape, sense, and thus offers the lens through
which we can see it” (Gibson, 2007, p. 73). What I say next is in sympathy with much of this view,
but I think there is always a gap, such that the work cannot itself constitute criteria but leaves readers
to assess offered standards of representation.
 CARING ABOUT CHARACTERS 

the stoppage of his cart and the voice of some old woman crying, ‘Two to-day, baker, and
I return this stale one.’10

To engage with Jude as a representation is, in this small instance, to experience

him in light of the ambitions, structure, and flow of this sentence. Jude as a
character is and is not central to the sentence, as he and the horse share the
position of grammatical subjects, and too many other contexts are invoked,
mostly oblivious to him and his concerns, for Jude to have stable centrality.
Past authors and their ideas, past students who held this textbook, the horse
doing the actual work of the moment, Dido and her suffering, and the occasional
complaint of a customer, are all entwined in this record. That he is said to be
“digging out” thoughts, rather than “studying” or “learning,” portrays his efforts
in terms of hard manual labor, and the “digging” sits uncomfortably close to
mention of “the grave.” A somewhat generalized old woman gets the last word.
This conglomeration manages to flow intelligibly, though without depending on
Jude’s consciousness or goals to guide it. In this sentence larger questions raised
by the novel show up in miniature—what attention do people deserve, and how
can their efforts to shape their lives be valued, when the flow of the world is
oblivious? Years later the Latin textbooks sit by his deathbed “roughened with
stone-dust,” having provided respite from his work as a mason, and they “seemed
to pale to a sickly cast” at the joyous bells ringing out—for other reasons—over
his corpse (Hardy, 1985 [1896], p. 490). This sentence both connects Jude
wonderfully with a much bigger, richer context than expected for bread delivery,
and lets the perspective of his agency and experience be jostled and sidelined.11
Jude the character can be experienced as an unreconciled mixture of repre-
sentational good fortune—attentive, possibly loving documentary effort—and
scrupulous diminishment. This character gets to be the one whose life story is
traced out with some patience, the node around which events converge and
disperse. So Jude the character is central, and is the beneficiary of an almost
inexorable concern to say what can be said about a seemingly obscure life. The
diminishment, however, concerns not the bleak, frustrating events that plague
that life, but the way the novel makes that which is specifically intelligible within
the frame of this character—the values, virtues, and motives which matter to
making sense of Jude—relatively feeble and drained of explanatory force in
driving and making sense of the surrounding world. Too many of the terms
that explain the turning-points of the story (convention and institutional

10
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Penguin, 1985 [1896]), p. 74.
11
Robert Stecker helped me in reading this Hardy passage.
 EILEEN JOHN

conservatism, money and physical need, fear and superstition, impersonal pas-
sage of time) ignore what is represented as important from Jude’s perspective.
While the goods associated with Jude (learning, love, gentleness, moral integrity,
social freedom) are goods in the novel, they seem to have a marginal influence
that is recorded by the novel more than protested. In this way there is a puzzle for
the reader as to whether understanding the character of Jude is important or not.
The values and concerns that seem key to understanding Jude do not seem key to
understanding the world he is represented as inhabiting. I take this to be a way in
which a character can suffer, when, even if the character is narratively central, the
character fails to be evaluatively and explanatorily central. The heroes and
heroines of romances and murder mysteries usually are central in all of these
ways, and this is an important feature of them as representations—what they are
said to think about and to value turns out to be key in resolving the problems they
face. As that comparison makes obvious, this kind of centrality has no straight-
forward relation to being artistically valuable; for a character like Jude to “fail” to
play this role within a larger representation can also make the character inter-
esting and can benefit the work as a whole.
Taking that as a sample of what engaging with characters as representations
can involve, I want to consider how this shows readers bringing together
“internal” and “external” perspectives on characters. It is common to distinguish
internal and external perspectives taken on fiction, with fictional characters being
perhaps the most prominent objects of this perspectival treatment. In Amie
Thomasson’s terms,
we can distinguish ‘fictional contexts’ of discussion about what is true from within the
context of a work . . . (or while involved in the pretence it demands of readers) from ‘real
contexts’ in which we discuss works of literature and their characters from the ‘real world’
perspective.12

As Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen put it, “from the internal point of
view, [fictional characters] share the same range of properties as real people
(being arrogant, wily, hopelessly in love) while from the external point of view
their properties belong in a quite different category (being created by an author,
being stereotypical, being symbolic of the futility of life).”13 It seems that
engaging with fiction calls for positing this duality, to capture the sense in
which readers work imaginatively “inside” a fictional world while also being

12
Amie Thomasson, “Fictional Characters and Literary Practices,” British Journal of Aesthetics
43 (2003): 141.
13
Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994), p. 146.
 CARING ABOUT CHARACTERS 

appreciative of the fiction from the “outside,” as a constructed object. This duality
suggests that there would also be two accounts of caring about fictional charac-
ters, perhaps one a Waltonian account of fictionally caring, within a pretence that
the characters are people, and the other an account of caring about artfully
constructed objects, perhaps emphasizing our aesthetic and artistic concerns.
However, one can also feel that the “inside” and “outside” terminology with
respect to fiction sets up too stark a divide. Stacie Friend critiques realist theories
of fictional characters for their “unsustainably sharp distinction between the
internal and external perspectives,” arguing that critical literary practice displays
an easy mingling and simultaneous adoption of these supposedly distinct
perspectives.14 Flint Schier offers a kind of integration of perspectives in his
insistence that,
our reaction to fictional characters is not just a reaction to fictional people, it is a reaction
to them as represented in the text . . . Therefore, our reaction is necessarily governed by
how they are represented . . . One of the pleasures . . . of seeing a tragedy . . . stems from our
interaction with the controlling intelligence of the artist. . . . Thus, we are reacting to
characters as vividly seen and realised by a controlling intelligence and we respond to
the work as an expression of that achieved vision of the characters.15

Lamarque and Olsen comment approvingly on this passage for showing “how
inextricably connected are the two perspectives. For the attitude we adopt towards
fictional characters . . . is largely determined by the forms of their representation”
(Lamarque and Olsen, 1994, p. 156). It seems that what we do “inside” the fictional
world is saturated with awareness of the representational forms that in some sense
belong to the “outside” perspective. This is evident, I hope, in the passage from
Hardy, as attention to Jude works through attention to his status and function in
the sentences and larger projects of articulation and explanation in the novel.
Schier goes on to say that the duality of this response to fictional characters—
hating Iago the man while delighting in Shakespeare’s creation—“might be
compared to our perception of an object in a painting where we simultaneously
admire the brushwork and form various feelings about the depicted object”
(Schier, 1983, p. 87). This evokes something like Wollheim’s “seeing-in” experi-
ence of painting, in which we have a holistic but two-fold experience of the
represented content in experiencing the painted surface.16 This comparison is
helpful in the way that it preserves attention to the representational forms within

14
Stacie Friend, “Fictional Characters,” Philosophy Compass 2/2 (2007): 151–2.
15
Flint Schier, “Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment,” in Philosophy and Fiction, ed. Peter
Lamarque (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), pp. 73–92.
16
Richard Wollheim, “Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation,” in Art and Its Objects,
2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 205–6.
 EILEEN JOHN

the artistic experience. But it is also unhelpful given the different ordinary
functions of words and paint. Seeing-in is a way of describing the magic, as it
were, of pictorial representation, in which experience of a painted surface gen-
erates experience of things, where experiencing those things (flowers, boats, dogs,
etc.) commonly has no essential relation to encounters with painted surfaces.
With the words and sentences of a novel, however, we encounter elements of a
kind that directly figure in ordinary experiences of people, in our thoughts,
conversations, and assorted social interactions. In experiencing people, we notice
both what is said by and about them and how it is said (as we notice talents for
gossip and story-telling, rambling conversational style, euphemism and indirec-
tion, free use of obscenity). Attention to the representational activity associated
with a given person is not attention to a neatly identifiable constructed object,
parallel to a novel; there is no one “controlling intelligence,” in Schier’s term,
behind the representations that contribute to experience of a person. But the
preliminary point is just that the internal/external vocabulary concerning fiction
exaggerates the difference between those perspectives, to the extent that it
suggests attention to representational forms is somehow “outside” of engagement
with the people and events in a world (real or fictional).
The more important point is that we have a great deal at stake in the
representational forms and activity that we encounter and generate. There is no
simple account of these interests. It is neither true that what we say and what is
said about us make us what we are, nor that all of this activity is “mere
representation,” somehow present but cut off from genuine impact. We have
an interest in what might be called the “live possibilities” for representing
ourselves, and each of us has only some limited power to control and change
these possibilities. That I can or cannot intelligibly be called a human being, a
daughter, a citizen, a bourgeois, a poor housekeeper—that those things make
sense to say about an entity such as me—depends on combinations of more-and-
less brute facts (e.g., biological, historical, political, economic, domestic circum-
stances) and how things have been thought about, identified conceptually,
evaluated, and prioritized in past and present representations. Richard Eldridge
speaks of this impact in characterizing poiesis, or the making of specifically poetic
representations: these are “representations of subjects, their characters, their
interests, and their possible stances in culture that are made by subjects and
that in turn help to make them, insofar as they make available certain routes of
self-construal and of action and identity in culture.”17 There is a complex flow of

17
Richard Eldridge, “Introduction: From Representation to Poiesis,” in Beyond Representation,
ed. R. Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 7.
 CARING ABOUT CHARACTERS 

influence between how we are able to construe ourselves, given the possibilities of
representation, and the qualities and relations that we realize in our lives.
We can benefit and suffer from the possibilities for representation that are
most alive in the communicative and expressive practices of our time. This is
most obvious in the case of categories that have held negative social meaning
(there are better and worse times to be representable as “divorced,” “black,”
“woman,” “Jewish,” or “homosexual”). Literary characters can be powerful in a
fairly brute way when they take on some of these crudely discriminating categor-
ies without upholding their working evaluative force. If those characters receive
uptake as representations, they contribute both to changing the live possibilities
for representation and, in a delicate and complicated way, to whether people
really are or are not valued for being in a given category.
That sort of challenge to socially meaningful categories is one kind of literary
representation in which readers can have an interest. There is also the less acutely
pointed but still ambitious project of representing lives intelligibly. This means,
roughly, offering terms on which lives show up as recognizable and responsibly
accounted for, to those living them. The standards gestured at here—of intelli-
gibility, recognizability, responsible accounting—are not directly standards of
truth-telling. This more inclusive territory of interests, in taking fictional char-
acters to be representations, involves being interested in how things can be said to
be. The question of whether things really are as they are said to be can be deferred
or ignored; we want to know how the world can be found to be, how it can be
experienced, categorized, and evaluated, even if many of those “findings” com-
municate more about the ones doing the representing than the world. We can be
concerned with how representational projects get off the ground—where does
one start? How does one select and prioritize what is to be said? From what
perspective, by whom, with what motives, in what vocabulary, with which
conventions in play, and in what spirit can X intelligibly be said to be or do or
say certain things? In the ordinary course of living, we do not seize the chance to
represent our lives ambitiously very often. Even when trying to represent some
aspect of a life well, we may often feel that we fail (heartfelt but still vague and
impersonal condolence letters, trailing-off attempts to convey a criticism, a
memory, a desire). But that lives can be given such representations is important
to us, as we live on this not utterly firm ground, where some aspects of what we
can be depend on which notions are taken up as articulating the meaningful
possibilities. Fictional characters serve as a kind of nexus for sustained, ambitious
representing activity, as a huge range of representing projects can converge in the
formation of characters: representation of concrete and abstract qualities, of
feelings, experiences, and actions, of what is thought and said, and of changing
 EILEEN JOHN

physical and social environments. To the extent that projects of articulating and
connecting elements of our lives are important but difficult to carry out, we have
an interest in seeing that elements of a life can take on articulated and connected
form. In the encounter with Jude, for instance, readers share, not precisely his
vulnerable situation, but the generally applicable problem of how central we are
to an intelligible representation of our lives. We might ask, in miniature, whether
we get to be the clear subjects of sentences that describe our days, or whether, like
Jude, it makes sense to situate us as easily jostled and marginal figures.
When readers test whether representational choices have been made intelli-
gibly, that process of testing involves a merging of the “internal” and “external”
perspectives. To judge that one might intelligibly say this about a life means
considering what the point of representing a life in this particular way could be,
and that consideration is to some degree dependent on thinking about the life as a
life. That is part of the functioning of the “character-making” representational
activity, to get us to think of a life in a particular way. That function of
summoning up a life can be more and less important, as some characters only
perfunctorily summon up a life, while others aim to prompt a sustained, vivid
summoning-up of a life. A reader’s task with a given character includes coming to
understand how deeply or perfunctorily it supports various kinds of engagement.
The critic James Wood describes this variation in fictional characters in terms of
how each work manages the “reality-level” of its characters. The characters’
reality-level differs from author to author, and our hunger for the particular depth or
reality-level of a character is tutored by each writer, and adapts to the internal conventions
of each book . . . novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough,
but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has
failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality-level.18

This notion of the specific hunger elicited by each work helps to suggest how a
reader’s immersion in “the life” of a character remains closely tied to how
representational effort is being used. Finding the demands that can be made on
a given character’s “reality-level” is not directly determined by an “internal”
concern for what would happen to such a person, but by how the work steers
us toward the terms for what is conceivable and knowable, worth knowing and
simply satisfying to know, about a given character.
Wood’s way of framing this demand on a work—that it develop a hunger in
readers for precisely the level of reality that it itself can satisfy—returns us to

18
James Wood, How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 93.
 CARING ABOUT CHARACTERS 

some questions and problems. Although this conception makes it clearer that the
locus of caring is a literary representation rather than a person, it also suggests
that the “hunger” arises in relation to each work on its own terms. This raises
again the possibility that these are isolated, transient phenomena of caring,
primarily to be explained via the distinctive artistic success of the works that
prompt such hunger. Is there anything to be cared about that is anchored in the
reader’s concerns beyond the reading experience? I hope that the earlier discus-
sion and the examples considered here at least partially address this question. We
have ongoing representational demands that we rarely meet well, and we depend
in complex ways on the resources or “live” possibilities for representation. So the
literary work that proves that representational demands can be well met, and that
uses and perhaps extends these resources ambitiously, can both satisfy the
distinctive hunger it elicits and meet these broader interests.
However, the idea that representational demands can be well met in the case of
a fictional character still needs elaboration. One might insist that either there is
no standard for meeting such demands (because there is nothing there to be well
or poorly represented) or the standard is trivial (if all there is to a character is
precisely what is said about it, any representation whatsoever that contributes to a
character is thereby successful). Can the terms used here—asking that the
representational activity be intelligible, recognizable, and responsible as an
accounting for a life—provide a standard if there is no life to be responsible to?
Posing the problem in this way misses the shift in concerns that occurs when we
acknowledge fictional characters as representations. The intelligibility, recogniz-
ability, and responsibility that articulate a standard are directed at the represent-
ing activity, not at a life that requires adequate representation. Is it intelligible
that these things should be said in this way? Is this picking out of sentences a
recognizable and responsible action? The representational activity needs to strike
the reader as having a point, as manifesting choices that could be made for some
reason (without demanding that truth-seeking or descriptive accuracy is the
paradigmatic reason). We can ask, from what perspective does it make sense to
bundle references to a horse, Dido, dead students, and stale bread closely together
in the representation of Jude? Is this bundling done in a way that expands or
diminishes Jude’s significance, and is there reason to allot significance in this
way? A fictional character is not, on this view, merely “what is said” about it,
because the saying of it is constitutive of the character. The representing activity
does not get left behind, as it were, once predicates are associated with a name by
a set of sentences; those sentences and the activity they are the traces of, and
whatever purposes and qualities we find in them, are the complex focus of our
attention and the basis for caring.
 EILEEN JOHN

It is nonetheless true that, in judging the representational activity that makes a

character, we bring to bear a partially independent sense of the demands of such a
life.19 As soon as the work refers to kinds we know from other contexts, real and
fictional, we start having a basis for comparing what is said with what we know of
those kinds and with what has been said about such things. As Wood’s notion of
the specific hunger emphasizes, this is not a matter of apples-to-apples compari-
son, since we simultaneously start learning which sorts of curiosity and under-
standing are viable and worthwhile in this representational environment. The
comparisons are more complex and unwieldy. When Nabokov’s Humbert says of
Charlotte Haze, Dolores Haze’s mother, that “she had a shiny forehead, plucked
eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be
defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich,”20 we are perhaps mainly
enmeshed in enjoying the different kinds of flourish within Humbert’s and
Nabokov’s words. But we also experience this as not like familiar strategies for
describing a face (the aggressive “definition”, evoking the laboratory and a
glamour icon as a dissolvable chemical, perhaps bounces off more familiar
remarks like, “she reminds me of Marlene Dietrich”). Though Charlotte Haze
is a relatively submerged character in Lolita, the reader has the capacity to think
of even her as placing human demands on Humbert and Nabokov that they for
the most part resist. The project of describing a person in a way that takes that
person’s agency and experience to matter lurks, though somewhat remotely, in
her presence as a character.
To return, in conclusion, to the basic question of what it is to care about
a character as a representation, consider one further example. In J. M. Coetzee’s
novel Life & Times of Michael K, the title character is not given much to say.
Here is a passage in which he initiates a fairly unsuccessful conversation, just
after his mother has died and the hospital nurse has given Michael K a parcel
of ashes:
So there is a place for burning, K thought. He imagined the old women from the ward fed
one after another, eyes pinched against the heat, lips pinched, hands at their sides, into the
fiery furnace. First the hair, in a halo of flame, then after a while everything else, to the last
things, burning and crumbling. And it was happening all the time. ‘How do I know?’ he
said. ‘How do you know what?’ the nurse said. Impatiently he indicated the box. ‘How do
I know?’ he challenged. She refused to answer, or did not understand.21

19
See Lamarque and Olsen on the possibility of “objectivity” with regard to a character
(pp. 140–3).
20
Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 37.
21
J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (London: Vintage, 2004 [1983]), p. 32.
 CARING ABOUT CHARACTERS 

Michael K is neither thinking nor saying what it seems he should in this moment
of mourning. He imagines too much about the fiery end of the old women, says
too little in pressing his question, and says something too strange in challenging
the identity of the ashes. The novel follows his touch-and-go survival around
South Africa at war with itself and portrays him retreating from the life of speech
and social interchange. A doctor who finds his silence both infuriating and
compelling writes a rambling letter, imploring Michael (whom he refers to as
‘Michaels’) to tell his story: “no one is going to remember you but me, unless you
yield and at last open your mouth. I appeal to you, Michaels: yield!” (Coetzee,
2004, p. 152). Michael later attempts to tell his story but rejects it as “paltry, not
worth the telling” (ibid., p. 176). He affiliates himself at the end with the worm
and the mole, living in the ground, gardening in their fashion, “mute and stupid”
(ibid., p. 182).
The life summoned up by this character is a harsh one, a sequence of events
and experiences that could prompt pity or other sympathetic reactions. The
character, however, challenges the aspiration to have and offer an illuminating,
humanly affiliating, humanly penetrating, and yielding story. The interest in
representing as I have discussed it—an interest in articulating and explaining
that takes the perspective of a human life seriously—is itself disputed via the
character’s gravitation toward non-telling (and toward affiliation with the mole
and with pumpkin seeds and plants in the ground). The intelligibility of this
representation, embedded within a complex exercise of telling such as a novel, is
hard to sort out. Can a character as representation effectively challenge the point
and value of representing? That this character is said at various points to reflect
explicitly on the value of stories, as in judging his own to be “paltry,” is itself not
part of a plausible story—the man who sees himself as a mole would not, it seems,
be reflectively evaluating stories. The “controlling intelligence” here is intrusive,
with the real story-teller making his character the vehicle for his worries. I think
that Michael K prompts an unusual kind of “specific hunger,” since the character
points to something wrong or easily corrupted—something cloying, needy, and
aggressive—about the urge to tell and have people’s life stories. The further idea
seems to be that stories do not have interest and value unto themselves, as if
telling about our lives was worth doing no matter what those lives were like. If we
have an indecent and degrading enough way of allotting respect and conditions
for well-being, such that mole or plant existence looks preferable, then this does
seem to challenge the importance of representing human life.
Let’s suppose that Michael K as a character, never quite settling into the role of
summoning up a life, tends to raise questions about the real conditions that need
to be in place for humanly connecting story-telling to be worth doing and not
 EILEEN JOHN

corrupt. The basis for caring about this character is, roughly, that our own life
stories are vulnerable in this regard, and Michael K as a representation follows
out a well-motivated response to this vulnerability in retreating from a “life
story.” We need good resources for representation, but we also need the condi-
tions of life that will make telling life stories not a matter of blithely assuming
there is a “human family” worth telling about. It is relevant to readers to
determine whether their world meets conditions for taking the perspective of
human life to be worthy of story-telling effort.
To conclude, fictional characters are in a way representationally excessive and
fantastic. They serve as occasions for more, and more intense, representational
activity than do most real people. But they are also manifestations of an ordinary
activity, of putting into words how people and their lives are found to be, and we
have strong interests at stake in this activity. We care about which possibilities for
representation are available, and we can need those possibilities to be refined and
expanded, or possibly to contract. This is an ongoing interest of ours to which
literary works, and the characters they include, are relevant. That is the big
picture. In the specific encounter with a particular character, quite complex
representational vulnerabilities can be explored. As in the examples of Jude and
Michael K, crucial kinds of vulnerability concern the centrality and power of a
character as a resource for explaining and evaluating a world and finding it to be
worthy of representation. Jude and Michael K display some of the ways in which
that which is important and intelligible within a character can speak to readers’
interests. We are similarly vulnerable to having our ways of valuing and explain-
ing things fail to have centrality and influence, and to corruption and paltriness
in our story-telling. In these ways we have a basis for caring about the represen-
tational activity manifest in fictional characters.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Christina Britzolakis, Maeve Cooke, Diarmuid Costello, Chris Cowley,
and Joshua Hackett for comments and conversation on these issues. An event in
honor of Jenefer Robinson’s work was the long-ago trigger for this paper, and
I thank Robinson and Greg Currie for comments at that event. I also thank all the
participants at the Knowledge and Meaning in Literature Conference in Regens-
burg, in particular Wolfgang Huemer, Eva-Maria Konrad, Tilmann Köppe, Peter
Lamarque, Maria Reicher, and Robert Stecker.
 3
Hamlet and the Problem
of Moral Agency
Robert B. Pierce

What is it for a play to have philosophical content? For example, if Shakespeare’s

Hamlet is among other things a seriously philosophical play, as most of us think it
is, does that mean that it asserts one or more philosophical principles? Perhaps,
as many critics assume, the play builds to a judgment of Hamlet’s response to the
ethical challenge with which he is confronted, or perhaps it takes a stand on a
prior issue: the reality and extent of human ethical freedom. That is, is Hamlet
portrayed as a free moral agent who undertakes actions, who can be judged, and
who can judge himself as he considers the possibility of acting in the morally
tainted world of Claudius’ Denmark? Certainly the play is full of characters
making moral decisions and full of judgments of Hamlet, especially by Hamlet
himself. When we first see him, he is being chastised by Claudius and his mother
for his behavior at their wedding feast, and thereafter we often see him struggling
with dilemmas like how to treat friends who may be betraying him, how to
behave toward Ophelia, and above all how to respond to the ghost of his father
charging him to undertake revenge. Hamlet frequently urges himself to action
and confronts doubts and feelings of inadequacy, though at times he acts
impulsively, seemingly without thought. Is it, as Coleridge suggested, the analyses
of a philosophical mind that so often make him pause, or is it inexplicable inner
forces that “puzzle the will,”1 so that he no more chooses what he does and what
happens to him, his fate, than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern choose their fate
(especially Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) as they are caught up

1
Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Arden
Shakespeare, 2006), 3.1.79 (reading “puzzles”). All quotations of Hamlet are from this edition, an
edited version of the Second Quarto.
 ROBERT B . PIERCE

in Claudius’ schemes and helplessly carried by a ship to England, accompanied by

the sealed letter that dooms them?
Responding to others as ethically responsible human beings is a natural aspect
of our encounter with them, whether in life or in a Shakespeare play. One might
say that forming a moral judgment is just a part of how most of us play the
language game of reading literature, to put it in Wittgensteinian terms. As we
read or see a play, we find ourselves trying to understand the characters as moral
agents and to evaluate them for what they do. But is that impulse a critically
justifiable part of reading? Such an intellectual task as weighing characters’ ethical
responsibility would seem to make sense under two of three main views of
human choice. First, if their will is free, one traditional view of human beings
and their literary counterparts, it clearly makes sense to judge them for the
choices they make: what they do expresses what they choose and hence what
sorts of beings they are.
Second, if human beings go through a decision-making process in choosing
how to act, even though the elements of that process are themselves causally
determined, so that they are events like other phenomena of the natural world,
then the humans can still be thought of as responsible, in the sense that their
moral worth is manifested in what they do; and there is again some point to
evaluation of them and their decisions. In this second case their behavior
expresses something about their inner, ethical life even though how they choose
is causally produced, just as a badly made pot is ugly, even though it did not
choose to be ugly. One might say that our judgment of them is naturally—
causally—produced by our response to the moral character expressed in their
choices. After all, we normally judge literary characters in the same way as we do
actual human beings, even while we know that in fact the literary beings are
creations of the author’s will, who exercise no independent willing of their own,
and perhaps God or nature or quantum indeterminacy plays the role of author
for all of us, penning the lines of our moral beings.
However, suppose one takes a third stance; and, on the basis of a rigorous
scientific behaviorism or a version of religious predestinarianism or some such
postulate, one considers decision-making an illusion or a mere epiphenomenon
of deep causal forces, as if the seeming decisions were like the images on a movie
screen that might seem to come from people acting of their own will, but which
are really phantoms created by the projector and strip of film, and behind them
by the artistic intentions of the director and other creators. Though such images
look like active agents making choices and behaving in the world, we know deep
down that everything they seem to choose and do is actually the product of a
beam of light passing through a strip of film. If we assume that the people we
know are like those film images, and perhaps if we encounter a literary text built
 HAMLET AND MORAL AGENCY 

to manifest such a world of pawns, as in the stricter forms of naturalistic

narrative, then ethical judgment of the person acting becomes equally illusory
and pointless. In that case judging Hamlet for his actions and inactions, for
example, is as silly as judging the snake that bites you or the rock you stumble
over. One is acting as though one took the snake or the rock to be a moral agent,
took the patterns of light for living beings.
Though critics often argue (or assume) that the play Hamlet explicitly lays out
or implies a stance like one of these three views on the reality and nature of
human choice, for the prince and perhaps for humanity in general, with Hamlet
as an exemplar, I would like to argue that the play takes no such stance.2 Rather it
dramatizes in him and his acting and suffering (and those of the other characters)
those human experiences from which we and his characters develop our philo-
sophical theories about freedom, determinism, and ethical responsibility. Our
experience of the play constitutes a sort of imaginative workshop, a stylized and
foreshortened version of the world in which we think and feel our way through
these issues. Experiencing that parallel between play and reality is what yields the
ethical value for us of our experience of this kind of drama. It is not that we learn
Shakespearian truths about morality but that we learn how to think and feel
about such issues. If Hamlet is the tragic hero as intellectual, that is not because
his thinking arrives at a deep truth about human freedom or human enthrallment
to circumstance, not even that he enables us to grasp such a truth, one that he
himself cannot see. Rather it is because he articulates with remarkable intelligence
and acuity of feeling what we all encounter, the kinds of experience that make us
seek theories of how and why we act and fail to act. He is portrayed in a
representation of the condition we all encounter (in an extreme form) when he
exclaims about the act of revenge that he feels called to:
I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. (4.4.42–5)3

2
In the huge body of criticism about Hamlet, some writings that especially bear on the topics of
this reading are Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987); Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on
Politics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s
Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006);
A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Morris Weitz,
Hamlet and the Philosophy of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); and Luke
Wilson, “Hamlet, Hales v. Petit, and the Hysteresis of Action,” Theaters of Intention: Drama and the
Law in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25–67.
3
It is typical of Hamlet that he pays no attention to the perfectly real external difficulties of his
position, just scolding himself for his lack of moral fiber in not acting.
 ROBERT B . PIERCE

But, for all his vigorous intellectualizing, never does he settle on one view of why
he behaves as he does, a view for the play to endorse or reject. What Shake-
speare’s play holds up to the moral side of nature is a mirror, not a book of ethical
theory, Hamlet’s or Shakespeare’s. Why is it reasonable to see the play in this way,
as an expression of the puzzlements in our encounter with the world rather than
an answer to the questions it raises?
We learn quickly that Hamlet is the paradigmatic questing intellectual. In Act
One he is shown to be a scholar, eager to return to his studies at Wittenberg. His
black clothes and melancholy air, fitting though they are to a son in mourning for
his father and to a prince as malcontent, bitterly estranged from the court of
Claudius, are also the appropriate garb for an intellectual engaged in deep study
and thought.4 Later we see him reading a book—a moral satire if we are to trust
his words to Polonius; and, when he soliloquizes before his encounter with
Ophelia in 3.1, he may again be reading and reacting to a philosophical text, as
well as to his own situation. Still later he turns Yorick’s skull into a text for
meditation that he reads to Horatio. His first meeting with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern is the witty sparring with friends of an eager intellectual, which he
breaks off (in the Folio version) because “by my fay, I cannot reason” (F 2.2.263).5
Often—and more wholeheartedly than with the two of them—he confides in
Horatio, his “fellow student” (1.2.176), when he is wrestling with intellectual and
ethical issues. At any rate, both in soliloquy and in conversation we see in him a
formidable intelligence grappling among other things with the problems of
human moral agency. Since such a protagonist might be appropriate to a
dramatic structure aimed at presenting an argument about the nature of moral
agency, either by having Hamlet arrive at the truth or by letting us see a truth that

4
See Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the
History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964), for melancholy as
the sign of the scholar, both as attendant malady and as vehicle of deep understanding.
5
Though I will indicate where I am drawing on material from the Folio version as opposed to the
Second Quarto that is my primary text, I will argue from both versions, partly because most of the
critical conversation over the years is based on a composite play drawn from the two texts. Of course
such a play is an editorial construction, nothing that Shakespeare wrote. On the other hand, I am
skeptical that he (or the company) would have thought of Hamlet as two separate plays, represented
by the Second Quarto and Folio versions, with different effects and meanings, and hence that we
should keep them distinct in our analysis. One could conceive of a Shakespeare who wrote two
different plays with different conceptions of Hamlet and of the nature of human moral choice and
who would never have gone back and forth between the two versions, though perhaps less plausibly
than in the case of King Lear. But I do not myself believe in the historical reality of that Shakespeare,
nor is there much interpretive payoff for distinguishing the two plays in our minds. After all, a whole
range of causes must have produced the differences between Q2 and the Folio, not to mention
the mare’s nest of Q1; and a number of these causes would have no role in shaping a coherent
artistic vision.
 HAMLET AND MORAL AGENCY 

he fails to understand, why do I contend that Shakespeare does not do that, as, to
put the matter rather too crudely, Molière in Le Misanthrope shows us that
Philinte is right and Alceste wrong about the ethics of living in a corrupt world?
What can be said about the ethical world within which Hamlet lives and acts?
How do choice and causal forces interact? One plausible explanation of the
nature of that world, subsumed under the idea of fatalism, is widely voiced by
characters in Hamlet. They mostly seem to believe that human beings may make
whatever choices they wish, but that there is no connection between human
choice and what actually happens in the world. The traditional image expressing
this view is of Fortune’s wheel.6 Fortune is a whimsical goddess who controls
what happens to people and who distributes her favors randomly, as Hamlet
suggests in picking up Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s reference to her:
GUILDENSTERN . On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.
HAMLET . Nor the soles of her shoe.
ROSENCRANTZ . Neither, my lord.
HAMLET . Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours.
GUILDENSTERN . Faith, her privates we.
HAMLET . In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true—she is a strumpet.
(2.2.224–31)
In the Folio text the three go on to image Denmark and the whole world as a
prison, the metaphor expressing a denial of meaningful freedom in a world where
human choice is only the few paces allowed us within the walls of a dungeon of
absolute confinement (2.2.240 ff.).
In such a fatalistic (rather than deterministic) world the existence of human
will is taken for granted, but that will is like the gear of a machine that turns freely
but does no work, because it has no purchase on the rest of the machine, acts on
nothing else. This fatalistic view is vividly expressed by the Player King from the
inner play:
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still [always] are overthrown.
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. (3.2.205–7)

Our ends in the sense of outcomes are the products of forces outside us, so that
our ends in the sense of purposes are wholly subjective, irrelevant to the world of
actuality. And anyway these purposeful thoughts of ours are utterly transient,

6
See Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1936).
 ROBERT B . PIERCE

easily forgotten like the idle impulses they are. And Claudius at least purports to
share this view when he urges Laertes to take revenge on Hamlet:
That we would do
We should do when we would, for this “would” changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents. (4.7.115–19)

Though Claudius may be speaking with Machiavellian intent, tempting Laertes to

kill Hamlet, his words echo the rhetoric of his opposite and double, the ghost of
Hamlet Senior, who appears to Hamlet in the closet scene “to whet thy almost
blunted purpose” (3.4.107). Note the impersonal agency implied by the
participle—who or what has done the blunting? The ghost in his turn echoes
Hamlet’s description of himself as “lapsed in time and passion” (104), with the
passing of time either fallen from his intent (to revenge) because of his passionate
fury at his mother or fallen away from his passionate intent to carry out the
ghost’s command.7 Again forces beyond the conscious will—passing time and
feelings that are either irresistible or evanescent—seem to Hamlet to be the real
agents of his inaction. Either they suddenly overwhelm or they gradually eat away
at his feeble attempts to decide and act.
Hamlet repeatedly flagellates himself for inadequate determination,8 as in his
first soliloquy: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I?” (2.2.485). But is he a
rogue, one who chooses to be evil, or a peasant slave, one born without the
capacity to act as a free man and a true moral agent? Like this opening phrase, the
whole soliloquy is a tangle of inconsistent thoughts and feelings. He keeps
slipping from stance to stance in a maze of images: I wish I would melt away—
because I have no firmness. I “can say nothing”—I have no power to act. But the
verb of action is “say,” not the expected “do.” Perhaps he imagines himself, not
killing Claudius, but denouncing him to his face with the verbal eloquence of the
First Player, thus in his imagination acquiring one specific kind of agency, that of
the skilled actor. In fact eloquent language comes easily to Hamlet’s lips whenever
he speaks of Claudius—except when he is in the king’s presence, at which times
he can only vent bitter taunts in painfully laconic bursts. And of course the
soliloquy here finally lurches away from its obvious conclusion—“I will kill
Claudius”—to “I will test the ghost’s word, by manipulating a play from behind
the scenes.” Thus Hamlet imagines himself, not even as the actor of his play, but
as the director. In short, not only can he not decide and act, but all his intellection

7
See Thompson and Taylor’s commentary on the passage in their note at 3.4.104.
8
Philosophers like Locke and Hume have struggled with defining the concept of velleity to
describe an act of willing that is insufficiently strong to spur a sufficient act.
 HAMLET AND MORAL AGENCY 

cannot bring him to a single coherent perspective on himself, to anything more

than bitter self-contempt.9
But surely there is no point to this self-flagellation if Hamlet has—indeed if
human beings have—no capacity to will and act freely, if he truly believes that we
are all pawns in a gigantic chess game played by powers beyond our ken. And yet
Hamlet both mocks human incapacity—we are slaves—and angrily condemns
human failure—we are rogues. No wonder he can picture humanity both as “how
noble in reason; how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and
admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god” and as
the “quintessence of dust” (2.2.270–4). In some sense at this moment he is at once
angrily scolding himself, mystifying Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and express-
ing his considered view, contradictory though it is, both of himself and of human
potentiality, voicing all three at once because he is too intelligent to attain
consistency by oversimplifying. And he views Ophelia with the same inconsist-
ency as he views himself when he confronts her in 3.1. His pun on “nunnery”
captures his ambivalence. Because he loves her in her innocence and so warns her
against himself, he genuinely wants her to flee to the protection of a walled
convent, but part of him thinks that she belongs in a brothel, because he despises
her weakness and treachery.
The act of killing Polonius is a vivid expression of these paradoxes in moral
agency that baffle Hamlet’s comprehension. He has deflected his focus from the
battle with Claudius to denouncing and trying to save his mother, even though
chance has just offered him an opportunity at an unprotected Claudius. Turning
from that opportunity, when he arrives at Gertrude’s closet, his tirade against her
is itself diverted when he hears Polonius behind the arras and kills him—hoping
that he may have killed Claudius. The thought or rather unreflective impulse
behind this act is his, but the end none of his own. Polonius’ death just gives
Claudius the excuse to banish Hamlet from the court, planning to send him to
England and his death. Hamlet himself interprets the killing of Polonius, not as
chance, a random event, but as the action of a mysterious Providence:
For this same lord
I do repent, but heaven hath pleased it so
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister. (3.4.170–3)

9
Luke Wilson’s stimulating analysis of Hamlet’s processes of decision seems to me to make
Shakespeare’s study of them more philosophically analytic than is justified. I would extend his
skepticism about the political implications of the portrayal to skepticism about our locating a
Shakespearian stance on the nature of human intention. See Wilson, and see Robert B. Pierce,
“Intention and Ogden Nash,” Comparative Literature Studies 38 (2001): 232–48.
 ROBERT B . PIERCE

That is, he has sinned and deserves divine punishment, yet he is a pawn in the
inscrutable purposes of the heavens, becoming what he “must be”: one who by
necessity carries out the divine will, whether as angelic messenger or as satanic
adversary, or as somehow both at once.
It is not that in these words Hamlet has attained some sort of philosophic
maturity, having burned through his anger toward his mother. After all, he goes
on to behave just as randomly as before, venting angry sarcasm toward Claudius,
claiming to see through the king’s purposes but doing nothing to thwart them,
and later, on the road, chastising himself for inaction compared to the energetic
Fortinbras. Yet he is also capable of spurts of passionate activity, when he alters
the letter, fights the pirates, quarrels with Laertes on the esthetics of grieving for
Ophelia.
As the fatal fencing match draws near, he expresses a version of the pervasive
fatalism in words that could be interpreted as a final mature vision, a kind of
Christian stoicism. After telling Horatio of his premonitions about the fencing
contest, he rejects Horatio’s offer to call it off:
Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ‘tis
not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The
readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be.
(5.2.197–202)

Certainly Hamlet attains a kind of calmness here, even a calmness about his own
death that is without any admixture either of fear or of his former yearning
toward self-annihilation. He can resist both the desire to know the future and the
fear of it, and he uses language that hovers between the Sermon on the Mount
and Epictetus. But, given our dramatic knowledge of how Claudius and Laertes’
plots are mounted against him, we can hardly find this stance a reassuring model
of how to encounter a treacherous world, even if a brief interim for action seems
to Hamlet to be open. As the final scene unfolds, it is as usual only in incidental
behavior that he acts firmly and confidently. He is gracious to Laertes under
impossible conditions, is even coolly civil to Claudius, and is generous to a fault
in accepting the terms of the contest, yet he gives no sign of having solved the
terrible problem of how to deal with what the ghost has called him to. If Hamlet
were the model of how to behave in a terribly mysterious world, one might expect
some stronger affirmation by him and others of the rightness of his final stance,
something more than just his cryptic “The rest is silence” (5.2.342) and Horatio’s
grab bag of causal forces in his summary of the play:

So shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
 HAMLET AND MORAL AGENCY 

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning, and for no cause,
And in this upshot purposes mistook
Fallen on th’inventors’ heads. (364–9)

Hamlet is too mercurial to give us an Arnoldian clear and whole vision of the
moral world within which we try to decide and act, and Horatio is too laconic, too
given to Euripidean indirection to do so; but, as we watch these two friends
struggling with the puzzles and compulsions of Denmark under Claudius, we can
see with Shakespearian vividness how our own world makes demands on us,
while baffling us as we consider how to respond. Rather than a philosophical
statement, Hamlet is a sort of dramatic workshop on how we can think and feel in
the kind of baffling world in which Hamlet and his fellow characters find
themselves, as we do ourselves, and surely for Shakespeare’s play to do that is
more valuable ethical work than would be asserting (or undermining) one or
another proposition about the reality and extent of human freedom or indeed
about what Hamlet should or should not do in his extraordinary circumstances.
We look on like Horatio and do or say something, even while not knowing quite
what to think.
PART II

Matters of Character
 4
Othello’s Paradox
The Place of Character in Literary Experience

Garry L. Hagberg

“I am not what I am”. With these words, Iago, the traditional literary embodi-
ment of unmitigated evil in Shakespeare’s Othello, makes a claim that contains at
its core an interesting tension. Within a context of actual deception, manipula-
tion, and a hideous disregard for the lives of those around him (including his own
wife, whom he kills as the plot progresses—and at the close of the play only one
major character, Cassio, is still living, all the others dead because of his machin-
ations), he falsely inspires in everyone a deep trust in his honesty, his supportive
reliability, and his general good will. Their misled trust is the source of his
malicious power—power he uses to catastrophically bad ends (Othello murders
his wife Desdemona, believing that she has been unfaithful on the basis of
evidence planted by Iago, and at the end kills himself upon learning that her
loving protestations of innocence were sincere and that he was set up by Iago; the
other characters meet similarly ignominious ends). But when Iago says he is not
what he is, he is asserting that he is not what he seems, that appearances are
deceiving, and when he says this he explains that early on he learned to keep his
inner, real self hidden for fear of (in his words) the birds that would come and
peck at the heart on his sleeve. He has been successful in instilling the false belief
in the community around him precisely because he has put forward what we
succinctly call a false front.
But that front was believable to the point of inspiring deep trust precisely for
reasons that concern basic elements in our understanding of, and expectations
about, character: (1) it was outwardly displayed and readily observable in action;
(2) it was discernibly consistent across time and circumstance; (3) it was forth-
right and clear; and (4) it seemed to embody a stability and strength that
generated sound judgment. What Othello knew of his trusted personal
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

soldier-assistant, a person constantly close to him, was in one sense everything

there was to know (at least on the level of outward evidence): he saw close up all
that action, all that consistency, all that forthrightness, and all that judgment, and
within those fairly unconstrained limits he understood Iago accordingly. The
frequent morally descriptive phrase is “honest Iago.”
But the paradox? Here is the doubled p and not-p tension: Iago says he is not
what he is, but also, the more Othello thought he knew, the less he truly knew.
The more evidence he had for his beliefs, the more wrong he was—it was justified
false belief masquerading as truth. As the person closest to Iago, in knowing
everything, he knew nothing. What is it about our presumptions about character
that led Othello to this irredeemably tragic end? And then: was not Iago truthful,
and profoundly (if fleetingly) so, in making his global self-descriptive denial?
Was that not, for that moment, actually “honest Iago”—a truthful liar? Or was
that denial, consistent with the hidden snake crawling beneath the crafted
dissemblance, also a manipulation? And so one asks: what do we mean by
“consistent” here, and why is it so important? Understanding this will, as we
proceed, tell us a good deal about (1) our conception of ethical character (which
as I discuss it here is derived from Aristotle), (2) why we care about literary
characters (the two senses of “character” here are, as we shall see, closer than we
might initially think), and (3) the imaginatively engaged ways in which we can
see life through a lens or within a frame borrowed from literature—with charac-
ter, and characters, at the center.

(1) Our Conception of Ethical Character

Aristotle, in the course of writing the foundational text for all subsequent
discussions of character in the Western philosophical tradition, says,
We call some virtues “intellectual” and others “moral”: theoretical wisdom, understand-
ing, and practical wisdom are intellectual virtues, generosity and self-control moral
virtues. In speaking of a man’s character, we do not describe him as wise or understand-
ing, but as gentle or self-controlled; but we praise the wise man, too, for his characteristic,
and praiseworthy characteristics are what we call virtues.1

This not only sets out a distinction between intellectual and moral virtues; it also
suggests, on the basis of this distinction, why it is that we can—if somewhat
grudgingly or reluctantly—admire the intellectual acuity and resourcefulness
shown in committing a deed that detracts from, rather than augments, a person’s

1
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962),
p. 32.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

moral standing. We can, for example, admire the perceptual acuity that Iago
displays, and we can see that his deception is grounded in a deep understanding
of powerful human emotion (e.g., jealousy) and its causal or circumstantial
origins, all the while seeing that he is morally despicable. This, as we will return
to later, is one important part of why we find characters like Iago so gripping. The
character-type of “diabolical genius”, developed throughout literature and found
all too often in life, is based on this distinction. Praiseworthy characteristics can,
but need not, imply a praiseworthy character. But we want to ask (in canvassing
what our conception of character is, prior to our discussing why we care about
literary characters and how it is that we can see life through a character-based
literary lens), where do moral virtues come from? As we will see, understanding
where such virtues come from in a person is a large part of understanding in a
refined sense what those virtues are. Aristotle argues that no moral virtues are
implanted by nature, and because of this, habit and acculturation are centrally
significant. A stone, he says, has a natural downward movement, and we cannot
re-habituate it to upward movement by throwing it in the air 10,000 times.2 But
moral virtues, the content of character, are not fixed in anything like the same
way. Natural abilities, such as hearing, we do not acquire in the act of hearing: we
have the inborn capacity, and then we use it.
The virtues, on the other hand, we acquire by first having put them into action, and the
same is also true of the other arts. For the things which we have to learn before we can do
them we learn by doing: men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing
the harp. Similarly, we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by
exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.3

Iago became a duplicitous person by enacting duplicity; he became viciously

manipulative by viciously manipulating; he became what he is “by first having
put them into action.” A person does not immediately arrive at the status “chain-
smoker” by smoking one cigarette and then later another. But that background
had to be traversed in order to arrive at this status ultimately—the “dots” of
individual chosen action become connected by the intrinsic teleology of a grow-
ing, and hardening, habit. Iago chose to tell, early on, one convenient lie. Then
another. And then another. And he saw that he could inspire, in a given person at
a given time, a moment of trust. And then he saw, later, that he could reinforce
that earlier trust by buttressing it with another related deception. Then he saw he

2
Ibid., p. 33. For a helpful introduction to the themes being discussed here, see J. O. Urmson,
Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); see especially chapter 2, “Excellence of Character”,
pp. 25–37.
3
Nicomachean Ethics, p. 34.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

could do much the same with others. And he saw he could in one circumstance
manipulate the emotional state of another. And then later, he saw he could do
this, and with the power of suggestion, direct their emotion-fueled actions from
his secretly central position of controlling puppet-master. His distinctive set of
characteristics, in Aristotle’s sense, have become engrained by the steadily pro-
gressing teleology and the gradual strengthening of his individually chosen
actions that connect in his character over time. And, like the smoker on the
way to becoming a chain-smoker, each single decision to act is made easier by
the collection of similar actions preceding it, the “dots” that together make the
line pointing out the trajectory of his character. After some time, the chosen
action is habitual to the point where it becomes not a fully chosen action in the
way the early instances of the chain are. We thus aptly use the phrase, “second
nature”. Aristotle captures the point in this way:
We must see to it that our activities are of a certain kind, since any variations in them will
be reflected in our characteristics. Hence it is no small matter whether one habit is
inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary, it makes a considerable difference,
or, rather, all the difference.4

Iago probably started young.

A rather crude version of consequentialism in ethical thought would hold that
it is exclusively the consequences resulting from an action that determine the
moral valence of that action; it is of interest to the understanding of character and
our conception of it that Aristotle, if perhaps without fully realizing it, puts in
place a peremptory counter-move against this variety of moral reductionism. He
observes that pain and pleasure function as a test of virtue: if we do the right thing
and feel pleasure subsequent to doing it, we have a laudable character by contrast
with the person who does (or, as we instructively say, forces himself to do) the
right thing but feels pain in doing it, i.e., he does it under a kind of inner duress
or inward protest. The outward or crudely observed actions look the same, but
they are not:
A man who abstains from bodily pleasures and enjoys doing so is self-controlled; if he
finds abstinence troublesome, he is self-indulgent; a man who endures danger with joy, or
at least without pain, is courageous; if he endures it with pain, he is a coward.5

In seeing this point, we see that gentleness, thoughtfulness, kindness, sympathetic

imaginativeness, and so forth are not what they are in a sense by themselves: one
can evince gentleness, thoughtfulness, kindness, and so forth as outward action,
as behavioral performances, but these will not be indicative of character. If they

4 5
Ibid., pp. 34–5. Ibid., pp. 36–7.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

are genuine acts of e.g. kindness but (as Aristotle is here considering) accom-
panied by inner pain or protest, they are importantly morally distinct from what
appear to be those same actions but accompanied by pleasure. But the matter is
more complex still than Aristotle left it at this point: if one is an Iago (and we will
return in Part III to the notion of being an Iago), it is not that one experiences
pain on performing an act of kindness. It is, rather, that one experiences pleasure
(and indeed malicious pleasure) on performing a manipulative action that has the
deceptive outward appearance of kindness.
It is of special interest in gaining a fuller understanding of our settled concep-
tion of character (one might well say: what the word “character” means) that, as
Aristotle also observes, an action that is morally indicative “must spring from a
firm and unchangeable character.”6 This is to say still more about the connected
dots, about progressively engrained habits, about the teleological force of one’s
earlier choices. One can ask: would we accept a seemingly random collection of
individual chosen actions, initially showing no connection, no pattern, no line of
development, no direction, as indicative of character? Two answers suggest
themselves, both supportive of Aristotle’s point. The first answer is that we
would not: we do not ascribe ethical characteristics on the basis of single
actions—just as one is not a smoker upon having taken one drag of one cigarette,
one is not kind on having performed one isolated gesture of kindness. Moreover,
if we see no direction, no pattern, to the collection of actions considered, we lack
the requisite basis for attributing dispositions or traits. It was precisely one such
pattern that Othello, and then the others, saw in (the outward behavior of)
“honest Iago”; the strength of the deception (to which we will return) depended
upon this. And then also, further supporting the first answer, we do not unprob-
lematically employ (that is, if we do, it will be only cautiously or provisionally,
only with provisos) ethical descriptions that imply enduring traits when we are
supplied only with a collection of unrelated actions or episodes.
The second answer is that we would—but only as a special exception that
proves the rule. That is to say, only where we have reason to believe that there is
no pattern to be perceived. And then this itself will provide the foundation for a
description of character or of enduring traits (the fact that such a case is difficult
to imagine is instructive and also supportive of Aristotle’s observation—this
would be a person in some kind of severe difficulty probably pertaining to drastic
memory problems, psychological instability, neurological impairment, personal-
ity disorders, and the like). And indeed, to have reason to believe that there is no
such pattern is itself to assess, with non-connecting evidence, a lack of pattern

6
Ibid., p. 39.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

over time and across circumstance. The description of what a person does, the
action they perform, is perhaps in certain cases specifiable independently of
interrelated details of the larger context within which they act, and that act can
be described independently of the history or teleology of past related actions that
in a sense underwrite and point to this present action (the present simply
described action is: “Iago took the handkerchief”). But the description not of
what a person does, but rather of what a person does, is not isolatable in anything
like the same way (Iago, having planted and watered the seed of doubt concern-
ing marital fidelity in Othello’s mind, cunningly plants false evidence of
infidelity—the handkerchief—and then nurtures Othello’s misperception of a
conversation that he mistakenly hears as incriminating). And what a person does,
as Aristotle sees, is the focus of any interest in character.7 The brief sentence
concerning the taking of the handkerchief tells us nothing. The longer sentence
telling us in a less reductive way what Iago did with it tells us an enormous
amount about the character of the person who performed this action. Literature
gives us, with still far greater contextual complexity and intricacy, descriptions of
the second kind, never of the first. And this is for good reason: the understanding
of character, in literature and in life, depends on it.
But before moving to Part II, there are three other elements of Aristotle’s
conception of character that we need to include in this discussion; the first two
involve some discussion, the third is straightforward. The first is this: It is a
requirement that the action in question be voluntary in order for it to be assessed
for its determinative significance regarding character, or regarding the use of
character-describing or morally attributive terms. Observing that when our
actions are “voluntary we receive praise and blame; when involuntary, we are
pardoned and sometimes even pitied,”8 Aristotle rightly sees the distinction as
“indispensable for a student of virtue.”9 One could initially think that this would
constitute a litmus test for characterological relevance: if voluntary, it is a “dot”
to be connected; if involuntary, then not. But the nuanced sophistication of
Aristotle’s lengthy discussion of this matter shows that moral life cannot be
demarcated in this simple way. And thus, the collected evidence concerning
character is not a simple matter either (as we will see later in this chapter, it is
literature that provides the necessary complexity). Aristotle writes,

7
On this point see the enlightening discussion in Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: the Desire to Under-
stand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chapter 4, section 5: “Mind in Action”,
pp. 141–51.
8 9
Nicomachean Ethics, p. 52. Ibid.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

But a problem arises in regard to actions that are done through fear of a greater evil or for
some noble purpose, for instance, if a tyrant were to use a man’s parents or children as
hostages in ordering him to commit a base deed, making their survival or death depend
on his compliance or refusal. Are actions of this kind voluntary or involuntary? A similar
problem also arises when a cargo is jettisoned in a storm. Considering the action itself,
nobody would voluntarily throw away property; but when it is a matter of saving one’s
own life and that of his fellow passengers, any sensible man would do so. Actions of this
kind are, then, of a mixed nature, although they come closer to being voluntary than to
being involuntary actions.10

Aristotle refers to “the action itself,” but as in the preceding examples of the
simple and more complex description of Iago’s action with the handkerchief, one
might conclude that there is no such thing as a morally significant simple
description of an action. The voluntary–involuntary distinction is not an all-or-
nothing affair, not either “on” or “off.” With this understood, one might next
picture a continuum ranging from one extreme to the other; the jettisoning of
cargo, as Aristotle says, is mixed—yet closer to voluntary. So it takes some
discernment to rightly place the action in question on this continuum; this will
take the form of knowing precisely which descriptions to use and how and to
what extent to qualify them. This presupposes the availability of a nuanced
ethical vocabulary. (Again, we will see how literature serves to cultivate this
later in the chapter.) But as Aristotle’s discussion next shows, the matter at
hand is in truth more complicated still.
The details that are relevant to the placement of an action on the voluntary–
involuntary continuum are themselves not of a single kind or category. And they
themselves are subject to character-determining evaluation. Aristotle writes: “In
making a choice, it is sometimes hard to decide what advantages and disadvan-
tages should be weighed against one another, and what losses we should endure
to gain what we want.”11
Thus the very selection of the criteria employed for the inclusion of relevant
circumstantial detail (and for the corresponding exclusion of detail thereby
considered irrelevant) is itself an ethical matter that can be strongly indicative
of character. What we initially take to be relevant to our ethical reflection on
choosing one or another possible course of action is itself to already step into
matters of character; and what we go on to think, to reflect upon, to reconsider, in
our reflection upon the right course of action is similarly indicative of character.
All of this constitutes part of the moral psychology of the agent or actor in
question, and it is not the case (a point important for our appreciation of the

10 11
Ibid., pp. 52–3. Ibid., pp. 53–4.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

philosophical value of literature) that we can identify the simple actions first and
then super-add moral psychology to them. Again, one cannot rightly or fully
describe the action without understanding the content of moral psychology,
where this content will incorporate or be inflected by (a) the placement on the
voluntary–involuntary continuum and, at the same time, (b) the cognitive–
reflective considering of, and selection of, the criteria that determine that place-
ment. Deliberation, for Aristotle, is a precondition for choice; both are indications,
or indeed constitutive, of the content of character.
The second element of Aristotle’s conception of character that we need to
include in this discussion concerns his famous doctrine of the mean. Early in his
discussion of this he mentions the parallel to the successful work of art: it is, he
says, “impossible to detract from it or add to it, the implication being that excess
and deficiency destroy success while the mean safeguards it.”12 Virtue, he says,
also “aims at the median,”13 and as with emotion and its expression, actions can
display excess and deficiency. Thus for him most (not all) of the virtues also fall
on a continuum, and so courage, for example, falls at the median point between
recklessness on the one pole and cowardice on the other. And it is here that he
adds another thought: there are, along this continuum, very many points, very
many ways, of getting it wrong, and only one way of getting it right. All this is
widely known of Aristotle’s ethical theory, but these observations are indispens-
able in thinking through what character means.
So here, weaving together a number of the themes in play, the person of
character will have an engrained habit of aiming toward the mean, of knowing
the importance of finding it, and of performing actions that are both voluntary
and circumspect, both actions of the person and thus ones performed as expres-
sions and as further constitutive content of that person’s character. But the
character–expressive action (there can easily arise misunderstanding about
this) is not in any sense mechanistic or automatic because it falls into a personal
tradition of related or similar actions that precede it and that give it its back-
ground. It is in this sense utterly not like mindlessly smoking another cigarette.
What is habitual is the active engagement of the intellect, the active cognitive
reflection that goes into the action and that, as we have seen, in part makes that
action what it is. Thus there will not be a formula for right action; such character-
determining action requires an assessment of the relevant circumstances and, as
we have seen, a thoughtful selection of the criteria that will determine what is and
is not relevant to the case or decision at hand. (Literature often captures this kind
of detail; philosophy rarely.)

12 13
Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 45.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

But here again, the continuum ranging from excess to deficiency is not a
simple one, not mono-dimensional. The finding of the mean takes an active
intelligence, the exercise of which is itself a character-defining virtue, and the
reflections of that intelligence are here again both subject to ethical evaluation
and constitutive of the moral content of the action. (It is here that one says one
has to admire the genius shown in the intricate plans of the criminal mastermind
despite the utter condemnation of the undertaking in which that intelligence was
shown, or conversely where the quality of the thought involved is found wanting
even though the undertaking to which it contributed is wholly laudatory.)
The third element, before moving to Part (2), is as mentioned as simple as it is
essential: for the good person, for the exemplar of virtuous character, appearance
and reality have to coincide.14 The reason they must do so is that, for the person
of character, what seems good to that person will be truly good. That person will
never have to put forward a false front because what that person wants is always
consistent with the good for all concerned, and the characterologically expressive
behavior or action of that person—what one sees of a person—is genuine and
true of that person. Indeed, one way to define “trust” would be to say that one
believes without difficulty or suspicion that of the person trusted, appearance and
reality are always equivalent, are always one. All of this, of course, is the opposite
of Iago.

(2) Why We Care about Literary Characters

Perceptual acuity in ethical matters is itself not something we are born with: we
create it, develop it, and engrain it in the act of doing it. We learn to play the harp
by playing the harp; we learn to become more discerning, more exacting, more
articulate, in our perceptions of moral life by practicing discernment, exactitude,
and articulateness. But also, we do not learn to distinguish between true and false
descriptions of human deeds, words, intentions, consequences, as though truth
and falsity were the only two options for any description of human action and
interaction. We learn, in fact, a huge range of subtle distinctions that themselves
lie along the course of a vast continuum of descriptions. But the question with
which we want to begin this section is: what drives this concern for perceptual
and descriptive acuity?
Raimond Gaita has helpfully discussed what he identifies as “truth as a need of
the soul.”15 He asks, “Could anyone not care whether she was really in love rather

14
See ibid., pp. 63–4.
15
Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 237–58.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

than merely infatuated? Could anyone not care whether her grief at the death of a
loved one—a parent, a child, a lover—was genuine rather than self-indulgent?”16
Whether what we think is true, or false, or any of the countless epistemic stations
between those poles matters to us in deep and variegated ways, and as Gaita
suggests, “The distinction between the real and the counterfeit seems . . . to be
fundamental to the very nature of the states that make up our inner lives.”17 If we
are to be fully human, he claims, we must be able to explore with some acuity and
in some detail the difference between the real and the counterfeit within the
fabric of our inner lives. This, I will say, is part of the rich experience that
literature affords, and it is in part both an occasion for reflection on character
and, more than that, even constitutive of character.
The sense of the word “soul,” as Gaita here employs it, is profoundly inter-
twined with our conception of character as outlined in the preceding section on
the kind of thing we mean by “character.” He is calling our attention to a
colloquial, and humanely entrenched, way of using the term “soul”; the uses
embedded in contexts such as saying that a kind of work is soul-destroying, or
that a given activity is good for the soul, that someone possesses a great soul, and
so forth. Thus upon hearing someone claim (plausibly) that a person’s soul was
deepened by re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, one does not reply with “So
you believe in immaterial substances?”, or “So you believe in religious immor-
tality?” Rather, this kind of remark opens the way to a discussion of the impact
this literary experience had on the person, its effects on that person’s patterns of
thought and feeling, the insight into the human heart gained through this
transformative experience of reading, and the difference it made to how the
person is now in contrast to how the person was before. (To label this meaning of
the word “soul,” as a reminder of the metaphysical implications to avoid, Gaita
says that this is the “non-speculative,” or “mortal,” soul.18)
These discussions of soul are, in the Aristotelian sense, equivalent to discus-
sions of character, and so it is here that the plot thickens. “The inner life, the life
of the soul,” he says, “consists of our emotions—love, grief, joy, and, of course,
intellectual passion—whose very existence is partly constituted by reflection.”19 It
is partly constituted by reflection: thus serious reflection upon character in the
broadly Aristotelian sense discussed previously is at once an activity that yields
deeper (and as we will return to the topic momentarily, truer) understanding of
character, while also yielding deeper character. But in what form do these twin
results manifest themselves?

16 17
A Common Humanity, p. 237. Ibid., pp. 237–8.
18 19
Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 240.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

Gaita writes,
We are required to be lucid about our inner lives under pain of superficiality. It is of the
nature of the states that compose the inner life that they profess their authenticity, that
they profess to be truthful and true. To grieve is to take oneself to be properly related to
the reality of someone’s death; to be related, that is, in a way that makes grief true to
(“correspond to”, “be in tune with”) that reality.20

This authenticity—a constituent part of the self-defining content of character—is

something we learn to discern: we see (to return to the earlier list) gentleness,
thoughtfulness, kindness, and sympathetic imaginativeness within the unfolding
life of a person and not in isolated episodes or fragments of action that we verify
or falsify by uniform or case-transcending criteria for each of these independ-
ently. And as we have seen, we see discernment, wisdom, and human under-
standing in the act of context-sensitive criteria-selection itself. We care deeply
whether these traits, or character-defining acts, are genuine or counterfeit, and we
can make that distinction only by seeing the person in question over time and
across a span of time and circumstance that allows us to make sense of that
person’s life (as Othello, tragically too late, comes to truly see, to make horrifying
sense of, Iago). We can see whether a person has cultivated a sensibility that
makes it possible to deliver just the right gentle, understanding, and sympathetic
words at just the right time to a person in difficulty—but we see this with
discernment, with the lucidity of which Gaita writes, and with the acuity that
brings with it an ability to measure the degree and depth of authenticity only as a
result of our own characterological development and cultivation. This kind of
perception is both rehearsed and enacted in ethically engaged literary experience.
But in precisely what form is this manifest? Gaita continues:
When it is pure, grief is a form of relatedness to reality whose cognitive character is
marked by the critical vocabulary that distinguishes real from false forms of it.21

Here is precisely where the connection between life and literature—the under-
standing of a character in literature and the understanding and constitution of
character in life—comes into sharp focus. The critical vocabulary—what we say
and what we further learn to say with ever-greater refinement and exactitude—is
the vehicle, the manifestation. Our ethical life is described, captured, expressed,
considered, reflected upon, reconsidered, and a thousand other things, in
our words—the same things that constitute literary characters, or that indeed

20 21
Ibid. Ibid.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

constitute literature.22 When Gaita says, “One can no more be indifferent to

whether one’s grief takes one to or away from reality than one can be indifferent
to whether one’s beliefs are true or false,”23 he is of course talking about life. But
I want to add that the same need for truth (as a need of the soul) drives our
concern for seeing literary characters as they are, for understanding them across
an expanse of time and circumstance, of seeing the word-borne identities
revealed in the virtues and vices they show in their thought, action, and style of
interaction. Aristotle said that it is within the unfolding history and character-
ological teleology of such thoughts, actions, and interactions that we become who
we are; I want to suggest that the critical vocabulary that we use to both reflect
upon and to instantiate and solidify our self-descriptions can be, and is often,
derived from literary experience, and that the cultivated descriptions of character
that we use in interpreting, in understanding, a literary character is similarly (but
moving in the opposite direction) derived from life. Or to put this point in
compact form: there may be two worlds, one real and one literary, but there is
only one world of language that they both share.

22
Stanley Bates nicely captures a centrally salient point here. In his chapter “Character,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), pp. 393–419, Bates writes (in response to the idea that literary characters are made out
of “mere words”): “Words, however, are not reducible to their physical manifestations, any more
than human actions are reducible to bodily movements, or money reducible to pieces of metal or
paper. Words are what they are because of their uses in a complex system of expression and
communication. The many possible uses of language depend upon the complex set of intentions
and expectations of the users of the language (and what those intentions and expectations can be are,
conversely, inscribed within language).” The words that both describe and show character in
literature and in life are not hermetically sealed in separate categories with fact on one side and
fiction on the other, and in neither case do we have in any generic or categorically encompassing
sense “mere” words.
In relation to this, Bates observes that literary characters depend “upon a representation of them
as exceeding the bounds of the fiction,” and that “they have to be representations of imagined
persons who are also imagined as having a ‘reality’ that extends beyond the narration”(p. 409).
Words—descriptions of intentional action or any variety of voluntary to involuntary action,
descriptions showing intellectual virtue, descriptions of a long sequence of deeds that have meaning
that can only be perceived cumulatively—do this work, and to understand them requires that we see
the character in question as having a life that extends both intricately and vastly beyond what is
explicitly stated. Like life, this is the background (or as Wittgenstein called it, “scaffolding”) against
which we make sense of what is said and meant. So to adapt Bates’s point about irreducibility: a
character in a novel is not wholly reducible to the set of words that create it. As in life, the range of
implication creates an atmosphere that constitutes both the setting and an indispensable part of the
meaning-content of those words. In short: Any simple dichotomy separating “mere fictional words
of non-existent characters” from “real words of real people” misses much more than it captures.
Bates writes: “Our understanding of who we are as human beings will be partly constituted by our
literature—both for the cultural community and for the individual. It is not clear that there is an
‘ordinary’ conception of human character that exists independent of the representations of character
in fictional narratives” (p. 414).
23
A Common Humanity, pp. 240–1.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

One might have begun with the simple idea that any concern for truth as the
soul’s need would not engage with fiction for the very reason that it is, after all,
fiction, i.e., it is by definition not true. But, consistent with (if on this point
beyond) what Gaita is claiming, we see the truth or falsity, the genuine or
counterfeit, within the world of a given work of literature; at the tragic end of
Othello, we see Iago not for who he seems (that is what all the characters in the
play have been taken in by), but for who he is. His seeming identity, within the
play, is a fictional creation of his own, sustained by admirably clever, morally
hideous manipulations. Of grief, Gaita continues, “And to grieve is to take oneself
to grieve authentically, that is, in accord with the reality whose nature—and
whose status as a genuine form of reality—is revealed in the grammar of the
critical concepts to which grief is answerable.” The very fact that we take
ourselves to be doing one kind of thing rather than another kind of thing itself
underscores the deep and intricate relations between character in literature and
character in life: in taking ourselves one way, we interpret ourselves one way, and
in stabilizing this over time we become what we initially interpret. This is another
way of making Aristotle’s point about the importance of habituation in the
solidification of character. And the status of the genuine—Gaita is profoundly
right about this—is revealed in the grammar of the critical concepts to which our
widely various and multitudinous ethical concepts are answerable. If one said (to
follow a remark of Wittgenstein’s) that one felt profound grief for a minute, we
would not understand that (or we would find it as self-refuting as it is odd);
genuine grief does not coordinate itself with the idea of the momentary, or with
the idea of brief self-contained episodes. Its criteria do not work like that. To say
that a person was deeply committed to truthfulness for a fleeting second is to say
something very negative indeed about that person’s truthfulness, and it is not the
internal content of the sentence but the way the grammar (in Wittgenstein’s
sense) of our concepts function together that tells us this. We see, and ever more
acutely learn, this kind of ethically focused philosophical grammar in literature
everywhere.
Gaita mentions the case of asking whether one has been rightly moved by
someone’s words or by their example (by seeing into “the ways we connect
concepts of truth, truthfulness, authenticity, and authority”),24 and one can
expand on this: we become settled—if a question concerning whether we should
have been moved or not—in our interpretation of that person’s genuine character
by seeing connections, by seeing the sense that the person’s life makes across a
broad range of assembled, pattern-fitting particulars. Such particulars (if real)

24
Ibid., p. 241.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

will fit with the grammars of integrity, honesty, courageousness, resourcefulness

under duress, dignity, sensitivity, and many related character-determining con-
cepts that may become relevant to the case or interpretive question at hand. Such
particulars, if seen to be counterfeit when subjected to the interconnecting
scrutiny25 that literature can show us how to undertake, will collapse, as does
Iago, as a house of cards.
Bernard Williams places emphasis on the active process of making sense of an
event or occurrence; he writes, “When we try to make sense of a particular
happening, we often tell a story about a sequence of events that led to it.”26 That
story, when it comes to the understanding of a person or what a person said or did,
is very often Aristotelian in nature and a matter of character: any human action—
word or deed—that calls for explanation or understanding has a contextually
enmeshed teleology that led to it, and as Williams is suggesting, to achieve a grasp
of that is to understand the action in front of us. And it is often to understand what
the person did as a choice—possibly exemplifying intellectual virtue—taken from
surrounding possible actions not chosen, where these fall on a continuum ranging
from excess to deficiency (virtue being the mean between any two such extremes).
And Williams adds: “If we do make sense of it (or explain it, or come to
understand it), we must take the elements of the story to be true.”27
We have discussed truth as a need of the soul in Gaita’s terms, and Williams’
observations cohere well with this way of seeing our interest in character: we need
the explanation of the action in question, the interpretation of the human deed, to
be not only interrelated as a coherent story, but, in addition to that, true. Thus, we
might for example find a superimposed explanatory template (Marxist, psycho-
analytic, etc.), a template that generates a story by bringing its elements together
into a narrative structure, but find it from the outset implausible (or of course
we might, in particular contexts, also find these forms of explanation deeply
convincing). In such cases of serious implausibility, we might say that we have
made sense, but in the wrong way.28 Debates concerning the best or truest

25
For deeply insightful discussions of the kind of understanding of a person or character that
results from what I am briefly calling here interconnecting scrutiny, see Ray Monk, “Biography and
Theory Reconsidered: Second Wittgensteinian Thoughts,” New Formations 67 (2009): 134–43; “This
Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character”, Philosophy and Literature 31/1
(2007): 1–40; and “Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding,”
Poetics Today 28/3 (2007): 527–70.
26
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002), p. 233.
27
Ibid.
28
In this connection see the chapter “The Fragility of Character” in Peter Goldie, On Personality
(London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 52–77. See especially the discussion of the premature interpretation
of fragments of behavioral evidence as settled dispositions, pp. 55–64.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

interpretation along these lines are identical in life and literature: the forms of
understanding, or in Williams’ terms, the making of sense, invariably concern the
past and the trajectory coming out of it that reaches right up to the present as it
lies before us. Williams calls a short-form narrative, one that is explanatory of
one brief event, a “mini-narrative”: for example, we ask ourselves, “Why did the
ice melt?” and, on quick investigation, see that someone tripped on the power
cord and inadvertently unplugged the refrigerator. Mini-narratives of that kind
do arise in cases of action–explanation that is characterologically significant, but
these are merely microcosms of the real thing, i.e., long-form and detailed,
capacious integration of a person’s words, deeds, interactive patterns, presenta-
tional and verbal style, degree of attentiveness, reach of sympathetic imagination,
and countless other categories of ethical engagement.
Williams provides an instructive example of such long-form narrative
explanations:
Mini-narratives can be combined and expanded into longer and, often, very particular
and unpredictable stories which also make sense of some outcome, such as a present
practice. In many cases, such a story is the only thing that can make sense of it. Why is it
that walls in Belfast, in the year 2001, bear the extraordinary legend “Remember 1690”?
“Well, . . . ” the weary explainer begins. The long and saddening story that follows may
make sense of something that seemed at first sight unintelligible.

The phrase “mini-narratives combined” can simultaneously describe the building

of our understanding of a person and our understanding of the relation between a
plot and a sub-plot; the phrase “expanded into longer and, often, very particular
and unpredictable stories which also make sense of some outcome” can simul-
taneously describe our reading of a work of literature and our coming to
understand the actions of a person we at first find puzzling or, indeed, unintel-
ligible; the making of sense, as Williams is discussing it, describes the active
nature of our interest in stories, in literature, and the active nature of our interest
in understanding persons. It is the nature of our understanding of characters, and
the nature of our understanding of character.
However, there is an important caveat, one that is especially important to
any account of the role of understanding character in literary experience, and
Williams articulates it well:

If the story makes sense of things, this implies that we, the listeners, can make sense of the
elements of the story, for instance, of actions that have significantly marked and formed
that history. But this does not necessarily mean that we think that those actions make
sense: that is to say, that we would regard them as reasonable things for us to do, or that
we think the states of mind from which they come, such as a fanatical attachment to one
version of the Christian religion, are reasonable. The condition of our understanding is
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

rather this, that it should make sense to us that such actions should make sense to people
in those circumstances.29

We might, for the moment, thus distinguish between what we could call under-
standing and meta-understanding: we can, in understanding a character in
literature, agree with that character to the extent that we actually do in life
what they do in literature; or we might in understanding such a character,
agree in hypothetical form, i.e., agree that we would and will do what they do,
if we were ever in those circumstances. But, in a case of meta-understanding, we
understand the characterological and experiential teleology that led this character
to do what they do, and so are able to make sense of what they do and why they
do it, while at the same time objecting, perhaps strenuously and completely, to
what they do. This is not a small matter for the following two reasons, the first
more widely understood, the second perhaps less so: the imaginative identifica-
tion with literary characters very unlike ourselves expands the reach and scope of
our human understanding and our imaginative grasp of other ways of living,
other patterns of self-defining words and deeds. And our own character is
expanded, and deepened, accordingly. That seems well known. But also: in
thinking through what can often be the subtle differences between understanding
and meta-understanding, and the reasons for withholding the assent or agree-
ment that would make meta-understanding into understanding, we sharpen the
sense of ourselves. This is itself one important form of character development,
and as mentioned in Section 1, this begins to show how the close study of
character in literature can at the same time be much more than that, i.e., how
it can, as it proceeds, create, strengthen, or solidify actual character. Making sense
of others in literary experience—seeing into character and coming to understand
what makes a character tick—is a way of making ourselves.

(3) Seeing Life Through the Lens of Literature

Whether we should rightly be moved by the words of others (where this is based
upon trust in their character) can be an intricate matter. This too carries across
from literature to life: we can be deceived by a false sentimentalism masquerading
as sincerity, and we can be manipulated by sentimentalism as used by a crafty
author. But there are cases of this in reverse: we can take the real as the false, and
realize only too late that we should have been moved by character-based words
that we mistakenly interpreted as counterfeit. Thus, under the veil of false beliefs

29
Truth and Truthfulness, pp. 234–5.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

manipulated by Iago, Othello, in his final exchange with his wife Desdemona,
upon hearing what he later realized were genuine, says of her protestations
concerning her alleged infidelity with Cassio, “Oh perjured woman! Thou dost
stone my heart.”30 He believes she is layering lies upon betrayal, and he is moved
in a sense in reverse: profoundly unsettled, he is moved to remain unmoved, his
heart turned to stone. Thus deaf to her final, desperate plea to postpone her death
until the following morning (and thus giving proof time to emerge), Othello’s last
words to her include what “Honest Iago” told him. Moved deeply by words that
should not have moved him, and not moved at all by the most important words
he heard in his life, he completes the hideous tragedy Iago has designed. His is an
irrevocable, lethal, mistake of character: if he could have listened and not acted
precipitously, and contemplated in a calmer state what he knew of Desdemona’s
longer-term narrative and the assembled mini-narratives, plots and sub-plots,
and characterological teleology that made her who she was, he could have averted
this murderously tragic end where his own hand functions as Iago’s tool. Or: if
only he himself had had the capacity for patient ethical reflection, the sustained
character-based reflection that Aristotle articulates, the virtuous mean lying
between two extremes on a continuum, the awareness of the character-revealing
intertwining relations between our moral concepts to which Gaita draws our
attention, and a knowledge of the need to understand on the overarching level of
the long form that Williams identifies. Or still again: if only Othello had first read
Othello. At the close of the play, realizing that he has murdered his wife for one
single piece of planted evidence (the handkerchief) that could easily (and he now
sees, in fact better) fit into another sense-making long-form narrative, Othello
himself sees his blinding failure of character as manifest in his rashness, i.e., his
very failure to characterologically reflect. In asking the survivor Lodovico to tell
the tale honestly and forthrightly (“I pray you, in your letters, when you shall
these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down
aught in malice”), he says of himself, “Then must you speak Of one that loved not
wisely but too well.”31
Metaphor momentarily stabilizes in language a novel way of seeing—a way of
seeing one thing as another, or a way of seeing one thing in the light of another.
Romeo said, en route to his own tragic end, “Juliet is the sun.” Winston Churchill
said (in helping to avert a possible real tragic end), “Mussolini is a utensil.”32

30
Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, in W. G. Clarke and W. A. Wright, eds, The Plays
and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 239.
31
Ibid., p. 243.
32
On this topic more broadly, see Ted Cohen, Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

One’s heart is not stone—and yet can be. One is not deaf to sincere words—and
yet can be. One’s hand is not someone else’s tool—and yet can be. Having
experienced through vicarious identification33 the inner life, as Gaita discussed
it—indeed in his non-metaphysical sense the soul—of Othello, one can know
what it is to fail in these ways, and be alert not to re-exemplify that failing in new
circumstances—not to be Othello. One can find out (if fortunately, rarely) the
hard way that one is in the midst of an Iago’s machinations. One can see oneself
or others in the light of these characters, and we can use them to investigate our
own moral teleologies and trajectories. “He’s a Romeo” can mean a number of
things (if not terribly many), and we find out the more precise content of this
character-based metaphor by seeing how the concepts in play fit together. “Say
hello to Humbert Humbert” fits other rather alarming concepts together. “Right
now, he’s Hamlet” does similarly perception-shaping (and instructively different)
work. “That face could launch a thousand ships” casts its own light from
literature to life. “Ugolino just left the meeting” can be clever but is never
laudatory, and “I’m telling you, Cassandra is speaking to you” calls one to listen
more closely, to heed a perhaps seemingly indecipherable warning. Remarks of
this kind can be playful, they can be deeply serious, and they too can be many
more things along an Aristotelian continuum. And they can be a mixture of both
the playful and the serious: consider, “It’s Herzog on the phone for you,” or
“Casanova is waiting at the bar,” or any application of “tilting at windmills.” And
then one hears the generic form, “He’s a character.” The fact that they are not
literal, direct propositions does not for a moment disqualify them from epistemic
or ethical respectability; often the kind of character-describing truth that is
needed by the soul is delivered—and only deliverable—in just this form, that is,
in the form of transplanted names that open a way of seeing. It is a metaphorical
form that is derived from characters and applied to—or better, revelatory of—
character. And if they strike one as apt, as plausible, as right, they can, as we say,
stick—and thus stabilize in figurative speech that novel way of seeing.
But then we also make sense, in Williams’ sense, of our experience by seeing
connections and resemblances between the long-form narrative plot-lines within
an imaginary literary world and the unfolding of our lives in the real one. And we
see this primarily in terms of character, its expression, its teleological unfolding
under outside influences, its inner or self-referential development, its reformu-
lation over time, and its breakages, discontinuities, or severances. The debate

33
I discuss this process and its role in character development in “Self-Defining Reading:
Literature and the Constitution of Personhood,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of
Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 120–58.
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

about this issue has been frequently polemicized, so that there are those who
argue that, on one extreme, life is literature, and on the other, that narrative has
no genuine or necessary place in self-understanding or in the true description of
our experience.34 The truth to be found here, a via media (or perhaps offramp), is
in what Wittgenstein discussed under the heading of aspect-perception35: there
are long-form narrative or dramatic structures within which literary characters
move, and we see their actions in the light of these structures. This much is well
known: we have the genres of tragedy, comedy, and romance (often comingled
with either, or perhaps both, of the previous two), and established narrative
categories such as thrillers, mysteries, the bildungsroman, biographies, and so
forth.36 And, like literature, we can see our lives or the lives of others in the light
of those structures. But perhaps less widely appreciated is the fact that we only
understand literary characters within such long-form structures: we see what they
do and say as progressions, as unfoldings, as inextricably webbed into their
previous words and deeds—which are themselves only comprehensible at an
earlier stage, only made sense of, in connection with longer-form structures.37 As

34
See, as excellent examples of the narrative-necessity and anti-narrative sides (respectively),
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), and Galen Strawson, “Against
Narrativity,” Ratio XVII (December 2004): 428–52.
35
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, revised 4th ed., by P. M. S. Hacker and
Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), “Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment”, Sec. xi., pp. 203–40. See also the
collection of papers discussing this phenomenon and its significance for philosophy, Seeing Witt-
genstein Anew, ed. W. Day and V. Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For a fine
discussion showing some of the complexity of the interrelations between perception and imagin-
ation or the imaginative contribution (and that no such simple dichotomy between the two will
suffice—and here I want to add that there is thus no simple or generic dichotomy between the brute
perception of an action simpliciter and the imagination-assisted perception of it), see P. F. Strawson,
“Imagination and Perception,” in Ralph C. S. Walker, ed., Kant on Pure Reason (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982), pp. 82–99.
36
For a helpful and acute discussion of literary genres as they connect to life-understanding, see
Ben La Farge, The Logic of Wish and Fear: New Perspectives on Genres of Western Fiction (Basing-
stoke: Palgrave, 2014).
37
In his classic essay “Must we mean what we say?” (in the volume of that title, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 20, Stanley Cavell writes: “It sometimes happens that we know
everything there is to know about a situation—what all the words in question mean, what all the
relevant facts are; and everything is in front of our eyes. And yet we feel we don’t know something,
don’t understand something. In this situation, the question ‘What is X?’ is very puzzling, in exactly
the way philosophy is very puzzling. We feel we want to ask the question, and yet we feel we already
have the answer. (One might say we have all the elements of an answer.).” This precisely describes
the circumstance of having an episode, or particular word or deed (the “elements”), of a particular
person or character clearly before us, and yet sensing that we do not yet grasp its full content or
significance. What is needed to answer this kind of question, to quell this sense of incomplete
comprehension, is the placement of the action in question into a long-form frame of the kind
discussed here. Dormant aspects need to be awakened. On the matter of the possible difficulty of
seeing the action or event before us for what it is, Wittgenstein, evoking a strong sense of the “more”
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

Williams suggested, this is an active form of sense-making, and we do this within

the imaginary worlds of literature all the time. And, adapting this way of seeing
the part as part of the larger whole, we do this in seeing, and gauging, and
evaluating, and comprehending character in life all the time as well. The active
process is one of seeing the case at hand under long-form aspects, under long-
form structural organizers. Think of the meanings of phrases such as: “I see
perfectly well why she said that”; “If you had known him then, you’d see why he
did that now”; “If you knew what she has been through, you’d be less quick to
criticize”; “He hasn’t told you what this means to him, but if you knew how
long . . . ”; “If you understood her better, you’d see that she really had no alterna-
tive”; and so forth through numerous phrases that call for the situating of the
presently considered word or deed in a longer-form progression in order to so
much as see what the particular word or deed in question actually is. A remark
made by T. S. Eliot (although he was referring to a creative act on the part of a
poet) perfectly captures what is required here to understand words and deeds as
both expressions of, and constitutions of, character:
And he is not likely to know what is done unless he lives in what is not merely the present,
but the present moment of the past.38

That past, if it is understood, if it has been retraced in such a way that the
dormant plot within it has emerged—if it has been made sense of—will have a
shape. And that shape will be narrative in form.39 So it is not only character that
we can see in life as illuminated by, as seen in the light of, literary characters. It is
also, and at the same time, the longer-form narrative structures within which we
see those characters both reveal and become who they are that are in fact identical
to the overarching structures within which we can see, make sense of, a real
person’s life. In short: the long-form structures in the mind of the reader or the
biographer—sense-makers in both cases—are the same. Medea’s terrible and
tragic action is an utterly horrific and irrevocable deed of unhinged revenge; we

that is needed, writes, simply (but pointedly): “How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my
eyes!” in Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 39. (Consider in this
connection T. S. Eliot’s line lower in this paragraph.)
38
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of
T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1975), p. 42.
39
From the present topic of character as understandable in narrative form, we open onto the
larger topic of living in a way that is consistent with a philosophically informed character, where, in
short, the life as lived is one with the philosophy. For a thoroughly engaging investigation of this
issue, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). It is of interest that Nehamas
selects as an epigraph the pithy (and profoundly morally significant) line from Camus’ The Fall:
“When one has no character one has to apply a method.”
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

can see that in what we call the act itself, but we understand it as the act it is only
by understanding the longer-form progression of which it is the hideous culmin-
ation. Fortunately (usually) far less tragic and murderous, we nevertheless under-
stand a culminating act of revenge as an act that stretches across time in a similar
structural way (indeed, with Aristotle, we may grudgingly admire the cleverness
of it while remaining morally wholly disapproving of it). We may witness with
increasing apprehension the inexorably growing self-knowledge of Oedipus, and
with that behind us understand the character that, in the present moment of the
past, blinds and banishes himself now that he sees who and what he is. Similarly
and in parallel, we may see in a flash a person close to us lose some element of
happiness with a painful gain in self-knowledge—but to understand that loss as a
function of self-knowledge we have to see that moment as a denouement of its
plot-line. And we can as well see and trace double-aspects, where both are parts of
a larger coherent whole: Lodovico, on entering the room with Othello and the
others, asks (referring to Othello), “Where is this rash and most unfortunate
man?”.40 These words lead us to see Othello as now having committed his most
recent, most extreme, and most tragic last rash act in a line of many previous such
acts, but they also lead us to see Othello as the most unfortunate and most recent
target of Iago’s calculated, vicious scheming. The content of human understand-
ing of this kind will be a matter of progression, or Aristotelian teleology, within a
longer-form narrative structure. In literature and in life, this is the ineliminable
frame within which we see, and are enabled to reflect upon, matters of character.
The emergence of plot, the long-form aspect under which we see and inter-
connect a web of particulars, can be sudden (as when we suddenly see anew a
collection of our past words or deeds that instantaneously line up into a coherent
revelatory pattern) or gradual (as when we come to realize that our thinking or
feeling has undergone a sea-change but at no single identifiable moment), but in
either case the way of seeing what seemed to lie plainly before us all along has
changed. Wittgenstein speaks of an aspect suddenly dawning, but it can also
slowly, steadily, and sometimes inexorably light up; in either case, the change is, if
in the way we see others, contributory to our understanding or “sense-making” of
their character, and if in ourselves, contributory to either our self-understanding
or indeed to the very making of what we are, our character. Or one could put the
point this way: there are characters in literature, and there is character in ethical
life; these are certainly different things. But the forms of understanding them are,
as we have seen throughout this discussion, not different things at all.

40
Othello, p. 242.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

So to sum up: Our underlying conception of character, what we mean by the

rather complex word “character,” as derived from Aristotle; the nature of our
concern for literary characters as one manifestation of the soul’s underlying need
for truth and our associated concern for character-descriptive fidelity; the ways in
which we can see persons, their actions, and their choices, as metaphorically
based on fiction but as revelatory of actual fact and as agents within larger sense-
making narrative structures that can emerge through implicit or explicit com-
parison to literature:41 these three elements tie together into at least a partial or
direction-pointing initial answer to the question asking about the not-so-simple
role played by character in literary experience.
But before closing, a final thought: I said at the outset that it was Iago’s self-
refuting assertion that generated the paradox. The more Othello knew of him, the
less he knew of him. If truth is a need of the soul that takes form as (1) the need
for the true understanding of others, (2) the true understanding by others of us,
and (3) the true autobiographical understanding of ourselves, then Iago is not
only a moral but also an epistemological catastrophe. All three of these
knowledge-types are matters of characterological understanding, driven by our
underlying caring for truth. Iago, by terrifying contrast, is an island: he is a man
apart, chillingly outside the interrelated world of human understanding of the
kind generated by our souls’ common epistemic desire. But then as also suggested
at the outset, perhaps even he, for a fleeting moment and as a truthful liar, voices
a need to be rightly understood, to align in Aristotle’s sense how he appears and
how he is—his paradoxical assertion momentarily achieves this. As a man
divided, he lives inside two competing narratives, one inner and the other
outer; they only merged for the moment of that one paradox. But in the end,
he was perhaps also in another sense a truthful liar: one can see him on a
protracted, long-form campaign to destroy himself—where “himself” referred
to the outer, false front. Perhaps he set up circumstances42 to reveal who he truly

41
What I mean to suggest by the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of the
comparison of life to literature is that we may, as in the examples mentioned here, do so by name
(“a Don Juan”), but also, and perhaps more frequently, by relying in an unstated, and perhaps
unaware, way on long-form structures that we have solidified and taken on board in literature and
then used intuitively in making sense of the episodes of a life through the process of interpretive
connection-making.
42
Thus we can consider at this point Iago in the light of Aristotle’s pause-giving remark: “and
because the ends we set up for ourselves are determined by the kind of persons we are,” Nicoma-
chean Ethics, p. 68. For the purposes of this chapter I have obviously focused on Aristotle in
connection with our broad and underlying conception of character, but the topic has been of course
treated continuously (and particularly in recent decades with the revival of virtue ethics). For a
powerful recent discussion (closing with the passage “It follows that moral philosophy’s habit,
particularly in its Kantian forms, of treating persons in abstraction from character is not so much
 OTHELLO ’ S PARADOX 

was—the most despicable and deadly manipulator of all time—and thus found,
in the end, a kind of unification within himself by being understood for what he
is. (Rejecting a demand for fuller explanation, his last words in the play concern
the true knowledge of him by others: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you
know.”43) It is as if real character and the need for truth triumphed over artifice,
indeed over the “character” he has within the play created. Perhaps real character
is like a fingerprint, and Iago emerges in a new light, under a new aspect, within
a now-revealed long-form frame. Everything he is, everything he has done, makes
a new, more believable, more convincing truth. In the end—and this is not a
tautology—he is what he is.
But ultimately, the tragic paradox is not his. It is Othello’s. Iago’s enigmatic
p and not-p contradiction was only a motivic anticipation—a theme put into play
for the long-form structure—of the moral-epistemic deeper tragedy. And it is
so very much deeper precisely because, on the level of character, Othello had so
much more to lose. And as we shall see in a moment, he did just that—profoundly
and completely.
We have seen, if only briefly, that how a person uses words and brings together
or separates moral concepts is one way of giving voice to character—this consti-
tutes at least some of the material from which we can gauge the depth of a person.
Indeed often, to come to understand what precisely a person means by what they
say just is to understand, and to fathom, their character (the philosophy of
language and ethics are not always in separate compartments).44 When Lodovico
inquires, “Where is this rash and most unfortunate man?,” Othello delivers the
most philosophically interesting, morally deep, and utterly terrifying line in the
play: “That’s he that was Othello. Here I am.”45
It is he who is not who he is. This body, standing before Lodovico and the
others, is physically continuous with the embodiment of the person that was
Othello, but the person is not continuous. Othello sees, in ruined inward

a legitimate device for dealing with one aspect of thought, but is rather a misrepresentation, since it
leaves out what both limits and helps to define that aspect of thought”), see Bernard Williams,
“Persons, Character, and Morality,” in his Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981), pp. 1–19. Literature, I want to add, as an aid to philosophy, in leaving nothing of this kind out,
by its nature precludes this variety of the misrepresentation of moral psychology.
43
Othello, p. 242.
44
I discuss this matter in detail in “A Person’s Words: Literary Characters and Autobiographical
Understanding,” in Philosophy and Autobiography, ed. Christopher Cowley (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 39–71).
45
Othello, p. 242. One way of characterizing the psychic condition here is to say that the self he
has become is a self beyond the reach of possible self-forgiveness; I offer a discussion of this in
“The Self Re-Written: The Case of Self-Forgiveness,” in The Ethics of Forgiveness, ed. Christel Fricke
(London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 69–80.
 GARRY L . HAGBERG

devastation, that he has committed actions so utterly incompatible with who he is

that he disavows his very self-continuity—this is discontinuity to the point of
willed irrevocable severance. His recent lethally rash episodic actions—actions
wholly voluntary but empty of even a shred of Aristotle’s moral or intellectual
virtue—cannot and will not be accommodated by the long-form structure, the
narrative frame, within which he has always made sense of himself. And so, to the
most extreme degree and at the most profound personal depth, trapped within
the ultimate horror of self-knowledge, he sees the present body now speaking,
now answering Lodovico, as not himself. And so his uses of the past tense in his
first sentence (“he that was Othello”) and the first-person pronoun in the second
(“Here I am”) are not now in conflict, for Othello was existent, and this remain-
ing, living body, discontinuous with Othello, is now the physically surviving
referent of this “I” (a referent in whose chest he will in a moment fatally plunge
a blade). As perhaps the most profound and complete loss of character of all of
literature’s characters, it is thus he who truly instantiates the paradox. Far beyond
the point of an irrecoverable characterological fracture, he is not, nor could he
ever again be, what he is.
 5
Character, Social Information, and
the Challenge of Psychology
Noël Carroll

1. Introduction
One common, recurring view of the function and value of fictional characters
is that they afford readers, viewers, and/or listeners social information—
information about various kinds of people and how they behave. By engaging
with such characters, it is thought, we improve our skills in predicting and
explaining how actual people—people outside of fictions—will act.1
Presumably, a flesh-and-blood agent has a network of traits, which we call her
character. This network is what gives rise to her behavior. It is in virtue of this
network of traits that we predict and explain her actions. Likewise, fictional
characters can be seen as composed of a package of integrated traits which we
are mandated to imagine by their authors. For this reason, it is possible for certain
fictional characters to model the kinds of characters observed in actual persons.
In the process of focusing upon such characters in our commerce with fiction, we
expand upon our skill in discerning various, diverse kinds of characters as they
can be observed in living-and-breathing people, as well as our ability to under-
stand what makes them “tick” and our capacity to predict their behavior.
Our interest in character is undoubtedly one of the major attractions of fiction.
We devour fiction because we take pleasure in learning about others—in their
intentions, desires, beliefs, emotions, and the ways in which these apparently
shape what they do. Since we are intensely social animals—animals that depend
on living in society and that are, consequently, highly dependent upon having

1
The view that our insatiable appetite for social information is a leading reason for our interest in
literary characters is a major theme of Blakey Vermeule’s interesting book Why Do We Care About
Literary Characters? (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
 NOËL CARROLL

and exhibiting social savoir faire—it is adaptive that we take such pleasure in the
lives, including the inner lives, of others. Nature, in other words, has equipped us
with an incentive to search for the kind of social information we need in order to
thrive by disposing us to desire and enjoy its acquisition.
The institution of fiction, then, is founded upon this innate curiosity that we
have about our conspecifics. It presents us with fictional characters about whom
we are as inquisitive as we are with regard to our neighbors. Fiction provides us
with the opportunity to practice and enhance our capacities for gathering social
information, for gaining insight and understanding into the various configur-
ations of character, and for developing our skills in inferring their intentions,
desires, beliefs, and emotions and for predicting how these will combine and issue
in behavior. In this way, literary, motion picture, and theatrical narratives, while,
at the same time they are immensely pleasing, also function to educate us socially.
Indeed, it is possible to comprehend them as on a continuum with the little boy’s
GI Joes and his sister’s Barbies, fictional characters in their own right that exercise
social skills through imaginative play.
This in brief outline is one view of the function and value of fictional charac-
ters. On it, the aptitudes and insights that we acquire from scrutinizing fictional
characters can be transferred to everyday life and our intercourse with others.
When we explore fictional characters, we exercise social talents that have carry-
over value to actual encounters and we may even learn of new social worlds that
“have such people in it.” But this view rests on the presumption that in the world
outside of fiction humans have the kinds of character-structures that the authors
of fiction invest in their creations.
However, recent experimental work in social psychology has begun to question
whether folks really have the sorts of consistent characters that what can be called
the common view attributes alike both to flesh-and-blood people and the inhab-
itants of fictions.2 Instead, it is argued that situation is far more important than
what we think of as character in the determination of action, including moral
action. What is the upshot of “situationalism” for the common view of the
transfer value of engaging with fictional characters? Does it show that it rests
on a mistake and maybe even that the conception of fictional characters is
nothing more than a disreputable fragment of an obsolete folk psychology?

2
The tension between the common view and the emerging situationalist persuasion in social
psychology was first brought to my attention by Jacob Berger in an unpublished seminar paper for a
class in the Philosophy of Art at the Graduate Center of CUNY in 2008. Skepticism about fictional
character is also discussed in Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 199–218.
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

In this chapter, I would like to argue for one way of defending a modified
version of the common view that we derive social information from fictional
characters. I emphasize that my ambition here is only to advance one defense in
this piece. I believe there are other defenses to be pursued in future papers. Here,
I intend to do no more than to initiate a counterattack to situationalist skepticism
about the notion that fictional characters afford social information with carry-
over value to the world outside of fiction.
I will begin by reviewing the common view through the thoughts of one of its
founders, Aristotle. Then I will rehearse the challenge that situationalism pre-
sents to the common view in greater depth than bruited so far. Once we grasp
what situationalism involves, we will be in a better position to see how certain of
the functions of fictional characters in the service of social information which is
claimed for them by the common view need not be threatened by situationalism.
To this end, I will attempt to illustrate the function that I have in mind by taking a
close look at its operation in the fictional narrative The Big Country—a 1957
novel by Donald Hamilton which was made into a motion picture in 1958 by
William Wyler.

2. Aristotle, Poetry, and Character

In his Poetics, Aristotle argues that
the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that happened, but the kind of thing that
might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction
between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other writing
verse—you might put the work of Herodotus into verse and it would still be a species
of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the
other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is more philosophic and of graver
import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of
history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind
of man will probably or necessarily say or do.3

Here, we see that Aristotle maintains that poetry—which, for our purposes, we
may construe as fiction—trades in generalizations. These generalizations are
about what certain kinds of men “will probably or necessarily say or do.” That
is, poetry tells us what certain kinds of people—people with this or that char-
acter-structure—are likely to say (to decide) and to do in certain situations.4

3
Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 2322–3 (emphasis added).
4
In Aristotle’s claim that the poet knows what such and such a man will probably say, I find it
hard not to hear an echo of Ion’s suggestion, regarding the craft of poetry, that the rhapsode “will
 NOËL CARROLL

Poetry, for example, shows us how someone like Creon will behave when his
proclamations are disobeyed.
What poetry says about the characters with such characters—as, for example,
Creon’s inflexibility—is putatively of universal significance. So what we are
shown about characters with such characters applies not only to the denizens
of tragedy, but to those living beings with characters like Creon’s whom we meet
on a daily basis in the course of everyday life.
Aristotle thinks that the primary pleasure that we derive from poetry is the
pleasure of learning. The learning dispensed by tragedy comes by way of
imitation—the imitation of actions as those actions flow from the agents with
certain discernible and recurring patterns of intentions. Aristotle maintains that
the plot is the primary element of tragedy, since he associates plot with the main
action of the narrative. But what we learn about that action is not simply that it
happened but how it was determined by the character—the network of traits—of
the major character (for example, Oedipus) in the tragedy.
Tragedy, on Aristotle’s view, teaches us certain scenarios—certain regularities
or tendencies in the course of human affairs—that are apt to occur when people
with this or that set of dispositions or character traits are placed in various
situations. In these cases, the constitution of their character will explain the
ensuing pathway of events, which in tragedy usually trends badly. But since
these tendencies are universal, given the character-structures that are in
place in the pertinent situations, they will be operative not only inside the theater,
but outside as well. Thus, by limning the characters of dramatic characters, poets
illuminate the springs of action of certain of our actual conspecifics, delineating
their characters by means of fictional models—a process otherwise known
as mimesis.
In Aristotle, we see a clear affirmation of the common view. By contemplating
what the dramatist has a certain kind of person do or say in a certain situation, we
comprehend various regularities of human life as those that are determined by
agents with certain character-structures. These regularities pertain not only to
human events as represented in fictions, but to social interactions outside the
amphitheater. Scrutinizing fictional characters is not only entertaining; it is good

know what it’s fitting for a man or a woman to say—or for a slave or a freeman or a follower or a
leader.” Aristotle, it seems to me, is returning to this attempt to define the craft of poetry which, of
course, Socrates rejects. But Aristotle, it appears, wants to work it out with greater precision in order
to advance his counterattack on Plato’s dismissal of poetry. Among other things, Aristotle maintains
the poet knows something, something close to philosophy, namely, recurring tendencies in the
trajectories of human action. For Ion’s attempt to define the poetic craft, see Plato, Ion, in Two
Comic Dialogues, trans. Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), p. 32.
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

for us. We learn from it lessons that apply to life—lessons about general patterns
of the way in which people of a certain type (people with this or that kind of
character) will or will be likely to react when various situations arise. And this
social information is advantageous when it comes to predicting, explaining, and
understanding their behavior.

3. Social Psychological Skepticism about Character

What I have called the common view, as articulated by Aristotle, assumes that
there is such a thing as character—that people have relatively stable networks of
traits or characteristics which enable us to predict, explain, and/or understand
their actions. Mary is cheap; so we predict that she won’t order wine with her
complimentary airline meal, because she would have to pay for it. On the other
hand, if the wine were free, we would anticipate her asking for it, and even
requesting more than one glass. When it is brought to our attention that Mary
recycles her Christmas gifts, we explain this to ourselves by saying, “Well, of
course, she’s cheap.” Her character is such—call it penurious or stingy—that
there is no expense that Mary will not attempt to avoid. On the common view,
fictional characters, such as Moliere’s miser or Dickens’s Scrooge, model an array
of character types in ways that abet our prediction and explanation of their flesh-
and-blood counterparts. But, this presupposes fictional characters have such
counterparts. That is, it assumes that the folks we encounter at work and play
have fixed characters in the preceding sense. And this is precisely what many
social psychologists are calling into question.
In an impressive number of experiments, social psychologists have shown that
in the relevant cases, people’s behavior is not best explained by what we might
suppose is their character, but by situational factors.5 One of these experiments
involves seminarians from Princeton Theological Seminary and it goes some-
thing like this.6
After reading a passage recounting the parable of the Good Samaritan, they
were instructed to go across campus to deliver a short, extemporaneous lecture
on the subject. Some were told they had barely enough time to reach the lecture
hall, others that they had ample time. Furthermore, on the way to the lecture hall,

5
See Maria W. Merritt, John M. Doris, and Gilbert Harman, “Character,” in The Moral
Psychology Handbook, ed. John M. Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 355–401.
6
John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and
Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27, 1
(1973), pp. 100–8.
 NOËL CARROLL

the psychologists planted a stooge, feigning need of assistance. It turned out that
the seminarians who were in a hurry were far less likely to behave like Good
Samaritans than the ones who were not in a rush.
Let us suppose that seminarians are the kind of people who are characteris-
tically predisposed toward helping behaviors, perhaps especially after reading
and thinking about the parable of the Good Samaritan. On this basis, we would
predict that they would be likely to stop, given the relatively stable network of
traits that makes for a seminarian, particularly one who is thinking about the
Good Samaritan story. Yet, the important explanatory variable in this experiment
was the amount of time the seminarians had to reach the lecture hall.
A situational factor, call it the hurry-factor, rather than their alleged character-
structures, explained how they acted.
Similarly, in another experiment, researchers observed that people who had
just found a dime in the coin return slot of a telephone booth (which dime had
been placed there by the experimental team) were twenty-two times more likely
to help a woman whose papers were scattered on the ground than those who were
not so “lucky.” That is, helping behavior of the sort that we might typically
presume issues from the deep springs of character may sometimes really depend
on something as apparently inconsequential as whether or not one has found ten
cents.7 In other experiments, situational features, such as the level of exacerbated
ambient noise, like the sound of a lawnmower, appear to influence at rates that
are not random the subjects’ inclination to help an injured man who has dropped
some books; at normal noise levels, people proffer aid at a rate five times greater
than those who are bombarded by louder noise levels.
Situational features that we are apt to think are irrelevant to the explanation of
our behavior, when investigated statistically, seem to tell a different tale. Subjects
tend to think that the number of people witnessing an event that calls for a
response has no influence on their behavior, but that’s not what the numbers say.
Furthermore, some of the pertinent experiments have darker portents than the
ones alluded to so far.
One experiment in 1976 had to be terminated almost as soon as it began
because the volunteers who were role-playing prison guards started to abuse the
subjects who were role-playing their prisoners. That is, the situation rather than
their putative everyday character determined their behavior. Likewise, during the
infamous Milgram experiments, college students who were instructed to admin-
ister electric shocks to other subjects continued to raise the voltage even though

7
Information about the experiments referenced in this section can be found in Merritt, Doris,
and Harman’s “Character.”
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

the people they were supposedly electrocuting (of course, they were really actors)
screamed for them to stop.
In these last two experiments, in other words, subjects behaved in what we
might describe as a sadistic manner at variance with what we would presume
about their behavior in everyday life. In everyday life, we would not attribute a
sadistic character to them. Rather, they behaved sadistically because of the
structure of the situations in which they found themselves.
The theme that unifies the various experiments that I have rather hastily put
before you is the following hypothesis: situational factors, including ones that
might seem irrelevant to the subject and even sometimes rather inconsequential,
seem to have far more determinative influence on what people do than their
alleged characters. Indeed, the behavior that we would predict in a number of
these cases on the basis of postulating stable character-structures in the subject
population surprisingly fails to occur.
From data like this, the situationalist might mount the following argument:8
(1) If behavior is typically the outcome of relatively stable character formations, then
systematic observation will disclose pervasive behavioral consistency.
(2) Systematic observation does not disclose pervasive behavioral consistency. (Recall the
seminarians, the victims of ambient noise, those who “found” a dime, those in smaller
crowds rather than larger crowds, and so on.)
(3) Therefore, behavior is not typically the outcome of relatively stable character
formations.

Furthermore, since the common view presupposes that behavior is typically

the outcome of relatively stable character formations, the preceding conclusion
calls into question the common view. That is:
(4) If the common view is correct, then behavior is typically the outcome of stable
character formations.
(5) Therefore, the common view is not correct.

That is, the common view reassures us that the character-modeling we

encounter in fictions reveals something about the characters of living and
breathing agents such that we can use what the models “tell” us in order to
predict, explain, and understand behavior. But since real-life character forma-
tions do not typically possess this predictive and/or explanatory power, neither
will their fictional models. Although we think we are deriving social information
by contemplating fictional characters, we are not really doing so. Perhaps if Lex

8
The first part of this argument is derived from Merritt, Doris, and Harman.
 NOËL CARROLL

Luthor had found a dime in a telephone booth instead of Superman, he wouldn’t

have become bent on world domination.

4. A Defense of a Modified Version

of the Common View
Skepticism about something like the common view has been abroad at least
since L. C. Knight poked fun at the impossibility of answering the question of the
number of children had by Lady Macbeth. Literary critics have protested loudly
and repeatedly that literary characters are not like real people. Obviously the
common view could not be accurate for all literary fictional characters, since
many fictional characters behave as they do in order to satisfy the exigencies of
the plots that they inhabit.
Consider the way in which the worm turns in the penultimate scene of many
comedies. Throughout, he has been portrayed as a meek and mild weakling. But
when the bully makes off with his beloved, he somehow suddenly musters the
courage and the strength to rescue the object of his affections. This hardly seems
accurate modeling of the character-type homo nerd. Rather, the comic plot needs
this incongruous turn of events. Moreover, a case can be made that this is not
rare—fictional characters are very often artfully designed to serve structural
purposes.
Examples like this call into question whether fictional characters are reliably
like actual people. However, the skepticism about character that derives from
recent experimental psychology makes a different point: namely, that actual
people don’t have character-structures of the sort that folk psychology frequently
attributes to them. To put the point playfully, as Yogi Bera might: it is not merely
that fictional characters are not like real people; real people aren’t that way either.
That is, the common view is dubious because it relies upon the controversial
notion that real people have character-structures that are determinative of their
behaviors, whereas faith in power of these putative character-structures is now
open to serious scientific question. In short, you can’t provide an accurate model
of what doesn’t exist. So, fictional characters cannot be providing readers,
viewers, and listeners with viable social information.
The common view, as I have articulated it, holds that fictional characters provide
us with social information that we can apply to the world because fictional charac-
ters possess character-structures like those of actual people. That is, fictional
characters “work” the way real people “work”—or, at least, the way that real people
with supposedly, highly integrated and pronounced character-structures “work.” So
we can apply what we learn contemplating from the one, to the other.
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

Although they are connected, we can divide the common view into at least two
parts: the epistemic part and the transfer part. The epistemic part claims that
literary characters accurately model the character-types of at least certain actual
kinds of people. The transfer part says that the social information garnered from
contemplating fictional characters can be transferred to our ongoing social lives.
The common view holds that transfer is feasible because of the epistemic
accuracy of at least some fictional characters. But what if we decouple the two
parts of the common view and modify it so that this new version of the common
view merely claims that the social information conveyed by fictional characters
can be transferred to our negotiation of life with our conspecifics?
Notice that the social psychological findings that we have been reviewing so far
raise problems, if they do, for the epistemic component of the common view—
namely, the claim that fictional characters accurately model the determinative
character-structures of actual people. This claim becomes rather shaky, if, as
some of the social psychologists allege, real people do not really have the kind of
determinative character-structures that folk psychology (and much fiction)
seems to presuppose. For the purposes of this chapter (and only this chapter),
let the skeptics have this much. It still does not entirely vanquish the common
view, or at least a modification of the common view, if it can be shown that,
despite its epistemic limitations, the new common view can still maintain that
fictional characters convey social information that has carry-over application to
everyday living.
How is that possible? The strongest form of skepticism that can be made-out
on the basis of the social psychological experimentation is that character, of an
allegedly fixed nature, is not as determinative in explaining and predicting
behavior as are various situational factors. So, modeling such character-
structures, as some claim fictional characters do, does not give us a leg up on
explaining and predicting the actions of our conspecifics. That is, it does not give
us useful social information. We may think that we are getting reliable social
information from contemplation of fictional characters. But we are deceiving
ourselves.
However, the denial of the acquisition of useful social information here is too
hasty. Undoubtedly, honing insight into explaining and predicting the behavior
of others counts as useful social information. But it is not the only sort of useful
social information. It is what we might broadly call factual social information.
Factual information, in this sense, tells us how the world is. But there is also
useful social information that is normative.
By “useful social information,” here, I mean social information that is applic-
able in orienting ourselves to social life. Being able to predict and explain how
 NOËL CARROLL

others are likely to behave is eminently useful in this respect. However, so is

knowing how people are supposed to behave where the people in question include
not only others, but ourselves. So even if fictional characters do not enable us, for
the reasons canvassed, to explain how actual people act, they may still provide us
with useful social information about what to expect—for example, morally—
from their behavior.
That is, even if fictional characters do not supply us with predictive models
with respect to actual persons, they may nevertheless afford social information
that we may use to evaluate people’s behaviors—again, both the actions of others
as well as our own. Thus, even if it turns out that the direction of fit between
fictional characters and the world is never such that fictional characters corres-
pond to the way the world is, that leaves open the possibility that fictional
scharacters indicate the way in which the world should be, from the social
point of view.
This is a very abstract conclusion and, admittedly, it has been reached in a
rather arm-chair fashion by means of an exercise of logic. But the conclusion is
really very commonsensical and readily confirmed empirically. Fictional charac-
ters frequently indicate to us how people should be (and shouldn’t be). Whether
they sometimes inform us about how people are, one can nevertheless affirm that
they often provide models (exemplars) of the way in which people, in a given
culture, should carry themselves and behave.
This is certainly a major, indisputable function of the founding epics, and the
heroes therein, of cultures and civilizations virtually everywhere. In these cases, it
seems undeniable that fictional characters supply readers, listeners, and/or view-
ers with useful social information. They provide role models for various social
roles—from warriors, like Ulysses, to their spouses, like Penelope. In this, they
enact norms which we may use to evaluate the behavior of real people in terms of
whether they live up to those norms or fail.
Cultures, of course, have as one of their most abiding interests the repro-
duction of the ethos that makes them the cultures they are. That ethos includes
a network of values, beliefs, roles, norms, obligations, and so forth. Individuals
need to be recruited into this cultural system as informed participants in
their social environment. They need to learn how people like them should
act. Cultures supply their citizens with multiple, redundant channels for
acquiring this information. But among these channels of information, one of
the most privileged vehicles involves the characters in the narratives the culture
tells itself.
Characters—such as those found in the great myths and later in the fictions
(and especially the popular fictions) of secular culture—are a crucial, recurring
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

mechanism for imparting social information about the way in which members of
that culture, given their role or station in it, should comport themselves. In this
fashion, fictional characters function to provide norms for evaluating ourselves
and others.
In a great many fictions, the ensemble of traits that comprise the characters
(particularly the central characters) involves a cluster of virtues and/or vices that
the characters exemplify to varying degrees. In a staggering number of cases,
characters embody the virtues and vices that are at the core of the ethos of the
culture of the author who has created them. Readers, listeners, and viewers
absorb the virtues and vices of the culture from their exemplification in concrete
characters more easily than they assimilate such social information from abstract
rules which, in any event, need to be given particularized applications in order to
be operationalized. In this regard, fictional characters may satisfy our craving for
social information even when they fail to give us accurate models of how people
do in fact act. Moreover, this is to be expected, since there would be no need
to explicitly articulate norms, if people always acted in accordance with them, so
to speak, naturally.
Of course, not all fictional characters have this function, nor is it my intention
to suggest that they do. But, by the same token, a substantial number of them,
perhaps even the majority, do serve this purpose, perhaps among others. Nor is it
only the case that this is true of popular fiction (although it is especially true
there). For we find normative modeling in ambitious fiction as well, such as
Mann’s Magic Mountain. Nor, it pays to remember, is this normative modeling
only positive. It may be negative, as is the case with Pyotor in Dostoyevsky’s
Demons.
A broad re-construal of the common view is that fictional characters afford us
useful social information that we can apply to our actual environment. This
would appear to be a highly defensible position, at least for a great many fictions.
But, if this is acceptable, then a remnant of the common view can be recuperated
even in the face of the most radical skeptical extrapolation of the findings of social
psychologists regarding the determinative significance of character for explaining
and predicting action. This may not be the most robust response to skeptics
about the common view, nor does it reinstate Aristotle. Consider it instead as an
opening move in a larger campaign.
In order to clarify the function of fictional characters that I have introduced
here and to demonstrate its relevance to the way in which fictional characters
afford social information, I will illustrate my points by looking at how character
functions in The Big Country. This will not only enable me to amplify the
argument so far, but will also allow me to demonstrate an important narrative
 NOËL CARROLL

structure for the articulation of the virtues and vices of a given culture—a
structure that I call the wheel of virtue.9

5. The Big Country

The Big Country is the title of a novel by Donald Hamilton that was subsequently
made into a motion picture by William Wyler.10 It is a popular fiction, an
example of the genre of the western. I have chosen to discuss it in this context
for several reasons. The western genre itself, at least up until the revisionism of
the late sixties, functioned as something like an American myth, projecting
character-types that embodied contemporary norms of character.11 In The Big
Country we are offered an exploration of the concept of manliness, albeit of a very
period specific sort, that projects models of what counts as real manliness and
what doesn’t. Presumably the positive image of manliness, manifested in the
fictional character of Jim McKay, is not only presented as something to be
admired and emulated, but also as a model against which to assess actual men
in terms of whether or not they possess the ensemble of virtues that make for a
truly manly character.
The title of both the film and the novel is The Big Country. The location in
question is Texas and constant reference is made to its immense scale, often with
a not so subtle hint of pride when observed by Texans. In the film, the enormity
of the landscape is a conspicuously recurring visual theme as people, places, and
events are repeatedly framed in awesome long shots in which said people, places,
and events are dwarfed by the vast expanse that surrounds them. I suspect that no
other western movie has made so much of the sheer size of the landscape. In this
regard, the visual design of the film, though rarely acknowledged, is brilliant in its
thoughtful, consistent use of space, especially empty space.
Landscape, of course, is often emblematic of the identity of a nation, as the
forest is of Germany. The landscape in the The Big Country is as American as all
outdoors: it is a wilderness, one whose manifest destiny is to be settled and
civilized, a fact acknowledged by characters in the fiction. The vast empty spaces
invite the idea of a future in which they will eventually be filled. The question the
fiction poses is: what kind of men (and, to a lesser extent, women) should

9
This structure is discussed at length in Noël Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue,” in my Art in Three
Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 201–34.
10
Donald Hamilton, The Big Country (New York: A Dell Book, 1957).
11
I should also mention that I have chosen a fiction that is over fifty years old in order to
illustrate my points because I think it is easier for us to note what is culturally distinctive about such
phenomena at a temporal remove.
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

populate it? As the painter Thomas Cole commented upon the significance of
representations of impressive American landscapes: “the mind’s eye may see far
into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the grey crag
shall rise a temple and a tower—mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless
wilderness; and people yet unborn shall sanctify the soil.”12
If, as Cole suggests, an empty landscape encourages thoughts about the people
who should occupy it, The Big Country, in effect, explores the issue in terms of the
options involving the kinds of people who deserve to inherit this empty earth, this
big country, which subject, when broached in the 1950s, becomes a question of
how we, now born, should be.13 Specifically, it is the question of what kind of
man should inhabit this land—what kind of man should the American man be.
The man recommended to us in this fiction is Jim McKay.14 He is a retired sea
captain of means. He heads to Texas to marry Patricia Terrill, the daughter of
Major Henry Terrill, the owner of a sprawling ranch called Ladder. Almost
immediately after he arrives in town and meets his betrothed, questions about
his manhood arise.
As they drive to Ladder, McKay and Pat are accosted by the Hannassey gang,
led by Buck, the son of the patriarch of the family, Rufus. The Hannasseys have a
longstanding feud with the Terrills, and Buck and his boys take pleasure in
humiliating the son-in-law-to-be of Henry Terrill. They lasso him, drag him
around, and shoot at this bowler hat. As Buck leaves, he comments that McKay
“ain’t much of a man.”
Interestingly, just before the harassment begins, Pat reaches for her Winches-
ter, but McKay takes it from her, not believing that the Hannasseys’ drunken
pranks warrant lethal retaliation. This signals to the audience that McKay is a
man who will avoid unnecessary violence and, even when violence is called for,
he will only employ it proportionately. He is not only a man from the East, but a
man from the future. However, his refusal to agitate for blood revenge rather than

12
Thomas Cole as quoted by Yuriko Saito in her Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), p. 74. For further comment on the national significance of landscape, see also
pp. 246–9.
13
Perhaps needless to say, there is only one mention of Native Americans in the film and no
mention of African-Americans (although there is a paternalistic or condescending view of Mexican
Americans as comically well intentioned). This fiction is, as might be expected, about the ideal
character of a manly White man. My purpose in this chapter is not to politically endorse this
prejudice, but only to demonstrate that the primary function of the fiction is to broadcast social
information about how to inhabit this role and to analyze how this is done.
14
I will recap the plot of the motion picture since it is probably better known and more accessible
than the novel.
 NOËL CARROLL

being respected for its moderation and judiciousness raises the suspicion that he
is a coward.
McKay’s father, it turns out, was an avid duelist. In fact, he died in a duel. But
McKay has no truck with ostentatious honor codes. He cares little for what others
think of him, but only what he thinks of himself. He disdains what he regards as
petty challenges to his manhood. He eschews the weight of appearances as
interpreted by others, and steers by what he believes is his real inner nature.
His rival, Steve Leech, the foreman of Ladder and an admirer of Pat, tries to
trick McKay into riding a nasty, unbroken horse named Old Thunder, who
throws off everyone who mounts him. McKay realizes a scheme is afoot and
declines to fall for it, which leads to some sneering remarks from Leech, intended
to further impugn McKay’s manhood.
Shortly afterwards, McKay attempts to stop the Major from raiding the
Hennesseys’ compound in retaliation for Buck’s earlier effrontery. McKay
doesn’t think that the dust-up is worth a full-scale counterattack. But his
forbearance—his unwillingness to take the hazing all that seriously—makes
him suspect, rather than earning him respect for having the nerve to argue with
the Major.
While the Hannassey compound is being pillaged, back at Ladder, McKay
secretly mounts Old Thunder. After being thrown again and again, he finally
tames the horse, but he has the stable hand who witnesses this promise not to tell
anyone what he has done. Again, the point is made that McKay doesn’t care what
others think of him, but only what he thinks of himself.
After the passage of some time, McKay decides to see some of this big country
on his own. With a compass and a map, he sets off, instructing the stable hand to
inform Pat and the Major that he will be back in a few days but that they should
not worry. In fact, he navigates his way to a ranch called the Big Muddy, which is
owned by Julie Maragon. This is a spread which both the Terrills and the
Hannasseys covet intensely as a source of water. McKay buys the ranch from
Julie, a friend of Pat’s and a schoolteacher, as a wedding present for his future wife.
While he is away, the Terrills decide that he is lost and frantically send out
search parties to find him. Finally, he, in a manner of speaking, finds one such
search party, led by his rival Leech. Leech accuses him of being lost, an accusation
McKay firmly denies. When they return to Ladder, Leech repeats the charge that
McKay was lost. This time, when McKay claims to have known his location every
step of the way, Leech calls him a liar, taunting McKay with the intention of
provoking a fight. Predictably, McKay declines.
Pat turns from him in shame and later accuses McKay of humiliating her.
“Don’t you care about what people think?” she says. “No, I’m not responsible for
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

what people think. Only for what I am,” he replies. Then he decides to find
lodging in town so they can both cool off a bit. But before leaving Ladder, he goes
to Leech’s bunk and, after securing Leech’s agreement that their fight will remain
their secret, they battle the night away to a draw. When it is all over, McKay asks
Leech what has been proven; Leech admits “nothing.” McKay, in other words,
isn’t afraid to fight Leech whose equal in fisticuffs he shows himself to be. He just
refuses to do so because that’s what people think he should do. As they say, he’s
his own man, a man utterly independent of the opinions of others.
The feud between the Terrills and the Hannasseys heats up. Thinking that Julie
Maragon still owns the Big Muddy, the Hannasseys kidnap her, ostensibly to
force her to sell her ranch, but really to coax Major Terrill into attacking the
Hannassey compound again, where an ambush awaits. The Major takes the bait.
Meanwhile, McKay, whom we suspect has fallen for Julie, also rides off to the
rescue, thinking that he can retrieve her on his own, thereby averting a bloodbath.
However, in order to do so, he must fight an old-fashioned duel with single-shot
pistols with Buck, the very iconography of the ritual, again raising the question of
what is a man or, maybe, who is a gentleman. Buck reveals himself to be a coward
in the face of McKay’s steely resolve and, when Buck attempts to shoot an
unarmed McKay, Buck’s father Rufus kills his son.
By this time, Major Terrill’s men have entered Blanco Canyon, and have fallen
into the Hannassey ambush. McKay convinces Rufus Hannassey that the feud is
really just between him and Henry Terrill and that there is no reason that so
many other people should be sacrificed to the pride of these two old men. Rufus
challenges the Major to a duel with Winchesters, the two old men kill each other
and peace comes to the land, but not before McKay and Leech exchange glances,
recalling to mind the end of their earlier stand-off, which, the viewer remembers,
proved nothing. Macho displays of violence in the name of honor never do, the
film implies, which is, of course, McKay’s credo.
McKay has a very fixed character. Again and again, he shows two recurring
traits. He will not do something just because that is what others expect, especially
where this involves proving that he is courageous. What “people” think of as
honor, he appears to regard as showing off. He is autonomous, true only to
himself and his own convictions.15 Second, and related to this, his relation to
violence is measured. He is averse to the violent exhibition of his prowess, though
he is a formidable person, and he consistently attempts to limit or tone down the

15
Perhaps here it pays to mention that Jim McKay is played by Gregory Peck, a star often
associated with roles like this one. McKay is very reminiscent of Peck’s version of Atticus Finch in To
Kill a Mockingbird—only sexier and a little less avuncular.
 NOËL CARROLL

level of force in proportion to what the situation calls for. In these respects, he
stands in contrast to the other leading male characters in the fiction.
Perhaps, he is most starkly different from Buck who is a braggart and a bully,
but who consistently shows himself to be a coward when the chips are down.
Buck is an alpha-male wannabe. He swaggers, boasts, and threatens, but cringes
under pressure. The difference is also underscored visually; Buck is slovenly,
whereas McKay seems to always have his tie on. Whereas a manly man like
McKay is confident, Buck is falsely confident.16
Major Henry Terrill, like McKay, looks like a gentleman. His clothes, like his
house, are fine. He is well spoken; his rhetoric is high toned and seems principled,
but as McKay reveals, the Major is a hypocrite, employing lofty language to mask
his selfish interests. Publicly, the Major talks the talk, and impresses others. But
for all his grand words, he is also a bully, scaring the women and children of the
Hannassey compound by raiding it when the cowboys are away. The Major may
convince others of his probity, yet that perhaps only underlines the theme of the
untrustworthiness of public opinion.
Steve Leech and Rufus Hannassey prove themselves to be better men than
Buck and the Major. Leech indicates this by developing a grudging appreciation
for McKay and by objecting to some of the Major’s more questionable actions.
But Leech is still a prisoner of the cowboy code of honor according to which one
must prove oneself to others by responding forcefully to every challenge with
one’s guns or one’s fists. Rufus also reveals a deeper sense of justice than does the
Major, but he is still not the mature man that McKay is. Even though he
recognizes that he has deceived himself about his true motives with respect to
Terrill, he is still not man enough to let go of his hatred and forge a peaceful
modus vivendi with his neighbor.
McKay’s character is articulated in two ways. First, he behaves in accordance
with a consistent pattern of action. He does not give in to the demands of others
that he prove himself, usually in terms of violence; and, though not afraid to
employ force, he does so only when he feels it is necessary and then only to the
degree he believes the situation calls for. However, it is not only through his own
actions that McKay’s character is clarified. His character is also cast in bold relief
by means of comparisons with the other leading male characters. For example,
McKay’s commitment to the principle of proportionate violence is made salient
in contrast to the Major’s tendency toward inordinate displays of force, as when

16
The notion of the manly man derives from Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006).
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

he retaliates to Buck’s harassment of McKay with a full-scale attack on the

Hannassey compound.
This second strategy for highlighting the exemplary character of a figure like
McKay is what I call the wheel of virtue. This structure is quite common in
narrative fiction, popular and otherwise. When we approach a narrative fiction,
we rarely encounter a random collection of personalities. Instead, the cast of
characters generally exhibits notably strong, highly structured, systematically
varied, and subtly polarized relations of comparison and contrast to each other.
Characters like McKay and Buck are opposites, setting off each other’s qualities in
a process of reciprocal reflection. Likewise, other features of McKay are under-
scored by contrasting him to Major Terrill who, although superficially resembling
McKay vis-à-vis civility, is really a brutal self-serving demagogue. In other words,
he is what McKay is not, since McKay is a self-effacing, peaceful man, genuinely
concerned about others.
The wheel of virtue involves arraying characters in a comparative/constrastive
structure that calls to mind a color wheel. However, what are displayed are not
colors, but virtues (and vices).
Moreover, virtue wheels need not be merely a way of tabulating the differences
between the various characters. Virtue wheels can be arranged in such a way that
they have the potential to direct our evaluation of the characters who are being
held up for comparison.
In Dickens’s Great Expectations, for example, we encounter a virtue wheel with
respect to parenting. There is Pip’s sister, her husband Joe Gagery, Miss Havi-
sham, and Abel Magwitch. Reflecting on this array, it is hard to resist the
conclusion that Joe Gagery is the only figure under consideration who exempli-
fies the virtues of a good parent. In contrast to Miss Havisham and Magwitch,
Joe’s commitment to his charge is one of selfless love, whereas the other two are
using the relevant children to subserve their own psychic needs. Pip’s sister is also
out of the question, since she regards Pip as a bothersome chore. The way this
particular wheel of virtue is articulated makes unavoidable the conclusion that
Joe is the representative of a good parental character.
Clearly, The Big Country employs the very common structure of the wheel of
virtue in a way comparable to Dickens’s deployment of the structure in Great
Expectations. That is, it is not only used to take note of various modes of
manliness, but it is designed so that one of the spokes in the wheel stands out
as the qualitatively best one. The other ways of being a man in The Big Country
pale in comparison to McKay’s mode of being in the world. In this respect,
McKay’s character functions as an exemplar of what, in the culture of 1950s
America, a manly man should be: autonomous, independently minded, cool-
 NOËL CARROLL

headed, inwardly self-confident, and peace-loving, unless provoked (usually in

the defense of others).
It seems highly unlikely that McKay’s character was intended simply to reflect
the prevailing character of American men in the 1950s. For patently even in those
days there were more Buck Hannasseys, Henry Terrills, and Steve Leeches than
there were Jim McKays. Indeed, something like this conclusion is even suggested
by the relevant wheel of virtue. McKay functions as the norm against which we
are encouraged to assess the rest. If McKay modeled men as they were, there
would be no raison être for the wheel of virtue in the first place.
By means of the structure of the wheel of virtue, The Big Country is able to
convey important social information to viewers in readers. This social informa-
tion is not about how men at the time of the production of the fiction were, but
how they are supposed to be. The Big Country doesn’t report on character; it
recommends a certain aspirational character-structure, perhaps especially to its
male viewers.17 It is the character of the manly man as embodied by Jim McKay, a
character who exemplifies a norm of manliness to be achieved, rather than an
imitation of the character of the males as they are. Indeed, with respect to the way
existing males are, Jim McKay represents something like an evaluative norm for
assessing their behavior.

6. Summary
One of our interests in character is connected to our appetite to acquire social
information that is transferrable from fiction to everyday life. On one view, this is
possible because fictions model the kind of character-structures that determine
the behavior of comparable living-and-breathing people. Contemplating fictional
characters affords us the opportunity to practice explaining and predicting the
behavior of various character-types as well as offering us clues about what makes
them tick. This is a very common view. Perhaps something like the germ of it can
be found in Aristotle’s Poetics.
However, this view looks like it may run afoul of the situationalist approach to
social psychology, which argues that situational factors are more determinative of

17
There is also an abbreviated wheel of virtue that pertains to women in The Big Country. This
involves the explicit contrast between Pat Terrill and Julie Maragon. Pat is concerned with what
people will think; Julie thinks that a woman should believe in her man. Rather than judging McKay
as others may superficially do, being in love for Julie means trying to understand the situation from
your mate’s perspective. Whether either or neither of these positions is defensible is not my point
here. I only mention it in order to reinforce the point that The Big Country employs the wheel of
virtue structure in order to equip audiences with social information relevant to evaluating the
comportment of their friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens.
 CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 

behavior than the allegedly fixed characters of folk psychology. Thus, fictional
characters cannot be modeling the determinative characters of our conspecifics,
because there are not the relevant sorts of determinative characters out there in
the world to be modeled.
As an initial response to this worry, I point out that not all social information is
connected to the explanation and prediction of behavior. Much social informa-
tion is normative. It is about how people should comport themselves. The
common view that fictional characters may supply us with social information
that can be transferred to everyday affairs can be defended then against even the
most radical extrapolations from situationalism by pointing to the undeniable
fact that in a great many cases, fictional characters provide readers, viewers, and
listeners with the means for evaluating their neighbors. This is an unexception-
able function of fictional characters in every culture, even if it is not the function
of every fictional character. In the pertinent cases, fictional characters afford the
sort of normative social information that is indispensable for orienting oneself to
one’s social environment. And by supplying readers, listeners, and viewers with
this kind of information, cultures are able to reproduce themselves.
My major example of this function of fictional characters was that of Jim
McKay in The Big Country. He models a kind of character prized in the 1950s—a
man of quiet strength who knows his own mind and stays true to himself as
opposed to the opinions of others. It is against this model that readers and
viewers are encouraged to assess the behavior of, for example, loudmouths and
bullies. Moreover, like many narratives, The Big Country makes its advocacy of
McKay’s version of the manly character manifest by means of the structure of the
wheel of virtue, where in contrast to the other ways of being a man, as repre-
sented by other characters, McKay’s is advanced as the best.
 6
Emma’s Extravagance
Jane Austen and the Character–Situation
Debate

Valerie Wainwright

“How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates!”1 Aghast after her trip
to Box Hill, Emma Woodhouse ponders what she said and wonders why she
behaved the way she did. Deprecating critics of Austen’s heroine are convinced
that her wrongdoing is a question of character. She lacks tenderness and good
will, demonstrating “almost crippling flaws of character,” remarks Wayne
Booth.2 More recently, Claudia Johnson’s trenchant argument that a great deal
of criticism has been shot through with misogyny and dislike of female rule has
re-oriented Austen’s reader and prompted a major shift in the way Emma has
been interpreted. Emma’s character, Johnson has reasoned, is fundamentally
sound: she “displays powers of delicacy and forebearance which are the more
impressive given the vivacity of her own temper and the incisiveness of her wit.”
Unsurprisingly, Johnson’s comments on Emma’s wrongdoing are brief: her
infractions, though “shameful,” “stand out precisely because they are so infre-
quent.”3 For Emma’s admirers, underscoring her good points has often meant
underplaying the significance of her misdeeds. Yet the reader cannot fail to note
that for Emma, Box Hill does mark a crisis in her life: “Never had she felt so
agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life . . . She had never been
so depressed” (E, p. 352). Perhaps this experience does matter, and the reader has

1
All references to the novel are to Emma, edited and with an Introduction and notes by Fiona
Stafford (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 35. Hereafter abbreviated E.
2
See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), p. 245.
3
Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 122, 130.
 THE CHARACTER – SITUATION DEBATE 

good cause to be interested in her conduct on this occasion. The question: “What
leads Emma to mistreat [Miss Bates?]” is one that Julia Prewitt Brown poses. But
she replies: “We cannot really answer this question any more than we can explain
an act of violence in an absurdist work . . . her discontent flowers with terrifying
naturalness into cruelty.”4
So what issues does Emma’s conduct raise? Should we decide that her prob-
lems can be traced back to her character, and, if so, what conception of character
is relevant? One way to begin a response to such questions is to turn to Mr.
Knightley and his reaction to Emma’s discourtesy to Miss Bates. Mr. Knightley
thinks he knows the reasons for her misconduct, and advances a theory that runs
counter to the views of all those critics who find explanations for Emma’s
indiscretion and tactlessness in her flawed character.5 For Mr. Knightley,
Emma’s behavior is shocking, but also surprising; it could not have been pre-
dicted, he thinks: “‘Emma, I had not thought it possible.’” Austen’s hero, like
present-day situationists, finds that knowledge of character is not necessarily
useful in understanding conduct. His explanation stresses transient elements: her
action is connected to her “thoughtless spirits” and “the pride of the moment” (E,
pp. 351–2, emphasis added). On this view, Emma’s behavior is best explicated in
terms of her happy, carefree, and self-satisfied mood, a fleeting state of mind
inimical to reflection. According to situationists, such as John Doris, the best
accounts of human behavior will not attend to character traits but will rather
focus on the situational context of an action. And this is because behavior
covaries with situational variables rather than with (putative) character variables.
A morally irrelevant factor such as mood may well be crucial: frequently
enlivened or depressed by context, mood, it appears, crucially affects the way
people respond to the requirements of others. Experimental psychology has led
some philosophers to argue that situationist social psychology has radical impli-
cations for moral philosophy, that the notion of character is of little use in
understanding why people act the way they do, in so far as it centers on traits
that are manifestly unreliable when put to the test over a wide range of situations.
In other words, modern psychological research reveals that character traits do

4
Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 119.
5
Hostile critics include the following: Avrom Fleishman, “ The Two Faces of Emma,” in Janet
Todd, ed., Jane Austen: New Perspectives (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), p. 252; Yasmine
Gooneratne, Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 158; Marvin Mudrick,
Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), p. 206;
Bernard J. Paris, Character and Conflict in Jane Austen’s Novels: A Psychological Approach (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 68–95.
 VALERIE WAINWRIGHT

not exhibit cross-situational stability. It follows, according to John Doris, that the
ideal of virtuous character is “deeply problematic.”6
Situationism has brought to the fore the issue of the most useful way to think
about character. For proponents of virtue ethics what is problematic is the
conception of character that situationists are operating with and seek to debunk.
Such theorists have queried whether the dispositions interrogated by social
psychologists correspond to the normative conception of character at the center
of their own theories.7 For their part, personality psychologists would also
dispute the contention that we should jettison the notion that character traits
do not matter. These theorists have long debated the most useful categories for
defining what is most distinctive about people, or characteristic of their behavior
over time, with consensus beginning to emerge around the Five-Factor Model
(FFM).8 Propensities, they claim, are fairly consistent “emotional, interpersonal,
experiential, attitudinal, and motivational styles.” Such styles relate to overall
patterns of feelings and actions; they are characteristic responses to a wide range
of situations and of phases—usually long phases—of a life. We should realize,
however, that such propensities “are only dispositions, not absolute determin-
ants” of conduct.9 For Robert McCrae and Paul T. Costa the Five Factor Model
may provide an explanatorily powerful framework for understanding consistency
of behavior or predictability over the long term.
In this chapter I shall be suggesting that what looks like Emma’s odd or
surprising behavior (to Mr. Knightley) may also be linked to the expression of
a distinctive (and attractive) combination of personality traits. Although her
behavior might have been hard to predict by those who know her well, it is
also the case that Emma does not act out of character. She “could not resist,”
Austen observes at the time Emma crushes Miss Bates (E, p. 347). It is an
important statement. Emma does not pause to think before replying wittily, but
unkindly, to Miss Bates (or before recounting her fantastic story of Jane Fairfax’s

6
Doris rejects an understanding of behavior “as ordered by robust traits,” but allows for the
“possibility of temporally stable, situation-particular ‘local’ traits that are associated with important
differences in behavior.” See John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1, 5.
7
See Rachana Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character,”
Ethics 114 (2004): 458–91. Christine Swanton maintains that, “For a virtue ethicist, a virtue is not
simply a disposition to perform acts of a certain type . . . The possession of virtue requires also the
possession of fine inner states.” See Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), pp. 30–3.
8
Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa, Jr, Personality in Adulthood: A Five Factor Theory
Perspective, 2nd edn (New York: Guilford Press, 2006), pp. 46–50; Daniel Nettle, Personality:
What Makes You the Way You Are (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 162–82.
9
McCrae and Costa, pp. 25–9.
 THE CHARACTER – SITUATION DEBATE 

secret love life to Frank Churchill). Arguably, what Emma “could not resist” is
her “predominant inclination” (as Dr. Johnson defines disposition), her propen-
sity to be playful. The action that comes so easily is an action that does not, as
Booth claims, reveal a character vice (deficiency of generosity),10 but which is
rather the expression of a particular kind of personality: that of an agreeable
extravert. Dr. Johnson quotes John Locke for his view that disposition is a
“Power” “ready upon every occasion to break into action.” Austen agreed. At
both the Coles’ dinner party and Box Hill, Emma’s playness of disposition erupts
most forcefully into “lively impudence.”
Extraordinary, surprising, and yet not uncharacteristic, Locke noticed such
behavior and identified a common problem:
There is scarce any one that does not observe something that seems odd to him, and is in
it self really Extravagant in the Opinions, Reasonings, and Actions of other Men. The least
flaw of this kind, if at all different from his own, every one is quick-sighted enough to espie
in another, and will by the Authority of Reason forwardly condemn, though he be guilty
of much greater Unreasonableness in his own Tenets and Conduct, which he never
perceives, and will very hardly, if at all, be convinced of.11

Extravagant or unreasonable would seem to be a pretty good description of

Emma’s opinions and conduct at the time of her blunders: wildly indiscreet
and insensitive to the feelings of others, she has difficulty exercising the self-
command which would facilitate the business of appraisal or of reasoning well.
She lacks sufficient self-awareness and the kind of attentiveness (to the moral
facts of the situation) remarked upon by Locke. In Emma, I shall be arguing,
Austen continues to investigate the reasons or factors relating to both character
and situation that contribute to unreasonable or inappropriate modes of conduct,
while raising doubts as to whether one can ever grasp, or correctly represent to
oneself, not only all the relevant (moral) facts of a tricky situation, but also the full
range of one’s own desires and objectives.12
An opportunity for the reader to consider the obstacles to living and acting
virtuously is presented early on in the novel, when Emma and Mr. Knightley
engage in animated debate over Frank Churchill’s failure to appear in Highbury
on the occasion of his father’s marriage to Miss Taylor. Like Emma, Frank
Churchill displays a lack of respect which causes suffering to others. His moral

10
Booth, p. 244.
11
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 394.
12
See Valerie Wainwright, “On Being Un/reasonable: Mansfield Park and the Limits of Persua-
sion,” Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 10–12,
59–83.
 VALERIE WAINWRIGHT

infraction—having “no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people”—

is, according to Mr. Knightley, the natural outcome of his distinctive vices. Now
proposing a version of virtue theory, Mr. Knightley begins by asserting that Frank
Churchill’s wrongdoing can be explained in terms of acquired but stable charac-
ter traits. He is convinced that Frank Churchill has it in his “power” to come, but
having been “brought up by those who are proud, luxurious, and selfish,” it is
highly likely that he will be “proud, luxurious and selfish too.” Frank Churchill
must have a flawed character, a “weak” character, and lack “vigour and reso-
lution”: “right conduct,” Mr. Knightley claims, can be assured by acting “on
principle, consistently, regularly” (E, pp. 136–42). On this view, behavior that is
virtuous can be achieved when individuals with fine traits and strong wills act
rationally, or in accordance with their commitments to values or principles.
People can be habitually virtuous; they can be relied upon to act consistently in
the right way.
Emma’s own contribution to the debate begins with a situationist premise: “‘It
is very unfair to judge of any body’s conduct, without an intimate knowledge of
their situation.’” Emma highlights the importance of early habits of obedience to
the Churchills, but more significantly, she suggests that understanding Frank’s
behavior involves grasping his own interpretation of what might be the right
conduct in the circumstances: “‘what an amiable young man may be likely to
feel’” (E, pp. 138–40). In other words, she develops her argument by reference to
a “subjective representation” of events: right conduct, as far as the agent is
concerned, is conduct which he believes to be appropriate given what he assumes
to be the particular demands of the situation. In this case Frank might think that
the claims of gratitude (to the Churchills) have priority over filial respect, she
suggests. While Emma is wrong about Frank’s motivation, she is right to propose
a change of perspective: if the goal is to explicate behavior, then an attempt to
reconstruct the agent’s subjective construal of situation may be well worth trying.
Equally important for Austen is Emma’s next point: for what she now intro-
duces is a different conception of character to the ideal of rational virtue
proposed by Mr. Knightley. Emma mentions certain traits of character (Frank’s)
and argues for their desirability. The temperamental and interactional qualities
which she praises—being “yielding,” “complying,” and “mild”—are all to be
found among the cluster of traits which, according to personality psychologists
McCrae and Costa, belong to the domain of Agreeableness (pp. 4, 49–53).
Furthermore, just like the narrator who early on pronounced upon “the disad-
vantages” of Emma’s “disposition to think a little too well of herself” (E, p. 7),
Emma suggests viewing such traits in terms of potential costs and benefits:
although Frank’s disposition “may cut him off from some advantages, it will
 THE CHARACTER – SITUATION DEBATE 

secure him many others.” For Austen, character traits may function in ways that
are morally good, neutral, or inappropriate. There can be no certainty that even
the most pleasing of characteristics, however robust, will be consistently morally
efficacious. However good the intentions of the moral agent might be, sometimes
the expression of these traits will procure benefits, sometimes not.
In her earlier novel, Sense and Sensibility, Austen had suggested that there may
be serious moral disadvantages to being agreeable. A crucial scene at Barton
Cottage demonstrates all too clearly that manifesting the traits that together
constitute the domain of Agreeableness provides no guarantee that one will do
the right thing. Indeed, the response of the truly agreeable may be morally
inadequate precisely because they act in ways that are in keeping with their
character. Willoughby’s dramatic exit from Barton Cottage presents Marianne
with the occasion to indulge to the full the exquisite sensations of Sensibility, just
as it provides Mrs. Dashwood with the opportunity to exert herself in the cause of
Prudence, and thus safeguard Marianne’s well-being. Mrs. Dashwood, however,
will not interfere; she prefers not to meddle, and lets herself be guided by a
principle of Delicacy or Discretion. And this is, we realize, because such a
principle is consistent with her propensity to be lenient and trusting. In fact,
she is a perfect representative of Agreeableness, displaying the key qualities of
soft-heartedness, trust, generosity, acquiescence, and leniency, all traits which,
according to personality psychologists, typically cluster together. When
requested by Elinor to discuss with Marianne the state of her relationship with
Willoughby, most adamantly she refuses to do so: to act in such a way, she
maintains, would cause Marianne “distress”: “‘it would be most ungenerous.’”13
For Elinor, such a response is inappropriate and unhelpful. And we are likely to
agree with her, and think that a little tough love would be in Marianne’s best
interests. Delightful Mrs. Dashwood may be, but her manner of response—the
intensity of which is a sure marker of her key traits—demonstrates all too clearly
the potential disadvantages of Agreeableness.
There are even greater disadvantages in store for that controversial character
Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park, who combines the key characteristics of both
Agreeableness and Extraversion (McCrae and Costa, pp. 4, 49–53). As personal-
ity psychologists have explained, these are two of the five dimensions that appear
to be the most appropriate and comprehensive categories for appreciating what is
distinctive about an individual’s personality. The other three comprise Neuroti-
cism, Openness, and Conscientiousness. Strikingly, we find that characterization

13
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
p. 64. Hereafter abbreviated SS.
 VALERIE WAINWRIGHT

in Mansfield Park—of Fanny Price and Mary Crawford—relies on a distinctive

mixture of traits that appear at opposite ends of precisely these domains—all five
of them. Thus Fanny Price’s behavior can be interpreted as a more or less
consistent expression of tendencies that follow naturally from the combined
traits of fairly high Neuroticism (manifest in her anxiety, self-consciousness,
and excessive emotional responses), lack of Openness (signaled by a preference
for the stable and routine), high levels of Conscientiousness, or sense of duty, low
levels of Extraversion (she is not lively or cheerful, energetic, talkative, or forceful,
but rather quiet, passive, and reserved), and low levels of Agreeableness, where
the latter is defined in terms of highly judgmental behavior linked to a sense of
moral superiority (McCrae and Costa, p. 4).
According to the FFM model of personality, Mary Crawford is an extravert14
who ranks high in Agreeableness; though it is important to distinguish, as
D. A. Miller does, between “Mary as she is” and “Mary as she comes to be
known.”15 Although Mary’s characteristic liveliness is transmuted, thanks to the
requirements of closure, into “a thoroughly corrupted cynicism,” the conduct of
“Mary as she is”—or as she behaves until she departs for London—is often highly
advantageous to others. This Mary manifests compliance time and again:
responding to the desires of others, she is willing to take part in the theatricals,
or play her harp whenever she is requested to do so. At Sotherton she makes “it a
point of honour to promote [Maria’s] enjoyment to the utmost” (MP, p. 77). Her
warmth or compassion is to be discerned in her expressions of sympathy,
delivered “in a kind low whisper” to Fanny after Mrs. Norris has scolded her
(MP, p. 137). Her leniency toward both Maria and her brother (for McCrae and
Costa this is a key facet of Agreeableness) after their elopement shocks Edmund
Bertram (MP, p. 425). But he has been shocked before, when acting like a true
extravert, the lively and talkative Mary freely criticizes both her uncle and the
clergy. Extraverts are candid, and Edmund finds such frankness hard to take.
Time and again, he is torn between identifying and berating flaws, and appreci-
ating Mary’s agreeableness or amiability (MP, p. 60), until his meditations on
“how delightful nature had made her” are terminated once and for all by Fanny
Price (MP, p. 426).

14
In the words of Edmund Bertram she has “openness of heart,” Mansfield Park, edited with an
Introduction and notes by Kathryn Sutherland (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 326. Hereafter
abbreviated MP.
15
On the novel’s changing attitude to Mary Crawford see D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its
Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1981), pp. 79–89.
 THE CHARACTER – SITUATION DEBATE 

As we have noted, amiability is not the first trait many critics would want to
attribute to Emma. Amiable or not, Emma does possess to a fair degree many of
those qualities that together constitute the disposition of Agreeableness: proof
of which is given on those many occasions when she endeavors to avoid conflict
or quarrels: “she dreaded being quarrelsome” (E, p. 108). While her Extraversion
is signaled by her talkativeness, playfulness, and candor: expressions of person-
ality that—as in Mansfield Park—will cause problems. Elinor Dashwood, the
heroine of Sense and Sensibility, worries about “a propensity” shared by those
extraverts Marianne and Willoughby “of saying too much what [they] thought on
every occasion, without giving attention to persons or circumstances” (SS, p. 37).
Emma, we discover, is able to restrain her propensity to say too much; she does
pay attention to the person or the circumstances. On meeting the newly wedded
Mr. Elton she is about to comment on his manners: “but no, she would not
permit a hasty or witty word from herself about his manners.” First, Emma
exercises self-control, and then articulates to herself reasons for holding back:

It was an awkward ceremony at any time to be receiving wedding-visits, and a man

had need be all grace to acquit himself well through it . . . and when she considered
how peculiarly unlucky poor Mr. Elton was . . . she must allow him to have the right
to look as little wise, and to be as much affectedly, and as little really easy as could be
(E, p. 252).

Having given herself time to think, Emma reconstructs the facts of his situation,
determining the grounds for not acting, and evincing in the process an under-
lying desire to be fair to a man so unfortunately positioned.
On another and happier occasion, Emma is curious to know whether Jane
Fairfax had braved the rain to get her post, and imagines her eager to set out “in
full expectation of hearing from someone very dear”; the “someone very dear”
being her friend’s husband now living in Ireland. Emma—the narrator
observes—“could have made an inquiry or two, as to the expedition and the
expense of the Irish mails;—it was at her tongue’s end—but she abstained.”
Emma “could have” spoken; the desire to do so is strong. But she is able to
constrain her tendency to talk. So how or why does she do it? No reasoning is
given, no explanation offered. What we do know is that Emma came to this
situation forearmed, as it were, with good intentions: she had promised
Mr. Knightley that she would “shew” Jane “greater attention” than she had
previously done. Emma’s benevolent mood, we infer, has favored her favorable
decision: she is “quite determined not to utter a word that should hurt Jane
Fairfax’s feelings.” Elsewhere Austen remarks upon Emma’s being “in the
humour to value” the “simplicity and modesty” shown by Harriet (E, p. 133).
 VALERIE WAINWRIGHT

Now “in the humour to value” the elegance and accomplishment of Jane Fairfax,
an admiring Emma opts for silence; she is able to resist the act that could have
been so easy (E, pp. 270–7).
So how can we account for her behavior on those lamentable occasions when
she says too much? What exactly do these episodes signify? The kind of behavior
for which self-assured and agreeable extraverts are well known would seem to be
advantageous in the social situations in which Emma participates. During a
leisurely walk in Highbury, a dinner party at the Coles’, and the outing to Box
Hill, Emma manifests fundamental characteristics of her personal style. She is
socially confident, gives free reign to her sense of fun and mischievousness, and
she is cooperative, trying to accommodate the demands of others. These qualities
enable her during the first and second encounter to converse easily with her new
companion, while in the third she attempts to play the role assigned to her on Box
Hill as the Arbiter of Nonsense.
Taking up Emma’s suggestion to Knightley, we might try to construe these
situations from her perspective, and hence consider what in these circumstances
an agreeable “‘young [wo]man may be likely to feel.’” Consideration of an
individual’s “life space” means attempting to understand her psychological rep-
resentation of the environment. This is an approach that, according to social
psychologists Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, involves trying to appreciate what
the person brings to the situation, her cares, concerns, and intentions, but also
what her “strategic assumptions, self-perceptions, and inferences about the
relevant situations” might be.16 There are, Austen recognizes, certain situational
factors which are likely to cloud moral vision, and distort or impede the processes
of cogitation and evaluation. The self-discipline and focus required by reason—
the attention to what is appropriate, to the facts of the situation that may provide
normative reasons—may well be difficult to achieve when the pace of dialogue is
fast, a premium is put on wit, and one’s interlocutor seems to admire and endorse
all that issues from one’s mouth.
On the first occasion, Emma’s situation-specific desires or objectives are, we
discern, of two kinds: she intends to find out more about Jane Fairfax, and she
wants to project an image of herself that is not at all like Jane’s. No longer “in the
humour” to care about Jane’s feelings, Jane, she has decided, is “disgustingly”
reserved; her manner “so cold, so cautious!” (E, p. 158). Yet Emma, we realize, is
not aware that her self-schema has become a concern. And lacking the self-
awareness to see what she is about, she is dangerously unconstrained. As she tries

16
See Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991), pp. 20–8.
 THE CHARACTER – SITUATION DEBATE 

to elicit information from Frank Churchill, what he himself elicits from her are
modes of behavior that are increasingly in keeping with his own extravert style
of “lively impudence.” This is a classic case of “situation evocation.” In the words
of psychologist Daniel Nettle: “we elicit a reaction from others that perpetuates or
exaggerates a tendency we already have.”17 Frank Churchill cannot be said to be
manipulating Emma, in the sense of actively pressurizing her to act against her
notions of what is right or due to others. He is certainly aiding and abetting her,
however, as she constructs and slides down her own slippery slope: the greater
the openness, and hence intimacy, she thinks exists between them, the more she
wants. And the happier she becomes. The better her mood, the more carefree or
careless she is. She is easy and relaxed: far too relaxed. Soon off her guard, she
heads toward inordinate openness.
Most dangerously, Frank’s agreeableness three times takes the form of agree-
ment. His acquiescence is highly gratifying, and serves to promote Emma’s
talkativeness, trustfulness, and self-satisfaction. His behavior exacerbates her
propensities, the propensities of a self-assured extravert playfully to say what
she thinks. Many of the dispositional propensities that are rated as conferring
psychological well-being—trustfulness, candor, liveliness, and self-assurance—
are all illustrated as Emma probes, confesses her own feelings, and then has fun
speculating about those of others. What could be a more “natural” progression
during a playful conversation between friends? As McCrae and Costa have
reported of their research: “People felt happiest and most genuine when they
acted in accordance with their enduring dispositions” (p. 229). If there are short-
term benefits to this mode of proceeding, so too will there be costs: costs borne
later by Jane Fairfax and Emma herself.
One of the most significant exchanges takes place when Frank attempts to play
down the drama of the Campbell/Dixon/Fairfax situation. But Emma—now far
down her slippery slope—cannot stop herself talking and surmising: “‘there was
one person, I think, who must have felt it: Miss Fairfax herself. She must have felt
the improper and dangerous distinction’” (E, pp. 187–90). Emma’s damaging
fantasy has taken off. By the time they come to discuss the mysterious gift of the
piano, the occasion of Emma’s next wrongdoing, she has come to assume that
with Frank Churchill she is dealing with a like-minded friend: their “thinking [is]
so much alike” (E, p. 191). Emma again construes the situation as a playful
conversation between intimates; and that means people who can trust each other
and be relied upon not to go carrying tales to others. According to McCrae and
Costa: “agreeable people are trusting, believing the best of others and rarely

17
Nettle, p. 46.
 VALERIE WAINWRIGHT

suspecting hidden intents” (p. 50). Hence, with characteristic openness, Emma
now asserts, “‘You may say what you chuse—but your countenance testifies that
your thoughts on this subject are very much like mine.’” Perfect honesty has come
to characterize their mode of interaction—so Emma has been brought to
believe—and freely she conjectures and expounds (E, p. 202).
Frank attests to his perfect conviction. “‘Your reasonings carry my judgment
along with them entirely’” (E, p. 204). What is crystal clear is that for all her
“reasonings,” Emma’s own judgment has been carried away. She does not pause
to reflect as to whether she ought to divulge her suspicions. Plunging headlong
down her slippery slope, she has become excessively communicative, giving voice
to suspicions that, it seems, he can be counted upon to share. She is, to borrow
Elinor Dashwood’s words, “led” by her own “active fancy,” and “by the exuber-
ance” of her delight along the downward path toward indiscretion (SS, p. 255):
most injudiciously, most disrespectfully, she imputes to Jane a “dangerous
pleasure.” We might surmise that however “strong the idea” she has conceived,
however compelling the urge to disclose her views, she would never have done so
with anybody else. Emma’s conduct can be related to propensities, but also to
desires and beliefs that are situation-specific: her responsiveness is acutely sen-
sitive to the agreeableness of Frank Churchill.
As we turn once more to the situation Emma finds herself in at Box Hill, we
may find that an interpretation that focuses on the issue of the possibility of
choice provides a way of illustrating the difficulties of her position. At Box Hill we
discover that Frank Churchill is even more dangerous as he elicits Emma’s
propensities to be acquiescent, assured, and assertive. Forcefully, he co-opts her
into his game and establishes her right to pre-eminence:

I am ordered by Miss Woodhouse (who, wherever she is, presides,) to say, that she desires
to know what you are all thinking of. . . . I am ordered by Miss Woodhouse to say, that
she . . . only requires something very entertaining from each of you, in a general way
(E, pp. 346–7).

Viewing the situation from Emma’s perspective suggests that she would assume
that what is called for is a mode that manifests both wit (she, too, must be
entertaining) and superiority (she must act the part of Arbiter assigned to her).
Playfulness, wit, and direction are what were asked for, and what she so promptly
supplies. So, Emma believes that her present role requires acting in a mode that is
amusingly assertive, she is willing to comply, and additionally, finds such a task
most congenial. When Miss Bates asks her “good-humoured” but also provoca-
tive question, “‘I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my
mouth, shan’t I?,’” Emma, with “mock ceremony” inaugurates the game. Her
 THE CHARACTER – SITUATION DEBATE 

put-down of Miss Bates, duly follows: “‘Pardon me—but you will be limited as to
number—only three at once.’” Emma playfully cooperates, as agreeable people
typically try to do. To suggest that she might have paused to engage in reasoned
judgment, and so attempted to discriminate between the moral and the ludic
implications of the situation, and hence chosen to act otherwise, is to suggest that
she act contrary to belief, desire, and disposition, which is indubitably to expect
too much of human nature. She “could not resist” (E, pp. 346–7).
At this point of our analysis the Five Factor Model of personality again comes
in useful, illuminating key facets of Emma’s character. For there is a feature of her
personality that she should, can, and does modify: her attitude of contempt. Her
Openness or receptivity enables her to listen to new ideas (Mr. Knightley’s
lecture) even when they are highly unflattering to herself. Drawing upon her
capacity for Conscientiousness, an ability to be self-directing, she pays her
penitential visit. Emma demonstrates that she is capable of a change of attitude,
and hence of conduct, and sets out on the following day determined to begin “a
regular, equal, kindly intercourse” with the family of Miss Bates (E, p. 353).18
But a fuller appreciation of Emma’s character, or more precisely her propen-
sities and abilities, involves a consideration of her expressions of empathy. In
meditative mood, as she recalls her “abominable suspicions of [Jane’s] improper
attachment to Mr Dixon,” Emma “greatly feared” that her dreadful “idea” “had
been made a subject of material distress to the delicacy of Jane’s feelings, by the
levity or carelessness of Frank Churchill’s” (E, p. 395). “Fearing,” or worrying,
about the effect of Frank’s disclosure of her fanciful notion comes very close to
the condition of empathizing with Jane. This mixture of remorse and attentive-
ness to the pain of another denotes genuine concern; and this is certainly a
marker of Agreeableness. But Austen requires more of her heroine than the
expression of concern. Daniel Nettle claims that to be high in Agreeableness “is
to be disposed to pay attention to the mental states of others, and, crucially to
factor these into behavioural choices” (p. 163). Austen fully agrees. However, she
understands that sometimes it may be hard even to see that one has a choice, that
there are alternatives. As a Lockean, Austen realizes that it is often difficult to
undertake an “Enquiry” in order to discover what would probably be the best line
of conduct given one’s concerns. On returning to the Martins’ farmhouse to pick
up Harriet after a visit of only 14 minutes, Emma can share their distress: “Emma

18
Angela M. Smith argues that our attitudes and reactions “can be said to reflect our evaluative
judgments” and that implies that we do have responsibility for these seemingly involuntary
responses”; that it is right to attach importance to these unreflective features of our lives. Smith,
“Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life,” Ethics 115 (2005): 236–71.
 VALERIE WAINWRIGHT

could not but picture it all, and feel how justly they might resent, how naturally
Harriet must suffer. It was a bad business.” We can be sure that she wants to do
what is best for Harriet, and yet realize that she is not acting in Harriet’s best
interests. Emma suffers too: “there was a great deal of pain in the process—so
much to herself at this time, that she soon felt the necessity of a little consolation.”
But she forecloses on the possibility of acting otherwise: “how could she have
done otherwise?—Impossible!—She could not repent” (E, p. 176). Emma employs
a reason (the Martins are of inferior rank, and hence unsuitable companions), but
fails to construct an argument. She thinks she knows what is good for Harriet, but
fails to represent to herself all the facts of the case; these are facts relating to what is
most likely or probable to promote Harriet’s happiness. The practice of reasoning
outlined by Locke entails careful “Consideration” into “all the grounds of Prob-
ability and Unlikeliness,” which means doing one’s “utmost to inform” oneself “in
all Particulars fairly” so as to be able to “cast up the Summ total on both sides.” But
Austen, like Locke, knows full well that such an “Enquiry” into “Probabilities”
may never get off the ground. For a man may “content himself with the Proofs he
has, if they favour the “Opinion” that suits with his Inclination, or Interest, and so
stop from farther search.”19 At this moment, when the happiness of both Harriet
and the Martins lies within her reach, Emma does indeed favor the Opinion that
“suits with [her] Inclination.”
Emma’s rating for empathy rises much higher as the novel draws to a close. She
can do better, and indeed does so, when to her horror Mr. Knightley seems to be
on the brink of admitting that he cares for Harriet. At this point Emma demon-
strates her ability not only to share another’s pain, but even to allow the other
person’s feelings and desires to dictate her own behavior even as she fears the
consequences: “cost her what it would, she would listen.” Emma manifests her
Agreeableness at the same time as she exercises her capacity for self-command
and reasonableness. Resisting the easy option to cut the conversation short, she
begins reasoning on possibilities and probabilities:

She might assist his resolution, or reconcile him to it; she might give just praise to Harriet,
or, by representing to him his own independence, relieve him from that state of indeci-
sion, which must be more intolerable than any alternative to such a mind as his
(E, p. 402).

Her reward for suppressing her first inclination, for wanting to help, for
endeavoring to discern what would probably be best for “such a mind as his,”
for giving him the opportunity to express himself, is the offer she cannot refuse.

19
See Locke, pp. 716–17.
 THE CHARACTER – SITUATION DEBATE 

Now Emma can again empathize, feeling acutely for Harriet. Meeting Austen’s
norms of reasonableness, norms set in her earlier novels, “She felt for Harriet,
with pain and with contrition, but no flight of generosity run mad, opposing all
that could be probable or reasonable, entered her brain” (E, p. 403, emphasis
added).20 Emma’s attitude and judgment are judged to be sound.
It has been suggested here that we view the issue of Emma’s disrespectful and
inappropriate behavior from the perspective of the character–situation debate.
For the person involved, the task of providing a causal explanation for wrong-
doing is almost impossible. Trying to separate out the various factors and
adjudicate their precise influence will be difficult, and Emma finds it hard to
see beyond her own transgressions. And clearly her self-blame can be used
against her. As Mary Waldron points out, “Emma is sometimes too willing to
accept guilt” and “her internal discourse should never be taken for the authorial
voice.”21
Certainly Emma’s attitude to the voluble and often infuriating Miss Bates is
transformed; she modifies what McCrae and Costa refer to as a “Characteristic
Adaptation” (pp. 187–92). However, while “Characteristic Adaptions” may well
change, “Basic Tendencies” such as character traits are typically stable. These
propensities are on the whole fairly resistant to modification, and Emma’s own
character does not seem to be an exception.22 Time and again Emma construes
and reacts to situations in ways that are consistent with her personality traits. Her
temperamental and interactional traits of candor, openness, and eager fancy are
indubitably attractive. Anne Elliot, the wise and gentle heroine of Persuasion,
Austen’s next novel, admires such propensities:
She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth
and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon
the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of
those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.23

At times Emma is able to exercise the power to sidestep emotions, to resist

impulses, to control all sorts of propensities, and to judge rightly. When she is
reflecting on Jane Fairfax’s hostility toward her, the operation of her “discerning
faculties,” as Locke called them, is admirable: “She understood it all; and as far as

20
Wainwright, pp. 59–83. Locke calls opposition to Reason, a kind of madness, p. 395.
21
See Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1999), p. 126.
22
Commenting on the character of Fanny Price, Joyce L. Jenkins observes that: “In Mansfield
Park Austen follows Aristotle’s view that once the basic adult character has been formed, it cannot
be changed.” See “The Puzzle of Fanny Price,” Philosophy and Literature 30 (2006): 359.
23
Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 173.
 VALERIE WAINWRIGHT

her mind could disengage itself from the injustice and selfishness of angry
feelings, she acknowledged that Jane Fairfax would have neither elevation not
happiness beyond her desert” (E, p. 378). But at other times, she does not,
seemingly cannot, achieve the attention or perception, the state of mind that
would help to forestall “Extravagant Opinions, Reasonings, Actions.” Austen’s
view of the obstacles to virtue that situationism reveals tallies with that of
philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah: examples of situational factors at work
may convince us that even the most agreeable of characters cannot be prudent or
just or kind through and through, as a virtue theorist requires.24 The mood of the
moment, a fledgling agenda, assumptions and interpretations; all such transient
factors may have little explanatory potential when it comes to understanding
what people are like, but they may nonetheless play a crucial part in any
explanation as to why those possessing even the most attractive or fortunate of
dispositions will cause pain to others and end up having to endure the experience
of a most “disagreeable consciousness.”

24
See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008), pp. 69–70.
PART III

Literature, Subjectivity,
and Poetic Vision
 7
The Question of Truth in Literature
Die poetische Auffassung der Welt

Richard Eldridge

1.
As Hegel remarks near the beginning of his discussion of literary art, “To define
the poetic as such or to give a description of what is poetic horrifies nearly all who
have written about poetry,” primarily because “the most heterogeneous works
count as poetry.”1 Hence it will help to begin by noting that the argument here is
not intended to apply directly to all things that are reasonably called works of
literature, but only to certain central cases of artistic literary achievement. The
question will then be, “What, if anything, do central cases of literary achievement
have to do with the presentation of truth?”
There is some warrant for a focus primarily on central cases when we think of
literature as a form of human practice that is significantly oriented, even if not
sharply defined, by reference to its high achievements. Paying attention to what
goes on in every case is likely to fail to illuminate both what is distinctively
present in the central cases and what the lesser cases often (but not always) aim at
but fail to achieve. To see this, consider baseball as a practice. When there are not
enough players available, children sometimes play baseball with one field closed,
or with throwing to the pitcher’s mound counting as throwing to first base, or
with batters at the plate, without called balls or strikes, until they make contact
and hit a ball into fair territory. Children who are just throwing a ball back and

1
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1971), Vol. 2, p. 971. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Hegel, Werke, Vols
13, 14, and 15 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), Vol. 15, p. 237. Hereafter cited in text by LFA, with
English volume number and pagination preceding German; e.g., LFA 2: 971; 15: 237.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

forth will often say that they are playing baseball, and it would be churlish to
insist that they are not, simply because there are not eighteen players present
observing all the rules of major league baseball. Even the official rules of major
league baseball change over time. For example, new rules are introduced to deal
with balls hitting ceilings or catwalks of indoor stadiums, or the powers and
responsibilities of umpires to eject players are increased in order to reduce
intentional beanings. One could try to develop an account of baseball that
covered all cases of baseball games, from the World Series to children’s versions
of street baseball, as well as everything in between, and reference to the rules of
baseball, or to some version of them, will not be irrelevant. But such an account is
likely to be less illuminating about the natures and interests of the various skills
that are both aimed at and developed by players, such as agility and good hands
for fielding or the abilities to hit or to throw a late-breaking slider, or about how
the development and exercise of such skills figure in competitive situations. Fans
of baseball know about and pay attention not only to the rules of baseball and not
only to particular teams, such as the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, but also to how
skills are developed, exercised, and tested in relation to competitive situations
over time, particularly at the highest levels, but also sometimes in settings where
younger players are either practicing for higher levels of play or simply enjoying
themselves, often quite informally. One way, though not the only way, to get a
grip on all these varieties of baseball practice is to pay attention to what is
remarkable and memorable about some of the best cases of baseball achievement:
to Ozzie Smith’s way of playing shortstop or to Mariano Rivera’s slider or to Ryan
Howard’s power to left field.
Matters grow even more interesting when we pay attention to the achieve-
ments of a team at a high level, where we focus on how quite divergent sets of
skills on the part of different players are brought into play in various ways over
time and under changing conditions of stadium, weather, injury, age, and so on,
in order to maximize a team’s chances of winning. An attentive fan will typically
know a good deal about developing—that is, variously advancing, eroding, and
changing—skill sets and chances of winning of a number of major league teams
playing at a high level. If knowledgeable fans are asked what they find interesting
or engaging or important about baseball, they will probably, if they are articulate
and in a reflective mood, mention something like this, and what they have to say
will be illuminating in a general way about the interest of baseball and about
achievements within it.
Something like this is true about literature as a practice. One could try to
generate a precise extensionally adequate definition of literature. But given the
varieties of literary practice, any such definition is likely to be wildly disjunctive,
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

to miss some marginal but by no means unimportant or uninteresting cases

(comparable to children’s adaptations of baseball to their local circumstances),
and to fail to illuminate the aims of literary art.2 It would be a fatal objection
against proceeding by considering certain central cases of literary achievement if
one either wildly misidentified central cases, such that the choices just seemed
arbitrary in relation to the experiences of many readers, or if one said wildly
implausible things about them, just as if one tried to illuminate the development
and exercise of distinctive skill sets in baseball by focusing on only a haphazard
local sandlot game. It would be problematic if the characterizations of the central
cases could not be related, with adjustments and compensations, to what is going
on in a wider range of cases. But keeping these risks in mind, it seems reasonable
to wade in to the topic of what certain literary writers do, when they are
managing to do something centrally important within literary practice, and
then just to go on from there.

2.
One of the most prominent and persistent ways to try to characterize what
literary writers are doing is to compare their work with what goes on in the
natural sciences, history, and other so-called cognitive disciplines. Literary works
are frequently though by no means always fictional, so that the literary enterprise
cannot be devoted primarily to offering news, backed by reasons drawn from
experiments, calculations, archival research, and so forth, about mind-
independent objects of experience. Even when they are not fictional, literary

2
Aiming primarily at extensional adequacy, Robert Stecker defines literature as follows:
“A work w is a work of literature if and only if w is produced in a linguistic medium,
and, 1) w is a novel, short story, tale, drama, or poem, and the writer of w intended
that it possess aesthetic, cognitive, or interpretation-centered value, and the work is
written with sufficient technical skill for it to be possible to take that intention
seriously, or 2) w possesses aesthetic, cognitive, or interpretation-centered value to a
significant degree, or 3) w falls under a predecessor concept to our concept of
literature and was written while the predecessor concept held sway, or 4) w belongs
to the work of a great writer.” [“What is Literature?” in Philosophy of Literature, eds.
Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 71]. Here
not only is the definition wildly disjunctive, it is also—given the vagueness of certain
central terms (“aesthetic, cognitive, or interpretation-centered value,” “take seriously,”
“to a significant degree,” “predecessor concept,” and “great writer”)—dubitable
whether it is extensionally adequate, and it is pretty clearly not illuminating of what
we care about when we care about literature, at least pending an extensive discussion,
with reference to cases, of what “possession of aesthetic, cognitive, or interpretation-
centered value to a significant degree” amounts to.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

works invite and reward attention to their surfaces, to their exact ways of
rendering a content, rather than only to the content rendered.3
In historical retrospect, it is easy to see why it is natural for many of us, at least
since the seventeenth century, to talk of literary works as made for the sake of
enjoyment or appreciation or reflection on themes rather than for the presenta-
tion of truth. Whereas the Homeric epics were pre-eminent among a small
number of literary works that were performed at festivals for hundreds of years
and that embodied and sustained the sense of a relatively isolated historical
people about the worth of a way of life, and whereas the Bible and perhaps
associated sermons were for a millennium among the few literary texts that many
people would encounter, the invention of movable type, not to mention all
subsequent varieties of text presentation, has made available to us uncountable
numbers of stories with many different plots. Coupled with increasingly complex
commercial life and awareness of distinct spheres of culture—linguistic, geo-
graphic, trading, agricultural, and so on—our encounters with manifold diverse
texts make it natural for us to speak of appreciation and enjoyment in place of the
presentation of a single, more or less coherent set of truths about value in life.4 In
contrast with the pluralization of literary works and literary experience, modern
experimental–mathematical natural science is the big dog in the room, with a
seeming monopoly on methodologically achieved consensus and truth-
presentation.
Whatever is going on in the generation and reception of modern literary
works, it may then seem that it cannot centrally be a matter of the presentation
of truths. Something else must be said about what literature is all about. As Frege
notoriously remarks, literary works frequently lack

the striving for truth which urges us to penetrate beyond the sense to the nominatum. . . .
[I]n listening to an epic, for example, we are fascinated by the euphony of the language and
also by the sense of the sentences and by the images and emotions evoked.5

3
Holding these two possible dimensions of literary work—the fictional and the highlighting of a
manner of presentation—in mind, Monroe Beardsley defines a work of literature as a text that is
either “an imitation illocutionary act” [e.g., a pretended or make-believe rather than real asserting,
asking, promising, etc.] or a text that is “distinctly above the norm in ration of implicit [i.e.,
connotative, rhetorical, or figural] meaning to explicit meaning.” Beardsley, “The Concept of
Literature,” from Beardsley, Literary Theory and Structure (1973), reprinted in Philosophy of
Literature, ed. Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 57.
4
Notoriously, Georg Lukács describes our modern condition as one of “transcendental home-
lessness” in that we no longer live, as he takes the Homeric Greeks to have lived, within a sense of a
single presiding plot about successes and failures to lead a valuable life. György Lukács, The Theory
of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), p. 41.
5
Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Nominatum,” [1892], trans. Herbert Feigl, reprinted in The
Philosophy of Language, ed. A. P. Martinich, 4th edn (New York: Oxford, 2001), p. 203A.
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

Depending, however, on what one makes of what is going on when one is

“fascinated by the euphony of the language and also by the sense of the sentences
and by the images and emotions evoked”—and Frege offers no further charac-
terization of what is going on—this characterization of our interest in literary
achievement is prima facie inadequate. Talk of euphony directs our attention
only to the surface of the literary work, as it were, without any reference to its
presentational or representational power; and fascination by sense and by images
and emotions evoked suggests an at least unclarified “inner” process. One wants
to ask at least: what is the character and what is the interest of such fascination?
And: can we describe it more fully, in terms that will make manifest not only the
persistence, but also the reasonableness of our engagement with literature, rather
than casting it as a psychological quirk that is more or less trivial in comparison
with the serious businesses of the sciences?
In a Fregean vein, but with considerably more sophistication about and insight
into literary experience, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen have argued
against the idea that literary works present truths about mind-independent
objects of experience and for the idea that the appropriate experience of a work
of literature is centrally a matter of the appreciation of its artistic value. Nega-
tively, they argue that we often appreciate and value works of literature even
when they fail to show us “what it is like” for a character to be in a situation and
fail to enrich or to modify our possessions of concepts.6 Hence literary achieve-
ment cannot be a function only either of the presentation of truths about
subjective experience or of conceptual enrichment. Positively, they develop a
conception of literary achievement as “its own form of insight, its own kind of
interpretation of thematic concepts,”7 where the forwarding of insight and
interpretation are best thought of as forms of the cultivation of understanding
rather than of the acquisition of new knowledge. As Lamarque has more recently
put it, literary art
is valued for the seriousness with which it treats themes of universal interest, like life and
death or love and duty, and these themes handled well invite serious reflection; but the
idea that attention to such themes issues in practical or instrumental usefulness, making
better or wiser or more morally sensitive people out of those exposed to art, as opposed to
those with no such exposure, is not empirically well founded.8

6
Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996), pp. 379–86.
7
Ibid., p. 409.
8
Peter Lamarque, “The Uselessness of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68,
3 (Summer 2010), p. 212B.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

The accounts of the value of literary experience that Lamarque and Olsen put
forward are attractive and serious, and they offer us a richer vocabulary of
appreciation, of reflection on themes, and of the cultivation of understanding
for describing that experience than anything that is on view in Frege. And yet the
difficulty that troubles their stance is not far from what troubles Frege’s. Just what
is going on when we acquire new understanding of a phenomenon via serious
reflection on the themes of a literary work? The term understanding suggests a
cognitive achievement, not just the psychological quirk of fascination. But then
one wants to know more about the nature of this achievement. Just what is
literary understanding like? What are its objects, and in what ways is, or isn’t, it a
form of knowledge? (Parenthetically, it is worth noting that the issue about the
effects of serious literary works on those who read them is not easy to settle
empirically—the difficulty being that it is unclear how we might even begin to
measure such effects. We would have to identify serious works, we would have to
find a body of readers who had reflected on them seriously, perhaps within a
practice of critical conversation, and we would have to find a control group of
people equivalent to our readers in familial and social background—which are
surely massively important for the formation and development of character—in
order to isolate the effects of reading. It is not at all clear that we could find
two such groups—serious readers and non-readers of otherwise equivalent
backgrounds—and the terms “serious” and “reflected on” are not obviously
open to parameterization in terms of variables that can be assigned a number
via standard techniques of measurement. And yet many of us do retain a sense
that serious reading—of course along with critical conversation and the massively
significant effects of familial and social background—does make a difference to
our characters.) To return to the problems of knowledge and truth: if, as
Lamarque and Olsen admit, successful literary works “develop a theme in
depth . . . through subject and form,”9 in such a way that understanding is
advanced, why ought we then not to talk both of readers coming to know
something and of the literary work’s ability to present truths, even if we will then
still face the task of illuminating in more detail exactly how these tricks are done?
Kendall Walton goes further than Lamarque and Olsen to describe the interest
of literature as bound up with its power to present objects and incidents, while
nonetheless himself also remaining broadly within the Fregean orbit. Against
Frege, Walton denies that either fictional or more broadly literary language is
either derivative from or less important than literal or scientific world-
representing language. It is, he writes, “wrong to the core” to hold “that fiction

9
Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, p. 450.
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

is parasitic on ‘serious’ discourse, that fictional uses of language, pictures, or

anything else are to be understood in terms of their use in making assertions,
asking questions, issuing orders, or engaging in other activities characteristic of
nonfictional language.”10 Literature and the other representational arts are their
own forms of practice, and they are forms of serious business, involving the
presentation of objects, persons, actions, and events for the sake, among other
things, of cognitive advances. And yet there is a crucial, central difference, as in
Frege, between what is presented in literal description and what is presented in
(most or many) works of representational art. The objects, persons, events, and
actions presented in a fictional literary work do not literally exist. Hence unlike
“biographies, textbooks, newspaper articles,” and so on, which “are used to claim
truth for certain propositions,” fictional literary representations “serve as props in
games of make-believe.”11 Representational works of art in general “are made
specifically for the purpose of being used as props in games of certain kinds,
indefinitely many of them played by different appreciators on different occasions.”12
The Fregean lineage of Walton’s position is clear. Literature just doesn’t engage
with the real in the way that natural science does. Instead it traffics in another,
artificial world—the work world, or the world that it sets up by prescribing to us
to make believe that things are thus and so. At first blush, one can worry about
this position that, as John Gibson puts it, offers “a picture of fiction as fodder for
fantasy,”13 detached from life. Walton’s reply to this is that however detached
from engagement with the real (in comparison with the natural sciences) fictional
texts and other literary works may be, trafficking with them is nonetheless a
serious business that engages with the real indirectly. We respond to literary texts
not with real emotions—since we lack the readiness to act in relevant ways and
the belief in the existence of real persons that are characteristic of genuine
person-directed emotions—but with quasi-emotions, that is, emotional contours,
as it were, or emotions stripped of the components of action-readiness and belief.
Through quasi-emotional engagement with literary works, we are able to practice
at what it is at least like to feel thus and so, in ways that are prescribed by the
work, freely, from a position that is insulated from responsibilities and urgencies.
This practice with quasi-emotions enables readers, as Walton puts it, to arrive at
“deepened awareness of themselves and their situations.”14

10
Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990), p. 8.
11 12
Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 51.
13
John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 172.
14
Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 257.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

This is an attractive suggestion on Walton’s part. Yet it seems in the end only
to restate the problem. What, exactly, is the nature of the “deepened awareness”
of ourselves and our situations at which we may arrive? In particular, how is this
centrally a matter of the invocation and shaping of emotions? Just how like real
emotions are quasi-emotions? If they are very like real emotions directed at really
existing persons, objects, and situations, then the puzzle seems to remain about
how we are able to feel even quasi-emotions with respect to fictional objects. If
they are less like real emotions—if the absence of readiness to act and of belief in
the real existence of a relevant object make an important difference—then we are
faced with the question of how practice in having and reflecting on quasi-
emotions carries over into the having of appropriate genuine emotions in real
life. Perhaps the circumstances of reading as opposed to those of life are just
different enough that no real emotional training for life arises out of reading;
sitting quietly with a book in hand seems on the face of it quite detached from
being bound up emotionally in the direct pressure of life’s urgencies. Quasi-
emotions as mere emotional contours, emptied of belief, may be pale and
irrelevant to responding with feeling when one does believe certain things are
really going on.
Worse yet for Walton’s view, sometimes—for example as in much lyric
poetry—an actual object is in view as a focus for imaginative and emotional
attention. Here we are, with Sylvia Plath, say, directly invited to imagine and
attend emotionally to what it is like for her actually to have cut her thumb (and
thought and felt about it) while slicing onions when pregnant. This makes it clear
that, as Richard Moran argues,

emotional aspects of imagination . . . should . . . be seen as part of the manner of imagining

and not as something that must belong to the content of what is imagined. . . . Imagining
something with apprehension is the description of something the person is actually
engaged in, and is not something within the scope of what is imagined.15

That is, paying attention imaginatively (and emotionally) to what is going on,
whether fictional or factual, is a way of holding that subject matter in view and
trying to get clearer about its significance. Here Moran shares with Walton the
thought that experiences of a literary work involve exercises of imagination that
include “‘trying on’ the point of view, trying to determine what it is like to inhabit
it,”16 as a point of view is directed to its intended objects, which objects may now,

15
Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” The Philosophical Review 103, 1
(January 1994), p. 93.
16
Ibid., p. 103.
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

Moran notes, be either actual or fictional. In emphasizing that imagining is an

active doing of something that may be prompted by the real and may have a
manner or style, Moran helps us to see how literary attention is structured by
devices of emplotment and figuration. Literary attention does not drive toward
transparency in presenting a work-world for the sake of make-believe as accur-
ately as possible. Instead, diction, figuration, and emplotment (making narrative
connections among incidents, thoughts, and emotional engagements) highlight
and structure how things, whether fictional or actual, may matter for us. Literary
texts that use such devices “are expressive of a certain complex attitude”17 that
may be directed indifferently at either fictional or really existing attentional
objects and that may be subjected to development and clarification by the
unfolding contours of plot and of literary surface as devices of attention. This
point is already registered in Aristotle’s distinction between theoria and mimesis.
Both theories and mimetic representations can be presented in words. Hence
words as such are not the medium of mimetic literary representation, which is
rather a matter of words used in a distinctive way to attend to the real, a way that
involves imagining and that was developed from “improvisations . . . little by
little” and that may involve “traditional stories” about what has in fact gone
on in certain families.18 Thus, as Joseph Margolis elegantly puts it, contra
Walton, “the imaginative is hardly limited to the imaginary,”19 and that it is a
mode of presentation of the actual may sometimes be what is most important
about it.
What Moran does not yet quite account for however, beyond the talk, follow-
ing Walton, of practice and training, is any possible truth-content of the literary
work. Though literary attention involving imaginative and emotional engage-
ment may be directed at the real, the emphasis still lies on the training of
imagination and emotional response rather than on the presentation of truths.
Moran does end his essay with the thought that “we seem committed to the idea
that imagination is a vehicle of knowledge of various kinds,” for example as in
thought experiments, but he confesses that “we understand very little of how
exercises of the imagination relate to learning anything about the world, or about
our concepts, or about ourselves.”20

17
Ibid., p. 85.
18
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987),
48b, p. 5; 53b, p. 18.
19
Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 135.
20
Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” p. 106.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

3.
Perhaps then, rather than focusing on the line that emphasizes what readers are
doing when they are engaging with literary works and how they are changing as a
result, we should turn to sharply anti-Fregean views that directly emphasize the
ability of works of art, literary and otherwise, to present truths. Prominent among
these views is the work of Nelson Goodman. His 1976 Languages of Art was
motivated primarily by an effort to avoid estheticist views of art and instead to see
media of art as involving the use of symbol systems, distinct in their structural
syntactic and semantic features from the ‘literal’ sentential symbol systems of the
natural sciences, but equally apt for presenting truths. Where the natural sciences
use sentences ‘directly’ representationally, artistic symbol systems use other
symbols depictively, as in painting, where the symbol system is semantically
and syntactically replete (every alteration of the smallest mark makes a differ-
ence), or expressively, as when words are used to recast schemata for the
presentation of objects, as in metaphors. Yet in art as in science, presentation
of the truth is a predominant aim. As Goodman puts it, the experience of art “is
cognitive experience distinguished by the dominance of certain symbolic char-
acteristics and judged by standards of cognitive efficacy.”21
The trouble, however, with this view is that it threatens to undervalue, both in
science and in art, the constraints on correctness of representation and on the
presentation of truth that come from the world. Rightness of rendering, accord-
ing to Goodman, “is primarily a matter of fit: fit to what is referred to in one way
or another, or to other renderings, or to modes and manners of organization,” as
may be. “The differences between fitting a version to a world, a world to a version,
and a version together or to other versions fade when the role of versions in
making the worlds they fit is recognized.”22 Goodman resists the charge that talk,
indifferently, of fitting versions to one another or to the world amounts to a
misunderstanding or undervaluing of objectivity and of the constraints on our
practices that are set by the real.
When the verbiage view [that all there are are versions, no givens] threatens to dissolve
everything into nothing, we insist that all true versions describe worlds. When the right-
to-life sentiment [—let a thousand worlds bloom, together with all their objects—]
threatens an overpopulation of worlds, we call it all talk.23

21
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976),
p. 262.
22
Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978), p. 138.
23
Ibid., p. 119.
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

In practice, we sort things out on the ground roughly, without worrying much
about metaphysical realism vs. metaphysical idealism.
Rough, ready, contextual, and in principle provisional though our sortings out
of our cognitive commitments may be, however, it is not clear that Goodman’s
somewhat cavalier pragmatism either will or should satisfy practitioners of either
natural science or literary art. In both natural science and literary art, sources of
correction seem to practitioners often to come from the world itself. Albeit that a
lot of interpretive work based on wider assumptions and practices is required, the
structure of a DNA molecule is a double helix, not a single helix, given the images
on the X-ray diffraction films. And likewise the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy,
along with the marriages of their rough real-world counterparts, just is more
compellingly and honorably an image and vehicle of potential human happiness
than are the marriages of Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, or Mr. and Mrs.
Bennet, along with their real-world counterparts.
In a radically different idiom, Martin Heidegger insists that “art is then the
becoming and happening of truth.”24 Arriving at this claim initially by way of a
(contested) analysis of a Van Gogh painting of worn, dirt-covered “country”
shoes, Heidegger construes this truth as a matter of “unconcealedness, . . .
aletheia,” whereby “some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in
the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into
the steadiness of its shining.”25 While it is not initially clear what “standing in the
light of its being” and “coming into the steadiness of its shining” involve on
the part of the shoes that are presented in and via the painting, it is clear that the
work itself is not to be construed as either simply a mere thing on its own or as a
copy of what it represents. Rather the work has a disclosive function; something
essential about the very being of the shoes as artifact is made manifest. As
Heidegger then goes on to develop his analysis of art’s disclosive powers via
discussion of a Greek temple, it emerges that what is disclosed is how a (typical,
central) artifact functions in the life of a historical people, so that what is
disclosed is the-thing-in-central-relation-to-a-way-of-life, where Heidegger’s
term for a broad way of life that is historically established and grounded on the
earth is world.

The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential
decisions in the destiny of an historical people. . . . Genuinely poetic projection [which

24
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Philosophies of
Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1964), p. 694.
25
Ibid., pp. 665–6.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

takes place in and through all genuine art] is the opening up or disclosure of that into
which human being as historical is already cast.26

One can object to the extreme selectivity of Heidegger’s examples, as though

one or two paintings, a Greek temple, and six or eight poems by Hölderlin and
Rilke could stand in for the whole of art. Within a governing focus on central
cases, however, selectivity by itself is not an obvious failing. More significant are
the problems with Heidegger’s treatments of his examples. It is by no means clear
that he reads the Van Gogh painting correctly,27 let alone the poetry of Hölder-
lin.28 With regard to Hölderlin in particular, Heidegger puts in place of Hölder-
lin’s own situated, tentative, malleable expressive subjectivity a picture of
Hölderlin as a mere vessel for the confident self-opening of Being toward the
formation of a new historical world. At the theoretical level, this comes out in
Heidegger’s own over-confident talk of “the destiny of an historical people,” as
though the identity-conditions for historical peoples and their destinies were
clear, in prospect as well as in retrospect. In addition, Heidegger’s talk of the
disclosive powers of art, while situating art firmly on the side of cognition, pays
comparatively little attention to the workings of specific, often multivalent,
devices of poetic formation. Specific individual lines, words, and images are
read on their own with relatively little feel for their dramatic contexts and for
the tentativeness of the overall emplotment of a Hölderlin poem. If the members
of the family of post-Fregean views tend to focus too much on the powers and
effects of poetry within the psychologies of individual reading subjects and to be
shy about the presentation of truth, the anti-Fregean views tend to focus too
much on works and their alethic presentational powers, with too little attention
given to how works are generated and received by complex, historically situated
subjectivities that are the bearers of multi-dimensional thoughts and attitudes.
Hence they risk distorting or failing to capture the needs and interests of these
subjectivities that are served by works of literary art.
In each case—the post-Fregean views of Lamarque and Olsen and Walton and
the anti-Fregean views of Goodman and Heidegger—the development of the

26
Ibid., pp. 676, 697.
27
See Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh,”
in Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society: Selected Papers, Volume 4 (New
York: Georges Braziller, 1998), pp. 135–42.
28
There is by now a massive literature, including important contributions by T. W. Adorno,
David Constantine, Paul de Man, Hans-Jost Frey, and Dieter Henrich, among others, on what
Heidegger gets wrong about Hölderlin. For a good overview and argumentative endorsement of
these criticisms of Heidegger (while also appreciating what is at least interesting about Heidegger’s
work on art), see Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic
Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), chs 1–3, pp. 27–144.
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

view is shaped significantly both by a contrast with the practices and achieve-
ments of the natural sciences and by concentration on the effects of literature on
its audiences more than by direct attention to what writers of works of literary art
are trying to do and doing. That is, while the topics of the effects and uses of
literature, both psychological and social, and of the poetic mode of construction
of a work and its presentation of a content, are surely intimately connected with
one another,29 beginning with close attention to the latter topic may help us to
avoid some of the oversimplifications that result from an initial concentration on
uses and effects in comparison with those of science.

4.
Among philosophers who have treated at length the nature of poetic construction
and its presentation of a content and who have done so in full awareness of the
historical varieties of literary works, Hegel is pre-eminent. Hegel’s account of the
ability of poetry to present a distinctive kind of truth centers around what he calls
die poetische Auffassung [ihrer Gegenstände] in contrast with die prosaische
Auffassung (LFA 2: 972; 15: 239). (“Poetry” is Hegel’s general term for all
forms of literary art; indeed, what he calls the poetic “runs through” all forms
of art [LFA 1: 89; 13: 123].) The word Auffassung is translated as “treatment” by
Knox, suggesting rightly enough poetry’s way of handling its objects. But Auf-
fassung also suggests more broadly conceiving of, paying attention to, perceiving,
grasping, or taking in. Throughout his discussion, that is, Hegel describes die
poetische Auffassung as a manner of world-intake or attention to the objects of a
world: “attention [Aufmerksamkeit] is drawn [by the work] precisely to the
appearing existent [das erscheinende Dasein]” (LFA 2: 1005; 15: 281; translation
modified). But this manner of attention to an object is both distinct from either
abstract thought or science, on the one hand, or the pure presentation of
particulars via sensation, on the other, and it is bound up with the specifically
poetic use of language.

Poetry displays the unification [of conception and execution] most strikingly, in that it is
essentially to be interpreted as a withdrawal [Herausgehen] from the real world of sense
perception as well as a subordination of that world, yet not however as a production that
does not dare to engage in embodiment [Verleiblichung] and movement in the external

29
Among theorists who do hold these two topics together and who devote substantial amounts of
attention to the latter, Aristotle, in contrasting poesis with theoria and praxis, Collingwood, in
contrasting expressive speech with symbolic speech, and Wordsworth, in asking “What is a Poet?”
[“Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,” in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed.
Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 453] are, along with Hegel, pre-eminent.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

world. . . . The poetic expression gives us more, because it adds to the understanding of the
object a vision [Anschauung] of it, or rather it dispenses with [entfernt] the bare abstract
understanding and puts the real determinacy of the object [die reale Bestimmtheit] in its
place. . . . When [poetry] attains its aim, not only is it liberated from that separation
between thinking which is concentrated on the universal, and feeling and vision
[Anschauung], which seize on [auffassen] the individual, but it also at the same time
frees these latter forms of consciousness together with their content and objects out of
their mere servitude and conducts them victoriously toward reconciliation with what is in
itself universal (LFA 2: 967–8, 1002, 1006; 15: 234, 277, 282; translation modified).

While the terminology in this passage is perhaps now foreign to us, the line of
thinking is clear. Poetry is different from both scientific classification and the
sensible intuition of particulars in that it attends to objects in such a way that
thinking, feeling, and intuition remain bound up with one another. Hence it is
different from free fantasy or make-believe in its engagements with objects, it is
different from idle feeling, and it is different from abstract generalization. Pre-
senting instead the real determinacy of the object attended to, in such a way that
reconciliation with what is universal is achieved, is a matter of locating the object
within a framework of imaginative emplotment that reveals its significance in
relation to developing human life. The object attended to may be as initially
simple as a field of daffodils or as complex as the French Revolution and its effects
on human character. What is important is that the object attended to is presented
as “animated, manifest, ensouled” (LFA 2: 973; 15: 241), insofar as it is bound up
via the work with a now more intelligible plot of human efforts to achieve
freedom as being-with-oneself-in-an-other within the actual world, bound up,
that is, with what Hegel calls the self-developing universal.
Accordingly, the chief task of poetry is to bring before our minds the powers governing
spiritual life, and, in short, all that surges to and fro in human passion and feeling or
passes quietly through our meditations—the all-encompassing realm of human ideas,
deeds, actions, and fates, the bustle of life in this world, and the divine rule of the universe.
Thus poetry has been and is still the most universal and widespread teacher of the human
race. For to teach and to learn is to know and experience what is. . . . Man exists conform-
ably to the law of his existence only when he knows what he is and what his surroundings
are: he must know what the powers are which drive and direct him, and it is such a
knowledge that poetry provides in its original and substantive form (LFA 2: 972–3; 15:
239–40).

To bring before our minds not just the individual physical or sensible object of
attention (whether object, person, incident, or scene), and not just the object as
an instance of an abstract universal, but rather the object as ensouled, in being
bound up in a plot of the development of the powers that drive us, requires
specific means of poetic responsiveness that are distinct from sensible intake,
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

measurement, and straightforward classification. Analytically, we can distinguish

in a literary work at least four levels of the work’s organization: (1) its acoustical
or graphical surface, that is, the sheer sound or look of its words; (2) its plot,
which may include not only sequences of public actions on the part of charac-
terized figures, but also sequences of reflections, reactions, and feelings; (3) its
theme, that is, what the elements of the plot that are presented have to do with
each other, in presenting, as Aristotle puts it, “things that are possible in
accordance with probability or necessity”30 in human life; and (4) its persona,
that is, the presented authorial intelligence that is both developing the presented
incidents and is engaged with them. These levels are analytically, not experien-
tially, distinct. Writers of literary art typically attend to all four levels of organ-
ization as they develop the work, and in reading we tend primarily to alternate
between attention to plot and theme, with attention to surface and authorial
personae implicit and always available as possibilities. Running throughout each
of these levels of textual organization are diction and figuration—the presenta-
tion of objects and incidents through imaginative comparison and stylized mode
of attention. The intent and the effect of a work of literary art is, precisely through
comprehensive organization on each of these levels as well as the use of figuration
and diction, to compel and guide sustained attention to the particulars that are
presented. Hegel writes of how, when the incidents presented are “vitally inter-
woven” [“lebendig ineinander verwebt”], we are brought by the work to “tarry in”
or “linger with pleasure over” [“verweilen”] what is presented, as its significance
for thought, feeling, and “the powers governing spiritual life” is made manifest
through the text’s densities of organized attention (LFA 2: 979, 981; 15: 248,
250–1). Hegel discusses in detail poetic versification, including rhyme and
rhythm, poetic expression in contrast with prosaic expression, poetic subjectivity,
and the forms of emplotment that are especially salient at distinct stages of
human historical life—that is, epic, ancient, and modern dramatic poetry, and
lyric, where lyric, though more distinctly important in modernity, is also available
at any civilized and settled historical epoch.

5.
Yet, for all that Hegel’s account of poetic attention to the objects, persons, scenes,
and incidents of a world offers a compelling account of the work of literary art in
relation to human historical life in the world, it is also likely, at least in part, to
strike us as overconfident. Is there really only one coherent set of “powers

30
Aristotle, Poetics, 51a, p. 12.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

governing spiritual life,” one self-developing universal aiming fruitfully at free-

dom as comprehensive being-with-oneself-in-an-other? It is difficult for anyone
nowadays to be a Hegelian just like that, taking there to be only one self-
developing universal manifesting itself everywhere in intelligible ways, at least
retrospectively. Do the genres of epic, ancient drama, modern drama, and lyric
succeed one another as central poetic forms in just that way, with the task of
bringing sheer particulars into reflective and emotional clarity allotted to lyric,
once the serious task of orientation in modern life is given over to philosophy’s
descriptions of governing institutions of successful modern social life? Does art,
literary or otherwise, succeed in forming common audiences of wide circumfer-
ence who respond alike to the powers of presentation of specific works, or are there,
always, divergences of response and persistent interpretive and critical disputes?
There are no simple, ready answers to these questions. Hegel admits explicitly
that there is not now, in modernity, much consensus about art’s contents and
achievements. In contrast with the more direct concern with spiritual powers that
is typical of Symbolic (especially Egyptian) and Classical (especially Greek) art, in
modern, post-Christian art

everything has a place, every sphere of life, all phenomena, the greatest and the least, the
supreme and the trivial, the moral, immoral, and evil; and, in particular, the more art
becomes secular, the more it makes itself at home in the finite things of the world, is
satisfied with them, and grants them complete validity, and the artist does well when he
portrays them as they are (LFA 1: 594; 14: 221).

Art has freed itself “from the content represented”; it has “got rid of [that]
content which [hitherto] on every occasion was determinate for a particular
people [and] a particular age” (LFA 1: 604; 14: 234).31 As a result, “we no longer
bow our knee” (LFA 1: 103; 13: 142) before the presentations of art, but instead
interpret, evaluate, discuss, and dispute about taste, all in relation to works in
manifestly divergent media with manifestly divergent contents.
All this is more than likely, and with good reason, to raise questions about the
objectivity of both critical judgment and artistic achievement in comparison with
the objectivity in supporting rational consensus methodologically that is signifi-
cantly more characteristic of the sciences. Absent objectivity comparable to that
of the sciences, doubts are likely to persist, again with good reason, about the
ability of art, literary and otherwise, to present a truth-content or to yield
cognitive insight.

31
Cp. “The End of the Romantic Form of Art”, pp. 602–11, for a general discussion of modern
art’s freedom from determination by specific, given content (LFA 1: 602–11; 14: 231–42).
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

But it also true that modern life and the modern mathematical–scientific
thinking that is prominent within it are themselves, as Hegel poignantly puts it,
persistently “burdened with abstraction” (LFA 2: 1128; 15, 437). It is easy,
perhaps even commonplace, to grow up and then to live with a sense of going
through the motions, as one submits to (or fails to live up to) the demands of
education and of a job within a complex, technologically and socially differenti-
ated system of labor. It is all too easy, and perhaps commonplace, to feel, at least
at times, that things aren’t making sense and that one’s life is a matter only of
happenstance and perhaps the pursuit of resources for private satisfactions. In
these circumstances—with many of us at some times in the grip of a persistent
need for and interest in orientation, reassurance, and animation in relation to our
activities, institutions, and relationships—it may be more than reasonable to take
seriously the literary artist’s “insight into the essence of human action” (LFA 2:
1179; 15: 502), as that insight may be achieved and sustained, however multi-
valently, through powers of literary form to present materials of human life for
the clarification of thought and feeling.
In a discussion of what he calls “romance, the modern popular epic” or of what
we can recognize as the novel, Hegel notes that there remains in life “conflict
between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances and the
accidents of external situations” (LFA 2: 1092; 15: 393), as modern human beings
face the problem of blending codifiable routine (the prose of circumstances) with
sense and feeling (the poetry of the heart). In both art and life, such conflicts may
be resolved, he goes on,

comically or tragically, or alternatively . . . when the characters originally opposed to the

usual order of things learn to recognize in it what is substantive and really genuine, when
they are reconciled with their circumstances and effective in them, or when the prosaic
shape of what they do and achieve is stripped away, and therefore what they had before
them as prose has its place taken by a reality akin and friendly to beauty and art (LFA 2:
1092–3; 15: 393).

Here the tragic and the comic involve, respectively, coming to terms with what
one has errantly done as a result of persisting in a misdirected exercise of what
is normally a virtue (as in Aristotelian reversal and recognition) or finding life
good enough anyway, despite the reversals that it contains. But the two further
cases are yet more interesting. We may sometimes learn to recognize what is
substantive in how things are done and to become reconciled with it, as in a
classic Bildungsroman plot, or we may achieve, at least in certain respects, a
substantial enough re-enchantment of the world, as perhaps in a romance,
where a couple recognizes and lives in mutual improvisation of their secret
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

affinities, achieving together something like joint purposiveness without an

exterior purpose.32
However multiple, pluralized, and closed to ready generalization they may be,
these do seem to be possibilities of human life that take on specific shapes anew
under changing circumstances and that can be made manifest by literary art, with
its characteristic devices of attention to the real (emplotment, thematization, the
modeling of attitude by an authorial persona, figuration, diction, and all the rest).
In making these possibilities of life manifest in their specific shapes—showing,
one might say, the universal in the particular—works of literary art hence have a
power to present and reveal content that is latent in life. We can understand
fictional and other literary works as tracking what tends to become of characters
who come equipped with understandings of life, where these understandings of
life are in circulation in general culture and not only within literary texts. As the
literary scholar Ottmar Ette usefully puts it,

the dynamic modeling of literary characters [involves] a complex choreography of

individuals who are variously equipped with understandings of life. Thus there appear
in the cradle of the modern European novel in Don Quixote two characters, who from the
beginning are in possession of sharply opposed understandings that are then brought into
contact with one another, experimentally “tested”, reflected, and modified, in ever new
turnings and adventures within the fictional laboratory. While Sancho Panza appeals to
the world of the Spanish proverb and thus to the form of knowledge of life of Iberian
popular culture that has accumulated in proverbs, . . . the knowledge of life of Don
Quixote stands for brilliance and danger, and for creativity and the collapse of a world
created by means of fiction that has immediately and fatally penetrated into the direct
practice of life.33

Or we might understand the recent novels of, say, Jonathan Franzen (Freedom,
2010) and Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010) as each exploring a
tendency, with all but infinite shades of variation, of certain largely middle-class
characters within a highly media-saturated consumerist culture to live out in-
fantilist conceptions of happiness as a matter of unrestrained choice directed
toward achieving continuous momentary hedonic pleasure. What becomes of
living within this tendency—a tendency that is present in our society and in many
of us at some moments— what alternatives to living according to this tendency

32
Here I am alluding to the achievements of the principal pairs in the comedies of remarriage
discussed by Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1981), but it also bears noting that Hegel in talking of entry into another, more enchanted reality
seems to anticipate what Robert Musil will later describe as “der andere Zustand.”
33
Ottmar Ette, “Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft: Eine Programmschrift im Jahr der
Geisteswissenschaften,” Lendemains 32/125 (2007), p. 23. My translation.
 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH IN LITERATURE 

there might be, how these alternatives might be arrived at, and what in turn their
consequences might be: all this is held in view for us, or at least undertaken to be
held in view for us, by these novels.34
Given, however, the manifest pluralization of tendencies of life in the
modern world, taking seriously such explorations of present but often
unarticulated tendencies and possibilities of life as the truth-content of
literary art will almost certainly leave us with a somewhat bifurcated concept
of truth: methodologically achieved consensus about world-correspondent
propositional contents for the natural sciences vs. understanding of salient
human possibilities for and hindrances to reconciling the prose of life with
the poetry of the heart for the literary arts. Or, to be more precise,35 it may
leave us with a bifurcation in methods for arriving at truths and a division
between two distinct domains of phenomena about which truths may be
sought: mind-independent, neutrally measurable reality, and the social worlds
of persons-in-relation-to-objects (including other persons). With respect to
this latter domain, the task is not that of law-formulation or prediction or
control or even neutral representation of the mind-independent, but rather,
as Benjamin Rutter puts it, that of “expanding” or at least scrutinizing “the
habitation of human life”36 via specifically artistic and literary devices of
attention to it.
This bifurcation—in methods for aiming at truth, in domains open to truth-
seeking, and in breadth of achieved consensus—may, in its way, cause unease.
Debates about whether literary art embodies significant truth-content in a form
of presentation that is in any way reliable are likely to persist. But it seems

34
Although they have a common theme or a common problem situation in view—that of
bringing together the prose of life and the poetry of the heart under the specific circumstances of
present social life—one of these novels is, despite some bravura passages, arguably sentimental,
given over to fantasy, and inattentive to actual plausibilities, hence false to life, while the other is not.
I leave the discernment of which is which as an exercise for the reader.
35
Arguably, we should resist any proposed explicatory analysis of truth. Truth is one
member of a family of semantic notions that are interdefinable, a family that includes satisfac-
tion, meaning, understanding, and reference. None of these notions is either epistemically or
metaphysically prior to the others, and none of them can be translated into an idiom that
employs only notions from outside this family. This is one important reason for being wary of
analyses of literary truth, no matter whether hostile or receptive to the very idea of truth in
literature, that presuppose an understanding of truth (as correspondence, as aletheia, a fit
among words, etc.) that undertakes either to move outside this semantic family or to take one
among its members to be epistemologically or metaphysically more fundamental than the
others. See H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “In Defense of a Dogma,” Philosophical Review
LXV (1956), pp. 141–58.
36
Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
p. 59.
 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

reasonable nonetheless to regard both natural science and literary art as forms
of the presentation of a truth-content, and what else but debates about reli-
ability of presentation should one expect, for beings who are as complex and
in possession of multiple interests and possibilities as we continue to find
ourselves to be?
 8
The Moral Relevance of Literature
and the Limits of Argument
Lessons from Heidegger, Aristotle,
and Coetzee

J. Jeremy Wisnewski

One can argue that we are unreflectively complicit in wrongdoing of the most
heinous sorts: we unwittingly promote suffering; we let others, beyond our vision,
die; we destroy the world of our children—the list goes on.
I’d like to draw some philosophical lessons from this somber thought—lessons
about the scope and limits of moral reasoning, and about the prospects for
changing the way we understand what philosophy has to contribute to the
problematic situations in which we are embroiled. To do this I will draw heavily
from the work of Heidegger and Aristotle, on the one hand, and the work of
novelist J. M. Coetzee, on the other. Heidegger and Aristotle show us, I contend,
that the fundamental task of moral philosophy is not to construct arguments for
particular views, and it is not to offer up rules for correctly carrying out actions.
The work of these two philosophers, rather, shows us that morality requires a
kind of seeing, and that this mode of perception cannot be reduced to its
propositional content. Changing our moral point of view, then, is not something
for which we can rely on argument alone. I will suggest, by briefly exploring the
novels of Coetzee, that literature provides a better source for our moral imagin-
ation than argument.1

1
The position I defend is thus in accord, at least in broad outline, with those who seek to go
beyond moral judgment—thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, and Alice Crary.
Although I do not discuss the similarities and differences between my own Heidegger- and
Aristotle-inspired views, those familiar with works like Crary’s Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge:
 J . JEREMY WISNEWSKI

Perceptual Morality and the Limits of Argument:

A Sketch of Heidegger and Aristotle on Ethics
In Book Z of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes five modes “in virtue of
which the soul possesses truth”: phronesis, techne, sophia, episteme, and nous
(418; 1139b15).2 Aristotle claims that “practical wisdom cannot be knowledge or
art; not knowledge because that which can be done is capable of being otherwise,
not art because action and making are different kinds of things” (420; 1140b1–3).
This entails that the way we encounter the world in episteme—a disclosure of
things through theorein—cannot adequately capture the way we encounter things
in phronesis—a disclosure of things through praxis. Episteme, unlike phronesis,
involves the capacity to demonstrate (syllogismos). The morally appropriate
actions to be carried out, however, do not admit of such demonstration, but of
deliberation or good counsel (euboulia). While the objects of knowledge (purely
actual Being) can be set out and demonstrated (once we perceive the first
principles through nous, at any rate), actions cannot be so easily put into
propositions. The reasons for this are several.
First, actions are unique to particular contexts. What the phronimos will do in
a particular case will depend crucially on the circumstances. This is why the
phronimos must rely on euboulia (deliberation)—a consistent openness to the
novelty of each new circumstance that discloses what is to be done (namely,
eupraxis). Such a shift in circumstances, however, can have no effect on episteme,
as episteme deals exclusively with the necessary and eternal. Second, and related,
is the fact that phronesis always concerns the ultimate particular: an action in a
concrete context. Episteme, by contrast, is concerned with the universal. Thus, the
way in which moral action is disclosed is fundamentally unlike the way one
acquires knowledge of the propositional sort. Specifically, morality involves a
kind of sight:

practical wisdom is concerned with the ultimate particular, which is the object not of
knowledge (episteme) but of perception (aesthesis)—not the perception of qualities
peculiar to one sense but a perception akin to that by which we perceive that the particular
figure before us is a triangle (424; 1142a23–9).

Heidegger thought of Aristotle as the first phenomenologist—and as the first to

delimit the phenomenological notion of world that Heidegger develops in Being

Cambridge University Press, 2007) will undoubtedly see those areas where our views overlap, despite
Crary’s contention that her view should not be seen as a “virtue ethics.”
2
J. L. Ackrill, ed., A New Aristotle Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
 LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF ARGUMENT 

and Time.3 Heidegger also saw, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, some of the
central concepts he would elaborate in the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time:
Vorhandenheit, Zuhandenheit, and Dasein figure prominently in Heidegger’s
lectures on Aristotle, albeit not always under these names.4 Likewise, the idea
of authenticity and the “they” emerge in Heidegger’s interpretations of phron-
esis.5 In fact, Heidegger sees Aristotle as having laid bare the ontological character
of Dasein in Being-with—this, Heidegger contends, is precisely what it means
both to speak a language and to live in a polis (this corresponds to Aristotle’s two
most famous definitions of human beings—the animal with logos and the animal
that lives in a polis).6 It is thus not surprising to find elements of an Aristotelian
ethics in Heidegger; nor is it surprising to find critiques of rule-based ethics in
Heidegger, as these critiques mirror Aristotle’s own account of phronesis.
Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein centers around some central concepts that seem
to be fundamentally concerned with questions of value, despite his seeming
protestations to the contrary. Among the most central, of course, is Heidegger’s
account of Being-with. As Heidegger argues, “the world is always the one I share
with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world. Being-in is Being-with Others”
(155). Importantly, this is not to be understood as the trivial claim that human
beings are around other human beings. Rather, Heidegger intends to capture
something he sees Aristotle as having captured: Dasein is a zoon politikon—an
animal that has its being in a polis, in a koinonia, a community. To try to
understand Dasein apart from its social existence is to fail to understand Dasein.
Heidegger’s central contribution to moral philosophy, in my view, is his
elaboration of the two divergent modes of Being-with—one involving the per-
sistent acceptance of standard rules of conduct, unreflectively accepting their
legitimacy (the moral praxis of the “they”); the other involving action that cannot
be rule-governed—that reflect the particularity of individual situations, refusing
to reduce these to the pre-conceptions of everyday understanding. This “authen-
tic” mode of Being-with, I want to suggest here, involves a recognition of one’s
finitude that works against the hubris common to moral failures of all sorts.

3
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962).
4
Heidegger’s analysis of Vorhandheit corresponds to the analysis of theorein; Zuhandenheit
corresponds to the analysis of techne, and Dasein corresponds to the analysis of praxis.
5
See Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloo-
mington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), in particular Sections 8, 19, and 20, as
well as Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and
Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009).
6
On the polis, see Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, on the sociality of logos, Plato’s
Sophist, in particular Section 25, and Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Section 9.
 J . JEREMY WISNEWSKI

Authenticity, above all else, reveals the emptiness of universalizing rules of

conduct, and does this through an uncovering of moral perception as central to
appropriately living in our thrownness.
On the view I am advocating, one function of the distinction between authen-
ticity and inauthenticity is to highlight two modes of how we understand the
demands of the world around us. For the inauthentic, our actions must conform
to publically accessible rules of conduct, and we can be measured against such
rules, and judged accordingly. For inauthentic Dasein, there is nothing more than
the social rules of the “they.”
Inauthenticity “disburdens Dasein of its Being” (165). This disburdening, a
central feature of inauthenticity, applies even to our average everyday moral
action. We appeal to rules, acting as though these individual sentences are
sufficiently capable of appropriately determining courses of action. Of course,
as part of average, everyday understanding, rules cannot do more than gesture at
moral action. They are good, as Aristotle points out, for the moral novice; they
are useless for the phronimos. Heidegger agrees:

The common sense of the “they” knows only the satisfying of manipulable rules and
public norms and the failure to satisfy them. It reckons up infractions of them and tries
to balance them off. It has slunk away from its ownmost Being-guilty so as to be able to
speak more loudly about making “mistakes” (334).

Heidegger offers no clues as to the content of an authentic life—and this is

deliberate. What he does offer, however, is an account of what structural features
authenticity will involve. Unlike inauthentic, average, everyday comportment, the
authentic life is one where one recognizes the kind of being one is, and does so
without illusion. This recognition, however, is not a recognition that can simply
be articulated in a clean set of propositions. It is perhaps for this reason that
Heidegger claims that silence is the authentic mode of discourse: the endless
attempt to articulate rules of conduct, and to pass these on to others, closes off
our ability to see the particularity of the situations in which we find ourselves.
This ability to see situations in their concreteness and particularity is character-
istic of authentic Dasein—Dasein which is resolute in the face of constantly
changing circumstances that cannot be divined in advanced. Resolute Dasein,
Heidegger contends, “wants to have a conscience”—that is, she wants to avoid
reducing the complexities of the situation to a set of pre-given rules for how to
proceed. Once we understand that Heidegger thought Aristotle had discovered
conscience in the idea of phronesis, the view Heidegger takes of conscience becomes
much more transparent: to want to have a conscience, in Heidegger’s ontology of
Dasein, is to be open to the concrete context of action in its particularity.
 LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF ARGUMENT 

Resoluteness gives itself the current factical Situation, and brings itself into that Situation.
The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something present-at-
hand which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It merely gets disclosed in a free resolving
which has not been determined beforehand but is open to the possibility of such
determination . . . it simply cannot become rigid as regards the situation, but must under-
stand that the resolution, in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure, must be
held open and free for the content of the factical possibility (355).

The notion of Dasein’s guilt, in my view, should be read with this in mind: the
moral life is not neatly articulable into a set of universal rules. Our “guilt” is more
primordial than that, and this primordiality captures the basis of our lives as
moral animals. “This essential Being-guilty is, equiprimordially, the existential
condition for the possibility of the ‘morally’ good and for that of the ‘morally’
evil—that is, for morality in general and for the possible forms that this might
take factically” (332).
One sense of Being-guilty, Heidegger points out, involves being the basis of
someone else’s lack. When I owe something to another Dasein, I am guilty. As
Heidegger explicitly remarks, this kind of Being-guilty, being indebted to
another Dasein on the basis of a “breach of a ‘moral requirement,’ is a kind
of Being which belongs to Dasein” (328). We are moral animals, and our
existence simply involves our guilt before other Dasein. Being responsible is
part of the being of Dasein. Thus, Heidegger contends, “if one takes ‘laden with
moral guilt’ as a ‘quality’ of Dasein, one has said very little” (328). One has said
very little because the nature of existential guilt has not been clarified, and this
guilt is the basis for factical moral guilt. It also says very little, however, because
one has simply asserted a well-known feature of Dasein’s being—namely, that
Dasein is the moral animal through and through. Heidegger sees our existential
guilt as rooted in our Being-with. He also sees the possibility of authentically
Being-with other Dasein as making possible a different mode of Being-with—
one where we do not allow antecedent rules or principles to decide every course
of action in advance.
But might it be the case that authenticity, given that it involves no concrete
prescriptions, might actually prevent our engagement in the world of praxis?
Perhaps surprisingly, Heidegger says just the opposite: it is our inauthentic mode
of Being-with that prevents action. One need not act; or, if one does act, one
simply acts in whatever way one is thought to be required to act. The problem
here, of course, is that what “they” say we should do fails to capture the unique
possibilities of our Being—and it fails to authentically recognize and deliberate
about the concrete situations that we must live through. Where deliberation
belongs, we instead find rules and procedures.
 J . JEREMY WISNEWSKI

It is here that we see the way that Heidegger’s phenomenological account of

authenticity and inauthenticity reveals the problem with a rule-based conception
of morality: rules replace careful perception; they substitute for our appreciation
of nuance and complexity. The parallels with Aristotle are striking: the phronimos
is one who understands the ergon and arête of human beings, and seeing this
clearly (rather than relying on, say, moral rules that the hoi polloi regard as
universal) allows the phronimos to live with excellence in the polis—to have the
kind of being appropriate to human Dasein.
Because the moral life involves a kind of perception, we should not under-
stand the phronimos (or the authentic individual) as knowing in advance what
to do in every action. Rather, the phronimos has made a resolution to seek the
good in every situation, and to deliberate about how best to achieve this. In the
1924–5 lectures on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger identifies phronesis with con-
science. Based on this, it is a short step to understanding Heidegger’s account of
wanting-to-have-a-conscience as at least analogous to the resolution of the
phronimos to find arête in all action—to be resolved to find arête despite not
knowing, in advance, what situations will emerge and how precisely to deal
with these situations.
Wanting-to-have-a-conscience “brings one without Illusions into the resolute-
ness of ‘taking action’” (Being and Time, 358). This is precisely how Heidegger
describes the moral phenomenology of the phronimos in his lectures on
Aristotle’s ethics: the phronimos has resolved to repeat the decision to act with
arête, despite the obscurity of the future. In this respect, the phronimos’ com-
portment to the world is one of anticipatory resoluteness (as described in Division
II of Being and Time). This does not entail that there is no moral content in the
actions of the phronimos. The desire for such content misunderstands the very
nature of phronetic action—it is non-articulate, and concerned fundamentally
with the concrete particulars of an action.

We miss a ‘positive’ content in that which is called, because we expect to be told

something currently useful about assured possibilities of ‘taking action’ which are avail-
able and calculable. This expectation has its basis within the horizon of that way of
interpreting which belongs to common sense concern—a way of interpreting that forces
Dasein’s existence to be subsumed under the idea of a business procedure that can be
regulated (340).

The relationship between phronesis and authenticity is a complex one. Unfortu-

nately, in the little space I have, I can’t do justice to either the nuances or the
difficulties of the relationship. Suffice it to say that the parallels are significant,
though of course not without limitation. For the purposes of my current
 LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF ARGUMENT 

endeavor, it will be useful to simply enumerate these similarities as a way of

reiterating what I regard as Heidegger’s essential contributions to our under-
standing of the proper scope and limits of ethical theory—and as a primary lesson
that moral phenomenology occasions.

(1) Both phronesis and authenticity involve a mode of perceptual experience

that discloses things in a way that is unavailable in our average everyday
understanding.
(2) Neither phronesis nor authenticity can be captured propositionally. The
sight of each does not translate into a set of prescriptions for how to
behave. Relatedly, neither phronesis nor authenticity can be taught.
(3) Both phronesis and authenticity are intimately connected to preparedness
for action. In phronesis, such preparedness involves having the capacity to
see what a particular situation requires in its concrete singularity. In
authenticity, such preparedness is termed “wanting-to-have-a-con-
science,” and involves a readiness to hear the demand to be what one is.
(4) Heidegger identifies phronesis with “conscience,” and the phronimos with
one who wants-to-have-a-conscience.

The idea that all moral philosophy is to be carried out in arguments, and that the
appropriate domain of ethics is in the linguistic, leaves untouched a large realm of
experience that is essential to experiencing our obligations to those around us.
This is perhaps the primary lesson we can gain from Aristotle and Heidegger.
A second lesson, however, comes from a recognition of the way in which we can
affect change in our moral perception. If not argument, then what?

Thinking Our Way into Morality: The Case

of J. M. Coetzee and for Literature
The view of ethics that we find in Heidegger and Aristotle presents a substantial
challenge to moral philosophy traditionally construed. It suggests, among other
things, that moral argument cannot accomplish what it hopes to accomplish. If a
manner of seeing is the essential mark of the moral life—of phronesis—and this
manner of seeing cannot be mastered by learning rules or memorizing argu-
ments, the crucial question becomes how we are to acquire the appropriate moral
phenomenology.
Aristotle’s answer to this is famous enough: we act as though we see things like
the phronimos sees things. Eventually, through habituation, this will happen. The
problems with this answer are equally famous: how can we know which persons
 J . JEREMY WISNEWSKI

we are to emulate? On Aristotle’s view, as on Heidegger’s, we must “choose a

hero.” The problems with this are of course legion: What if our heroes are
anything but? How can we be certain we have chosen correctly?
Here, both Aristotle and Heidegger have an answer that is worth considering:
we share enough by way of common understanding to have a general agreement
concerning what sorts of things will count as heroic. We must begin with
common understanding.
I want to suggest a similar answer. We learn to see things appropriately
through practice. We can learn to sympathize with other human beings, or feel
their suffering, or see what’s wrong with racism, sexism, and heterosexism
through placing ourselves into imaginative contexts that make this happen. Of
course, relying on our own moral imagination cannot be effective: we need others
to force our imagination into places where it might not usually go—to stretch the
boundaries of our thinking. There may be no real heroes, and there may be no
real phronimos. Those we choose as heroes may well mislead us. But, I contend,
our chances are best when we allow the works of imagination (rather than just
those around us) to act as our moral guides. And for this task, I think, there is
nothing better than literature. Literature allows us to think our way into contexts
that are wholly unique—that emphasize particularity—and that can educate the
moral imagination.
I want to consider just one example of this phenomenon: the work of Nobel-
prize winning author J. M. Coetzee. The view of morality that emerges in his
work, I want to suggest, highlights what we might call “the burden of being.” It
highlights this in a way that reveals how little argument can accomplish to
alleviate this burden, and how argument can in fact get in the way of our seeing
appropriately the world around us. For my current purposes, I’d like to discuss
two of Coetzee’s novels, albeit terribly briefly. The first is the novel Disgrace, the
second is his Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons.
Disgrace is a complex and interesting novel. Ostensibly, it tells the story of a
South African academic who has an affair with a student, is brought up on sexual
harassment charges, and is forced out of university life. He travels to his daugh-
ter’s farm where he tries to adjust to his new life. Soon after, the academic (David
Lurie) and his daughter (Lucy) are assaulted, in their home, by some local
Africans. While Lurie suffers some injuries (the assailants attempt to light him
on fire), his daughter, Lucy, is gang-raped. She becomes pregnant, and decides to
have the child. Disgrace tells this story in painfully sparse prose, from the point of
view of David Lurie. Much of the novel takes up the simple burden of living—a
burden shared by all involved: the native Africans, struggling with a post-
apartheid South Africa; the privileged whites, no longer comfortable in a state
 LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF ARGUMENT 

that seems to be plummeting into anarchy; David Lurie, who has been disgraced
by his inability to control his own libido; Lucy, who refuses to leave her home, but
who cannot continue living her life on the farm in the wake of her rape; even the
stray dogs of South Africa—animals with whom Lurie comes to feel a strange
affinity, and for whom he tries to provide dignified funeral rites.
In one respect, Disgrace is a portrait of just that: the various forms of
disgrace—those we are responsible for, and those we are not—that we all must
bear. The entire tone of the novel is one of a shameful awareness of the crimes of
South Africa—crimes for which Lucy feels some measure of responsibility,
despite the fact that she had nothing to do with the racial oppression of gener-
ations past. There is also the disgrace Lurie suffers as the result of his affair with a
student—an affair that he pursues with some rigor, despite the fact that his
student seems to want nothing more than to be away from him. Lucy’s disgrace
is perhaps the hardest to take: she describes herself as dead at one point in the
novel. She wants to blame herself for her rape; she refuses to go to the police,
insisting that what happened to her is a private affair. And finally, there is the
collective disgrace in the face of our relation to our past and to the non-human
world. Despite the attempt to construct an ever-more rational society—a process
that Coetzee tellingly sees as fraught with moral peril—despite what looks like
moral progress on racial matters, we are left with stunning portraits of the lives of
animals, and our continual cruelty to them—a cruelty that is amplified by our
consistent desire to bring the processes of rationalization to bear on the existence
of all animals, human and otherwise. There are too many dogs. Response? Kill
them and burn the bodies. There is anger at being continuously oppressed.
Response? Take what you feel is rightfully yours. Crush whomever is in the way.
The kinds of disgrace that we all face litter the novel from cover to cover—
disgrace for what we’ve done, what has been done to us, and for the systems that
we allow to stay in place (apartheid, racial oppression, cruelty to animals). There
is no solution offered. If anything, what comes to the fore in Coetzee’s writing is a
recognition that “solutions” are part of a rationalist agenda that can be part of the
problem. Even seeing the “problem” is no mark of astute perception, as seeing the
problem becomes a kind of deflection: we now concoct solutions by implement-
ing rational machinery; we “solve” the suffering and disgrace that we cause.
Except that we don’t. Every character in Disgrace—except for the animals,
killed off by the dozens on Sunday afternoons—suffers from moral blindness to
varying degrees. To take just one example, Lurie sees Lucy’s disgrace at being
raped as something forced on her from the world that is fundamentally unjust,
and he sees his own disgrace as something similar, albeit less significant. What is
interesting, however, is that Lurie never acknowledges that his own actions are at
 J . JEREMY WISNEWSKI

least parallel to the actions of those who raped his daughter. He is blind to his
own earlier wrongdoing—“not quite rape,” he says, characterizing the second and
third times he has sex with his student, “but certainly undesired.”
Coetzee’s fiction is dark, but it is a darkness that is honest, that allows us to see.
Even as we rage against injustice, we become blind to our own failings. We
criticize the irrationality of others, all the while ignoring the fact that our own
arguments and obsessions make us blind to our own complicity in wrong-doing.
As with most (or even all) ethical lapses, Lurie’s moral blindness is one of
overestimating his own importance, failing to recognize the finitude of his
judgment and capacities. Like the rest of us, he thinks he’s better than he is.
The lesson I would like to draw from this is a lesson of humility in moral
matters—one that I, for one, still struggle to learn. Despite my own lapses into
hubris, I do not think it fruitful to speak of those who routinely engage in
wrongdoing as “irrational.” We all routinely engage in wrong-doing. What is
required in response to this is not more argument, or a better grasp of principle,
or of the valid forms of argumentation. A course in logic is no cure for moral
blindness. Indeed, it can actually increase our blindness, as we look for tears in the
logical ligature of some argument rather than actually grappling with the subject
matter of an argument. What is required to cure moral blindness is a means by
which we can see what we could not see before, and there are few vehicles as
effective as literature in this regard.
Should Lucy report her rape to the police? Is it up to her to make that decision?
Is it a simple matter of “wrongness” to steal property that resulted from the
oppression of your ancestors? Moral principles, I think, can actually inhibit our
ability to see the complexities of moral matters. It is easy to apply a principle and
then simply react. Seeing the contours of the issue in concrete particularity is by
no means so straightforward—and this is something that no principle can
accomplish. This, at the end of the day, is what the novel offers that the moral
theory cannot: the concrete particularity of our moral entanglements.
J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello accomplishes a similar task. The novel
centers on several lecturing engagements of an aging novelist (Elizabeth Cost-
ello). Her lectures center on various topics, but the central of which concerns
animal suffering. Costello characterizes herself as a wounded animal, unable to
understand how she can live in a world where wanton cruelty to animals is
carried out on such a massive scale. She rejects the idea that her stance is
“ethical.” Rather, she contends, she is “trying to save her soul.” Her vegetarian-
ism, however, creates all kinds of complexities for her relationship with the
human beings in her life. Her daughter-in-law, a philosopher of mind, thinks
of Costello’s views as unforgivably pedestrian. Costello claims that, if she can
 LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF ARGUMENT 

“think her way” into something that doesn’t exist—namely, her fictional
characters—there is no issue experiencing what it’s like to be an animal con-
demned to a life of suffering and death. When objections to this are raised (that
she possesses reason, for example, and language), Costello simply asserts that she
is not so sure she possesses reason, if reason is what leads to such rampant
cruelty. Her lifestyle consistently alienates others, and she recognizes this. Despite
all of her sympathy with those tortured animals in factory farms, she finds very
little sympathy with the human beings around her. She simply doesn’t under-
stand how they can be blind or oblivious to the slaughter going on around
them—a slaughter she provocatively compares to the holocaust.
The ruminations on the limitations of reason in this novel are a sufficient
reason to engage it—but there are many more besides. Among the most intri-
guing elements of the novel is a recognition that civility is a truly difficult
enterprise. Costello refuses the standards of civility in many ways throughout
the novel, although she certainly does not mean to. When a provost of a
university expresses his respect for her vegetarianism, Costello responds bluntly:
“I am wearing leather shoes and I carry a leather purse. I wouldn’t have over-
much respect.”
Elizabeth Costello is, I would like to say, a good person, but this does not entail
that she never errs. On the contrary, she errs frequently. She has difficulty relating
to people, and difficulty allowing people to maintain any particular view of her.
Much of her goodness, I think, lies in her near-brutal recognition of her own
moral failings. She emphatically does not claim that she is surrounded by
immoral meat-eaters. What she says, rather, is that she cannot understand how
others can do nothing about the lives of animals in the modern industrial world.
She lives in a state of moral desperation—one which, the novel suggests, will only
end in her death. But despite her woundedness, despite her desperation, she is
never holier-than-thou. She admits her wrong-doings freely; she knows many of
her moral limitations.
In Coetzee’s novel, then, I think we find several lessons: our obsessions with
particular moral issues can create difficulties for those around us, and we would
do best to recognize our own deep moral limitations. The complexities of the
moral life, moreover, cannot simply be brushed aside by a philosophical theory,
or some set of principles, or even some set of arguments. Coetzee allows us to see
these difficulties in vivid detail. Indeed, his fiction thrives on just this kind of
perception.
Even more intriguing, perhaps, is Coetzee’s recognition of the limitations of
fiction for the moral imagination. In one of the lectures Costello gives, for
example, she takes up the issue of whether novelists should try to imagine
 J . JEREMY WISNEWSKI

every possible point of view. Aren’t there some modes of moral perception that
we should assiduously avoid? Should we try to sympathize with the Nazi soldier,
for example? Isn’t there a danger in just this? While Costello defends this view in
one lecture, she takes it back in another, claiming that a writer’s job is not to
believe, but to sympathize. To see, not to judge. In this imaginative exercise—one
deeply reminiscent of Kafka’s “Before the Law”—Costello once again shows us
the danger of principle. Principles—even those about where our sympathies
should lie—oversimplify the moral complexities of our world. What is required,
above all else, is humility at our own moral frailty, and the consistent attempt to
exercise our moral imagination in a way that explicitly recognizes our finitude.
There is no principle available for how to do this. We can’t have a set of rules for
what to read any more than we can have a set of rules for what to do. Particu-
larism here, forgive the irony, is absolute.
The exercise of the moral imagination, I would like to add, can be carried out
in many ways—through film, literature, poetry, and phenomenology. All of these
can facilitate our ability to imagine our way into a recognition of our limitations,
and into a more transparent understanding of the elements of moral experience.

Seeing Our Problems Clearly: The Case

for Phenomenological Ethics
Allow me to return to myself as an arrogant young man. Coetzee taught me to see
my hubris about moral matters much as Homer taught me to see the perils of
war. The phenomenological account of the moral life offered by Aristotle, and
developed in Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle, shows that same arrogant young
man that his arguments were not enough—that the source of morality is more
basic to lived experience than premise and conclusion.
But to advocate humility and a recognition of moral frailty is not to give up
one’s moral convictions; it is to see them in a new light. I have not changed my
mind about factory farming, for example. I still do not think that anyone can
seriously defend factory farming; nor do I think that anyone can seriously defend
the fact that we allow children to die from easily preventable problems, like
malnutrition or the absence of antibiotics. The absence of these convictions in
others, however, is by no means a mark of irrationality, or of some kind of
malevolence. On the view I have been articulating, we are to understand this as an
absence of a certain way of seeing our current practices. This mode of seeing can
be cultivated, as can other modes. What will distinguish the better from the worse
mode, of course, will be the subject of some dispute. How to resolve such
disputes, however, is not likely (on my view) to result from a consideration of
 LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF ARGUMENT 

the arguments. It is more likely, I think, that certain kinds of seeing will reveal
themselves to be insufficient to our experience.
I concede that this initially looks like philosophical heresy. To disparage the
use of arguments in the realm of moral philosophy may well strike my audience
as simple irrationalism. Rather than accepting this, I would contend that critics of
my view are in danger of making two mistakes: first, they may be over-confident
about the ability of an argument to move a person to action; and second, I would
say that any philosophical vantage point that limits philosophy only to argumen-
tation involving explicit premises, conclusions, and the inferential link between
them, has a very impoverished view of philosophical thinking. Such a view,
I would contend, robs us of the resources of the philosophical imagination—of
our ability to “think our way” into the positions of those around us, like us, and
even radically unlike us.
I would also like to make clear, again, that my claim is not that arguments are
useless, or even usually useless. That kind of claim would amount to performative
contradiction, and would underestimate the significant merits of argumentative
discourse. My claim, rather, is that we should not mistake the absence of
persuasive argument for the absence of truth. Rather, we should follow Gada-
mer’s dictum that truth is not method, and the general phenomenological point
that there are other modes of accessing truth than the syllogism. This is no more
an irrationalism than is the view that the axioms of geometry cannot be proven:
we presuppose these axioms as a constitutive element of the practice of geometry;
to deny their validity is to be unable to do geometry.7 To become distracted about
the provability of these axioms is, in a sense, to become obsessed with argument
where argument has little role to play. In this respect, it “deflects” the real issues at
hand, to again borrow a term from Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell.8
Likewise, I contend, it is a deflection of the issues at stake in factory farming, or
world poverty, or environmental degradation, to worry about the absence of
arguments that everyone finds convincing. Such a deflection, as Cora Diamond
reminds us, makes our problems simple ones of premises and conclusions: does
this theory generate an obligation to feed the poor? To end cruelty to animals? To
stop global warming? These questions, in a very straightforward sense, are simple
ones. Our ethical challenge is not to sort out these issues, in my (Aristotelian) view.
It is to see the world aright. And to do this, we will need more than argument. We
will need imagination and humility.

7
It doesn’t matter if the axioms in question are Euclidean or not.
8
See Stanley Cavell et al., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008).
 J . JEREMY WISNEWSKI

Can phenomenology contribute to this task? I think so. Excavating the struc-
ture of moral experience can allow us to see more clearly by bringing us to have
experiences we did not have before, or to notice things about our experience that
we did not notice before. It cannot do this work alone, of course. Perhaps the
richest source of the moral imagination, I have suggested, is to be found in
literature—where we see the moral demands made on people in their concrete
particularity. But phenomenology does have a substantial role to play in making
us see more clairvoyantly what the significance and value of literature is, and
what kinds of values we’re already committed to.
 9
An Endless Person
Heidegger, Breton, and Nadja
at the Limits of Language

Jonathan Strauss

The problems of understanding or constructing subjectivity shaped André

Breton’s 1928 volume, Nadja, which has been widely considered one of the
crucial texts of the surrealist movement. The work begins with the sentence
“Who am I?” and critical reactions have long focused on the ways in which
Breton attempts to answer that question over the subsequent pages. These
commentators have often drawn on philosophical and psychoanalytic theories
to better understand Breton’s notions of individual identity, and to do so they
have tried to show how these theories influenced him. They have, consequently,
worked to establish historical connections between the author of Nadja and
thinkers such as Hegel, Bergson, and Freud.1 This convergence of two disciplin-
ary approaches creates a certain paradox, however. While the limitations
imposed by the principle of influence are entirely appropriate from a historical

1
In his recent Les Philosophies d’André Breton (1924–1941) (Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 2009),
Emmanuel Rubio emphasized the importance of Hegel on Nadja (see esp. pp. 153–5 and 524–35),
arguing that “the Hegelian stage, emphasized by Breton, corresponds perfectly to the philosophical
climate of Nadja” (p. 525) and that between 1924 and 1933 Hegel’s philosophy allowed surrealists to
reconcile two apparently contradictory orientations: poetry (as personified by Rimbaud) and social
engagement (as personified by Marx) (see pp. 527 and 534). Concentrating on the notion of
recognition and its implications for temporality and subjectivity, Suzanne Guerlac, on the other
hand, contests the importance of Hegel’s influence on Breton. Instead of understanding recognition
in terms of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, an approach crucial to Sartre’s critique of surrealism
as a politically unengaged practice, Guerlac proposes that Breton conceived of recognition in
Bergsonian terms (see Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), pp. 144–6 and 161–2). On references to Freud in readings of Nadja, see the
discussion of psychoanalytic approaches to the text later in this chapter. All translations are mine
unless otherwise indicated.
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

perspective, they are less so from a philosophical one, where the legitimacy of
ideas and propositions depends less on the circumstances of their discovery than
on more abstract and formal relations among them. While a historian might
argue, for instance, that the siege of Jena helps explain certain aspects of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, which was largely composed in the embattled city, the
book itself proposes something close to the opposite: rather than embracing their
historical determinacy, the abstract principles Hegel propounds seek to explain
the ephemera of circumstance as the representations of a higher necessity. It is in
this more abstract sense that Heidegger has an important bearing on Breton’s
conceptions of subjectivity in Nadja, although the surrealist probably knew
almost nothing about the German philosopher at the time he was composing
the book.2
There are several compelling reasons for juxtaposing these two writers who
knew so little about each other. First, there are clear similarities between Breton’s
and Heidegger’s conceptions of individual identity. In particular, Heidegger’s
Being and Time, published one year before Nadja, elaborates a concept of
thrownness, or Geworfenheit, that helps to clarify and evaluate the futural,
open-ended aspects of subjectivity that mark Breton’s descriptions of himself in
Nadja. Second, these similarities allow one to use Heidegger’s more propositional
and traditionally academic formulation of the issues as an instrument for expli-
cating Breton. For despite the notorious idiosyncrasy of Heidegger’s prose style,
his writing is essentially propositional, whereas Breton’s is poetic, allusive, and
rhetorically more complex. The extent to which Breton’s conceptions differ from
Heidegger’s allows one to gauge some of the originality of his thinking, but it also
serves as an index of a larger difference: the resistance of poetical constructions of
subjectivity to their more traditionally philosophical restatement or reduction.
And third, the massive importance of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical
notions of subjectivity (and subject–object relations) permits one to situate
Breton’s thinking about subjectivity within one of the most influential currents
of modern continental philosophy. Heidegger’s arguments serve, in this way, as a
heuristic for reading the surrealist adventure.
In his groundbreaking 1955 Philosophy of Surrealism, Ferdinand Alquié trea-
ted the tension between objectivism and subjectivism as a defining component of
surrealist practice and concentrated on the roles of desire and hasard objectif, or
objective chance, in attempts to resolve that tension. For hasard objectif embodies
what Breton described as “the encounter of an external causality with an internal

2
See Rubio, p. 20.
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

purposiveness.”3 It was also, according to Alquié, “the essential problem that,

philosophically, surrealism poses.”4 And while Breton did not actually use the
expression in Nadja, Alquié argues that he was clearly elaborating the
concept in key passages of the work, notably his description of the black
curtain that turns red in the Place Dauphine and his reaction to the simi-
larities between Nadja’s remarks about a fountain in the Tuileries garden and
a passage from a text by Berkeley that he had just been reading.5 Still, despite
the importance of hasard objectif for his reading of Nadja, Alquie seems
more interested in the roles of love and desire in the text, and they lend to its
notions of subjectivity an open-ended, futural quality that finds its clearest
expression in the passage where Breton asks “Qui vive?”6. “The poetic state is
never, for the surrealists, treated as a state,” Alquié writes; “it is lived and
thought as interrogation, as question, as direction, as semidiscovery and, in
Monnerot’s phrase, ‘groping-toward.’ ”7
Michael Sheringham has similarly argued that during “surrealism’s high
period between 1924 and 1934,” the “layers and dimensions of subjectivity
[ . . . ] are without interruption the terrain and stakes” of Breton’s poetic output.8
This emphasis on subjective experience, according to Sheringham, provided the
foundation for Breton’s critique of Marxist political engagement by reorienting
the question of engagement in social problems from historical materialism
toward the enigmas of individual experience.9 The issue of subjectivity thus
allowed the confrontation of two theories of social involvement, one premised
in poetry, the other in political philosophy, and lent to the surrealist enterprise a
practical human significance. In his analysis of Nadja, Sheringham notes that
human life, for Breton, is interrogative rather than assertive, an observation that
again resonates with Alquié’s vision of the surrealist project. Sheringham writes:
In each case, the word “vie [or life]” is connected with the enigma of identity, but with
identity figured not as a state but as a process. “La vie” holds out the possibility of
subjective recognition and self-recovery in the shape of a cryptogram to be deciphered,

3
“Enquête” in Minotaure, nos. 3–4, p. 101, quoted and translated in Ferdinand Alquié,
The Philosophy of Surrealism, trans. Bernard Waldrop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1965), p. 108.
4 5
Alquié, p. 109. Alquié, pp. 103–4 and 106–9.
6 7
Alquié, pp. 110–11. Alquié, p. 153.
8
Michael Sheringham, “André Breton et l’avènement du sujet,” Voix, traces, Avènement: L’écriture
et son sujet, ed. Alain Goulet and Paul Gifford (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 1999), p. 61.
9
See, notably, Michael Sheringham, “Subjectivité et politique chez Breton,” Surréalisme et
politique: Politique du surréalisme, ed. Wolfgang Asholt and Hans T. Siepe (Amsterdam: Rodolpi,
2001), pp. 107–19.
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

or the anticipation of an event which may never materialise. [ . . . ] And rather than
assertion, its mode is interrogative.10

Cryptogram, anticipated event, question, the model of subjectivity that Shering-

ham tries to decipher in Nadja is remarkable not only for its rhetorical structure
and its dependence on desire, but also on the peculiar temporality from which
both questioning and desire derive. That temporality is, in the simplest terms,
futural, but the word only begins to indicate the ontological complexity of a life
whose present is grounded not in personal history but in a future that may or
may not occur.
Sheringham’s focus on the futurity of the subject marks a significant departure
from the many psychoanalytic readings of Nadja (and of surrealism in general) to
the extent that for psychoanalysts the identity of an individual—the explanation
of a neurotic symptom, the present configuration of the psyche, the personality—
is to be found in the past or, more precisely, in the individual’s more or less
successful negation and appropriation of earlier developmental phases or experi-
ences, especially if the latter are of a traumatic nature. Alina Clej, for instance,
argued that the subject Breton presents in Nadja is fundamentally decentered and
absent from itself, situated not in Breton himself but in the “objet trouvé” that is
Nadja. But even Nadja, according to Clej, is only the figure for a still greater
mystery, probably a war trauma, that haunts an inaccessible and crypt-like
structure within Breton’s identity.11 Margaret Cohen drew on Freudian theories
of the uncanny and the return of the repressed when she described the notion of
subjectivity that emerges from Nadja as an attempt to transcend the normative
limits imposed by psychoanalysis’s function as cure rather than celebration of
irrational impulses.12 More recently, Michael Stone-Richards has described the
temporality of Nadja as a disjunction between the après-coup organization of
narrative, which freezes time, and the passé anachronique of the unconscious,
which fissures discourse with silence. Like Clej, Stone-Richards associated the
unconscious forces working on the text with war trauma.13 Natalya Lusty has
argued that the notion of haunting in Nadja is more retrospective than

10
Michael Sheringham, “ ‘Plutôt la vie’: Vitalism and the Theory and Practice of Subjectivity in
Breton’s Writings,” André Breton: The Power of Language, ed. Ramona Fotiade (Exeter: Elm Bank
Publications, 2000), p. 13. Sheringham makes similar observations about the “open-ended” quality
of Breton’s descriptions of subjectivity in “Avènement,” pp. 53–68.
11
See “The Coherence of Breton’s ‘Nadja’,” in Contemporary Literature 10:2 (Spring, 1969),
pp. 241–52.
12
See Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), pp. 57–119.
13
See “Encirclements: Silence in the Construction of Nadja,” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 8:1
(2001), pp. 127–57.
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

prospective in its effects on subjectivity. Intersubjective and intertextual, haunt-

ing allows “the construction of the self in narrative form by a historically lived
and present self who can only trace the outlines and contours of a past from a
present that is symbolically compressed or ruptured.”14
Breton’s interest in Freudian theory is well known and his service in a military
hospital during World War I lends credibility to the speculations that he was
affected by some sort of traumatic event. Psychoanalytic theory, especially the
work on unconscious psychic crypts by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,
would seem to offer a powerful explanation for the notion of “haunting” that
plays such an important role in Breton’s description of subjectivity: it is the
return of the repressed.15 As compelling as all these arguments may be, they are
undermined by Breton’s own words, for in the opening paragraph of Nadja he
explicitly rejected the notion of a haunting that would return him to a blocked or
frozen figure of himself, which is, precisely, what the neurotic symptom or
traumatic memory does. Breton may, indeed, have been affected by such mem-
ories and the psychoanalytic descriptions of his subjectivity may, in many
respects, be accurate, but to appreciate the originality of his conception of
subjectivity, one must also recognize that he was trying to transcend the limits
of that same model of self-identity. Whether he succeeded or failed in that
attempt is another question.
Michael Sheringham has tried to detail some of the complexity in Breton’s
notion of subjective futurity by adducing the “parallel dimensions,” the “future
somehow already there,” and “other, contrapuntal lives” implicit in Breton’s
notion of the subject.16 Now, while no one has given a more nuanced and
complete account of subjectivity in Breton than Sheringham, his work, I would
argue, is not yet complete. It is possible, in fact, that the very open-ended quality
of the subjectivity Breton elaborates can never be fully theorized, but it will
nonetheless increase in richness through successive readings. And in that regard,
it is worth noting that Sheringham’s expressions echo, perhaps involuntarily, the
terms in which Heidegger described the future-oriented temporality characteris-
tic of individual human existence, which he calls the “thrownness” of Dasein. In
particular, Sheringham’s notion of contrapuntal and parallel lives recalls Heideg-
ger’s assertion that Dasein is structured around its relation to possible existences,
which are sensed, guiltily, in every moment of decision and which open the

14
“Surrealism’s Banging Door,” Textual Practice, vol. 17:2 (2003), p. 341.
15
See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987),
pp. 227–321.
16
Sheringham, “Voix,” p. 59.
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

individual out toward a future closed only by the finitude of death.17 Still, Shering-
ham has argued that Breton’s approach to life served to “bridge the divide between
subjective desire and real existence.”18 While this formulation indicates that
Breton’s idea of life offered a partial resolution to the subject/object divide that
haunts so many commentaries on Nadja and surrealist philosophy in general, it still
recognizes such a divide and thus situates Breton within a pre-Heideggerian
metaphysics of subjectivity. It was that metaphysical alienation of the living indi-
vidual from its own existence that Heidegger tried to resolve in substituting the
notion of Dasein, or being-there, for that of subjectivity. By drawing on Heidegger, it
is possible to appreciate some of the originality and significance of Breton’s work
in Nadja, especially the ways in which it reframes the issues of subjectivity in non-
metaphysical terms while establishing a dialogue between poetry and philosophy.

“Who am I?” André Breton asks in the opening line of Nadja. It was a question
that had followed him across the years. In a letter of 1916 to Théodore Fraenkel,
he had written, “Oh! But who am I?” Again in 1920 he wrote to his future wife,
Simone Kahn: “Who am I?” after asking her, a little less than a month earlier,
“How are you able to always stay the same?”19 The various questions revolve
around self-identity, but they already decline it into different modes and posi-
tions: How do you stay the same? Who am I? How are you? Who am I?
Subjectivity, for Breton, was a question, and as these excerpts indicate, it broke
down into different ontological modalities that somehow involved another per-
son. Nadja was Breton’s first effort to address these questions in a sustained form
and the book marks one of the most original interventions into the issue of self-
identity in the twentieth century.
Breton wrote the first two parts of Nadja in August of 1927, and they center on
the account of his meetings with a young woman over a period of ten days, from
October 4 to 13, 1926. That woman, who appeared in his life like a “miracle,” as
he put it, subsequently went mad, and in March 1927 was interned in a psychi-
atric hospital, where she died, still in custody, in 1941.20 After opening with
the question, “Who am I (Qui suis-je)?” Nadja attempts in various, recurring

17
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 325–35.
18
Sheringham, “Plutôt la vie,” p. 19.
19
André Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade],
1988), p. 1523. Breton married Kahn on September 15, 1921 (Ibid., p. xliii).
20
Breton, Œuvres, vol. 1, p. 746. On the historical identity of Nadja, who was born Léona-
Camille-Ghislaine Delcourt, see Mark Polizzoti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), p. 265 and Hester Albach, Léona, héroïne du surréalisme, trans.
Ariette Ounanian (Paris: Actes Sud, 2009).
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

moments to answer it, offering up, in the course of these attempts, a notion of
subjectivity that draws on—and draws together—the ideas of death, life, and
afterlife.
To appreciate this aspect of the text and evaluate some of its significance as an
investigation of subjectivity, it helps, as I have argued, to place Nadja into
dialogue with passages from Heidegger’s Being and Time. The first of these
passages concerns the peculiar temporality of Dasein, its primordial relation to
the future that structures, according to Heidegger, its being as a whole. Heidegger
sometimes calls that futurity “thrownness” or projection, as when he says that “in
being its Self, Dasein is, as a Self, the entity that has been thrown.”21 Dasein is
thrown, or projected (entworfen), by itself, which creates, of course, a vicious
circle, since I am both the thrower and the thrown. I am the one who exists as
having been thrown and on that basis, somehow, I must already have thrown
myself. The thrower must always already have thrown in order to be the thrower.
The solution to this paradox lies in Heidegger’s conception of time. He writes:
Only in so far as Dasein is as an ‘I-am-as-having-‘been’’, can Dasein come towards itself
futurally in such a way that it comes back. As authentically futural, Dasein is authentically
as ‘having been’. Anticipation of one’s uttermost and ownmost possibility is coming back
understandingly to one’s ownmost ‘been’. Only so far as it is futural can Dasein be
authentically as having been. The character of ‘having been’ arises, in a certain way,
from the future.22

In being itself therefore, Dasein returns in some sense to what it has already been,
but we have already seen that for Heidegger that return is not to something that
simply “is” or “was.” The authentic past cannot, therefore, be thought of as a
present that has slipped away, and Dasein as a continuity, part of which is no
longer so accessible to it, like a rod partially dipped in water; the “having been”
must instead be understood in terms of futurity or potentiality.23 The present, as
projected, is an anticipated anticipation, it is the once-futural possibility that
might or might not have been, and in this way the relation to the past is grounded
in, or arises from the future. Dasein returns to itself as that which was anticipated
but might or might not have been and which continues to project itself, as

21
Being and Time, p. 330.
22
Ibid., p. 373. Cf. also: “Primordial and authentic temporality temporalizes itself in terms of the
authentic future and in such a way that in having been futurally, it first of all awakens the present.
The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future” (p. 378).
23
“ ‘As long as’ Dasein factically exists, it is never past [vergangen], but it always is indeed as
already having been, in the sense of the ‘I am-as-having-been’. On the other hand, we call an entity
‘past’, when it is no longer present-at-hand. Therefore Dasein, in existing, can never establish itself as
a fact which is present-at-hand, arising and passing away ‘in the course of time’, with a bit of it past
already” (Ibid., p. 376).
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

anticipation, on other possibilities. In seeing time in these terms, Dasein recog-

nizes in its own temporality its specific relation to Being as a concern for the
possibility of Being or not-Being. This is Dasein’s being in the present: it is in this
complicated way. And it is, in fact, an “I” that Heidegger is talking about here. He
calls it an “I-am-as-having-‘been’,” but it is an “I” nonetheless. Breton asks, “Who
am I?” Heidegger answers, “an ‘I-am-as-having-‘been’.”
The self, for Heidegger, would thus seem to be an endless game of three-card
Monte in which being endlessly escapes under the cards not chosen. Or it would
be such an endless game, if we did not have an intimation of one possibility that
puts an end to all others, and that possibility is death. We intuit it in a feeling of
anxiety that, according to Heidegger, never leaves us:

Thrownness into death reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and impressive
manner in that state-of-mind which we have called ‘anxiety’. Anxiety in the face of death
is anxiety ‘in the face of ’ that potentiality-for-Being which is one’s ownmost, nonrela-
tional, and not to be outstripped. [ . . . ] Thus the existential conception of ‘dying’ is made
clear as thrown Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, which is non-relational
and not to be outstripped.24

Because it is non-relational, because, in other words, it cannot be transferred to

another, because another cannot die in my place, and because it puts an end to all
futurity, the intuition of an ineluctable death is, for Heidegger, the basis of the
self ’s uniqueness and consistency. Each one of us is left confronted by an absolute
end that defines us as an individual. Breton asks his fiancée, “How are you always
able to stay the same (Comment faites-vous donc pour être toujours la même)?”25
Heidegger answers: “By feeling anxious about my death.”
At the end of the second part of Nadja, Breton attempts to excuse himself for
any role he might have played in the young woman’s madness and institution-
alization. He defends himself, as he puts it, by observing that he read her letters
not as acts of madness but of poetry. He then goes on to deny that there exists a
categorical difference between madness and sanity. Aware that this might seem to
some readers no more than a convenient sophism, he responds: “There are
sophisms infinitely more meaningful and important than the most incontestable
truths (Il est des sophismes infiniment plus significatifs et plus lourds de portée que
les vérités les moins contestables).”26 Sophisms are not then truths, but they may
nonetheless be more important. And they seem to be a form of poetic reading. In
short, to read sophistically, to reject the difference between poetry and madness,
is more important than truth. Breton then clarifies his thought:

24
Ibid., p. 295. 25
Breton, Œuvres, vol. 1, p. 1523. 26
Ibid., pp. 741–3.
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

Si sophismes c’étaient, au moins c’est à eux que je dois d’avoir pu me jeter à moi-même,
à celui qui du plus loin vient à la rencontre de moi-même, le cri, toujours pathétique, de
« Qui vive? » Qui vive? Est-ce vous Nadja? Est-ce vous, Nadja? Est-il vrai que l’au-delà,
tout l’au-delà soit dans cette vie? Je ne vous entends pas. Qui vive? Est-ce moi seul? Est-ce
moi-même?
If sophisms they were, at least it is to them that I am obliged for having been able to call
out to myself, to the one who comes from farthest away to meet me, the ever pathetic cry
of “Who goes there?” Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that
the beyond, all the beyond is in this life? I can’t hear you. Who goes there? Is it I alone? Is
it myself ?27

To explain what he means by a poetics more important than truth, Breton

describes a scene in which he asks himself who he is, but he stages the event in
somewhat unnerving rhetorical terms that complicate and enrich the version of
subjectivity that he is depicting. Most notably, the self is related to itself not
through the Cartesian modality of a proposition (for example, “I think therefore
I am”) but through a question: “Qui vive?” In this sense, the self is unknown but
formulated and framed by the terms of the question itself. It is structured as a
possibility still to be realized. And the question he asks of himself is a strange,
archaic one that goes back to at least the early fifteenth century. It is what
sentinels ask of strangers. Who goes there? Friend or foe? But in the vulnerable
context of the sentinel, who is exposed at the edges of hostility, friend or foe
means life or death. And so the question translates a certain anxiousness. To be
sur le qui-vive is to live in anticipation of an attack. Who lives, means, therefore,
perhaps death. The expression is strange, as I said. It is addressed to a stranger,
but it is also etymologically inexplicable. Why the subjunctive, which seems to
relate it, at best, to the expression “homme qui vive,” which means, more or less,
anyone at all? It addresses a someone who might, in an indeterminate—a
subjunctive, potential—way live.28

27
Ibid., p. 743. Cf. a passage from the 1923 poem “Plutôt la vie”: “Où une voix dit Es-tu là où une
autre répond Es-tu là/Je n’y suis guère hélas (Where a voice says Are you there where another answers
Are you there/I am hardly there alas)” (Ibid., p. 176). This scene, in slight variations, thus offers a
recurrent and, I would argue, characteristic formulation of self-identity for Breton. Here too, the
questioning plays out in the face of death or “le jeu de ce que nous faisons mourir (the game of what
we make die).”
28
The editors of the Pléiade edition draw a connection between these lines and a passage from
“Le Volubilis et je sais l’hypoténuse,” in Clair de terre (Breton, Œuvres, vol. 1, p. 167): “Là-bas sur les
remparts de l’air l’interrogation est sentinelle [ . . . ]/Nous sommes les rossignols du Qui-vive (Over
there on the ramparts of the air the questioning is a sentinel [ . . . ]/We are the nightingales of the Who
goes there?).” Here the sentinel is transformed into the question itself, as if that rhetorical form were
its mode of being.
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

According to Breton, this poetic scene is not true but it is the basis of the self,
and that self calls to itself in an anxious uncertainty, translated by a series of
questions: Who goes there? Is it you, or is it I? And if it is I, am I alone? These
questions, by being questions, capture some of the open-ended futurity that
characterizes Heidegger’s description of Dasein, its relation to itself as a pro-
jection onto a future of possibilities delimited only by the possibility of death.
Even the anxious affect of the relation of the self to itself recalls Dasein’s relation to
its own possibilities, the Angst deriving from a guilt that endlessly gnaws at it in
the face of death and that stems from the certainty that possibilities of the self must
be rejected and left unrealized. In the face of death, I, as Dasein, am constantly
killing off the “I’s” that I could be but will not become.
By focusing on the rhetorical aspects of Breton’s formulation of his relation
to himself, one notices that the “Qui vive?” passage incorporates a notion of
thrownness that is dissimulated in the French and entirely lost in the English
translation, for in French one “casts a cry” (“jette un cri”). When read in the
context of the whole first sentence, the “me” and “à moi-même” reiterate the
same indirect object, with the direct object being the cry of “Qui vive?” itself.
But in their absolute form, before one realizes that the direct object of “jeter” is
the cry, they create an alternate and arresting phrase in which the “me”
becomes a direct object that is thrown upon itself: “me jeter à moi-même”
(“to throw myself upon myself”). This fragment is contained in the larger
context of the sentence, which reincorporates it into another meaning but
does not efface it. And so, in a more poetic reading of this passage, in which
the subordinated stumps of phrases are reincorporated into the larger import-
ance of the text, the question of who I am is grounded in and formulates a
projection of myself onto myself. I am, in this sense, thrown or geworfen onto
myself as the question: “Qui vive?”
The “Qui vive?” passage allows one to reread the opening paragraph of Nadja
in terms of its temporal and poetic qualities.

Qui suis-je? Si par exception je m’en rapportais à un adage: en effet pourquoi tout ne
reviendrait-il pas à savoir qui je « hante »? Je dois avouer que ce dernier mot m’égare,
tendant à établir entre certains êtres et moi des rapports plus singuliers, moins évitables,
plus troublants que je ne pensais. Il dit beaucoup plus qu’il ne veut dire, il me fait jouer de
mon vivant le rôle d’un fantôme, évidemment, il fait allusion à ce qu’il a fallu que je
cessasse d’être pour être qui je suis.
Who am I? If for once I availed myself of an adage: why after all would it not be a question of
knowing who I frequent (hante)? I must confess that this last word confounds me (m’égare),
since it tends to establish between certain beings and me more singular, less avoidable, and
more troubling relations than I had thought. It says much more than it means to, it makes
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

me play while still alive the role of a fantom and obviously alludes to what I must cease to
be in order to be who I am.29

Breton is picking up on an anonymous expression in French that goes “Dis-moi

qui tu hantes, je te dirai qui tu es (Tell me who you frequent, I’ll tell you who you
are).” But “hanter” has two meanings, and Breton plays here on that ambiguity.
The word means both to haunt and to frequent. The adage takes the verb in the
second sense, Breton in both. His identity is identifiable from his relations to
those he frequents and haunts, but in both cases, it depends ontologically—for it
is a question of “who you are”—on others.
According to Breton, the very word “hanter” misleads him into a realm more
troubling than he thinks, a realm in which, therefore, he exists in ways that
exceed his thinking self. Similarly, he writes, “hanter” is itself a word that says
more than it wants or means to, that “dit beaucoup plus qu’il ne veut dire” and
therefore exceeds itself. This seems appropriate to its use in this context, for
according to the definition of the self Breton draws out of the word, I must stop
being myself in order to be the one who—qui—I am. It is not a question of how,
but of who—who I am (as in the “Qui vive?”). Even alive, according to this adage,
I live as if I had died. I survive or exceed myself, much as the word says more than
it means to. The self-surpassing quality of the word “hanter” thus becomes a
means of expressing the self ’s own eccentricity to itself, a way of putting into
language its inherent mysteriousness and inaccessibility to thought. I exist, then,
according to this anonymous apothegm, as a series of posthumous relationships
to others, relationships that go beyond me as a living, thinking person.
The word “haunt,” Breton writes, makes me play the role of a ghost by alluding
to “what I must cease to be in order to be who I am.” To explore the implications
of this proposition, Breton plays on his understanding of the word “fantom” and
its relation to the notion of an afterlife.

La représentation que j’ai du « fantôme » avec ce qu’il offre de conventionnel aussi bien
dans son aspect que dans son aveugle soumission à certaines contingences d’heure et de
lieu, vaut, avant tout, pour moi, comme image finie d’un tourment qui peut être éternel. Il
se peut que ma vie ne soit qu’une image de ce genre, et que je sois condamné à revenir sur
mes pas tout en croyant que j’explore, à essayer de connaître ce que je devrais fort bien
reconnaître, à apprendre une faible partie de ce que j’ai oublié.
The representation I have of the “fantom,” with all the conventionality it presents both in
its appearance and in its blind submission to certain contingencies of time and place, is
important to me, above all, as the finite image of a torment that is perhaps eternal. It could
be that my life is nothing but an image of this type and that I am condemned to retrace my

29
Ibid., p. 647.
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

steps in the belief that I am exploring, to try to discover what I should easily recover, to
learn a scant part of what I have forgotten.30

To haunt for Breton would thus be to return after one’s death to the circum-
stances of one’s demise (or one’s “ceasing to be”) in an infinite attempt to
understand them. It represents, in other words, the tortured effort to adequate
one’s thinking to those relations with others that at once define the self and
endlessly surpass it. The ghost consequently represents an obsessive and poten-
tially endless return to an end, an interminable reiteration of the already deter-
mined, and anything, therefore, but a genuinely futural being.31
This image would certainly seem to justify psychoanalytically oriented inter-
pretations that would understand Breton’s account of his subjectivity in Nadja as
an expression of an encrypted trauma or neurotic blockage, but in the lines that
follow, Breton takes issue with the subjective model he has just described. The
ontological condition of haunting is echoed in rhetorical structures underlying
Breton’s use of the word “ghost,” for while the latter might be an accurate figure
for individual life, Breton observes that in it a finite image replaces something
potentially infinite, thereby terminating and dis-figuring it in the very moment of
its figuration.32 Both as figure and as experience, the fantom thus represents the
return to a self that has been reduced to a finished image—infinitely engaged in

30
Ibid.
31
In “Life by the Letter,” trans. Caren Litherland, October 64 (Spring, 1993), pp. 91–205, Vincent
Kaufmann has also observed a relation between obsessiveness and autobiography in Nadja. For him,
it is Nadja herself who is “emblematic of automatism carried over into life” (p. 100). Kaufmann
argues for the importance of others in Breton’s literary construction of a self, but only as readers: as
“Nadja’s primary quality was to be the ideal reader of Breton’s almost complete works,” so “the most
remarkable thing about Jacqueline Lamba (Breton’s second wife) is not so much Jacqueline herself as
the connection Breton sees between [his] encounter [with her] and an automatic poem written a few
years earlier entitled ‘Tournesol.’ Their amorous encounter clearly turns into an explication de texte”
(p. 100). I, on the other hand, understand Breton’s critique in Nadja of obsessive haunting as an
attempt to imagine a lived experience that would treat others such as Nadja as something else than
readers—or at least to expand the notion of reading into something lived, open-ended, and
“merveilleux.” More in this line, Hal Foster contrasts Breton’s “disruptive subject” in Nadja with
the melancholic and petrified subject in de Chirico’s later works, which Foster identified with “a pure
culture of the death instinct” (“Convulsive Identity,” October 57 (Summer, 1991), p. 34.)
32
In a compelling analysis of Breton and Bataille, Kendall Johnson defines haunting as a
metonymic sliding of the self that is not closed by metaphor (1999, p. 365). Based on my own
readings of the rhetorical structures in the opening paragraphs of Nadja, Johnson’s definitions seem,
however, to work better for Bataille than for Breton. Johnson also argues that in Nadja, “[t]he subject
circulates like a phantom around the unutterable contents of an inaccessible forgetting” (p. 355). He
is drawing on Alina Clej’s use of Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytical notions of the crypt and
“anti-metaphor” in her own readings of Breton (see Clej, p. 837). But while the obsessive behavior
produced by the self ’s relations to an encrypted forgetting may well describe Breton’s initial
description of the “ghost,” he himself, as I have argued, rejects that idea of self-survival in favor of
a more genuinely open-ended and interpersonal notion of individual identity.
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

others, but dead. It is that last part that seems to be the one point on which Breton
cannot accept what we might call this subjective hauntology, for as he writes in
the next sentence of Nadja’s first paragraph:
Cette vue sur moi-même ne me paraît fausse qu’autant qu’elle me pré-suppose à moi-
même, qu’elle situe arbitrairement sur un plan d’antériorité une figure achevée de ma
pensée qui n’a aucune raison de composer avec le temps, qu’elle implique dans ce même
temps une idée de perte irréparable, de pénitence ou de chute dont le manque de
fondement moral ne saurait, à mon sens, souffrir aucune discussion.
This view of myself seems false to me only in that it presupposes me as a condition of
myself, that it arbitrarily situates on a stage of anteriority a finished figure of myself that
has no reason to negotiate with time, that it implies in that same time an idea of
irreparable loss, of penance or of decline whose lack of moral grounding would not suffer,
to my mind, any discussion.33
Breton’s objection—his only objection—to this image of the I is that it pre-
supposes the self as already finished. This is similar to Heidegger’s assertion
that the I that has been is not, in its authentic temporality, something that was in
a finished sense, but rather that it was an I constructed by its engagement in an
open-ended future. For both Breton and Heidegger, the self is defined by death
but given identity through the way that even in its pastness it composes or deals
with unfinished time. The self, for both, is a ghost whose death is yet to come,
which is lived in this life or, as Breton puts it, “dans les limites de cette vie.”34
But there are other, linguistic aspects to Breton’s description of haunting that
distinguish his notion of death from Heidegger’s. In the lines that directly follow
the previous quotation, it becomes clear that for Breton to be a ghost in this life
means distinguishing oneself from others:
L’important est que les aptitudes particulières que je me découvre lentement ici-bas ne me
distraient en rien de la recherche d’une aptitude générale, qui me serait propre et ne m’est
pas donnée. Par-delà toutes sortes de goûts que je me connais, d’affinités que je me sens,
d’attirances que je subis, d’événements qui m’arrivent et n’arrivent qu’à moi, par-delà
quantité de mouvements que je me vois faire, d’émotions que je suis seul à éprouver, je
m’efforce, par rapport aux autres hommes, de savoir en quoi consiste, sinon à quoi tient,
ma différenciation.35
What is important is that the specific aptitudes that I gradually discover in myself over
the course of my life do not in any way distract me from the search for a general aptitude that
would be proper to me without deriving from elsewhere. Beyond all the sorts of tastes
that I recognize in myself, the affinities that I feel, the attractions that I undergo, the events
that happen to me and only to me, beyond the quantity of movements that I see myself make,
of emotions that I alone experience, I seek, in relation to other men, to know in what consists,
if not on what depends, my differentiation.

33
Breton, Œuvres, vol. 1, pp. 647–8. 34
Ibid., p. 647. 35
Ibid., p. 648.
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

As Breton describes it, a person is individualized by a general aptitude that would

somehow extend beyond characteristics or circumstance. While he acknowledges
that he does not know what that identity would consist of, he does understand it
to be related to other individuals, since its essence lies in his distinction from
them. His notion of identity is not, therefore, determined by the finitude of death,
as it is in Heidegger, but through one’s difference from other people. So, whereas
for Heidegger death is non-relational, Breton describes haunting, or the experi-
ence of death, as essentially relational. It is also, as the continuation of this
passage reveals, dependent on some form of communication or language:

N’est-ce pas dans la mesure exacte où je prendrai conscience de cette différenciation que
je me révélerai ce qu’entre tous les autres je suis venu faire en ce monde et de quel message
unique je suis porteur pour ne pouvoir répondre de son sort que sur ma tête?36
Is it not to the exact degree that I become aware of this differentiation that I reveal to
myself what, among all other men, I am on earth to do and what message I bear at the risk
of my life?

It is consequently in my message that I am different from others. This difference

from others is the essence of my haunting, which is, in turn, my relation to death.
Message implies an addressee, another person, and therefore implicates that other
in the very structures of my identity. But it also determines my identity as a linguistic
or symbolic gesture. And, if the “Qui vive?” passage is any indication, it is not the
content of the message, but rather its very status as message that counts in the
formation of identity. The message takes, then, the form of an ineffable asking for
oneself. It is the active, searching wait for myself in the person of the one who will
come as a “marvel (merveille)” and who will, in answering the “Qui vive?” show not
who I am, as if I were dead and merely haunting myself, but will show how I am,
which is to say, the experiences, uncertainties, and questions that structure me not
as a once-and-for-all truth but as a sophistic, poetic existence.
This message, this questioning that is the general, poetic aptitude defining the
self in its relation to others would seem to take form in the text of Nadja itself, for
toward the end of the book Breton writes:

J’envie (c’est une façon de parler) tout homme qui a le temps de préparer quelque chose
comme un livre, qui, en étant venu à bout, trouve le moyen de s’intéresser au sort de cette
chose ou au sort qu’après tout cette chose lui fait.37 I envy (in a manner of speaking) any
man who has the time to prepare something like a book and who, at reaching the end,
finds the means to interest himself in the fate of that thing or in the fate that, after all, that
thing creates for him.

36 37
Ibid. Ibid., p. 745.
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

The book, in some way, creates the destiny of the writer, but Breton is uninter-
ested in the book as a finished thing. Instead, insofar as he is interested in his own
fate, his identity that is yet to come, his interest would seem to lie in the
unfinished book, in the book as a process of writing. And he adduces, obliquely
but telling, three aspects of that process: its temporal quality (“any man who has
the time”), its style (or “manner of speaking”), and its relation to others (“I envy
any man”). In its temporality, its poetics, and its connection to others, Nadja
itself would be the process of subjectivity for Breton.
These sections from Nadja illustrate some of the resemblances between
Breton’s poetic I and Heidegger’s Dasein: (1) the futural aspect of its temporality,
in which the self identifies itself in the unresolved modality of a possible identity;
(2) the way in which this subjective futurity inflects the present, which is, at every
moment, the realization of a previous projection; (3) the role of death as one of
the possibilities of the self; (4) the anxiousness with which the possibility of death
imbues the question of self-identity; and (5) the idea of thrownness, that grounds
the temporality of the self. And yet, there are two crucial differences between
their two approaches. First, Breton frames his notion of subjectivity in terms of
poetry rather than truth, and as idiosyncratic as Heidegger’s notion of truth may
be, it is central to his concept of Dasein. By favoring poetic meaning over truth,
Breton seems to draw attention to the rhetorical modality of his relation to
himself. In the “Qui vive?” passage, he expresses this relation as a series of
questions, and these questions, by their very status as questions, open the self
toward a future that Heidegger’s propositional language, as nervous and complex
as it may be, inevitably resolves and closes. Heidegger writes, in that sense, from
the point of view of the non-futural, from the point of view of the dead. Breton,
conversely, writes from the point of view of the living. Being and Time may
describe Dasein, but Nadja, as text, enacts subjectivity.
Second, and perhaps more important than this poetic aspect in Breton’s
formulation of subjectivity, is what one might call its ethical nature, since his
I is foundationally related to others.38 The answer to the question of who I am

38
In a reading of the late poem “Le Puits enchanté,” Michael Sheringham has also alluded
to the “ethical” aspect of Breton’s notion of subjectivity (“Voix,” p. 67), and while he does
emphasize the “importance of allocution and address in the constitution of the subject”
(p. 66), he relates that ethical component more to the process of enunciation itself than to
issues of intersubjectivity: “And not only would that subjectivity find its chosen site in poetic
work [travail] but at the same time it would find its ideal status and vanishing point in the
subject of writing [ . . . ] For Breton, the subject of writing would be [ . . . ] invested with
powers and dignities associated [ . . . ] with an ethical and revolutionary project” (p. 67).
Sheringham relates “allocution and address” more to issues of love, so I am not sure why
he uses the term “ethical” here. I have tried, in a certain sense, to answer that question here
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

may be revealed in those I frequent, as Breton writes in the book’s first paragraph.
In the “Qui vive?” passage, he also allows that the one who responds to the
summons of the self might be another, in the person of Nadja. This very
possibility—that another might answer in the place of the self to come—marks
a sharp break with Heidegger’s notion of the “nonrelational” quality of Dasein’s
connection to death and, therefore, to itself.39 No one, according to Heidegger,
can take my place before death, and yet that is just what Breton proposes when he
suggests that Nadja might be the one who answers for him in the anxious
moment of the “Qui vive?” Moreover, for Breton, death is the open-ended relations
to others, for he embraces those others as the basis for the distinctiveness—or
rather the active distinguishing—of the self when he proposes that he is who
he haunts.
Nadja is thus a crucial aspect of Breton’s self-identity, and given the import-
ance of love in Breton’s theoretical and poetic writings it is tempting to under-
stand her importance as deriving from an amorous or erotic tension between the
two. Both Alquié and Sheringham have emphasized the importance of desire in
the open-ended structures of Bretonian subjectivity, and Alquié in particular
incorporated those observations into a larger argument about the role of love in
surrealist models of the self, but erotic desire cannot explain the function of
Nadja in relation to Breton’s subjectivity because, as Alquié himself remarks,
Breton was not in love with her.40 Simple desire cannot explain that function
either, because it reduces another person to a finite object of potential enjoyment.
As Alquié himself observes, “[e]njoyment negates the Other, or forgets him,”
whereas “love is addressed not to an object of thought but to a being, [so that]
something will always be hidden; every being is free and contains some infin-
ity.”41 The self-structuring interest in the infinity and mystery of another whom
one does not love, which finds expression in Breton’s relation to Nadja, bears,
however, a close resemblance to Émmanuel Lévinas’s description of the ethical
relation: in it, the subject is opened up by his consciousness of the infinite
difference separating him from another human being, and the gratuitousness of
this concern, most evident in the interest shown to a stranger, is what Lévinas

by drawing together the issues of poetics and intersubjectivity in Breton’s descriptions of

himself and Nadja.
39
On the non-relational aspects of death, see Being and Time, pp. 279–311.
40
On the role of desire in Breton’s notion of subjectivity, see Sheringham, “Plutôt la vie,” p. 19,
and Alquié, pp. 71, 73, and 149. On the importance of love, see Alquié, pp. 8, 84–96, and 120–1. On
Breton’s inability to love Nadja, see Alquié, p. 141.
41
Alquié, pp. 141 and 121.
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

calls goodness.42 It is worth noting, in this respect, that it is very much as a

stranger that Nadja first enters into Breton’s life and arouses his interest. Not only
does he meet her by chance in the street, but the normal clues that would help him
frame her identity are largely missing or inconsistent. She is “curieusement fardée
(strangely made up)” and remarkable for the “grand dénuement de sa mise (the
great poverty of her dress),” which suggests lack of money but also an absence of
symbolic markers that would allow Breton to situate her socially—she is at once
destitute and somehow naked.43 What most attracts his attention, however, is her
eyes: “Je la regarde mieux. Que peut-il bien se passer de si extraordinaire dans ces
yeux? Que s’y mire-t-il à la fois obscurément de détresse et lumineusement
d’orgueil?”44 Her eyes, which mirror her different moods, do so through a series
of questions that Breton describes as an “enigma.” It would seem to be this
enigmatic quality of Nadja that allowed her, at least potentially, to answer the
call by which Breton summons himself to himself, that allowed her to stand in for
him as one possible identity among others. For when he frames himself as the
question “Qui vive?’ Breton creates himself as open-ended and futural precisely by
considering himself to be as enigmatic as the stranger, Nadja, who erupts marvel-
ously (“comme une merveille”) into his life.
What would be significant about Nadja’s appearance, then, is that she arrives
in Breton’s life as a question. She herself seems to have been aware of this
interrogative quality to her own identity, since one of her drawings, reproduced
in Nadja, shows a woman framed by a question mark and accompanied by the
comment: “Qu’est-elle (What is she)?” The futurity of the self, its temporality,
would thus be grounded for Breton in a relation to the mystery of another person,
insofar as she cannot be reduced to an object of desire or knowledge. In this
respect, Nadja reconciles the poetic and ethical aspects of Breton’s notion of
subjectivity, or, more accurately, she shows how they are inseparable. When, in
1920, he asked his future wife, Simone Kahn, who he was and how she remained
the same, he was already framing issues of identity in these same terms: the
modality of the self ’s ontological relation to itself, its “how,” is crucial to its
identity, and that modality is at once poetic (or rhetorical) and ethical, for the self,
insofar as it is knowable to itself, is structured as a question addressed both to the
self and another. The self is thus both immanent to the text of the letters to

42
See Émmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990),
esp. pp. 40–2. On the gratuitous quality of goodness, see p. 57. On the nudity of the stranger,
see p. 71.
43
Breton, Œuvres, vol. 1, pp. 683 and 685.
44
“I look at her more closely. What extraordinary thing is happening in those eyes? What
obscure distress and luminous pride is at once reflected there?” (Ibid., p. 685).
 JONATHAN STRAUSS

Simone (insofar as it is the questions formulated in them) and it transcends that

text (insofar as it is addressed to someone else). The surrealist notion of an
immanent transcendence, a transcendence entirely in this life, would thus not be
as paradoxical as it might sound: the transcendence of the self occurs, Breton
indicates, in the infinite enigma of one’s relation to another person.
Breton’s Nadja and Heidegger’s Being and Time address similar concerns
about individual human identity in cognate but significantly different terms.
And yet, how do they speak to each other, if not in some dialogue de sourds or
dialogue of the deaf, since their authors undoubtedly did not read each other’s
works? At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that they do so through the
abstraction of philosophical propositions, through their tendency to negate the
contingent, historical circumstances of their discovery or invention. But that
argument reduces the notions of subjectivity discussed here to timeless, meta-
physical constructs, which is a position that both Heidegger and Breton militated
against. Perhaps it is better to understand the dialogue between these two texts in
poetic, rather than metaphysical terms and to hear in it a dialogue qui sourd, one
that wells up (sourd) out of language itself and that leads these two thinkers, both
of whom were intensively sensitive to the force of language on human identity,
toward their insights. For it is an impersonal speaking that suggests to Breton that
he is a ghost, an adage that says more than even it means to say, a saying beyond
intention that determines and reveals the structures of the self. And for Heidegger
the nature of being was revealed in the particularities of the Greek and German
languages, speaking in and as the languages themselves—through a speaking that
erupts like the strangeness of the “Qui vive?”
By reading Nadja in dialogue with Heidegger, it is possible to appreciate
certain aspects of Breton’s self-identificatory project that might otherwise have
been overlooked or suppressed. The subjectivity that Breton elaborates across the
book’s pages emerges as resolutely open-ended, such that its opening question is
never answered but instead reformulated, through the very process of writing, as
how am I who I am? That open-endedness depends on an underlying and un-
Freudian futurity within self-identity. The temporality of Breton’s subjectivity
resembles Heidegger’s insofar as it represents a projection of the self onto its
possibilities such that each present moment of the self is constructed not as a
return to an already realized identity but to one of its unfinished possibilities.
Heidegger calls this thrownness, Breton, haunting. But for Heidegger, this futur-
ity is closed off and the individual is individualized by the non-relational aspect of
one of my possibilities, which is my death. For Breton, however, my futurity is
individualized by my interest in another person, by my commitment to their
enigma. In this sense, the finitude of death is reintegrated into the experience of
 AN ENDLESS PERSON 

life, a fact that is emphasized by Breton’s choice of the word “haunting,” which
means a living after one’s own demise. Breton, through the poetic qualities of
address, questioning, and tone, thus conceptually and experientially subordinates
the absolute alterity of death, its non-relational quality, to ethical, interpersonal
relations. Whereas for Heidegger, the individual is defined by the absolute of
death, for Breton, the individual is defined by his or her relation to another
person. By reorienting his notion of subjectivity away from the finitude of a “non-
relational” death and toward the enigma of another person, Breton reorients a
post-metaphysical model of subjectivity away from its grounding in issues of
ontology toward a basis in ethics and language.
PART IV

Language, Dialogical Identity,

and Self-Understanding
 10
The Dialogic Self in Hamlet
On How Dramatic Form Transforms
Philosophical Enquiry

Anthony Gash

One of Shakespeare’s most famous reflections on the dramatic art-form is given

to Hamlet as he instructs the players:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance that you
o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of
playing whose end both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to
nature (Hamlet III.ii.19–22).1

This dictum would be echoed by Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare

(1765) where he found it to be Shakespeare’s highest excellence that ‘he holds up
to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life’.2 Although the exact
wording may derive from Donatus’ commentary on comedy, which attributed to
Cicero the definition of a play as ‘an imitation of life, a mirror of custom, an
image of truth,’3 the sentiment would seem to place Shakespeare in the Aristo-
telian tradition of thinking about drama as ‘the imitation of an action’ (Poetics,
Ch.6, 1450a).4 But Hamlet goes on to say something more idiosyncratic: ‘to show
virtue her own feature, scorn her own image’ (III.ii.22–3). It is as if the applica-
tion of a commonplace figure, a ‘mirror’, to the performance of a play has
prompted a new thought, that a mirror can be turned in different directions: it

1
This, and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974).
2
Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 59.
3
Donatus, Commentum Terenti, 1.22 (my translation).
4
Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company,
1982).
 ANTHONY GASH

need not be of nature but can be of the audience, to whom the actors hold up a
mirror so that they see themselves. We are at once closer to Plato’s cave where the
images (eikones) that enchant the prisoners are illusory images of themselves and
other people from which the mind must be released by philosophical dialectic.5
Shakespeare’s version of the topic suggests that what the audience sees is an
image of just that aspect of themselves which they cannot see in life, their own
viewpoint on the world, although others experience it in their actions and
attitudes—here exemplified by virtue and scorn. In another play, All’s Well
That Ends Well, Shakespeare specifically associates ‘scorn’ with a falsifying
‘perspective’ only acknowledged by its owner in retrospect when his emotional
state has changed: ‘Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me’ (All’s Well
That Ends Well, V.iii.48). The suggestion is borne out by the recurrence of the
mirror metaphor in the closet scene, when Hamlet says to his mother:

You go not till I set you up a glass

Where you may see the inmost part of you. (III.iv.19–20)

In this case the glass in question is like drama in being a combination of words
and a picture, and Hamlet’s performance elicits the queen’s acknowledgment:
Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul. (III.iv.89)

The implicit discussion of drama is therefore inseparable from the issues which
philosophers continue to discuss in terms of ‘subject and object’ or ‘self and
other’. To cast the theatrical experience in these terms, I go to a play expecting it
to be conducted in terms of a subject–object relation. I expect to see the
behaviour of another person which I can identify as this or that, and on the
basis of this ‘knowledge’ I will predict and judge, sympathise or disapprove. But
what I also encounter is a face-to-face relation: the actor who looks back at me,
and in whose eyes I see myself.
Consider Hamlet’s first extended utterance—his response to his mother’s
question, ‘Why seems it so particular with thee?’:

Seems, madam, nay, it is, I know not ‘seems’.

‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor my customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

5
‘For, to begin with, do you suppose that that these men would have seen anything of themselves
or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?’
(Republic, VII, 515a), trans. Paul Shorey in Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within which passeth show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I.ii.76–86)

Because the speaker itemizes and negates the things that an actor can do in a play,
this constitutes a covert rebuke to the audience’s expectation that we will be
swiftly able to identify what type of ‘character’ we are dealing with—the revenger,
for example, or the melancholic or the (indecisive) intellectual. The self-
conscious actor who speaks in this way about the ‘actions that a man might
play’ is turning the tables on us. But one soon discovers that he is also turning the
tables on his questioner, his ‘good mother’ Queen Gertrude. By continuing to
wear the ‘customary’ black of a funeral and denying that his mourning behaviour
adequately denotes his grief for his father’s death, he is effectively teaching his
mother to mourn. In the soliloquy which follows he will refer to the indecent
haste with which she has remarried by referring to the ‘shoes’ with which she
followed the hearse, and the tears that she wept ‘like Niobe’ (I.ii.143–5). So he is
now behaving as she still should be. At the time, these shoes and tears indeed
‘seemed’ to denote her truly. They did not, but that is not to say that they could
not have done. Hamlet’s costume and his ‘dejected’ facial expression are sincere.
And his defence of his sincerity against his mother’s implication that he is
behaving histrionically, when she asks why the common fact of mortality
‘seems’ so ‘particular’ with him, ‘Seems madam, nay it is. I know not seems,’
rightly protests that the distinction between being and seeming is usually an
inappropriate response to another person’s behaviour. Gertrude’s terminology
does not describe behaviour, but expresses distrust of it. Equally inappropriate, he
contends, is his mother’s contrasting of the universal and the particular, which
Claudius will soon repeat by condemning protracted grieving as irreligious,
unnatural, and irrational, a kind of egoism or ‘peevish opposition’ (I.ii.100) to
our common condition. No, Hamlet replies, his father’s death is both common
and unique. But all this can be overlooked by historicizing critics in favour of the
allusion to the words ‘that within that passeth show’ which has been used to
support generalizations about changes in the criteria of personhood during the
Renaissance from public membership to interior individuality.6 But Hamlet does

6
G. W. F. Hegel says that, in contrast to the ethical duties and collisions of Greek tragedy, ‘what
presses for satisfaction [in individuals] is the subjectivity of their hearts and minds and the privacy of
their own character’. Hamlet, he continues, differs from Orestes in just this way. See Aesthetics: Lectures
on Fine Art, published posthumously, 1835, trans. T. M. Knox, in The Hegel Reader, ed. Stephen
 ANTHONY GASH

not say that the inky cloak does not denote him truly but that it ‘alone’ does not,
and that goes for each of the other ‘actions’. None of the forms of grief are proofs
of woe’s presence, but they are expressions of it. The actor–character or dramatis
persona is not therefore just speaking about himself, but through speech, cos-
tume, and gesture, articulating a web of relationships with the living persons who
surround him, the dead person whom he mourns, and the audience in the
theatre. And it is in this dialogic context that a stream of antitheses which were
already prominent in classical philosophy was raised and reconsidered dramat-
ically: general and particular, seeming and being, outward behaviour and inward
emotion. Yes indeed, Hamlet’s woe is ‘within’, but equally, to invoke one of
Wittgenstein’s most subtle aphorisms: ‘An inner process stands in need of
outward criteria.’7 This undermining of the expected relationship between spec-
tator and actor is also mirrored by the play within the play that Hamlet calls ‘the
Mouse-trap’ (III.ii.237). Like us, Claudius goes to watch a play about fictional
kings and queens but finds his conscience caught to such a degree that he has to
turn his back, calling as he does so for lights, as if in retreat from the darkness of
truth to the safety of sight (another reminder of the cave allegory). And sight here
is intertwined with power over the other because Claudius has up till then
secured his power by the practice of spying, where, in his own words,

We’ll so bestow ourselves, that seeing unseen,

We may the encounter frankly judge. (III. i. 32–3)

That is also a possible description of an audience’s role in a play: they too see
and judge while remaining ‘unseen’ themselves, and the comparison is rein-
forced when Polonius goes on to direct Ophelia as to how to play her part in
the ‘encounter’ between herself and Hamlet: like an actor she must ‘justify’ her
solitary entrance on to the stage, in this case by pretending to be reading a book
(III.i.42–4). But the dramatic convention of an audience ‘seeing unseen’, which
is one of the necessary foundations of the dramatic game, is countered in the course
of the play by the thematizing of another of its indispensable foundations, dialogue,
dialogue being that situation in which two people are related face-to-face, subject to

Houlgate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 472. Jacob Burckhardt contrasted medieval man’s consciousness
of himself as ‘a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation’ with Renaissance man who
‘became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such.’ Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy, 1860, trans. Middlemore (Oxford: Phaidon, 1945), pp. 81–5.
7
Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell and Mott, Ltd., 1958), 1, 579, p. 153.
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

subject, I to thou. To a quite remarkable degree Shakespeare has succeeded in

loosening the requirements of ‘plot’, which for Aristotle was ‘the first principle and,
as it were, the soul of drama’ (Poetics, Ch.6, 1450a), to allow the middle of the play
to be taken up with a series of improvisatory and inconclusive dialogues between
Hamlet and a number of individuals.
The idea of dialogue comes to the fore when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
having been entreated (II.ii.19) (a euphemism for ‘commanded’) to ‘glean’ (II.
ii.16) what is afflicting Hamlet, report back to Claudius that Hamlet has been
‘niggard of question, but of our demands/Most free in his reply’ (III.i.13–14).
Editors note the discrepancy between this summary and the dialogue itself which
begins and ends with a volley of questions from Hamlet, ranging from the
oblique, ‘What have you, my good friends, deserv’d at the hands of Fortune,
that she sends you to this prisoner hither?’ to the painfully direct, ‘Were you not
sent for? is it your own inclining? is it a free visitation?’ (II.ii.239–41, 274–5). But
the summary could fit the dialogue which is yet to come, when, following
Claudius’ angry response to the ‘mousetrap’, Hamlet responds to a series of
demands with answers, some of them extravagant, where questions might have
been expected. Here is an example:

GUIL . The Queen, your mother, in most great affliction of spirit hath sent
me to you. [a veiled accusation: expected answer: in the range of ‘what is
her request?’]
HAM . You are welcome.
GUIL . Nay, good my lord, this courtesy is not of the right breed. If it shall
please you to make me a wholesome answer, I will do your mother’s
commandment; if not, your pardon and my return shall be the end of
my business.
HAM . Sir, I cannot.
ROS . What my lord?
HAM . Make you a wholesome answer—my wit’s diseased. (III.ii.311–22)

Both of these dialogues between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
meta-dialogues in that their subject is the rules of question and answer, about
which the two parties disagree. In the first Hamlet asks too many questions. In
the second he asks too few. In this respect their ‘high’ prototype is Plato’s
Protagoras, where Socrates’ method of question and answer is contrasted with
both the rhetorical speech in which Protagoras is expert and the aggressive
adversarial debate of the political assembly and the law-court which seeks victory
rather than truth. ‘It is the argument itself that I wish to probe, though it may
turn out that both I who question and you who answer are equally under
 ANTHONY GASH

scrutiny’ (Protagoras, 333c).8 The eventual reversal of the roles of questioner and
respondent which occurs in almost all of Hamlet’s dialogues, including those
with Polonius and his mother, depend on Hamlet’s refusal to identify with the
‘you’ whom the requests and concealed threats imply. The ‘I’ who ‘cannot’ reply
in the quotation, for example, is a purely formal one—the madman who logically
cannot give a rational answer rather than the guilty individual to whom Guilden-
stern’s requests are addressed.
What Hamlet later says of the gravedigger’s responses to his questioning is
thus remarkably appropriate to his own responses: ‘How absolute the knave is!
we must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us’ (V.i.137–8). ‘Absolute’
here means something like ‘strict, literal-minded, logical’: so to equate absolute-
ness with ‘equivocation’, or double-speak, is puzzling. In fact the sentence about
equivocation is itself equivocal: it may mean that the speaker is equivocating and
the respondent exposing that duplicity by his over-literal reply; or it may be the
respondent who is equivocating by maliciously or wittily inventing an ambiguity
which the speaker did not intend. Either way, the respondent finds an ambiguity
in the speaker’s utterance which the speaker had not noticed, by ignoring its
intention and treating it as a logical exercise. The technique relies on the fact that
the meaning of a sentence is in its use as much as in its logic, and that all
sentences, when abstracted from their interpersonal context, are potentially
ambiguous or indeterminate in meaning. By answering with an inappropriate
logicality, Hamlet thus strikes a blow at a picture of language as primarily
referential or denotative and demonstrates that it is a transaction between
persons in specific contexts. In this sense, he is on the same track as Wittgenstein
in his Philosophical Investigations when he talks of ‘language games’ and the
emergence of precise meaning within—and only within—a specific evolving
context of interactive usage, or on the same track as J. L. Austin making the
distinction between ‘performative’ and ‘constative’ utterances. Or, to consider
such exchanges in a more political idiom, specifically that of the Marxist phil-
osopher Louis Althusser, Guildenstern’s requests ‘interpellate’ Hamlet as a sub-
ject: ‘the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit
freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely)
accept his subjection’.9 We need not accept Althusser’s proposal that the category
of the ‘subject’ is necessarily an ideological construction, to recognize the force of
its irony when applied to a particular abuse of power which by addressing

8
Plato, Protagoras, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Plato, op. cit.
9
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’,
in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 169.
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

someone whom one is using instrumentally as a free individual produces a

confusion of subjectivity and subjection. For ‘subject’ we might read ‘Hamlet’
and for Subject the King, Claudius. Hamlet’s discourse refuses the symmetry of
an ‘I’ who is the mirror image of Guildenstern’s implied ‘you’. The subject of his
utterances therefore becomes not himself but his interrogator’s language and the
pattern of activity which that language expresses.
The very first dialogue in which we encounter Hamlet after he has assumed his
‘antic disposition’ shows the method in miniature:

POL . Do you know me, my lord?

HAM . Excellent well, you are a fishmonger (II.ii.173–4).

We do not need to interpret the word fishmonger, as editors often do, to mean a
pimp or a businessman, or, as Coleridge assumed, that he is ‘fishing’, to recognize
that it is grammatically an unexpected kind of answer. Polonius assumes that the
question is about Hamlet’s state of mind: does Hamlet recognize people whom he
has known or not? If the first, he is sane: if the second he is mad. Like a doctor
examining a patient, what Polonius expects is either a ‘yes’ answer, or a demon-
stration of ‘confusion’ from which the questioner deduces ‘no’. But Hamlet
responds as if the question were about Polonius and requires a statement or
definition. The statement, in turn, forces the questioner to answer ‘Not I, my lord’
(II.ii.175), thus generalizing the question of identity to include both questioner
and answerer, and then requiring moral self-examination of the questioner:
‘Then I would you were so honest a man’ (II.ii.176). As late as Act Four the
method is much the same:

KING . Now Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAM . At supper. [As if the king were not accusing him of being responsible
for the murder, but simply requiring information.]
KING . At supper? where?
HAM . Not where he eats, but where ’a is eaten [revealing an unforeseen
ambiguity]; a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your
worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and
we fat ourselves for maggots; your fat king and your lean beggar is but
variable service, two dishes but to one table—that’s the end. (IV.
iii.16–25)
It has only taken a few lines for Hamlet to switch the focus away from himself and
towards human mortality, and thence to kings and their illusions of power, and
thus back to his questioner. Claudius, it should be noticed, is a reluctant partner
 ANTHONY GASH

in dialogue, his preferred mode being the extended rhetorical monologue—one of

the modes of power which Socrates had been the first philosopher to resist.
We have become used to thinking of Hamlet either as the supreme example of
interior subjectivity in literature, or alternatively as such a protean player of roles
that it is impossible to find in him the consistency that we expect in a character,
or perhaps even in a person. There is a wonderful record of a conversation
between Shelley and Byron in which each takes one of these views.10 And nearer
our own time, Francis Barker alternates between both of them to argue that
Hamlet is pre-Cartesian and pre-bourgeois, but only just: ‘The historical prema-
turity of this subjectivity places it outside the limits of this text-world in which it
is as yet emergent only in promissory form’.11 But it should be noticed that even
when both these descriptions, Hamlet as discontinuous role-player and Hamlet
as interior consciousness, seem to apply, as when Hamlet hurls himself into
Ophelia’s grave, expressing his love for her:
I lov’d Ophelia, forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up thy sum. (V.I.269–71)

and also playing the role of an extravagantly bombastic revenge hero:

Woo’t weep, woo’t fight, woo’t fast, would tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel, eat a crocadile?
I’ll do it. (V.ii.275–6),

both self-expression and role-playing are subsumed by the idea that he is in

dialogue with Laertes. It is Laertes’ behaviour in jumping into the grave which
gives him his cue, and he is holding up a mirror to Laertes’ language, his ‘phrase
of sorrow’, his ‘rant’ (V.i.255, 283).
Hamlet has recognized his own inconsolable grief in Laertes (at this point
Laertes is Hamlet’s mirror), but then Hamlet become Laertes’ mirror to demon-
strate to him what is wrong or mistaken in his attempts to quantify or objectify
his love by seeking Hamlet’s death in compensation, or heaping up words—the
very kind of behaviour, incidentally, which Claudius has encouraged in him.
The improvisatory quality of the dialogues in which Hamlet engages pulls his
interlocutor out of the agenda for which he enters the stage. To this extent the role
of Hamlet epitomizes a conception of acting as interactive rather than determined
by character or plot. I want to call this a ‘dialogic’ conception, but equally it belongs

10
New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 1830, N.S. XXIX pt. ii, 327–36.
11
Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 36.
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

to the idiom of fooling which comes to the forefront of Shakespeare’s re-thinking of

the dramatic universe at just this point in his career. A possible date for the writing
of Hamlet is 1600, as it is of As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Both the latter plays
are remarkable for a new kind of ‘philosophical’ fooling, quite distinct from the
robust physical clowning of a Launce, a Bottom, or even a Falstaff. This departure
may have been occasioned by the entry of Robert Armin, an expert in the idiom
and history of fools, into Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in
1599. The full title of one of Armin’s jest books associates the fool’s art with that of
questioning: ‘Quips upon Questions; or a Clown’s conceits on occasions offered,
bewraying a moralised metamorphosis of changes upon interrogatories; showing a
little wit, with a great deal of will.’ Muriel Bradbrook suggested that ‘the very form
of the little book . . . puts Armin with the learned fools in the great tradition
descending from Thomas More, patron of players, and from Erasmus, rather than
the boisterous clowns of the countryside and playing place’.12 To this observation
one only needs to add that those two great Humanists recognized in Socrates the
original philosophical fool, taking him as the model for their own paradoxical and
ironical works, Utopia and The Praise of Folly. In Erasmus’ Praise of Folly the vehicle
for Socratic irony was an extended speech, as Folly praises herself, leaving the reader
to decide exactly when she does so wisely or foolishly. Shakespeare reconstructs this
Humanist tradition by re-uniting the philosophical fools with the Socratic speech
genre, the dialogue, and more specifically the question, which was the foundation of
the Socratic elenchus (cross-examination). The fool becomes the epitome of theat-
ricality because, as Socrates had claimed in the famous passage from the Theaetetus
on intellectual midwifery, he has no wisdom, prior to his encounter with another
person (Theaetetus, 150c). It is therefore relatively fruitless to interpret what a
Shakespearean fool says as an expression of an interior self, as if they were the sad
clowns of Watteau and Verdi, or of a personal quest, since the fool is not his own
master and must perform to order. Instead the fool’s task is to be the mirror in
which the other actor sees, or fails to see, his own discourse reflected and refracted.
But if I am right that Hamlet’s discourse, like the fool’s, and like Socrates’, is
discourse oriented less towards a self which it might express or a reality which it
might describe than towards another person, then it follows that the Romantic
view of him as a particular type of introverted character, in Goethe’s words, ‘a
lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature without the strength of nerve which
forms a hero’,13 and the Marxist account of him as representing a new kind of

12
Muriel Bradbrook, ‘The New Clown’, in Shakespeare, the Craftsman (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1969), p. 52.
13
J. W. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Carlyle (London: Chap-
man and Hall, 1839), Bk. IV, Ch. 13, p. 200.
 ANTHONY GASH

historical consciousness, which corresponds to the rise of bourgeois individual-

ism, are seriously flawed. Coleridge’s account is perhaps the most misleading of
all, because it comes so close to the truth. The play, he claims, demonstrates
Shakespeare’s ‘deep and accurate science in mental philosophy’ by showing a
character whose grasp of the ‘outward impressions’ is overbalanced by ‘the
inward operations of the intellect: if there be an overbalance in the contemplative
activity, man becomes the creature of meditation and loses the power of action’.
The result is that Hamlet’s words ‘give a substance to shadows’ while his mind
‘beholds external objects as hieroglyphics’.14 He might equally have said that
Hamlet’s words correct an overbalance in the opposite direction, towards ‘action’
and ‘objects’ which prevails in the rotten state of Denmark. But Coleridge can’t
quite admit that because he feels guilty about his own indolence when measured
against men of action like Nelson and Wellington, whom he applauds in the same
lecture, and because he is divided as to the value of the Platonist objective
idealism which his vocabulary affirms but his argument dismisses. As he states
in the next lecture, he does not think of the plays in terms of performance,
believing that ‘Shakespeare’s plays have found their true place in the heart and the
closet rather than on the stage’.15
One of the things which probably tempts us towards such generalizations is that
we often first come to the play through the soliloquies, which are one of the play’s
outstanding features. But arguably the play contrives to problematize even this sub-
genre, whose conventional name means ‘speaking alone’. In performance, ‘speaking
alone’ means extending the dialogue which has been between characters, towards
the audience, who now becomes the dialogic partner, and one of the functions of
Hamlet’s soliloquies is to make the convention explicit by giving voice not merely to
his own responses but to the audience’s hypothetical responses to him:
Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,
Plucks me by the beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie in the throat
As deep as to the lungs-who does me this?
Hah, ’swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter. (II.ii.566–74)

14
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from ‘Lectures on the Characteristics of Shakespeare’, Bristol, Nov.
1813, as reported in the Bristol Gazette, reprinted in Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 135.
15
Ibid., p. 140.
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

As Mikhail Bakhtin says, in expounding his concept of the dialogic novel with
reference to the hero-narrator of Dostoyevky’s Notes from Underground, ‘there is
literally nothing we can say about the hero . . . that he does not already know
himself ’:16 the subject of the play has become not ‘character’, which has implied,
since Theophrastus, a third-person perspective which defines and delimits, nor
‘consciousness’, for whom others are objects, but self-consciousness, the subject’s
dialogue with third-person conceptions of himself. Bakhtin introduces the neolo-
gism ‘unfinalizability’ in this context: Dostoyevsky’s heroes, he says, ‘all acutely
sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from
within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them’.17
Hamlet’s soliloquies attempt just this kind of outgrowing of their own premises.
It might be objected that Hamlet’s very first soliloquy, ‘O that this too sallied
flesh would melt’ (I.ii.129–59), stresses the solitude of its speaker or the interior-
ity of his thoughts by a touching coda as others enter the stage: ‘But break my
heart, for I must hold my tongue!’. But, on reflection, this utterance is itself using
the artificial conventions of theatre, which allow ‘soliloquies’ to represent private
thoughts, philosophically, to compare the shape of private ‘thoughts’ with those
of interpersonal language. ‘Hold your tongue!’ is an order, and a violently
physical one, which the solitary speaker internalizes, probably not for the first
time, and in so doing ‘breaks his heart’ again.
The play should, as C. S. Lewis argued in a wartime lecture, be read as
Shakespeare’s poetic essay on man.18 Part of that essay asks not just ‘what is
man?’ but ‘what is a man . . . ?’.
What is a man?
If the chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? (IV.i.33–5).

But once this is recognized, a new temptation arises: the hope of finding a ‘clearer’
version of the relevant theory of the self in more orthodox kinds of philosophical
writing—in Montaigne or Hume on the multiplicity of perceptions, for example, or
in Descartes on the duality of the thinking self and the physical world. Neither of
these approaches can do justice to the notion that the self is always already situated
in a dialogic or dramatic relation to another person or persons: and yet it is just this
thought that Shakespeare’s theatrical experience enabled him to contribute to the
long history of philosophical debate on the composition or identity of the self.

16
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 52.
17
Ibid., p. 59.
18
C. S. Lewis, ‘Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem?’, Proceedings of the British Academy 18 (1942).
 ANTHONY GASH

In this sense, he looked backwards to Plato and forwards to modern phenom-

enology. The Platonic analogy consists in the fact that Plato (or Socrates as
represented by Plato) introduced two innovations into philosophy simultan-
eously: the concept of the soul, mind, or self (psychē) and the concept of dialogue
or dialectic. The practice of dialogue and the new way of conceiving the self are
presented on a number of occasions within Plato’s dialogues as mutually guar-
anteeing each other. In the Apology, for example, Socrates claims that his
questioning of Athenians in the marketplace to find out whether they know
anything is inseparable from his mission to get them to ‘care for their souls’ (29c).
This use of the word psychē, it has been argued, would have been unfamiliar to his
interlocutors, who may at first have taken it to mean something like ‘ghost’ rather
than the essential or mental self.19 In the Republic, and in the allegory of the cave
in particular, dialectic is presented as a new form of education directed at the
entire psyche, and aiming to turn it round, on the understanding that it already
possesses knowledge but misdirects it (518c–d). In this process of re-orientation
towards things worthy of human understanding and love, it also revises its own
conception of itself—realizing that it is indeed a desiring psyche which has
affinities with the moral ‘forms’ that it loves, rather than a material thing or a
social position. In the Symposium the same philosophical ascent and self-
recognition is expounded in terms of partnerships between friends who generate
immortal theories and poems (209a–c). These emphases were subsequently
distorted by Renaissance accounts of Platonic love which assimilated the ascent
to the ideal of solitary contemplation. And they are absent in Descartes’ process
of systematic doubt which reaches its proof of the soul’s existence in the course of
temporary withdrawal. At the same time as being discovered and exercised in
social dialogue, however, it should be emphasized that the Platonic psyche is
revealed by the same dialogues to be conceptually distinct from physical or social
behaviour or sensation, all of which it exceeds.
Modern philosophers have returned to these themes in numerous criticisms of
the Cartesian conception of the ‘moi’, which allows the self to be its own most
certain object of knowledge and makes it a mere spectator of the world. They
stress instead the subject’s responsiveness and responsibility to the world in
which it acts (Heidegger, Lévinas) or the inapplicability to a mental substance
of personal pronouns such as ‘I’ or ‘me’ which belong to a public language
(Geach, Ryle, Kerr). But it is important to notice that such doubts about the
Cartesian cogito have not necessarily led to a rejection of the concept of the soul

19
Proceedings of the British Academy 7 (1915–16), 235–59.
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

altogether. Wittgenstein, for example, suggested on one occasion that Descartes’

version of the private self might be an inversion of the truth in that our concept of
the soul is clarified more by paying attention to our pre-reflective response to
other people than by any so-called act of introspection. In this connection
Wittgenstein wrote:
‘I believe that he is suffering’—Do I also believe that he isn’t an automaton?
It would go against the grain to use the word in both connections . . .
‘I believe that he is not an automaton’, just like that, so far makes no sense.
My attitude to him is an attitude towards a soul [eine Einstellung zur Seele]. I am not of the
opinion that he has a soul.
(Philosophical Investigations, Part 2, Section I, trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe, as quoted by Peter Winch)

One of Wittgenstein’s points here is that belief is not a theoretical matter but a
practical one. Another is that philosophical theories and statements about ‘the
person’ or ‘the mind’ should be tested for a meaning-determining use within a
sense-specifying language game. (‘I believe that he is not an automaton’ as yet
fails the intelligibility test.) Peter Winch has written eloquently on this passage,
showing how it might discredit both dualist and behaviourist approaches to the
so-called ‘other minds’ problem. He points out that the word ‘einstellung’ has no
connotation of pretence or contrivance, nor even of prior intention. ‘The point’,
he observes, ‘is that our unreflective reactions are part of the primitive materials
out of which our concept of a human person is formed and which makes more
sophisticated reflections possible’.20
The word ‘attitude’ used here clearly has relevance to the dramatic rehearsal
and performance of a script, which recontextualizes words and concepts within
the interpersonal attitudes which those words and concepts refine. Moreover, it is
only the bad actor, as represented by, say, Osric, who ‘strikes attitudes’ in the
pejorative sense, while the art of playing Hamlet, like the plight of being Hamlet,
involves painfully inhabiting a condition vis-à-vis others which the actor or agent
in no sense chooses. Good acting is much more a matter of discovering attitudes
in responding to others rather than of assuming them. Because it is inauthentic,
Osric’s playing of the ‘tune of the time’ (V.ii.80) can be exhaustively imitated, as
Hamlet’s mimicry of him demonstrates. By contrast, Hamlet’s admission that ‘to
Laertes I forgot myself ’ (V.ii.76) and his being thrown into ‘a tow’ring passion’
(V.ii.79) when responding to Laertes’ pre-set attitudinizing—‘the bravery of his

20
Peter Winch, ‘Eine Einstellung zur Seele’, in Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987), p. 147.
 ANTHONY GASH

grief ’ (V.ii.79) (where ‘bravery’ implies ‘ostentation’ or ‘bravado’)—reveals his

own ‘attitude’ in the deeper sense that Wittgenstein and Winch have in mind, a
response which he cannot pick and choose.
What confronts us in Hamlet is therefore neither a Cartesian consciousness
nor a bourgeois individual but a dramatic conception of the self which provides
the basis of an ethical one—a concept of responsibility, continually brought back
to its etymological sense of ‘answerableness’. This is why, as we have seen, one of
the effects of Hamlet’s fooling is to catch the other person in the act of treating
him like a thing. In response, Hamlet treats himself like a thing and language as a
personless system of rules in order to revealingly parody precisely what his
interlocutor is already doing:

You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the
heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note up to the top of my
compass; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make
it speak. (III.ii.362–9)

The important thing about this famous passage—one in which drama and
philosophy fully converge—is not that Hamlet is making special claims for his
own unique depth, but rather that he is reaffirming the conception of the soul as
the essential nature of all persons by drawing on the Platonic conception of the
soul as sharing in the invisible harmony of the divine cosmos. Hamlet’s concep-
tion of the soul here as ultimately unknowable, and as autonomous rather than
instrumental, is derived more from our pre-reflective attitude to another person
as a subject to whom we are responsible and our shame at treating them as an
object or instrument than it is from introspection. We might seek its Platonic
antecedents in the proposition that dialogue, when properly understood and
practised, is a means of freeing the soul from a false image of itself, and in the
suggestion that ethics precedes metaphysics in the dictum that ‘the good isn’t
being but is even beyond being exceeding it in power and dignity’ (Republic,
509c). Plato remarks on the same occasion that the good ‘provides knowledge
and truth but is itself beyond them in beauty’ (ibid., 509a).
This Platonic terminology has been cited by Émmanuel Lévinas in his medi-
tations on otherness, the you, as the paradoxical basis of ethics and even of
selfhood—the ‘I’. Lévinas asks whether there was not an additional implication to
the Greek word philosophia than the love of wisdom, namely, the wisdom of love.
And he goes on as follows:

Wisdom teaches the face of the other person. Wasn’t that announced by the Good beyond
essence and beyond the Ideas in Book V1 of Plato’s Republic? The Good in relation to
which being itself appears. The good from which being draws its understanding of its
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

appearance and its ontological power. The Good in view of which, ‘Every soul does what it
does.’ (ibid., 505e)21

But an ‘attitude towards a soul’, or the alterity of a face, might be precisely what
our relentless consumption of audio-visual media flees. So thought Plato and
Rousseau of the theatre, and we have already noticed that in Hamlet sight and the
quest for knowledge, an audience’s normal activities, are unflatteringly linked by
the theme of spying. Its verbal equivalent is the fishing recommended by Polo-
nius when advising Reynaldo how to ‘sound’ conversational partners as to the
faults and misdeeds of his own son:
See you now,
Your bait of falsehood takes the carp of truth,
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirection find direction out. (II.i.60–3)

There is a terrible irony in Polonius’ abuse of the terms ‘truth’ to mean informa-
tion and ‘wisdom’ to mean cunning, while the word ‘reach’, to mean understand-
ing, shows how the method of enquiry changes or creates its object as does a
physical action, so that the truth so proudly displayed by the angler is made by
him rather than found as he thinks it is. It is this model of human relations as one
of ‘knowledge’ in the reductive sense of the relation of subject to object, angler to
fish, that Hamlet’s dialogic responses confound. The recurrent pattern might be
seen as one in which an actor is encouraged by a director (usually Claudius) to
obtain knowledge of another. He sets out therefore imagining that he is embarked
on a subject–object relation, understanding to understood, enquirer to enquiry,
rational to irrational, powerful to weak. But it is worse than that actually. He or
she is acting as the instrument of another’s power, rendering the relationship
little better than that of object to object, disguised by various degrees of deception
and self-deception, as one of subject to subject. In these inherently political
circumstances, a true dialogue, subject to subject, can only be restored by a
discomforting purging of the subtle appropriations of the other person. Before
Socrates could be a midwife of subjectivity (Theaetetus, 149), he had first to be a
prisoner in the cave, then a gadfly (Apology, 30e) and a paralysing stingray
(Meno, 80a, c). These are Hamlet’s roles, too.
It is not therefore that the play consists of a series of I–thou dialogues, soul to
soul without mediation, but on the contrary that each new dialogue implies that

21
Émmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini, Essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990), p. IV
(my translation).
 ANTHONY GASH

this is an unrealized ideal, a mode of being which has departed from the ‘prison’
of Elsinore which is also the prison of the world (II.ii.241–7), or is yet to arise. Yet
the reality of the I–thou is present in the performance of the play—in the
cooperative relationship between the actors who explore the different degrees
of reification and self-reification in the characters, ranging from Osric who
because he is imitating a courtier (like Sartre’s waiter) can himself be mimicked
without any remainder, to the infinitely more complex case of Ophelia whose
obedience to her corrupt father makes her ‘honesty’ to Hamlet questionable in
spite of her love for him. All the characters in their different ways are ultimately
trying to please Claudius, who represents the criminality of secular power, with
its smiling and moral face, which cannot confer the good it seems to offer because
it is itself imprisoned, like Plato’s tyrant, who is ‘drawn towards utter lawlessness,
which is called by his seducers complete freedom’ (Republic, 573e), only to find
himself in a ‘prison house’, ‘enslaved to cringings and servitudes beyond com-
pare, a flatterer of the basest men’ (ibid., 580c, e). In Claudius’ own words:

O limed soul that struggling to be free

Is more engag’d (III.iii.68–9).

Or in Hamlet’s:
The King is a thing—(IV.ii.28).

If the Utopian philosophical republic is to be discovered in the discerning,

sensitive dramatic performance rather than in the play’s coercive fictional society
or its chaotic plot of ‘unnatural acts/Of accidental judgments, casuals slaughters/ . . .
purposes mistook’ (V.ii.381–2), then it is no accident that the internally exiled
prince is most at home amongst the touring actors. Like Shakespeare’s play
Hamlet, their first performance of Priam’s slaughter which Hamlet remembers
aloud and the player completes (II.ii.434–520) could not be further away from the
causal chain linked by ‘probability or necessity’ (Poetics, Ch.10, 1452a), ‘enacted
not narrated’ (Poetics, Ch.6, 1449b) that Aristotle had required of a dramatic
tragedy. It is, on the contrary, a combination of epic narration and dramatic
impersonation in which the former predominates, much as Plato had recom-
mended in the ‘musical’ education of the guardians of a just commonwealth
where the oral storyteller is to choose at every turn between actions from which
he wants to distance himself by narration (diēgēsis) and those with which he
identifies by dramatic impersonation (mimêsis) (Republic, 396c–e). By illustrating
this unusual mode, which Hamlet thinks too esoteric for the multitude (‘’twas
caviary to the general’ (II.ii.436–7)), Shakespeare provides a defamiliarizing
mirror of his own public art of dramatic storytelling. Far from hurrying on a
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

dramatic action, the player interrupts the brutal story which he is telling by a
‘pause’ (II.ii.487):
For lo, his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverend Priam seems i’ the air to stick. (II.ii.477–9)

The verbal and physical suspension of the death-blow marks the point at which
the aesthetic, reorganizing time as musical rhythm, and the ethical, rising above
compulsive reaction by means of contemplative restraint, coincide. The actor
expresses on behalf of Phyrrhus the compassion that Phyrrhus either did not feel
or felt only momentarily, while extending to Hecuba the compassion which in
her fear, grief, and isolation she was denied.
Further evidence that Plato was attracted by a mixed epic-dramatic mode of
performance comes in Socrates’ dialogue with a professional reciter of poetry, Ion. It
seems not unlikely that Shakespeare, reading in Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for
Poetry that Plato ‘in his dialogue called Ion giveth high and rightly divine commen-
dation to poetry’22 or told about it by Ben Jonson, who owned Plato’s complete
works in Latin translation, had looked it up, only to find that it was more than he
could have hoped for: a dialogue between the philosopher and the actor.
SOCRATES : You are chanting, say, the story of Odysseus as he leaped up to
the dais, unmasked himself to his suitors, and poured arrows before his
feet, or one of those pitiful passages, about Andromache or Hecuba, or
Priam. When you chant these, are you in your senses? Or are you carried
out of yourself, and does not your soul in an ecstasy conceive herself to
be engaged in the actions you relate, whether they are in Ithaca, Troy or
wherever the story puts them?
ION : How vivid, Socrates, you make this proof of me! I will tell you frankly that
whenever I recite a tale of pity, my eyes are filled with tears. (Ion, 535b–c)23
As Hamlet puts it:
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,/That he should weep for her? (II.ii.559–60)

There is an answer to Hamlet’s rhetorical question. The boundary between

myself and another person is a permeable one which it is the vocation of the
art of theatre to explore through all its gradations of relationship between the

22
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1965),
p. 129.
23
Plato, ‘Ion’, trans. Lane Cooper, op. cit.
 ANTHONY GASH

actor and the role, from critical distance to self-emptying (Plato’s ek-stasis or
standing outside oneself) as the condition of union. The tears that Hamlet weeps
for his father are the same tears that the actor weeps for Hecuba and the audience
for the imaginary Hamlet and for themselves.
Moreover, the player’s dialogue with Hecuba is not simply a fanciful dialogue
with ‘nothing’ (II.ii.557), always a spiritually pregnant word for Shakespeare, but
a reminder of the reality of humanity’s unceasing dialogue with its dead. In Greek
epic and tragedy, in Elizabethan history plays, and in the liturgical re-enactment
of Christ’s last supper, some act of recollection and commemoration takes place.
The player’s tears for the long-dead Trojans memorialized by Homer and then by
Virgil are thus linked by analogy, rather than causal contiguity, to Hamlet’s
conversation with his father’s ghost. He undertakes it as a meeting between two
immortal souls (1.iv.65–7), and then, when the visible ghost has left the stage,
steadfastly promises ‘thou poor ghost’ to remember, ‘while memory holds a seat
in this distracted globe’ (I.V.96–7). The metaphor of sitting down in a globe fuses
the conflict (or counterpoint) between attentive stillness and restless movement
in theatre, brain, and world.
Only this ‘impossible’ dialogue with the dead makes sense of Hamlet’s dia-
logues with the living. So nothing could be more ridiculous than Polonius’
attempts to reduce the play to a sequence of probable ‘causes’ (he repeats
the word interminably) and effects (II.ii.100), culminating in his false explanation
of Hamlet’s ‘madness’ (as resulting from Ophelia’s rejection of his romantic
overtures).24 Polonius has mistaken not only the scope of love but the kind of
play that he is in. The player’s dialogue with the dead also corresponds with
Hamlet’s conversation with the jester’s skull—‘Alas, poor Yorick’ (V.i.182–95),
where the actor talks to an inanimate physical object with disgust and tenderness,
thus imaginatively reversing the reduction of living persons to objects that the
pragmatism of Claudius requires.
The player says of Hecuba’s degradation:
Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep’d,
’Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounc’d. (II.ii.510–11)

The topic of ‘Fortune’s state’ would have been familiar from Boethius’ neo-
Platonic The Consolation of Philosophy, which both Chaucer and Queen Eliza-
beth translated, where the wheel-turning goddess reveals that ‘wealth, honour

24
One might compare Shakespeare’s concern with the limits of the language of causality, applied
to human behaviour, with a similar emphasis in Plato (e.g. Phaedo, 99a–b), and contrast it with
Aristotle’s insistence on causal unity in the Poetics.
 THE DIALOGIC SELF IN HAMLET 

and the like are all under my jurisdiction’.25 Shakespeare’s phrase puns between a
political state ruled by a usurping tyrant, and the whole world, where all
particular and transient ‘states of affairs’ are apparently ruled by time, change,
and physical laws. For Boethius, writing in prison, where he faced imminent
death, the apparent rule of Fortune was itself governed by Providence, as a
means to each soul’s self-discovery, while the philosophical soul and its virtues
cling to the steadfast mind of God, at the still ‘centre’ of the turning wheel.26 By
implication the player too pauses at the centre of the wheel of action and
reaction. For Claudius, however, who on one notable occasion speaks like an
experimental, Baconian scientist in a chemical laboratory, fortune’s world is the
only one there is:
Not that I think that you did not love your father
But that I know love is begun by time,
And that I see in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of week or snuff that will abate it (IV.vii.110–15)

It is ultimately this reductive conception, in which love is seen as only an object of

knowledge and causal explanation like any other, rather than as the condition of
the possibility of understanding, as the Greek word ‘philo-sophia’ had implied
and St John’s first epistle developed in its rotation of the words ‘love’ and
‘know’,27 that the theatrical encounter of souls both indicts and transcends:
For ’tis a question left us yet to prove
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love. (III.ii.202–3)

25
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969),
II.ii, p. 57.
26
Ibid., IV.vi. pp. 136–7.
27
‘7. Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God. 8. He that loveth not knoweth not God, For God is love’, Authorized King James
version, The First Epistle General of John, Chapter 4.
 11
“The Power of Conversation”
Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics

Richard Dawson

The hero in Jane Austen’s Persuasion discovers his self-ignorance, learning that
“my enemy” has been “my own self.”1 At the time of this discovery, Captain
Frederick Wentworth admits to the heroine, Anne Elliot, “I shut my eyes, and
would not understand you, or do you justice.” He goes on to speak about a
reorientation:
It is a sort of pain, too, which is new to me. I have been used to the gratification of
believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable
toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses . . . I must endeavour to subdue
my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve. (P, p. 233)

Frederick now has a deeper self-understanding. This occurred through “the

power of conversation” (p. 226).
The “transformative power” of “conversation” is a central concern in Hans-
Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.2 Gadamer’s Truth and Method
does “not intend to produce an art or technique of understanding, in the manner
of the earlier hermeneutics”; “instead, it is concerned with . . . the commitment
involved in all understanding.”3 His “real concern . . . is philosophic: not what we
do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting
and doing” (TM, p. xvi). For Gadamer, the two categories doer and done to are

1
Jane Austen, Persuasion (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998), p. 232; hereafter abbreviated P.
2
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Incapacity for Conversation” (1972), Continental Philosophy
Review 39 (2006): 351–9, p. 355.
3
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975) p. xvi; hereafter
abbreviated TM.
 AUSTEN ’ S PERSUASION , GADAMER ’ S HERMENEUTICS 

inadequate for talking about understanding. (He has a vital place for the middle
voice, which transcends the active and the passive.4) “Hermeneutic philosophy,”
he says, “understands itself not as an absolute position but as a way of experience.
It insists that there is no higher principle than holding oneself open in a
conversation.”5 Austen’s Persuasion can serve as a resource for thinking about
this principle. This chapter offers a reading of Persuasion in combination with a
reading of Gadamer. It adds to claims along the lines that Austen’s novels take
philosophical questions seriously.6

1.
As with Austen’s earlier novels, Persuasion can be fittingly imagined as a contri-
bution to the Bildungsroman—novels of “formation,” which deal with education,
culture, identity, and development. Gadamer engages with the word Bildung in
the first chapter of Truth and Method. With regard to a certain kind of character,
he speaks of a “trained receptivity towards the ‘otherness’ of the work of art or of
the past.” (That which is a ‘trained receptivity’ requires an education in actively
getting passive.7) He says that “the general characteristic of Bildung” is “to keep
oneself open to what is other, to other, more universal points of view.” It is a
disposition that “embraces a general sense of proportion and distance,” a dispos-
ition that can blur the self–other distinction: “To distance oneself from oneself
and from one’s private purposes means to look at these in the way that others see
them” (p. 17). The “cultivated” person is able to place her or his experiences and
concerns within various perspectives. Bildung is connected to the capacity for
knowing one’s limits and for making “a sound judgment” in regard to “right and
wrong, proper and improper” (p. 31).

4
For a comprehensive discussion on the nature and significance of the middle voice in
Gadamer’s work, see Philippe Eberhard, The Middle Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Basic
Interpretation with Some Theological Implications (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).
5
Quoted in Donald D. Stone, “Arnold and Gadamer: The Hermeneutics of Humanism,” in
Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997), pp. 105–25, 105. For a helpful discussion on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as
promoting “a philosophy of experience,” see Nicholas Davey, Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s
Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York, 2006) pp. 5–6.
6
See, for example, Felicia Bonaparte, “Conjecturing Possibilities: Reading and Misreading Texts
in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,” Studies in the Novel 37 (2005): 141–61. For a reading of
Persuasion that suggests that Austen takes the philosophy of conversation seriously, see James
Kastely, “Persuasion: Jane Austen’s Philosophical Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Literature 15 (1991):
74–88. My reading of Persuasion owes much to Kastely’s.
7
This image of “actively getting passive” draws from The Middle Voice in Gadamer’s Hermen-
eutics, p. 19.
 RICHARD DAWSON

In his effort to take judgment seriously, Gadamer resists “the fundamental

prejudice of the enlightenment,” which is “the prejudice against prejudice itself”
(pp. 239–40). “There are such things as préjugés légitimes,” he claims. Appreci-
ating “that there are legitimate prejudices . . . is necessary . . . if we want to do
justice to man’s finite, historical mode of being” (p. 246). Recognizing the
existence of such prejudices is an opening for inquiry into the process by which
one “distinguishes legitimate prejudices” from others.
One’s “prejudices” constitute the “standpoint” and a “horizon” from which an
interpreter works (and is worked) when she or he is involved in the activity of
understanding (pp. 269–72). “The horizon is the range of vision that includes
everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.” His language here is
connected with ordinary language: “we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the
possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons etc.” (p. 269).
The “understanding” that interests Gadamer involves a process in which an
interpreter achieves a critical distance from some of her prejudices. He images
understanding as a “conversation,” in which there is a non-assimilative accom-
modation of various standpoints, which he talks of as a “fusion of horizons”
(p. 272). The “fusing” of horizons, whilst building common ground through a
common language, does not erase all differences—a sharpened shared sense of
differences may emerge. (We may do well to hope for a greater capacity to live
with differences.) In genuine, responsive conversation, the participants change as
“prejudices” are challenged and modified. Such a conversation can be talked
about in terms of an “I”–“Thou” relationship, about which Gadamer says:

In human relations the important thing is . . . to experience the ‘Thou’ truly as a ‘Thou’, ie
not to overlook his claim and to listen to what he has to say to us. To this end, openness is
necessary. But this openness exists ultimately not only for the person to whom one listens,
but rather anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without this kind of openness to
one another there is no genuine human relationship. Belonging together always also
means being able to listen to one another. When two people understand each other, this
does not mean that one person ‘understands’ the other, in the sense of surveying him.
Similarly, to hear and obey someone does not mean simply that we do blindly what the
other desires. We call such a person a slave. Openness to the other, then, includes the
acknowledgement that I must accept some things that are against myself, even though
there is no one else who asks this of me. (p. 324)

Gadamer’s use of the word “openness” gives life to a claim that has been
fundamental in Western ethical thought, namely the importance of treating
another person not as an object (where “there is no genuine human relation-
ship”) but as an end in herself (or himself), a “Thou.” Gadamer’s “openness”
would include the character virtue of being willing and able to embrace evidence
 AUSTEN ’ S PERSUASION , GADAMER ’ S HERMENEUTICS 

against one’s preferred beliefs, goals, or judgments. A willingness and an ability to

change one’s prejudices is not a sure sign of weakness but rather a vital ingredient
in talk about justice.
In genuine, responsive conversation, the participants change as “prejudices”
are challenged and modified. Gadamer offers this imagery:
We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more fundamental a conversation is, the
less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a fundamental conversation is
never one that we want to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall
into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way in which one word
follows another, with conversation taking its own turnings and reaching its own conclu-
sion, may well be conducted in some way, but the people conversing are far less the
leaders of it than the led. No one knows what will ‘come out’ in a conversation.
Understanding or its failure is like a process which happens to us. (p. 345)

“Understanding” is not the passive taking in of a fixed objective meaning by a

mind that can remain unchanged by the act of understanding but, rather, an
experiential process that changes one’s mind-ing. Mutual understanding begins
in a “conversation” with a rhetorical equality, in which each interlocutor has a
basic respect for the claims of the other (there is empathy with the situation of
another): “Reaching an understanding in conversation presupposes that both
partners are ready for it and are trying to recognise the full value of what is alien
and opposed to them” (p. 348).
The interchange that occurs in a “conversation” is analogous to “play” in a
“game” (p. 96). Like players engrossed in a game, conversation partners get
carried away with the activity and drop self-consciousness in its movement:
“Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in his play.” A person
who actively resists playing, one “who doesn’t take the game seriously,” is a
“spoilsport” (p. 92). Gadamer’s talk about the word “play” centers on motion:

If we examine how the word ‘play’ is used and concentrate on its so-called transferred
meanings we find talk of the play of light, the play of the waves, . . . the play of forces, the
play of gnats, even a play on words. In each case what is intended is the to-and-fro
movement which is not tied to any goal which would bring it to an end. (p. 93)

We might say that an interpreter can find herself only if she gets lost in her
interpreting. When she engages in some serious wordplay, she will appreciate
that words can play her.
Conversation worthy of the name may be imagined as a game that begins in
the activity of questioning: “To conduct a conversation requires first of all
that partners to it do not talk at cross purposes. Hence its necessary structure is
that of question and answer.” The activity of questioning keeps a conversation
 RICHARD DAWSON

going: “Dialectic, as the art of asking questions, proves itself only because the
person who knows how to ask questions is able to persist in his questioning,
which involves being able to preserve his orientation towards openness.” As
Socrates appreciated well, questioning has a political dimension to it: “As against
the solidity of opinions, questioning makes the object and all its possibilities fluid.
A person who possesses the ‘art’ of questioning is a person who is able to prevent
the suppression of questions by the dominant opinion” (p. 330). Conversation,
then, is an exploration of “possibilities,” which emerge in questioning.
At the heart of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is “the play of language” (p. 446). For
him, a word is not an object out there in the world, an object that has been
constructed for the purpose of pointing to another object. A word has a force, a
weight:

As I often tell my students, when you take a word in your mouth you must realise that you
have not taken a tool that can be thrown aside if it won’t do the job, but you are fixed in a
direction of thought which comes from afar and stretches beyond you. (p. 496)

We may do well to attend to variations in the weight of a word in order to become

a better catcher. His interest in the activity of catching is suggested in the
epigraph to Truth and Method, Rilke’s poem on the play of the universe:
Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is / mere skill and little gain; / but when you’re
suddenly the catcher of a ball / thrown by an eternal partner / with accurate and measured
swing / towards you, to your center, in an arch / from the great bridgebuilding of God:
/ why catching then becomes a power—/ not yours, a world’s.

2.
When we first meet him in Persuasion, Frederick has just returned from service in
the Napoleonic Wars, during which he made a substantial fortune. Eight years
earlier he had been engaged to Anne, but she was “persuaded” to break the
engagement. Her godmother Lady Russell opposed the engagement for a variety
of reasons: he had “no connexions” and was financially insecure, and he was
“headstrong.” As for Anne,

it was not merely selfish caution, under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she
not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have
given him up.—The belief of being prudent, and self-denying principally for his advan-
tage, was her chief consolation, under the misery of a parting. (P, pp. 30–1)

Anne’s role in breaking the engagement receives adverse criticism: “Anne . . . had
to encounter all the additional pains of opinions, on his side, totally unconvinced
 AUSTEN ’ S PERSUASION , GADAMER ’ S HERMENEUTICS 

and unbending, and of his feeling himself ill-used by so forced a relinquish-

ment.—He had left the country in consequence” (p. 31). Frederick will learn that
being “totally unconvinced and unbending” may be a virtue in some circum-
stances, but it may be a vice, especially if there is on his side a failure to hold
himself open in a conversation and to attempt to reach a common
understanding—if, that is, he is “headstrong.”
Frederick failed to appreciate that Anne felt the pull of her love for him as well
as a conflicting pull to break the engagement in deference to the judgment of her
godmother. The act of letting herself be guided by Lady Russell said little or
nothing about the depth of Anne’s love for Frederick. Contrary to what Frederick
assumed, Anne continued to love him even though she broke the engagement.
Anne, who continuously tries to read herself and to re-tell a coherent story about
her past and present life, can be considered to be a person of “integrity” (p. 17), to
use a word that the playful narrator problematically applies to Lady Russell. For
Anne sought to identify and to bring into harmony, through deliberation,
different pulls within her. As Frederick will come to learn, sound self-knowledge
is a requirement for integrity because one must be tuned in to the different pulls.
Frederick and Anne come to re-enter the same social circle some eight years
later. The narrator offers details on Frederick’s thoughts on the broken
engagement:

She had used him ill; deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shown a
feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not
endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It
had been weakness and timidity. (p. 62)

Frederick’s judgment on Anne’s “character” is flawed. His language of judgment

is too simple to do justice to Anne’s complex experience. His “temper,” we will
come to appreciate, is over-“confident.” In short, Frederick could do well with
some humility, a sign of which is an assumption that the other might be right.8
The path to Anne and Frederick’s union begins when Sir Walter Elliot (Anne’s
father) rents his ancestral home to an Admiral Croft, who is married to Freder-
ick’s sister Sophie. We catch up with Frederick when, having just been returned
to shore, he visits her at nearby Uppercross, where Anne’s relatives, the Mus-
groves, reside. Frederick, who may frequently want something “to do” (p. 29),
makes it his “object to marry.” He “fully intended to settle as soon as he could be
properly tempted.” We might question the fittingness of the word “properly” on
hearing from the narrator that he “had a heart for either of the Miss Musgroves, if

8
See The Middle Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, p. 136.
 RICHARD DAWSON

they could catch it; a heart, in short, for any pleasing young woman who came in
his way, excepting Anne Elliot” (p. 62). Anne may be better at “catch” than he can
imagine. He will have to learn to throw well in order to learn about her hidden
talents.
During a walk, Anne’s sister Mary dissuades Henrietta Musgrove from visiting
Winthrop, the home of Henrietta’s suitor, Charles Hayter. Elitist Mary considers
him an inappropriate suitor—“It is very unpleasant, having such connexions!”
(p. 84). Louisa, however, successfully insists on the visit. When alone with
Frederick, Louisa, unaware that Anne is within earshot, says this to him:

And so, I made her go. . . . What!—would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had
determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a
person?—or, of any person I may say. No,—I have no idea of being so easily persuaded.
When I have made up my mind, I have made it. (p. 85)

Louisa’s words here sound like words composed for Frederick, who on hearing
them would remember an imagined Anne resisting the “interference” of Lady
Russell. Whilst Louisa seems to be paying attention to “doing,” she might do well
to also attend to the companion category done to. Has she been “easily per-
suaded” about the praiseworthiness of not being “easily persuaded”?
Praise from Frederick, who might be seeking to justify to himself his judgment
on Anne, is forthcoming:
Happy for her, to have such a mind as yours at hand! . . . [W]oe betide him, and her too,
when it comes to things of consequence, when they are placed in circumstances, requiring
fortitude and strength of mind, if she have not resolution enough to resist idle interference
in such a trifle as this. Your sister is an amiable creature; but yours is the character of
decision and firmness, I see. If you value her conduct or happiness, infuse as much of your
own spirit into her, as you can. . . . It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a
character, that no influence over it can be depended on.—You are never sure of a good
impression being durable. Every body may sway it; let those who would be happy be firm.
(pp. 85–6)

Frederick here uses “weak” and “firm” as opposite and unqualified terms of
reproach or praise. However, the meanings of “weak” and of “firm,” as he will
come to learn, are not independent of “circumstances”—of particular people,
relations, places, and times.
Frederick, continuing his discourse with Louisa, and interacting with his
immediate physical environment, exercises his analogical imagination:
‘Here is a nut,’ said he, catching one down from an upper bough. ‘To exemplify,—a
beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of
autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot any where.—This nut,’ he continued, with
 AUSTEN ’ S PERSUASION , GADAMER ’ S HERMENEUTICS 

playful solemnity,—‘while so many of its brethren have fallen and been trodden under
foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel-nut can be supposed to be
capable of.’ Then, returning to his former earnest tone: ‘My first wish for all, whom I am
interested in, is that they should be firm. If Louisa Musgrove would be beautiful and
happy in her November of life, she will cherish all her present powers of mind.’ (p. 86)

How, with all due “playful solemnity,” can a hazelnut make vulnerable its identity
and its self-“possession” so as to “fall” into conversation and to fall in love?
Analogies can serve to make coherent what we have or do not have in common
with other people and to make coherent our own memories and expectations.
There are, however, apt and inapt analogies and a variety of degrees in between.
To live by the hazelnut analogy (that is, to live by the single rule “be firm”), as
Frederick will soon learn, is too simple to be coherent and workable. In experi-
encing this incoherence Frederick’s understanding of others and of himself will
be significantly transformed.
Frederick’s principal disorientation takes place at Lyme Regis, where his friend
Captain Harville resides. The visiting party includes the Miss Musgroves, Charles
and Mary Musgrove, and Anne. At Lyme they meet Harville and his wife and a
Captain James Benwick, who is staying with them (a wounded-in-action James
had been engaged to Harville’s sister Fanny, who recently died). On Lyme’s
famous Cobb, Louisa insists to Frederick that she be “jumped down” a “steep
flight” of steps—“the sensation was delightful to her.” Whatever the sensation
might have been to him, Frederick was “less willing” because of the “hardness of
pavement”: “He advised her against it, thought the jar too great; but no, he
reasoned and talked in vain; she smiled and said, ‘I am determined I will:’ he put
out his hands; she was too precipitate by half a second, she fell on the pavement on
the Lower Cobb” (p. 106). We may hope that the knock to her head enhances her
powers of mind and enables her to be happier in her November of life than she
previously could have imagined.
What is to become of Frederick and Anne in the emergency?

‘Is there no one to help me?’ were the first words which burst from Captain Wentworth, in
a tone of despair, and as if all his own strength were gone.
‘Go to him, go to him,’ cried Anne, ‘for heaven’s sake go to him. I can support her
[Henrietta] myself. Leave me and go to him. Rub her hands, rub her temples; here are
salts,—take them, take them.’
Captain Benwick obeyed . . . Captain Wentworth, staggering against the wall for his
support, exclaimed in the bitterest agony,
‘Oh God! her father and mother!’
‘A surgeon!’ said Anne.
He caught the word; it seemed to rouse him at once, and saying only ‘True, true, a
surgeon this instant,’ was darting away, when Anne eagerly suggested,
 RICHARD DAWSON

‘Captain Benwick, would not it be better for Captain Benwick? He knows where a
surgeon is to be found.’
Everyone capable of thinking felt the advantage of the idea. . . .
‘Anne, Anne,’ cried Charles, ‘what is to be done next? What in heaven’s name, is to be
done next?’
Captain Wentworth’s eyes were also turned towards her.
‘Had not she better be carried to the inn? Yes, I am sure, carry her gently to the inn.’
‘Yes, yes, to the inn,’ repeated Captain Wentworth, comparatively collected, and eager
to be doing something. (pp. 107–8)

Frederick’s “first words” (“Is there no one to help me?”) are in a “tone” that will
be new to Austen’s reader’s ears, and perhaps to his own. His words make an
opening for Anne’s “word.” He finds himself playing catch with her—“He caught
the word.” In catching her “word,” an act which “seemed to rouse him at once,”
he evidently interiorizes an expression which has come from her interior, an
interior which has spontaneously assumed and expressed itself in the role of
captain. Both captains spontaneously “obeyed” her. Whilst Frederick is “eager to
be doing something,” we might wonder if he appreciates what has been done to
him. We might also wonder if the narrator’s attention is on categories other than
doer and done to.
Anne ends up joining Frederick and Henrietta in returning to Uppercross in
order to deliver news of the accident. When Henrietta expresses regret about the
walk to the Cobb, Frederick “burst forth, as if wholly overcome” with these
words: “Oh God! that I had not given way to her at the fatal moment! Had
I done as I ought! But so eager and so resolute! Dear, sweet Louisa!” To these
exclamations, Anne’s mind turned to the past and to the topic of justice:

Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now to question the justness of his own
previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and
whether it might not strike him, that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have its
proportions and limits. She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel that a very
persuadable temper might sometimes be as much a favour of happiness as a very resolute
character. (p. 113)

(This talk about “proportions and limits” will sound familiar to an Aristotle reader.9)
A re-reader of the novel will know that Frederick admits to Anne that at Lyme he had
“begun to understand” himself by “receiving lessons of more than one sort” (p. 228).
Notably, with respect to Louisa, he had “learnt to distinguish between the steadiness
of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and

9
For connections between Aristotle and Austen, see D. Gallop, “Jane Austen and the Aristotelian
Ethic,” Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 96–109, p. 101.
 AUSTEN ’ S PERSUASION , GADAMER ’ S HERMENEUTICS 

the resolution of a collected mind” (p. 228). He has learned a very significant lesson,
namely, that his language of judgment was too simple. The fall knocked Frederick
from his habitual modes of thought and expression.
Let us turn to the point when Frederick becomes free from his unintended
commitment to Louisa, for Captain James Benwick and her are now engaged.
Frederick heads for Bath, where Anne has joined her family. There is much
awkwardness when he and Anne unexpectedly bump into each other on the street:
he was “not comfortable” (p. 166). When it begins to rain, and Frederick pursues the
matter of her transport, Anne tells him that she is “only waiting for Mr Elliot,” who
“will be here in a moment” (p. 167). This is her cousin, William Elliot, who has
designs on her. William walks in, and in a few moments he and Anne “walked off
together, her arm under his, a gentle and embarrassed glance, and a ‘good morning
to you,’ being all that she had time for, as she passed away” (p. 168). Frederick might
now imagine himself to be too late to express his “constancy” to Anne.
In the penultimate chapter, the conversational action is at the White Hart Inn.
When Anne enters, Mrs Musgrove and Sophie Croft are talking with each other,
and Captain Harville and Frederick are beginning to write a letter to James.
Sophie speaks about “long” and “uncertain engagements”: “To begin without
knowing that such a time there will be the means of marrying, I hold to be unsafe
and unwise, and what, I think, all parents should prevent as far as they can.” We
can take it that Anne senses in this a resource with which to begin to play catch:
“Anne found an unexpected interest here. She felt its application to herself, felt it
in a nervous thrill all over her” (p. 217). (Frederick also found an interest in the
conversation: his “pen ceased to move, his head was raised, pausing, listening,
and he turned round the next instant to give a look—one quick, conscious look at
[Anne]” (p. 218). Their eyes meet.)
Harville leaves Frederick to complete the letter, which concerned a painting of
James that was originally intended for Fanny, and he (Harville) attends to Anne.
He starts to talk to her about the apparent speed with which James has shifted his
affections from Fanny to Louisa: “Poor Fanny! she would not have forgotten him
so soon!” After Anne agrees, Harville says, “It was not in her nature. She doted on
him” (p. 219). This particular claim about “her nature” offers a resource with
which to move to the general and back again, a movement that can serve as the
life of a great conversation, which is serious and playful.
Anne immediately makes a claim for the constancy of women in general. In doing
so, she indirectly expresses her undiminished love for Frederick. This turn in
their conversation, in which Anne shows a willingness to follow the question, is as
follows:
 RICHARD DAWSON

‘It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved.’
Captain Harville smiled, as much as to say, ‘Do you claim that for your sex?’ and she
answered the question, smiling also,
‘Yes. We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate
rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and
our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession,
pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and
continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’ (p. 219)

Let us not concern ourselves here with the two categories “do” and done to. It
would seem likely that on hearing “weaken impressions” Frederick will remem-
ber his nut analogy, particularly his concern about “a good impression being
durable.” Will he be willing and able to follow the question and the answer?
Harville then moves the interchange from the general back to the particular, a
move that invites a distinction to be made between men (namely Frederick and
James):

‘Granting your assertion that the world does all this so soon for men (which, however, I do
not think I shall grant), it does not apply to Benwick. He has not been forced upon any
exertion. The peace turned him on shore at the very moment, and he has been living with
us, in our little family circle, ever since.’
‘True,’ said Anne, ‘very true; I did not recollect; but what shall we say now, Captain
Harville? If the change be not from outward circumstances, it must be from within; it
must be nature, man’s nature, which has done the business for Captain Benwick.’ (p. 219)

Harville may have initially wanted to conduct a conversation, but we might say
that he is now falling into conversation, especially if he follows the question.
Might they cavort with the two categories “outward” and “within”?
In response to Anne’s seemingly hurried move away from the particular
(“Benwick”) and her accomplished return to the general (“man’s nature”), Har-
ville offers an analogy: “No, no, it is not man’s nature. . . . I believe in a true
analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the
strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out
the heaviest weather” (p. 219). Anne does not challenge his analogy; she accepts it
as a possibility. She responds with a different analogy, and with it a different
possibility. In doing so she defines herself as one who seeks to explore complexity
rather than engage in what we readers have learned (from Frederick’s mistakes)
as the vice of oversimplifying:

‘Your feelings may be the strongest,’ replied Anne, ‘but the same spirit of analogy will
authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but
he is not longer-lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments.
Nay, it would be too hard upon you, if it were otherwise. You have difficulties, and
 AUSTEN ’ S PERSUASION , GADAMER ’ S HERMENEUTICS 

privations, and dangers enough to struggle with. You are always labouring and toiling,
exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time,
nor health, nor life, to be called your own. It would be hard, indeed’ (with a faltering
voice), ‘if woman’s feelings were to be added to all this.’ (p. 220)

Let us, as Frederick might well do, now move from the general to the particular: did
Frederick give much thought to Anne’s “feelings” when she broke the engagement?
Did he allow the Other to claim his attention as a Thou, not as an It?
At this point in their conversation, there is a disturbance in the room. The
narrator notes that “a slight noise called their attention to Captain Wentworth’s
hitherto perfectly quiet division of the room.” It was nothing less than this: “his
pen had fallen down.” Anne and Harville here direct their “attention” to that
which we can take to be a switch in Frederick’s attentiveness. “Anne was . . . half
inclined to suspect that the pen had only fallen because he had been occupied by
them, striving to catch sounds” (p. 220). Frederick, we can be sure, has been
“striving to catch sounds” (and has caught Anne’s analogies well) and in so doing
has lost his self-consciousness and has dropped the pen. Anne’s “word,” sent with
accurate and measured swing, has entered into him. (Her sounds “pierce” his
“soul,” as he will put it in his forthcoming letter.) Frederick has played and has
got lost in their play. He has caught her word.
Returning to converse with Anne on the topic of gender relations, Harville
invokes the authority of books. But Anne “will not allow books to prove any-
thing.” She goes on to make a claim that celebrates similarity and difference. One
difference she identifies seems to be offered to Harville as a general remark and to
Frederick as a specific remark:

I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that
I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures! I should
deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were
known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of every thing great and good in your
married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic
forbearance, so long as—if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object.
I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my
own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when
existence or when hope is gone. (pp. 221–2)

Anne here has transformed an us against them (men versus women) story to a we
story, in which there are “fellow-creatures.” This is an act of hope centering on an
expression of “hope” to a (non-“object”) Thou about the activity of doing “justice.”
At the end of this expression of hope, Anne has given all she has got. The
narrator tells us that she “could not immediately have uttered another sentence;
her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed.” (Here is a white heart at
 RICHARD DAWSON

the White Hart.) The play of question and answer has taken Harville to his limits,
and he is persuaded by what he has heard: “There is no quarreling with you.—
And when I think of Benwick, my tongue is tied” (p. 222). Harville has shown in
this conversation that he is willing to open himself, his pre-judgments and beliefs,
to refutation. He is a man who has what Anne called a “persuadable temper”
(p. 113). This is a virtue that enabled their conversation to take place. If Harville
had at the outset been “totally unconvinced and unbending” (p. 31)—as Fred-
erick is said to have been in his interchange with Anne over her decision to end
their engagement—they would have had not conversation but parroting of blind
prejudice.
Harville and Frederick now begin to depart the White Hart. Frederick hands
Anne a letter, in which he says:

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such
precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your
own than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets
sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust
I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. . . . I can hardly write.
I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can
distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others. . . . You do us justice
indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. (pp. 223–4)

Frederick has actively got passive and gifted an ear, attuning himself to Anne’s tonal
distinctions and to her experience. By means of good listening, aspects of Frederick’s
own character, along with Anne’s character, have been brought to awareness,
contemplated, and adjusted. Frederick’s demonstrated capacity for “hearing,” we
may hear Austen suggest, is no small part of the “worth” of Wentworth.
Anne “devoured” the letter, learning that her words have carried and will carry
weight: “A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s
house this evening, or never” (p. 224). Their communion fittingly takes place in
Union Street. They then take a “gravel-walk, where the power of conversation
would make the present hour a blessing indeed” (p. 226).

3.
Several “critical moments of the narrative” in Persuasion involve “overhearing.”10
The novel suggests much about the importance of getting a hearing—a just

10
Ann Gaylin, Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 43.
 AUSTEN ’ S PERSUASION , GADAMER ’ S HERMENEUTICS 

hearing. For the transformative power of conversation involves not only good
speaking but also good hearing. In his address “The Incapacity for Conversation,”
Gadamer remarks on “the incapacity for listening,” which “is such a well-known
phenomenon that one doesn’t need to provide illustrations.” However, he does
give one:
Once, thanks to an abuse of official authority in Leipzig . . . , I was put in jail. Throughout
the whole day I kept hearing, called down the corridor, the names of those who were to be
led off for interrogation. Almost every time a name was called, I thought at first I had
heard my name—was my anxiety so severe? Ignoring and mishearing occur for the same
obvious reason: one who ignores or mishears is one who constantly listens to himself,
whose ears are so filled from the encouragement that he constantly gives to himself and
with which he pursues his drives and interests, that he is unable to hear the Other.11

A Persuasion reader might wonder if at the time of his first marriage proposal
Frederick had the problem of giving himself too much “encouragement” in
regard to his “drives and interests.” Whatever the case, we can be sure that he
was “unable to hear the Other.” We can also be sure that he had a greater capacity
for listening at the White Hart Inn.
At the heart of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, to recall, is “the play of
language.” Concerning this heart: “the nature of language is one of the most
mysterious questions that exist for man to ponder on” (TM, p. 340). The question
of language, however, can readily go unasked: “Language is so uncannily near to
our thinking and when it functions it is so little an object that it seems to conceal
its own being from us” (p. 340). Gadamer stresses that language is not simply a
tool for pointing to objects that are out there in the world and for conveying
thoughts from one person to another:

language has its true being only in conversation, in the exercise of understanding between
people. . . . The process of communication is not a mere action, . . . a setting-up of signs,
through which I transmit my will to others. (p. 404)

Instead, language is a collective activity that shapes both who we humans are and
the ways in which we imagine the world. The verb “to communicate” has its roots
in the activity of sharing something with someone or imparting something to
someone so that it belongs to all those participating in the interchange. Gadamer
offers this imagery:
[L]anguage . . . is not a possession at the disposal of one or the other of the interlocutors.
Every conversation presupposes a common language, or, it creates a common language.

11
“Incapacity for Conversation,” p. 358.
 RICHARD DAWSON

Something is placed in the centre, as the Greeks said, which the partners to the dialogue
both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence
agreement concerning the object, which is the purpose of the conversation to bring about,
necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation.
This is not an external matter of simply adjusting our tools, nor is it even right to say that
the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in the successful conversation
they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one
another in a new community. To reach an understanding with one’s partner in a dialogue
is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of one’s own
point of view, but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain what
we were. (p. 341)

Here we have some intimate connections between the words “communication,”

“community,” “common,” and “communion.” These connections put into ques-
tion the basic sender–message–receiver image that is at work in a great deal of
talk about communication, an image that involves an active sender transmitting a
message to a passive receiver, with the meaning of the message contained in the
language. Gadamer would have us resist the opposition of active versus passive.
We need to imagine communication as a collaborative enterprise, in which there
is a joint “transformation.” Language in this communing process is an activity in
which we make and remake ourselves and our worlds together. In other words,
“[l]anguage games are where we, as learners—and when do we cease to be that?—
rise to the understanding of the world” (p. 446). There is a sense in which we are
creatures of our own making, as we make our languages together. Austen’s White
Hart conversation offers an excellent example of such making.

Acknowledgments
I am indebted to James Boyd White’s course book The Legal Imagination: Studies
in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression (Boston: Little Brown and
Company, 1973) for the writing assignment to which this chapter is a partial
response. The assignment is titled “What Is a Good Conversation?” (p. 951).
Doing the assignment (and getting done to) whilst eavesdropping at the White
Hart Inn has given me a new appreciation for the suggestion that “the hearing is
the heart of the legal process” (19).
This chapter was completed in 2010. Various passages engaging with Austen
and with Gadamer have since found their way into separate parts of my book
Justice as Attunement: Transforming Constitutions in Law, Literature, Economics,
and the Rest of Life (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014).
 12
Quartet
Wallace’s Wittgenstein, Moran’s Amis

Stephen Mulhall

1. Gramma’s Disappearance
David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System,1 begins with the
disappearance of Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman’s great-grandmother (since she
shares Lenore’s name, Lenore refers to her as ‘Gramma’) from the nursing home
in which she has resided for years, and tracks its consequences for the various
members of their extended family and interlinked network of colleagues and
friends. Gramma was once a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s during her time in
Cambridge, England; her most valuable possession is a green-bound, clasp-
locked copy of the Philosophical Investigations; and over the years, she has
attempted to pass on to the Beadsman family in general, and to Lenore in
particular, her understanding of the nature and significance of Wittgenstein’s
later conception of the relationship between language and reality, as encapsulated
in the slogan ‘meaning is use’.
So it isn’t surprising to find a literary critic such as Marshall Boswell2 claiming
that ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations . . . is the key to understanding
Wallace’s audacious first novel’ (UDW, 23). Of course, what this claim really
means is that The Broom of the System is informed by a particular reading of
Wittgenstein’s masterpiece—that of the novel’s author (who as it happens spent
many years studying philosophy, and has elsewhere spoken of his deep admir-
ation for Wittgenstein’s writings); and that seems eminently plausible, although
it would surely be foolhardy to assume that Wallace’s understanding of

1
Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987)—hereafter BS.
2
Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press, 2003), hereafter UDW.
 STEPHEN MULHALL

Wittgenstein can simply be identified with that evinced by one of his characters—
even the one whose defining feature is her having been a student of Wittgenstein
himself. But even if one did make that assumption, matters would not be
straightforward: for since the main business of the novel begins with Gramma’s
disappearance and ends only with the discovery of her hiding-place, we are never
given unmediated access to her understanding of her Cambridge teacher—there
are no scenes in which she speaks directly to others (and so to us) about what she
has learnt from him. Rather, we hear various other characters articulate to one
another their interpretation of Gramma’s various attempts to impart that under-
standing to them over the years: Lenore’s father recalls how Gramma tried to
teach him about Wittgenstein’s vision, Lenore’s would-be lover Rick Vigorous
recalls Lenore’s own attempts to explain what she took away from her conversa-
tions with Gramma, Lenore’s younger brother LaVache expresses his sense of the
evil those ‘indoctrination sessions’ effected, and so on.
One might think of this as Wallace’s novelistic embodiment of another famous
Wittgensteinian emphasis—his sense of the inner life as essentially tellable or
utterable, say oriented towards the outer (a point that Lenore reports Gramma as
emphasizing to her); pretty much every section of the novel primarily focuses on
rendering, in very various ways, the speech or writing of some character or set of
characters (whether by transcriptions of therapy sessions, gubernatorial admin-
istrative meetings and hospital trauma room exchanges, interior monologues and
one-sided telephone conversations, or explicitly fictional prose composed by
characters in the fiction), with only very occasional outbreaks of authorial
description of the individual faces, bodies, and worldly contexts in and through
which these torrents of words are enunciated. However that may be, experiencing
the elusive recession of Gramma’s own voice behind or within such complex
orchestrations of multiply refracted and mutually contesting other voices might
well lead any reader to conclude that the business of establishing exactly what
Wallace’s understanding of Wittgenstein might be, and exactly how it informs his
novel, will be an exceedingly delicate one.

Q: What is the broom of Wallace’s Wittgenstein’s system?

Lenore summarizes what she has taken from her Gramma’s attempts to com-
municate her Wittgensteinian wisdom in two fundamental claims: first, ‘that
there’s no such thing as extra-linguistic efficacy, extra-linguistic anything’ (BS,
121), and second, ‘that any telling automatically becomes a kind of system, that
controls everybody involved’ (BS, 122). And for Boswell, both of these claims
accurately reflect Wallace’s Wittgenstein’s understanding of the role of the rules
of language-games in the constitution of meaning: ‘[in] the wide-open spaces of
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

Wittgenstein’s language-game . . . meaning is achieved through functional and

constructive interaction with others rather than the referential connecting of
words to their objects’ (UDW, 34); and ‘Lenore is “controlled” from without by
the language-games she inhabits, like it or not’ (UDW, 32). In short, language
creates ‘a self-referencing web . . . over the reality it would seek to illuminate’
(UDW, 29), and individual speakers are subordinate to the pre-existing rules of
the language-games they inhabit. To this extent, Boswell takes Lenore’s crippling
anxiety about the reality of her own existence to be an accurate reflection of the
way both Wittgenstein and Wallace think things really are between speakers,
language, and the world.
The best way of seeing the extent to which both Lenore and Boswell funda-
mentally misunderstand Wallace’s Wittgenstein is to ask oneself to what the title
of this novel really refers. Here is Lenore’s father, talking to her on the phone
about her Gramma and his memories of her ways of explaining Wittgenstein
to him:
Has she done the thing with the broom with you? No? . . . What she did with me—I must
have been eight or twelve, who remembers—was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a
straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the
broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle.
The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more
violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you
could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but you
couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and
yelled into my ear something like ‘Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom
isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?’ Et cetera. And that if what we
wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental
essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of
domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the
broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence . . . Meaning as fundamen-
talness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. (BS, 149–50)

Despite Stonecipher Beadsman’s concluding introduction of the idea of meaning,

this teaching vignette in fact only concerns the relationship between essence (or
fundamentalness) and use, and it operates not in the realm of language, but in
that of reality; in short, it concerns not the meaning of the word ‘broom’ but the
essential nature of brooms. On Boswell’s reading of Wittgensteinian grammar,
one might expect Gramma to emphasize that the grammatical rules for the use of
the word ‘broom’ determine what we will take to be its essential nature, prior to
any individual language-user’s interpretation of it; but in fact, her lesson empha-
sizes the extent to which the individual user of a broom is capable of determining
what is essential to it by choosing for himself what he wishes to use it for. In other
 STEPHEN MULHALL

words, Wallace’s Wittgensteinian Gramma(r) does not veil us from reality but
places us within it, as users of the objects to which our words refer; and it does not
control our modes of interaction with those objects, but rather creates a space
within which each individual can define what is truly fundamental about those
objects for himself, constrained only by the limits of his imagination. Nor does
the shaping or informing function of our choice of language-game deprive us of
direct contact with the extra-linguistic reality; on the contrary, the broom’s
handle really breaks the kitchen window, and its bristles really do sweep up the
shattered glass that really results. What this lesson is supposed to convey is a
vision of reality as ours to inhabit, and a vision of ourselves as imaginative,
improvisatory creative inhabitants of it (rather than mere functionaries of a
language system, however open).
It may be worth emphasizing how faithfully this fictional scene appropriates its
philosophical original in the Investigations; for in that text, Wittgenstein also
makes use of the example of a broom, whose significance is best appreciated if we
acknowledge its emergence after his employment of another of the objects
populating Stonecipher’s recollection of Gramma’s teaching—a chair:
But what are the constituent simple parts of which reality is composed?—What are the
simple constituent parts of a chair?—The pieces of wood from which it is assembled? Or
the molecules, or the atoms?—‘Simple’ means: not composite. And here the point is: in
what sense ‘composite’? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the ‘simple parts of
a chair’.
[D]oes my visual image of this . . . chair consist of parts? And what are its simple
constituent parts? Multi-colouredness is one kind of compositeness; another is, for
example, that of an open curve composed of straight bits. And a continuous curve may
be said to be composed of an ascending and a descending segment.
If I tell someone without any further explanation, “What I see before me now is
composite”, he will legitimately ask, “What do you mean by ‘composite’? For there are
all sorts of things it may mean!” The question . . . makes good sense if it is already
established what kind of compositeness—that is, which particular use of this word—is
in question.
When I say ‘My broom is in the corner’, is this really a statement about the broomstick
and the brush? Well, it could at any rate be replaced by a statement giving the position of
the stick and the position of the brush. And this statement is surely a further analysed
form of the first one.—But why do I call it ‘further analysed’?—[D]oes someone who says
that the broom is in the corner really mean: the broomstick is there, and so is the brush,
and the broomstick is fixed in the brush?—If we were to ask anyone if he meant this, he
would probably say that he had not specifically thought of either the broomstick or the
brush. And that would be the right answer, for he did not mean to speak either of the stick
or of the brush in particular. Suppose that, instead of telling someone to ‘Bring me the
broom!’, you said ‘Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it!’—Isn’t
the answer: ‘Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?’ . . . Imagine a
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

language-game in which someone is ordered to bring certain objects which are composed
of several parts . . . [a]nd two ways of playing it: in one (a) the composite objects (brooms,
chairs . . . etc) have names . . . ; in the other (b) only the parts are given names, and the
wholes are described by means of them.—In what sense is an order in the second game an
analysed form of an order in the first? Does the former lie concealed in the latter, and is it
now brought out by analysis? True, the broom is taken to pieces when one separates
broomstick and brush; but does it follow that the order to bring the broom also consists of
corresponding parts? (PI, 47, 60)

In one way, Gramma’s lesson is a less radical or far-reaching (although entirely

authentic) version of that taught by Wittgenstein: where she merely demonstrates
that the significance or importance of a part is determined by the use to which the
composite object is to be put, Wittgenstein further invites us to see that the
specific parts into which an object might be deemed to decompose, as well as its
status as composite as opposed to simple, is a function of the language-games in
which it is to be employed. But both, in their different ways, work to disabuse us
of the notion that this vision subordinates the language-user and their modes of
access to reality to the predetermined grammar of language-games. Wittgenstein
does so by stressing that the composition or grammatical structure of linguistic
phenomena (both utterances and language-games) is no more predetermined
than is the composition of the objects to which those phenomena refer; for
whether or not his two imagined versions of the order to bring the broom
amount to one and the same order is entirely dependent on context, having to
do with such factors as whether one is currently more interested in the practical
outcome of the order’s being carried out (which would foreground their common
point), or rather in the ease with which it will be understood (which would
foreground their relative oddness). Gramma does so by stressing that neither the
broom nor our familiar ways of referring to it determine what counts as its
fundamental or essential parts; that is rather determined by the creative imagin-
ation of the person interested in using it. In effect, then, both Gramma and
Wittgenstein use their brooms to represent the grammar of language-games as
translucent to reality and as ultimately determined by rather than determinative
of the autonomous choices of language-users. For them, participation in
language-games requires neither the sacrifice of contact with non-human reality
nor the subordination of interpersonal communication to the external, imper-
sonal control of predetermined grammatical rules.
It follows that Lenore’s interpretation of Gramma’s Wittgensteinian teaching
is far from accurate to its primary emphasis or impetus—perhaps not surpris-
ingly, given her description of herself as ‘not being an especially verbal person in a
family that tends to see life as more or less a verbal phenomenon’ (BS, 398). To
 STEPHEN MULHALL

believe that there is nothing extra-linguistic is something like the reverse of the
moral of Gramma’s broom; to believe that one’s own existence is indistinguish-
able from that of a fictional character is precisely to overlook Gramma’s emphasis
on the distinction between world and words, between various ways of using the
word ‘broom’ and various ways of using the broom; and to believe that one is
being controlled from without is to mistake the structure of a pregiven space for
individual speech with a script that all inhabitants of that space might be
compelled to follow. LaVache’s sense of the evil inflicted on Lenore by her
teaching is thus an understandable response to its impact on his sister, but it
doesn’t legitimate his dismissal of the teacher or her teaching. By contrast, their
father’s depiction of this primal teaching scene is distorted only by his misleading
concluding gloss on its significance; but that gloss connects his misapprehension
to Lenore’s, because it leads him to accede to a crippling idea that Lenore
shares—that of transposing Wittgenstein’s slogan ‘meaning is use’ to the domain
of human lives. Wittgenstein never says that the meaning of a human being’s
existence is a matter of her function or usefulness; indeed, to make such a
transposition from the realm of language and tools is precisely to treat real people
as if they were fictional creations, made for an authorial purpose. To understand
Wallace’s Wittgenstein, we need to trust Gramma’s words and deeds in this
primal scene, not the ways in which they have been taken by her family.
If we do read Gramma in the terms that this teaching vignette with the broom
provides, we might agree with Boswell that she is the broom of the novel’s system;
but then she cannot be interpreted as ‘the ghost of this book’s plot machinery’
(UDW, 32), at least not if this means the absent but omnipotent authorial
controller of all that goes on in the novel’s narrative. The point of the book’s
title would rather be that the idea of the book as being a system or a piece of
perfectly crafted machinery is as inapposite as the idea of its author as an
omnipotent, absent controller—it is the mere appearance or ghost of a genuinely
substantial interpretative idea, an empty fantasy whose adherents thereby give
expression to an essentially paranoid understanding of literature and reality.
Gramma might be taken to express her aversion to that fantasy in a variety of
ways—for example, in her decision to communicate with Lenore and her brother
LaVache by sending them two drawings, the first of which (the barber with the
exploding head) illustrates a famous logical paradox standardly taken to demon-
strate truth’s capacity to exceed or outrun the expressive powers of formal
languages, and the second of which (the man on a slope) illustrates the inherent
openness of representations to multiple interpretations. Her mode of embodi-
ment in the world is also worth considering here, for Gramma’s body lacks any
kind of internal heat regulation, but rather takes on the temperature of her
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

environment (this is why her room in the nursing home is maintained at 98.6
degrees). We ought not to ignore the fact that this feature of her mode of being
makes her literally cold-blooded—a term of criticism that her teaching methods
(even in the novel’s primal scene of instructions) would already have amply
invited, and that acquires particular gravity and penetration when the philoso-
pher whose teachings she aspires to impart made so much of the traumatic
consequences of coercive teaching methods in his various invocations of children
as pupils in the Investigations. But neither should we ignore other aspects of its
figurative significance—aspects that relate Gramma rather more positively to the
spirit of her teacher and his works.
To begin with, such unconditioned openness of inner to outer has a certain
Wittgensteinian flavour to it; and it might also be seen as embodying Wittgen-
stein’s sense that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life—that is, that
the meaning of things is internally related to (not so much facilitated as consti-
tuted by) the contexts in which one encounters them. Most importantly, how-
ever, having one’s internal temperature entirely dependent on the external
temperature also amounts to an utter incapacity to control one’s own bodily
being, and so hardly suggests a capacity to control the environment of others, let
alone the whole ambient landscape of the novel in which she lives. If anything, it
suggests a pure form of receptivity—an inherent tendency to mirror the circum-
stances in which one finds oneself rather than to manipulate or alter those
circumstances.
There is something deeply Wittgensteinian about this kind of receptivity: for it
is central to his understanding of philosophical method that the philosopher
should merely describe what is actually in front of her eyes, rather than imposing
any theoretical preconceptions on what is there to be seen (assuming that reality
must be a certain way, and looking to reinterpret it in accordance with those
preconceptions when it stubbornly fails to match up to one’s expectations). The
ideal philosopher is therefore someone who utterly withdraws herself from the
scene—someone whose representations of our life with words merely register
what presents itself to her, so that her prose is utterly impressed or imprinted
with it, in all its indeterminacy, open-endedness, ragged edges, and blurred
contours. Her absence is not a means of self-imposition, a withdrawal in order
better to exercise control over the landscape she surveys, but rather an essential
refusal to interpose her own convictions and idiosyncrasies upon it, and so upon
her interlocutors or readers.
Gramma’s self-withdrawal is thus an acceptance of impotence, not a means of
attaining omnipotence; and its self-abnegating motive is crystallized in the
novel’s clear implication that she dies at the climax of the central plot, when
 STEPHEN MULHALL

the artificially overheated telephone tunnels in which she has been concealing
herself are breached (cf. BS, 463). After all, if absolutely effective manipulation of
all the other people in the world of the novel had been her goal, she would have
signally failed to achieve it; for Lenore is not at all slow to realize that the
intersecting plans of her father, Rick Vigorous, and her therapist are as if
designed to invite her to a certain location (the Great Ohio Desert); and although
she does go there, she goes because that is what she decides to do, not because she
is being controlled by forces unknown and external to her.
Insofar as The Broom of the System has or is a system, then, it is indeed a
Wittgensteinian system—but that means that it is systematically committed to
the unsystematic, to the limits of any predeterminate system, to the primacy of
the heterogeneous: committed, that is, to language’s capacity to be carried by the
irreducible variety of individual voices and their unpredictable, improvised
interactions and contradictions in directions that the grammar of words neither
dictates nor prohibits, from starting-points which always have a prior history to
end-points that are always open to continuation (as the emancipatory mood of
Lenore’s escape with Andrew Lang never shakes off the traumatic traces of their
first encounter or of his brutal freeing of himself from his wife, who reveals the
non-terminal nature of the book’s conclusion by declaring there her adamant
intention to follow them both).
Gramma’s absence and end may thus amount to an initial incarnation of
Wallace’s Wittgensteinian conviction that a way can be found out of the writerly
dead-end of postmodernist metafiction only if one is willing to divest oneself of
any ambition towards closure and control, as if arrogating to oneself a position
entirely outside the tangled contexts within which alone the possibility of
authentically and sincerely articulating what one has it at heart to say can be
realized. The authentic author is not a deus ex machina, protected from everyday
human failures of attentiveness and honesty by the systematic application of
irony, parody, and pastiche; he is a deus absconditus, to be found nowhere in
particular in the world of his creation because everything in it speaks of him
(since its createdness points towards a creator), and is in fact a mode of his
speech—an utterance from him to us, his hypocritical readers and siblings. With
the early Wallace, absence is the mode of his presence.

2. The Self-Censurer
J. L. is a married librarian in the Welsh town of Aberdarcy, who becomes
involved in an affair with the wife of the one of Aberdarcy’s more influential
town councillors—an affair much complicated by differences of temperament,
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

class, and wealth, not to mention very different levels of guilt and anxiety about
its possible consequences. At the beginning of their relationship, after visiting a
nightclub together and kissing for the first time, J. L. returns home to his wife and
two young children and reports the following train of thought:
Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good
chap for not liking myself much, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap,
I got indoors, vigorously rubbing lipstick off my mouth with my handkerchief.3

Q: Is J. L. a good chap? (Marks will be awarded for how you arrived at your
answer, even if it is incorrect; so show your working-out.)
Richard Moran provides an answer to this question in his excellent study of self-
knowledge, Authority and Estrangement4, in which he cites the protagonist of
Kingsley Amis’ second novel (John Lewis, although Moran never names him) in
order further to explore the ways in which a human being might suffer the
conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself—an
exploration in which Moran draws upon both Wittgenstein and Sartre.
The Wittgensteinian element is rooted in his famous response to what is
known as Moore’s paradox—why does it make no sense to say ‘It’s raining and
I don’t believe it’? The first clause makes a claim about the world independent of
the subject, whereas the second says something about how it is with that subject;
and yet combining these two clauses with their two apparently different subject-
matters engenders something paradoxical. Why is this?
Wittgenstein’s answer, according to Moran, depends upon seeing that expres-
sions of belief are expressions of what the subject takes to be true (hence, in many
cases, true of the world existing independently of the subject). Typically, the point of
saying that I believe that it’s raining is not to describe a feature of my psychological
state but to describe how I take things to be in the world: it gives expression to a
conclusion I have reached (perhaps by looking, perhaps by listening to others), and
so amounts to a commitment or resolution—the utterance declares that and how
I have exercised my rational judgment. At the same time, however, I recognize that
it is one thing for it to be raining, and another for me to believe that it’s raining: as a
finite being, one fallible person in the world amongst others, I cannot avoid
acknowledging that my believing something is hardly equivalent to its being true,
hence that my believing that it’s raining is something additional to the fact towards
which it is directed or transparent—the fact of precipitation.

3
Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling (London: Panther, 1955), p. 81—hereafter UF.
4
Moran, Authority and Estrangement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)—here-
after AE.
 STEPHEN MULHALL

The contrast with the third-person case may help to clarify matters here.
Another person’s beliefs represent (psychological) facts on the basis of which
one may make up one’s mind about some matter (say, the weather), whereas
one’s own beliefs just are the extent to which one’s own mind is (already) made
up. The beliefs of another person can represent indicators of the truth, evidence
on the basis of which I draw conclusions; but with respect to my own beliefs,
there is no distance between them and how the facts present themselves to me,
and hence no going from one to the other. I may either trust or mistrust another’s
beliefs, but I can neither trust nor mistrust my own; for to speak of my beliefs just
is to speak of my convictions about the facts, and not of some additional thing by
which I might be convinced. Even though I recognize that my beliefs are
empirical facts about me, I don’t primarily relate to them, as I do the beliefs of
others, as empirical facts or data; the critical difference here is between the sort of
thing one may treat as evidence on which to base one’s judgments about how
things are, and the judgment itself.
As an empirical matter, the fact of anyone’s believing P leaves open the question of the
truth of P itself, although another person may close this opening by inferring from a
psychological fact to a nonpsychological fact. But for the person herself, if her belief that it
is raining does not constitute the question’s being settled for her, then nothing does. To
have beliefs at all is for various questions to be settled in this way . . . to be a believer at all is
to be committed to the truth of various propositions. (AE, 76–7)

Sartre joins forces with Wittgenstein when he invokes his example of the
gambler, which Moran regards as comprehensible only if understood as illustrat-
ing in the domain of action what Wittgenstein’s treatment of Moore’s paradox
discloses in the domain of cognition—namely, the distinction between commit-
ment of oneself and theoretical knowledge about oneself. If the gambler has
resolved to stop gambling, then he has made a decision—he has committed
himself in a certain way, committed himself to avoid the gaming tables; so for
him, his decision is not just empirical evidence about what he will do, but a
resolution of which he is the author and which he is responsible for carrying
through. Nevertheless, he does know himself empirically; he knows his akratic
history, and from this point of view on himself, his ‘resolution’ is a psychological
fact about himself, the strength of which provides whatever justification he might
have for the theoretical expectation that he will avoid the gaming tables. And
from this perspective (that of facticity rather than transcendence, in Sartrean
terminology), it appears to him as an ungrounded, inconstant thing on which to
repose any confidence about what he will do. And he is right about this: from
within this theoretical perspective no additional strength can be disclosed, since
all of it is borrowed from the strength of the resolution itself, which is accessible
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

only from the perspective of commitment or resolution. Having diverted himself

from the practical reasons that issued in the commitment in the first place—
having displaced the resolution from the realm of rational decision-making—he
can only view it as a psychological phenomenon in himself, as which it appears
far from compelling.
But if this utter submersion of oneself in facticity is a kind of evasion (an
evasion of one’s existence as transcendence, as a being capable of commitment or
responsibility), it is equally an evasion absolutely to deny one’s facticity—as if
saying ‘Don’t worry about my actually history of letting you down, for I hereby
renounce and transcend all that’. I shouldn’t ignore that history, because my
practical perspective has no automatic trumping power over my character flaws
or proneness to backsliding (another mark of my finitude); and even if I am
confident about my ability to avoid such backsliding, the key point about a
resolution is that it is mine to keep or to break at any time. My resolution exists
as a fact on which others might base their predictions about me only insofar as
I continue to endorse it, which means only insofar as the reasons in favour of
acting in one way continue to seem sufficient to me. And if they come to seem
insufficient, then I come to be unresolved, and I cannot even (inauthentically)
relate to my resolution as an empirical fact, since it no longer is one.
Now back to John Lewis, who appears in Moran’s account as exemplifying a
paradox of self-censure. Something has plainly gone wrong in the case of John’s
course of reflection; it appears both self-undermining and morally dubious.
Something in the spectator’s stance he takes towards his original self-censure
creates the illusion that he can bootstrap himself out of that initial judgment;
what would be unproblematic if he were reflecting on another person here
launches him on an apparently unending recursive chain of reversals of judg-
ment. There is nothing wrong in itself in someone’s reflecting on one of his beliefs
about himself as a psychological fact about him (after all, it is), hence as
something from which certain conclusions about himself may be drawn. But
any such expressive interpretation of John’s shame depends on his endorsing the
judgment it embodies, actually committing himself to it; whereas his committing
himself to the commendatory self-evaluation that results from that expressive
interpretation amounts to his withdrawing that initial endorsement. His initial
sense of shame can only be the basis for his belief that he is rather a good chap if it
does actually manifest what he takes to be true of himself, if it expresses his
conviction about himself (as having behaved shamefully, as being a disgrace); but
to commit himself to the belief that he is a good chap is precisely to decide that he
is not a disgrace, and so must require the withdrawal of his initial judgment about
himself. However, since it is only his commitment to the initial judgment that
 STEPHEN MULHALL

gives him any reason to endorse the second-order judgment, its withdrawal
would entail that he must withdraw that second-order judgment. Ultimately,
John has to stop with his initial sense of shame; for the second-order evaluation
that is the only candidate basis for his retracting that original evaluation can only
provide such a basis if he continues to endorse the original evaluation.
That initial self-evaluation is not just a belief—something that manifests a
conviction about its object (in this case, his moral character); shame is a general
moral attitude, with characteristic feelings and moods; it is something close to a
total orientation of the self, the inhabiting of a particular perspective. This
means that one can jettison the total orientation of shame without ever losing
one’s belief that what one did was shameful; the passage of time might rescue
someone from constantly feeling again his utter worthlessness, and allow him
to look back on his earlier behaviour with a cooler, more affectless but still
negative appraisal, as if thinking that the shameful actions of his earlier self no
longer shame him. And this might allow him to say that he can retain his initial
condemnatory belief about himself whilst abandoning his original shamefaced
attitude. But to exactly that extent, that earlier undergoing of shame and self-
disgust would no longer provide a basis for a positive current self-appraisal—it
would no longer give him reason to endorse the belief that he is (as opposed to
was) rather a good chap.
The first step in John’s chain of reversals of judgment thus attempts to exploit a
conflation between the stance of commitment and the stance of theoretical
knowledge, by regarding his first-order judgment as both a commitment and a
psychological fact.
He wants to be permitted to incorporate his current shame into the total evidence base for
determining what sort of person this shows him to be . . . [But] if he’s asking himself a
question which he’s appealing to certain evidence to settle, then the sense of this activity
presumes both that this question is indeed open for him, and that it is one that is properly
settled by the evidence (rather than by, e.g., a decision or resolution). If he is appealing to
his own shame as evidence for something, we must ask ‘Evidence for what?’, and the
answer is clearly: evidence for what sort of person he has shown himself to be, evidence
for settling the question of how he is to feel about himself. But supposedly, he has just
answered this question for himself; that’s precisely what the shame itself is a response to.
He thus would need some reason to reopen that question, something grounded in some
dissatisfaction with his original answer to that question, which is his response of shame.
Yet nothing in his reflections displays any reason for such dissatisfaction—reasons . . . that
are internal to the justification of a response like shame (as opposed to pragmatic reasons
for avoiding its discomforts) . . . And even granting some reason to reopen the question,
the deeper problem remains . . . for the very [expressive, exculpatory] conclusion he is now
attempting to draw is based on the fact of his having settled that question, and . . . in a
particular way . . .
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

He wants to take credit for his feeling ashamed, and invest that credit in a renewed
deliberation about how to feel about himself . . . But reopening the question of how he is to
feel undoes the creditworthy aspect of his shame as his settled attitude. (AE, 185–6)

So, Moran’s answer to the Q with which we began is: Yes and No.
What he comes to see and what he expresses in the judgement he breaks off with . . . is that
what presents itself at first as an inquiry into his character is in fact a continual shifting
between two perspectives on the self in order to continually reopen the question, defer
closure, keep the answer in suspense for as long as it takes to keep a ‘redeeming
interpretation’ in play. (AE, 187)

So John Lewis ends his chain of thought by not liking himself at all, and so judges
himself to be not at all a good chap; but his decision to break off his potentially
indefinite, recursive chain of reversals of judgment at such a self-critical point
gives others a reason to account him a good chap after all.
This is not to recreate the paradox of self-censure: for the chain of recursive
reversals with which Moran is concerned is paradoxical only when initiated and
followed through entirely within the first-person perspective; there is nothing
paradoxical in John judging himself to be dislikeable, whilst other people judge
him to be a good chap precisely because he judges himself to be the reverse (and
does so in part because he began by attempting to evade a condemnatory
judgment of himself by means of the morally dubious conflation or deferral of
closure whose [il]logic Moran so nicely delineates). Of course, in order for any of
his friends or acquaintances in Aberdarcy to gain access to his own ultimate self-
evaluation, together with the process by means of which he arrived at it, he would
have to tell them; and that would raise the question of whether and how his
decision to do so should affect the credit he would otherwise accrue if the
necessary information had been acquired by others without his intervention.
Would not such a decision be open to sharply critical expressive interpretation—
along the lines of ‘This is just a transparent attempt to gain credit in the eyes of
others for something for which he can’t honestly take credit himself ’? Here, we
have something like a mirror-image of the paradox of self-censure: for now,
although the empirical fact of John’s recursive self-censure might legitimately
function for others as a basis for commending him (or at least thinking better of
him), it can only be made available for that role in a way which would deprive its
subject of the credit he would otherwise acquire. In effect, then, although John’s
(initial) shame and (third-order) self-disgust are to his credit, they cannot
function as a legitimate basis for assigning that credit to him either through the
first-person perspective or through its (second- and) third-person counterparts.
Might we call this a paradox of the self-exposure of self-censure?
 STEPHEN MULHALL

Perhaps not. After all, John’s initial critical self-evaluation takes the form of
feeling ashamed; and if he does indeed arrive at a sense of the even greater
shamefulness of his attempt to evade commitment to that initial evaluation, then
shame ought to be even more thorough-goingly determinative of his total
orientation to himself and the world. And the one thing shame canonically
seeks is privacy or concealment—it is an emotion that shuns the gaze of others.
Why, then, would he even contemplate disclosing this whole shameful process of
self-evaluation to others—particularly to his friends? It could only redouble his
sense of shamefulness, by suggesting that he was attempting once more to evade
his initial evaluation (this time by attempting to evade his concluding, third-
order self-evaluation).
However, even if exposing one’s self-censure is not paradoxical in the way that
engaging in the form of self-censure it would expose may be, it nevertheless leaves
the self-censurer in a peculiar position—credit is due, but it cannot possibly be
given. To put matters the other way around: morally decent behaviour here
compels self-concealment, and so demands the sacrifice of what one is owed,
morally speaking. And of course, it further compels the self-concealing self-
censurer to sacrifice any credit accruing to him for concealing his self-censure:
he cannot permit himself to give himself credit for it (due to the paradoxical
nature of self-censure), and he cannot permit himself to do the only thing that
would permit others to give him credit for it (due to the credit-subverting
shamefulness of the necessary self-exposure). And the same would hold for the
credit due to him for sacrificing the credit due to him for his initial self-
concealment, and for the credit due to him for concealing that second-order
sacrifice; and so on.
Indefinitely increasing amounts of genuine but essentially inaccessible moral
credit? Unstoppable recurring acts of moral self-sacrifice set in train the moment
one judges oneself to be shameful? Something is going wrong here.

2(A). The tremendous rakehell

Try it again. ‘Not liking himself much’ is John’s initial, and relatively moderate,
mode of self-censure; but what he doesn’t like himself much for is ‘feeling a
tremendous rakehell’. That’s an interesting turn of phrase: according to the OED,
‘rakehell’ gave up the linguistic ghost in the sixteenth century, being supplanted
by its own abbreviation, namely, ‘rake’, which itself carries an air of nostalgia,
conjuring up a mode of dissolute behaviour (together with a mode of evaluating
it) that probably lost its cultural grip well before the end of the nineteenth
century. So John’s feeling this way is not just a matter of his taking pleasure in
the intensely pleasurable beginnings of a sexual relationship with a beautiful
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

woman, or even of his taking pleasure in what the general population of Aber-
darcy (including himself, in certain moods or at certain moments) would regard
as deeply immoral behaviour; in so describing his feeling, he is also putting into
his own mouth a characterization of his adulterous affair that suggests a mas-
sively overblown conception of it—implying that this ordinary-verging-on-
sordid venture is something of Byronic stature and transgressive significance,
the exploit of a Don Giovanni. To describe himself as feeling a tremendous
rakehell after one furtive kiss is to express his own view of himself in a way
that ironizes, and so savagely criticizes, it long before he gets to the first, explicitly
self-critical stage of not liking himself much for having the feeling. Or perhaps
one should rather say that a fundamental part of why he doesn’t like himself
much for having the feeling is that how he experiences it amounts to a way of
misleading himself about its real nature—it is a mode of self-interpretation that
amounts to a mode of self-deception.
John’s dislike of himself is thus rooted not (or not only) in a sense of shame
about his adulterous activities, but (also) in a sense of shame about his tendency
to romanticize their nature. But as his choice of self-description implies, he no
sooner romanticizes himself than he is aware that he has done so: the ironic
excess of the description inserts a gap or distance between his interpretation of
what he is up to and what he is really up to, and because that description comes
from him—because the novel is a first-person narrative—its inordinateness
registers his unwillingness or inability simply to identify himself with his own
initial self-interpretation. In this respect, John’s description of himself as a
tremendous rakehell exemplifies something absolutely fundamental to his
character—his incessant attempts at (or at least, his incessant inability to avoid)
establishing ironic distance from any and every description of himself that might
be thought to capture his identity. He is a librarian—but he is a librarian in the
way Sartre’s waiter is a waiter: it is a pure performance, a perfect following-out of
the script that role thrusts upon him, usually to great comic effect. He really
believes that he loves his wife and children, but he struggles to realize or enact
that belief in his dealings with them. He regards himself as a savage critic of
bourgeois pretensions in those who claim superior social status in Aberdarcy; but
he cannot carry out this role without extreme self-consciousness, he is infuriated
by his tendency to recognize admirable human qualities in those he should be
criticizing, and he eventually finds himself conducting a deeply unsatisfactory
affair with one of the most shamelessly self-serving, egotistical, and unkind
members of that group. The structure of ironic self-distancing that generates
the process of recursive reversals of judgment exemplified in the passage upon
which Moran fastens is thus not only already at work in the very phrasing upon
 STEPHEN MULHALL

which the recursive process operates; it is at work, implicitly or explicitly, in a

variety of ways throughout the language of the novel. It is, one might say, the
signature of its narrative voice—the interior monologue of a subject who no
sooner feels something than he questions its sincerity or justice, who oscillates
unpredictably between performing pitch-perfect parodies of what others expect
him to say or do and really saying what he thinks (typically in tones of savage
sarcasm), who no sooner resolves to do something than he eagerly does the
opposite. This is someone who is not so much governed by an uncertain feeling as
he is constituted by feeling uncertain, someone who truly is not what he is and is
what he is not—the Existentialist individual as Angry (and ferociously funny)
Young Man.
So we find ourselves once more brought back to the fact that Moran’s para-
doxical self-censurer has not only a name and a highly specific character, but also
a particular status: he is both a highly specific character in a fiction, and the
narrator of that fiction. It is only because it is John himself who describes himself
as a tremendous rakehell that we can be confident that ironic self-distancing does
not merely come in at a relatively late or isolated stage in his thinking (and so
opens itself to interpretation as instantiating a very specific form of moral
weakness), but goes all the way down into the most basic or immediate forms
of his experience—call it his orientation to the world. And to be reminded that
our access to John’s story is always through his consciousness is to be provided
with a hint as to where things went wrong in Section 2, when I seemed to
confront a bewildering difficulty with respect to whether anyone else might
gain access to the information needed in order to appreciate the moral credit
John deserved for stopping his recursive reversals of self-judgment at the par-
ticular critical (rather than admiring) point that proved to be its terminus. For in
puzzling over what ought to stop him from revealing this aspect of his interior life
to those around him, I omitted to recall that we were only in a position to be
confronted by that puzzle because we had already been given access to his interior
life; we are reading the novel in which he appears, and more specifically reading
his account of the events it narrates. Access to his interior life is thus not
something we have to achieve—it is not something of which he might even in
principle deprive us altogether, since his mode of fictional being is such that it is
automatically bestowed on anyone who makes his literary acquaintance.
So what is beginning to emerge is that our evaluation of John Lewis has so far
been conducted as if (with Moran) his key relationship is with himself, or (with
me) as if his relationship with the other inhabitants of Aberdarcy is at least
equally important; but what we have all thus far occluded is his relationship with
those who are reading about him, and so the significance of the possibility that
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

the themes of sincerity and irony that dominate the world of the fiction might
also have a bearing upon the relationship between that world’s author, its
inhabitants, and its readers—the very territory staked out by David Foster
Wallace’s attempts to find a way out from postmodernism and its dangerous,
despairing predilection for irony, parody, and pastiche in the face of the per-
ceived impossibility of sincerity.
Thus re-oriented, suppose we go back to the problem in which we became
entangled at the end of Section 2. I got into the indefinitely recursive anxiety
about John Lewis’s inability to disclose matters redounding to his moral credit by
glossing over a certain ambiguity in my reference to the ‘others’ to whom such
disclosure might or might not be effected. But the moral imperative not to
disclose the basis of his claim to be considered a (relatively) good chap applies
only with respect to his fellow fictional inhabitants of Aberdarcy; it cannot apply
to those others whose existence and relationship to him are presupposed and to
some extent determined by his status as a fictional narrator—his readers, me and
(ideally) you. For John has no choice to make about whether or not he discloses
himself to us: insofar as his existence is that of a fictional narrator of a fiction
about himself, disclosure is a consequence of his mode of being, or rather of his
existing as opposed to not existing as a fictional character. As his readers,
accordingly, we are automatically given the necessary access to the grounds for
judging him to be a good chap that he cannot in good conscience provide to
anyone inhabiting his fictional world; we cannot relate to him at all except as
someone to whom moral credit is owed (insofar as it is owed)—someone who
deserves our approbation to at least this extent, and who does not risk that credit
by creating the conditions under which we can recognize its reality.
That would seem to get John Lewis off the ‘self-exposure as self-condemnation’
hook on which we left him in Section 2. But if we truly take seriously his status as
fictional, then we need to consider the implications of the fact that he is a fictional
creation, and ask ourselves how these considerations affect the moral credit of his
creator; in other words, we need to consider not just the character–reader
relationship but the author(–character)–reader relationship. For suppose, as
most literary critical readers (and no doubt many readers simpliciter) have
certainly done, that That Uncertain Feeling has a strong autobiographical
element—putting it crudely (but not in terms of any simple identity-relation),
that John Lewis is a powerful synthesis of some of the characteristic thoughts,
feelings, and situations of Kingsley Amis with those of his closest friend Philip
Larkin in the mid-1950s (not to mention the succeeding decades). What, then,
are we as readers to make of the fact that someone whose incessant self-ironizing
has very likely incorporated the paradox of self-censure, and who has accordingly
 STEPHEN MULHALL

encountered the problem of self-condemning self-exposure, should decide to

write a novel in which the central character undergoes the paradox but (by virtue
of his status as narrator of the fiction) automatically escapes the problem of self-
exposure? In a way, John Lewis thereby gets all the moral credit owing to him for
being a (relatively) good chap; but since the only people in a position to accredit
him with it do not inhabit his world, it hardly improves his standing within it. But
if those same readers are inclined to see an internal relation between John Lewis
and his creator, then they will similarly be inclined to give Kingsley Amis the
credit that he shows to be due to his creation—and Amis inhabits one and the
same world as his readers (doesn’t he?), hence a world in which those lines of
credit can be established and maintained (perhaps over a whole career).
Q: (A) Is John Lewis Kingsley Amis’ way of gaining credit for being a
(relatively) good chap?
Q: (B) What would John Lewis think of such a strategy?

3. The Death of the Author

At the centre of his 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men5, David
Foster Wallace placed a piece called ‘Octet’. It is divided into five sections, each of
which adopts the formal structure of a ‘pop quiz’—the kind of unannounced tests
by means of which high school teachers commonly evaluate their students; the
format involves first outlining a highly schematic scenario, and then posing a
question about it directed at the reader. ‘Octet’ contains five such pop quizzes,
numbered 4, 6, 7, 6(A), and 9, and arranged in that order; numbers 4 and 7 are
half-a-page in length, number 6 is two pages, number 6(A) eight pages, and
number 9 is around thirteen pages,6 as long as the first four put together.
‘Pop Quiz 4’ imagines two late-stage terminal drug addicts out on a freezing
winter’s night, one wearing a coat, the other (burning up with a fever) lacking
even that protection; the first takes off his coat and lays it over the other. Q:
‘Which one lived?’
‘Pop Quiz 6’ imagines two male friends who have a serious disagreement at work:
Y refuses to do something dishonourable in order to protect X, but X feels deeply
betrayed by Y. Y nevertheless continues with his practice of regularly visiting X’s
family, seemingly oblivious to the general discomfort and X’s increasingly offensive
reaction to his presence, culminating in a half-slap that damages Y’s spectacles. But
without ever determining exactly how the narrative will continue (will X forgive Y,

5
Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (London: Abacus, 2000)—hereafter HM.
6
Including its footnotes.
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

or will Y stop visiting, or will the whole situation simply continue?), it is abandoned,
on the grounds that ‘the whole mise en scene here seems too shot through with
ambiguity to make a very good Pop Quiz, it turns out’ (HM, 113).
‘Pop Quiz 7’ imagines a woman who, after her divorce, fights her ex-husband
for custody of their baby; but his extremely wealthy family line up behind him, on
the grounds that any member of this family should get whatever he wants, and
they threaten to deprive the baby of the hefty trust fund set up in its name unless
the husband gets custody. So the mother walks away from the battle, leaving the
child to its father. Q: (A): Is she a good mother? Q: (B)—optional: explain
whether and how receipt of the information that the woman had grown up in
dire poverty would affect your response to (A).
‘Pop Quiz 6(A)’ returns to the X of ‘Pop Quiz 6’. Now, however, the focus is on
his father-in-law, who has never liked X, has in fact urged his daughter to divorce
X when they were going through a rocky patch, and is now dying of inoperable
brain cancer. X’s wife and her whole, close-knit family are deeply upset; and
although X continues to feel disliked by the father and alienated from the whole
family, he resolves to keep his feelings to himself, and support his wife in any way
he can. So he keeps her company during hospital visits, and castigates himself
privately, not only for his hatred of a sick old man (hatred that leads him to view
his visits as supportive of the cancer rather than the patient), but also for being
obsessed with his own feelings rather than focusing on his wife and her sense of
devastation, which of course makes him worry that his shame and self-doubt
about his self-involvement are themselves just another form of self-involvement.
Eventually, he confesses his problems to Y, who advises him simply to continue
with his supportive stance, and regard the self-loathing it involves as penance for
his loathsome feelings; and X follows this advice, feigning concern so convin-
cingly that, when the old man finally dies, the rest of his wife’s family invite him
to a private, inner-circle ritual of remembrance, in which everyone takes turns to
expatiate upon their most treasured memories of that wonderful old man. As the
time for him to speak comes rapidly closer, X finds that he has less and less idea
what to say. Q: (A): Self-evident. Q: (B): X has found that his decision to conceal
his true feelings from his wife has made him feel not only alienated from but
angry with her over an ignorance he has made every effort to cultivate and
sustain. Evaluate.
‘Pop Quiz 9’ directly asks its reader to imagine that she is, ‘unfortunately’, a
fiction writer:
You are attempting a[n eight-part] cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it
happens are not contes philosophique and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables,
exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as ‘short stories’ . . . [T]hey’re supposed
 STEPHEN MULHALL

to compose a certain sort of ‘interrogation’ of the person reading them, somehow—i.e.

palpations, feelers into the interstices of something, etc. . . . though what that ‘something’
is remains maddeningly hard to pin down . . . You know for sure, though, that the
narrative pieces really are just ‘pieces’ and nothing more, i.e. that it is the way they fit
together into the larger cycle that comprises them that is crucial to whatever ‘something’
you want to ‘interrogate’ a human ‘sense of ’, and so on. (HM, 123)

But the whole thing turns into a total fiasco. Five of the eight pieces don’t work at
all7; if the sixth works at all, it does so only after a complete rewriting, and only if
its unsuccessful earlier version precedes it—matters that can be mitigated aes-
thetically only by embedding acknowledgements of them into the Pop Quizzes
themselves, thereby flirting with metatextuality of a kind that will seem facile and
will risk compromising the urgency of the whole project. You originally hoped to
counteract the pervasive and ineliminable risk that the ‘Pop Quiz’ structure itself
might make the project seem to be a mere formal exercise in readerly interroga-
tion by fitting them into one another so tightly that their overall organic
unity would allow the urgency of your concerns to come through; it would in
fact interrogate:

7
In a footnote designed to bolster this claim, two examples of failed Pop Quizzes are given,
together with reasons for their rejection. The first asks us to imagine a psychopharmacologist who
invents an incredibly effective broad-spectrum antidepressant, and who is then besieged in his own
home by hordes of grateful patients, whose overbearing attentions reduce him to the point of
contemplating shimmying up his chimney and expressing via a megaphone his incandescent hate-
filled rage for those he helped; its culminating questions concerned whether and why he might
deserve what happened to him, and whether any positive shift in the happiness/misery ratio in the
world must always be compensated for. This was rejected because it was too long, and at once too
obvious and too obscure; and most importantly, its cartoonishness gave the impression of being
merely grotesquely funny, rather than simultaneously grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious,
‘such that any real human urgency in the Quiz’s scenario and palpations is obscured by what appears
to be just more of the cynical, amusing-ourselves-to-death-type commercial comedy that’s already
sucked up so much felt urgency out of contemporary life in the first place’ (HM, 127, fn 3). The
second example asks us to imagine a group of early twentieth-century immigrants to the USA, to
whom a sadistic processing officer on Ellis Island assigned the most obscene, ridiculous, and
undignified English-language equivalent of their original names that he could come up with. After
a lifetime spent suffering the consequences, these immigrants end up in a nursing home to which the
officer himself is ultimately consigned, in a paralyzed, mute, and emphysematic state of utter
helplessness; and they have to decide whether or not to exact revenge upon him. This Quiz did
have the necessary grotesque/redemptive urgency, but it was rejected nevertheless, in part because all
the key concluding, reader-interrogating questions are necessarily already thrashed-out in the final
stages of the piece’s narrative, and in part because ‘this piece didn’t fit with the octet’s other, more
“workable” pieces to form the sort of plicated-yet-still-urgently-unified whole that’d make the cycle a
real piece of belletristic art instead of just a trendy, wink-nudge pseudo-avant-garde exercise’ (HM,
128, fn 3).
Q: So does ‘Octet’ contain these two rejected Pop Quizzes?
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

the reader’s initial inclination to dismiss the pieces as shallow formal exercises simply on
the basis of their shared formal features [by] forcing the reader to see that such a dismissal
would be based on precisely the same sorts of shallow formalistic concerns she was (at
least at first) inclined to accuse the octet of. (HM, 128–9)

But now your best attempts to rescue or reconceive that overall unity have
generated pieces that only court more intensively that initial charge of shallow
formalism.
So, imagine further that now you’re trying to read your remaining pieces
objectively—trying to work out whether they individually and collectively convey
the redemptive urgency that inspired you to begin and to revise them, by
imagining how they might appear to the person for whom they’re intended, i.e.
to your envisaged reader. This is a truly terrible position to be in as a writer:
There are right and fruitful ways to try to ‘empathize’ with the reader, but having to try to
imagine yourself as the reader is not one of them; in fact it’s perilously close to the dreaded
trap of trying to anticipate whether the reader will ‘like’ something you’re working on,
and . . . there is no quicker way to tie yourself in knots and kill any human urgency in the
thing you’re working on than to try to calculate ahead of time whether that thing will be
‘liked’. (HM, 129)

But then you realize that your ‘Pop Quiz’-style interrogative structure, with its
added metatextual flirtations, might give you a way out of the conundrum it is
causing:
you could poke your nose out of the mural hole that “Isn’t working as a Pop Quiz” and
“Here’s another shot at it” etc. have already made, and address the reader directly and ask
her straight out whether she’s feeling anything like what you feel’ (HM, 131).

You realize that this will only work if you are 100 per cent honest; anything less
than completely naked, defenceless, helpless sincerity (with all its risks of appear-
ing pathetic and/or manipulative and/or desperate to please) will just land you
back in the same conundrum. But there is a way to achieve this: you can construct
a ninth Pop Quiz, (one which will further intensify your metatextual flirtation
since it will be in effect a metaQuiz, but nevertheless) one in which you will
describe the situation in which you find yourself (the fiasco, the conundrum, the
feeling that what originally drove you to start the project still survives in its
reconceived remains), and in which you will simply puncture the fourth wall,
completely naked, cap in hand, and flat-out ask the reader whether she feels what
you feel.
The ‘interrogation’ structure will then no longer be a mere formal device; you
will really be bothering the reader in just the way that a chef would be bothering
someone if he chose to ring her just as she was sitting down to eat a take-away
 STEPHEN MULHALL

meal from his restaurant in order to ask whether she’s enjoying it and whether it
works as a dinner. It will make you seem like someone attending a party who is
not only obsessed about whether or not the other partygoers like him, but spends
the whole party going up to people and asking them directly whether or not they
like him. Take the time to imagine the expressions on these people’s faces, and to
imagine those expressions directed at you. If you take this route, you risk looking
desperate and pathetic; you will certainly not look wise, or serene or authoritative,
but rather lost and confused and uncertain about the validity of even your most
pressing impulses and intuitions. ‘So decide’ (HM, 136).

Q: (A): What is the ‘something’ that the fiction writer in ‘Pop Quiz 9’ wants
to interrogate or palpate or feel his way into his reader’s human sense of,
and that he hopes is conveyed by the other Pop Quizzes?

Suppose we begin to answer this by separating the sheep from the goats—the
pieces that merit inclusion in the writer’s envisaged cycle from those that he
rejects; and suppose further (in good Wittgensteinian style) that we avoid
presuming that such unity as the sheep may exhibit must take the form of a
single common feature (or even a set of them), as opposed to a variety of
overlapping similarities (call this a family resemblance model of unity).
Leaving the claims of Pop Quiz 9 to one side for the moment, this would
mean that we regard Pop Quizzes 4 and 7 as primary or central cases; Pop
Quiz 6-and-6(A) would be a less central case (at the very best, given its
desperately jerry-rigged engendering); and the second failed Pop Quiz (call it
number ‘2’) would be a peripheral but nevertheless serious candidate for
inclusion (since, unlike the first failed Pop Quiz, its author feels that it carries
significant traces of the urgency he wanted to convey). What, if anything,
holds this quartet together?
The first two cases are virtual transcription of biblical scenarios. Pop Quiz 7
reworks the tale of Solomon having to decide between two women each of whom
claims to be the mother of the same baby; he discovers which is telling the truth
by seeing which refuses his offer to settle the dispute by literally dividing the baby
between them. And Pop Quiz 4 takes its central image of a coat from one of the
Beatitudes invoked in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount:
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth;
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever should smite thee on thy right
cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
And whosoever compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away.
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use and persecute you;
That you may be the children of your father who is in heaven (Matthew, 5: 38–42)

Seen against this background, the core of Pop Quiz 6(A)-with-(6) would be the
willingness of X to love his enemy, and the self-sacrificial consequences of his
doing so—the need to sacrifice not only his closeness to his wife, and his prideful
disdain for Y, but also his image of himself as compassionate, decent, and
(ultimately) as truthful. And Pop Quiz 2 would plainly fit perfectly into the
same self-sacrificial, loving-one’s-enemy framework—perhaps a little too per-
fectly or at least too explicitly for its author’s purposes, since its sheer obviousness
would make the concluding question virtually redundant as an invitation to
genuine interrogation on the part of the reader.
We can, then, take the Pop Quiz 9 fiction writer’s belated and hesitant
specification of this ‘something’ as accurate to the texts it follows:

[T]he surviving semiworkable pieces all seem to be trying to demonstrate some sort of
weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships, some nameless but
inescapable ‘price’ that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if they
ever want truly ‘to be with’ another person instead of just using that person somehow . . . ,
a weird and nameless but apparently unavoidable ‘price’ that can actually sometimes
equal death itself, or at least usually equals your giving up something (either a thing or a
person or a precious long-held ‘feeling’ or some certain idea of yourself and your own
virtue/worth/identity) whose loss will feel, in a true and urgent way, like a kind of death,
and to say that there could be (you feel) such an overwhelming and elemental sameness to
such totally different situations and mise en scenes and conundra . . . seems to you urgent,
truly urgent, something almost worth shimmying up chimneys and shouting from roofs
about. (HM, 133)

Q: (B): Does the author of ‘Octet’ puncture the fourth wall?

It really does feel like it. As you gradually begin to figure out exactly what is going
on in Pop Quiz 9, it really does feel as if the author of the previous three (or four)
Pop Quizzes is stepping out from the fictional machinery, utterly naked, cap in
hand, attempting with 100 per cent honesty (and with full awareness of how
pathetic or desperate he will seem) simply to describe the difficult situation in
which he has found himself as a writer, and thereby to contextualize and motivate
his attempt to ask the reader (each and every reader) whether he or she feels what
he is feeling.
But he isn’t. First of all, the fiction writer delineated in Pop Quiz 9 never
actually, straight-out asks his readers whether or not they feel what he feels;
rather, he presents himself as realizing that he can do so, and realizing the risks
 STEPHEN MULHALL

and costs attached to doing so—but the piece ends before or without him ever
actually doing so. Second, the delineation of this critically incomplete, evaluative
contemplation of the possibility of authorial coming-on-stage is itself a part of
‘Octet’; it is another of that piece’s pieces—one more Pop Quiz. This means that
the fiction writer it describes is himself a fictional character—one more authorial
creation (like the generous terminal drug addict, like X and Y, like the mother)
rather than the author who created him (even if he resembles that author very
closely in certain pertinent respects); these fictional characters are created solely
as a means of posing a question to the readers of the Pop Quiz, but they don’t
themselves ask the questions that their actions are designed to invite or provoke.
And with good reason: for any question directly asked by a fictional character can
only be a fictional question—that is, a question asked by the character, not the
author, and asked of his fellow fictional characters, not of their reader. If the
author of ‘Octet’ really were the fiction writer of Pop Quiz 9, then he couldn’t ask
the readers of ‘Octet’ anything at all.
However, even if the fourth wall of ‘Octet’ can’t possibly be directly punctured,
it doesn’t follow that its author can’t ask his readers the relevant question in
another way. After all, it can’t be denied that something resembling a question
really is posed by Pop Quiz 9; but it is one that is doubly distinct from any of
those posed by the other Pop Quizzes in ‘Octet’. As we have already noted, it
doesn’t have the grammatical form of a question as such (certainly not one whose
presence is signalled with the archetypal ‘Q’ prefix, as is every other Pop Quiz
question in ‘Octet’), but rather with something between an order and a reminder:
‘So decide’; and this in turn reminds us that it begins with the following sentence:
‘You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer’. In other words, this Pop Quiz doesn’t
just offer its readers one more imaginary scenario containing characters whose
thoughts and actions we are asked to evaluate from the outside, as it were—from
what one might call the logical space of the test-setter or test-taker; it specifically
invites us to imagine ourselves to be one of those characters. The invitation posed
by Pop Quiz 9 is not (or not simply) to imagine others to whom one remains
other (evaluative spectators of their deeds), but to imagine oneself as this
particular other. Consequently, Pop Quiz 9 turns out not to be a means by
which the author of ‘Octet’ asks his reader to evaluate something; it is a means
by which the author of ‘Octet’ asks the reader to imagine being the author of
(something very like, even indistinguishable in all the respects which matter to us,
here and now, from) ‘Octet’—an author who must decide whether or not to ask
his readers to evaluate something. Why?
Here, we need to recall that the author of ‘Octet’ includes Pop Quiz 9 within
‘Octet’, and hence implies that (metaQuiz though it may appear to be) it succeeds
 WALLACE ’ S WITTGENSTEIN , MORAN ’ S AMIS 

in contributing to the organic unity to which he thinks the other three (or four)
successful Pop Quizzes also contribute. That would mean that it supplies another
instance of the ways in which our attempts to be with another human being
might involve risking either our literal death or the death of something we take to
be central to our psychological identity and existence. Now, let’s listen again to
the concluding sentences of Pop Quiz 9, and so of ‘Octet’:
[Asking the reader directly whether she feels what you feel is] not going to make you look
wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they
believe the literary artist who wrote what they’re reading is when they sit down to try to
escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather
it’s going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure
about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness
and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you
do . . . more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with
the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine (fn: at least I sure do . . . ] to be clean and
dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the
whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.
So decide. (HM, 135–6)

Two constitutive and interlinked self-images are being diagnosed here: the idea of
the author as Authority (omniscient, omnipotent, and radiant with conviction),
and the idea of the reader as seeking in fiction a relationship in which she escapes
from the insoluble flux that characterizes her relationship with herself and with
the other real people she meets in her non-reading life. The author of ‘Octet’
believes that the relationship between reader and writer is in fact just one more
kind of troubled and troubling relationship between human beings; it is one more
place in which we encounter the insoluble flux of ourselves and others rather than
an escape from it (which is why Pop Quiz 9 only appears to be metatextual). He
aspires to write in such a way as to ‘be with’ his readers, to meet them as equals
on the common ground of their lostness and confusion and self-doubt; and the
idea of the Authoritative author (by removing him as writer from the trenches
to an Olympian realm of clarity and control) makes this impossible. Hence, he
aspires to write in such a way as to do without—to disavow or sacrifice—this
immensely comforting self-image, and thereby to encourage his readers to do
without its foundational role in their self-image as well; for both parties, this
will amount to a radical kind of dying to the self (as that self is presently
constituted). But he cannot coherently do so by exercising that magical Author-
ity, or even by appearing to believe that he can exercise it, on pain of self-
subversion; so, for example, he cannot either directly say that he is, or directly
present himself as, such a self-sacrificing person in his fiction (since either
move would amount to an—incoherent—attempt to violate the necessary
 STEPHEN MULHALL

conditions of the author–reader relationship, as if he took himself to possess

power that was at once genuinely authorial and utterly without limits). Instead,
he invites his reader to imagine herself as that reader’s author, as himself: he
thereby invites her to acknowledge the mere humanity of the author, to rid
herself of the idea of the Authoritative author by admitting his essential
accessibility to her imagination, hence his no more (but no less) than equal
standing with her. But he doesn’t then tell her how the problems that the
author of ‘Octet’ is facing are to be dealt with—for example, by elaborating the
imaginary author of (something very like) ‘Octet’ to the point at which that
author actually makes the decision that confronts him; for then the creator of
the fiction would be dictating the reader’s course of imaginative action whilst
purporting to be respecting their essential equality, their shared, quivering,
improvisatory, and risky occupation of the muddy trenches of human relation-
ships. Instead, he leaves his imaginary counterpart’s decision entirely in his reader’s
hands; he hands over the decision-making authority finally and entirely to her.
Will she dismiss this as one more shallow, dissembling, and hypocritical
metatextual exercise—one more way in which a postmodern author feigns a
full acknowledgement of his status as the humble creator of mere illusions, whilst
continuing to exercise all the creative power in that relationship, and so actually
maintaining his superiority vis-à-vis his reader? Or will she recognize it rather as
an unprecedentedly explicit, pervasive, and sophisticated way of acknowledging
the primacy of his reader’s imagination (as the domain in which his characters,
and so himself as their creator, can alone come fully alive)? When a hyperbolic-
ally talented author devotes all his creative genius to crafting a text whose
involutions and reflexivities ultimately deliver decision-making power to his
reader, does that show the extent to which an author really can die to the idea
of his Authority, or is it rather one more devious way in which he in fact
preserves it? What matters more—what he delivers, or the fact that (when all is
said and done) he delivered it?
You decide.
PART V

Patterns and Possibilities

of Moral Growth
 13
Moral Development in Pride
and Prejudice
Alan H. Goldman

1.
Assuming that we begin life with few or no genuine moral capacities, we can tell
what is required in the development to full moral maturity by specifying the
capacities exercised in fully mature moral judgment. Such judgment, if it is to be
translated into action, requires three distinct but interrelated types of compe-
tence: cognitive-perceptual, emotional, and volitional. In order to judge accur-
ately, we must above all perceive, i.e., recognize, the morally relevant factors in a
situation and determine their weights or priorities among them when they
conflict. Often in order to do this, we must empathize and sympathize with
those potentially affected by our actions, since what is morally relevant is what
affects their interests, and their interests are relative to their emotions and desires.
The emotional capacity to empathize is necessary for accurately predicting the
consequences of our actions or their effects on others. To feel and judge in the
right way, one must also have an accurate self-image, a healthy sense of one’s own
fallibility and biases. This will prevent overly hasty and self-centered judgment
based on superficial appearances and relations only to one’s own interests. It will
also prevent ascribing one’s own feelings and desires to others whose emotional
makeup may be different. Such self-centered, superficial judgment is the mark of
the morally immature or stunted, and empathy that is not fully developed
assumes that all feel as one does oneself in similar circumstances.
A realistic sense of one’s fallibility involves knowing when to defer personal
judgment to social rules, which are generally good rules of thumb for successfully
coordinating actions among agents not intimately related. Part of moral devel-
opment therefore consists in internalizing such rules that facilitate efficient
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

interaction. At the same time, since morally relevant factors can arise unexpect-
edly and can interact unpredictably, so as to prevent their being completely
captured in a set of rules simple enough to be of use, full moral maturity includes
the ability to rise above social rules of thumb and violate them when morally
necessary. Such violations of socially accepted rules are justified, however, only
when it is clear that personal judgment is morally superior to the application of
the rules. Again, full moral maturity involves the ability to make such judgments.
Finally, a morally mature person must not only judge correctly, but must also
be motivated to act on the moral judgment. This may again require acting outside
accepted social convention or acting against one’s narrow self-interest or the
interest of one’s group. To develop such motivation and have it override more
primitive or natural narrower interest, one must develop a self-identity that
includes moral considerations as major components. One must simultaneously
recognize one’s fallibility yet have the ego strength and resolve to act on one’s
reflectively confident moral judgments. This is a third distinct capacity in the
fully mature moral individual, in addition to the emotional capacity for empathy
and the cognitive ability to recognize and correctly weigh morally relevant factors
in complex and conflicted contexts.
Mature moral judgments and actions are combinations of emotional involve-
ment, reason-guided perception, and volitional commitment. All these capacities
are acquired gradually and interdependently over the course of moral develop-
ment. Such development takes one from an initially self-centered perspective to
full appreciation of the perspectives of others. This happens as the subject encoun-
ters and is forced to acknowledge those other points of view, initially in family
members and then in ever-widening groups of respected peers. The process can be
stunted by lack of beneficial interactions in such ever-expanding circles.
I have briefly described the capacities acquired in the course of moral devel-
opment by noting what full moral maturity requires. Psychologists, of course, do
not use this method to describe the process of moral development. Instead, they
typically relate parables or describe morally problematic interactions to children
and adolescents to see how their interpretations and the lessons they draw from
these stories differ at different ages. The major psychological theories, like the
emotive and cognitive meta-ethical theories, have emphasized either the cogni-
tive or emotional side of moral development, although more recently there has
been at least one attempt to combine them.1 Cognitive theories emphasize
judgments of reciprocity or fairness, while theories of moral emotional

1
See, for example, John C. Gibbs, Moral Development and Reality (Boston: Allyn and Bacon,
2010). Despite much strange metaphysical musing, this is the best example of a combined theory.
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

development emphasize empathy as prompting benevolence. Cognitivists point

to a concept of fairness somewhat independent of empathy that explains the
motive to punish immoral acts independent of sympathy for victims. Both kinds
of theory see immature judgment as self-centered and superficial, focused on one
salient property most often related to oneself.
Cognitive theories, beginning with Piaget and then Kohlberg,2 focus on the
subsequent ability to attend to multiple properties and perspectives and respond
to less superficial cues, a “decentration” of attention that parallels a like devel-
opment in the purely cognitive realm. Piaget’s initial centration (conservation)
experiments involved pouring a liquid from a short, wide container into a long,
narrow one. Young children focus on either the height or the width as the salient
property and therefore judge the volume to change, while older children can
attend to both properties as the change in one compensates the change in the
other. Likewise, in the moral realm young children tend to focus on salient overt
action and not intention, tend to see immoral behavior as any that gets punished
by adults, and they focus on only one side in situations of conflict. Children at a
slightly later stage rely on simple rules and generalizations. More mature judg-
ments can focus on and balance opposing interests and take into account less
superficial properties such as intentions.
On the emotional side, infants appear to be wired with a primitive kind of
empathy, in that they will cry when others do in a kind of imitation. Such
primitive empathy expands by conditioning and association, but in early stages
the child will respond only to overt signs of distress, will seek comfort or relief
from its own empathic distress instead of seeking to relieve the affliction of the
others who cause it, and, as mentioned earlier, the child will ascribe his own
feelings to others who may be feeling differently. Children assume that others will
feel what they would feel in similar situations. At later stages, empathy is
cognitively and verbally mediated, the subject responds to more subtle cues,
comes to respond to more distant individuals and groups with different values,
and directs help to their conditions and painful feelings.
What is perceived as moral or immoral behavior, as well as responses to moral
and immoral behavior as perceived in others, also develop over time. As noted,
immoral behavior is seen at first as what gets punished, then as what society or
one’s group condemns, as its rules are internalized. Subjects at intermediate
stages of development will seek to reciprocate perceived benefits or harms to

2
Jean Piaget, Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1965); Lawrence
Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development: Vol. 2, The Psychology of Moral Development (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1984).
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

themselves, the motive being to get even, not to treat others kindly or as they
would want to be treated, and not to foster meaningful relationships. Fully
morally mature individuals accept social norms self-consciously and critically,
making exceptions when circumstances morally require them. Their self-identity
incorporates a moral identity with a strong sense of personal responsibility to
avoid harm and provide help even to those at some distance, physical or social.
Such maturity comes about through interaction with ever-expanding circles of
individuals considered as equals even though differing in perspectives or values.
If those considered peers or equals comprise only a tightly knit group hostile to
outsiders, this restriction can stunt moral development. Morally stunted individ-
uals fail to empathize broadly, instead generalizing classes of people as threats.
They also suffer cognitive distortions: mislabeling revenge as justice, blaming
others for their own shortcomings, seeing themselves as victims. They typically
lack social skills as well, being overly aggressive or submissive. They fail to adopt
others’ perspectives, remaining centrated on their own, or they consider other
perspectives only to further their own aims. Finally, to the extent that they judge
moral requirements correctly, they lack the will to act on their moral judgments.
I have noted two ways of revealing the changes that occur in the course of
moral development. There is a third way. While psychologists generally interview
different subjects of different ages, moral development itself might be best
charted by single extended narratives of the same characters. This can be done
in novels, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is one of the best, if not the best,
example.3 The entire text of the novel traces the extended moral development of
its two main characters, while the minor characters represent various stages of
stunted moral development. This brings out what is not obvious from the
psychological studies of children—that many or most adults fail to judge and
act in ways reflective of complete moral maturity. Austen’s main characters
are young adults, and the novel ends with a marriage that for them marks the
culmination of their moral development. Their actions at earlier points in the
novel, as well as the actions of the minor characters, mark the various ways in
which moral judgments fail to reflect full maturity. And it is clear from their
deficiencies that Austen is aware of all the distinct capacities required for fully
mature judgment: empathy, decentrated discerning perception, self-knowledge
and recognition of fallibility, and the will to act on one’s reflectively endorsed
judgments made in exercising these other capacities. So I shall argue in the
remainder of this chapter.

3
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). Page references in the text
are to this edition.
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

2.
It is perhaps necessary first to offer some excuse for adding to the corpus of
Austen critical literature, already a lifetime’s worth of reading, and especially for
adding to commentaries on this, her most popular novel. The excuse is the lack of
adequate treatment of our topic. The vast majority of that critical literature
concerns the novel’s language, efficient narrative structure, relations to earlier
and later works and authors, and social stance. Regarding the latter, most closely
related to moral themes, critics over time have been more or less evenly divided as
to whether the novel is radical or conservative, focusing either on Elizabeth’s
character or on her marriage to Darcy. Is she a revolutionary early nineteenth-
century female, or does her marriage signal capitulation to the social status quo
(even if that status quo reflects the recent rise of the bourgeois class)? Criticism
that revolves around that question tends to see the novel’s characters simply as
representatives of their social classes. But, as will become clear, they are far more
complex, better seen as individuals, although subject to social stereotyping (a vice
for Austen) by others and themselves. Of the philosophers who have written on
Austen, most do not focus on Pride and Prejudice, and they are most concerned
with arguing whether she is best seen as an Aristotelian, a Humean, or a Kantian
in general moral outlook.4 (Not surprisingly, there are elements of all three in her
characters, as in all of us.)
Thus, although the theme of moral development is as clear as could be in Pride
and Prejudice and is noted by many critics, none has described its detailed
dramatization in the novel in full and correct terms. Most criticism views the
novel as dealing with very limited subject-matter in a literarily masterful way, or
as interesting in content only for its controversial political or social stance. Critics
find no interesting universal moral truths here, only defense of certain (disagreed
upon) class and gender values.5 Jane Austen herself famously described her novel
as “too light,” and it is the least didactic in style, if not content, of her works.6 Its
famous first sentence indeed sets the tone for the whole: “It is a truth universally
acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want
of a wife.” The opening clause could come straight from Berkeley, Smith, or

4
The most sustained argument is in E. M. Dadlez, Mirrors to One Another (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009).
5
See Johanna Smith, “The Oppositional Reader and Pride and Prejudice,” in L. C. Lambdin and
D.T. Lambdin, eds, A Companion to Jane Austen Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), p. 27.
6
So characterized also by Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon,
1975), pp. 197, 217.
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

Hume, portending philosophical depth to follow; but what follows, setting the
amusing ironic tone on several levels, plunges us back into the most mundane of
contexts. The double irony lies in the fact that it is the single women who are in
want, and, more pertinent here, in the contrasting clauses that surely warn us not
to look for deep philosophy here.
Such humorous irony continues throughout the novel, both in plot construc-
tion and style. The plot, while a conventional Cinderella-type story, turns on
ironic reversals in which characters’ actions have effects opposite of what they
intend. For example, Elizabeth’s barbed attempts to repel Darcy attract him; Lady
Catherine’s attempt to prevent their union promotes it. Stylistically, whatever
profound truths we are to find must be gleaned from informal witty conversa-
tions in the context of this wholly conventional plot. But profound truths about
moral development are indeed to be found in this novel, its astonishing accuracy
in regard to moral development only partially captured in much later diverse
psychological studies and philosophical analyses. Beyond the commonplaces that
we should strive for self-knowledge and not judge others too quickly, the details
of the characters’ paths to moral maturity are easily clouded behind the down-
right funny apparent comedy of manners.
Austen writes of no earthshaking events or larger-than-life heroes. Her
characters are unremarkable people in circumstances like ours (albeit in a
different historical–social context). Momentous events in their lives are not
violent or life-threatening, but are such as marriage refusals or letters explain-
ing misunderstood motives. Their personal relationships are the foci of their
moral judgments and behavior. This allows us ordinary readers to share their
judgments and more easily identify with their developing perspectives. At the
same time, their being fictional characters affords us access to their thoughts
with a kind of unbiased detachment, which is accentuated by the light touch of
the humorous tone (the proper use of humor being itself thematized in this
novel, as we shall see).
At the beginning of the story none of the characters has attained ideal or full
moral maturity; all are morally lacking in one way or another. The minor
characters remain so, each illustrating moral defects that together show Austen’s
awareness of all that is required of a morally mature person. In regard to the two
main characters, Austen does not so much describe their development as reveal it
through their changing judgments and actions, allowing us to relive our own
process of maturation through their experience, without the extensive superflu-
ous noise and years of real life. Our emotions are engaged, but, as noted, not so
strongly as to block clear vision of what is happening, if we reflect carefully
enough on this central theme.
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

3.
The narrator’s and reader’s viewpoint almost throughout is that of Elizabeth
Bennet. Wickham is introduced, for example, not by a description of his charac-
ter, as are her parents before we meet her, but in terms of what she sees in him—
his looks and manner. We share her emotional reactions to the other characters,
feeling embarrassment for her mother’s behavior, amused contempt for Mr.
Collins, and resentment at Lady Catherine’s slights. Having access to her
thoughts, we initially share her mistaken judgments too, delighted by her and
her father’s acerbic wit, often exercised at the expense of other characters.
Judgment of character is the moral focus, and Elizabeth, although priding herself
on her ability to so judge, displays all the characteristics of immature moral
judgment noted by cognitivists. Her initial judgments are based on superficial
salient appearances and centered on properties related to herself. She judges
Wickham, who is handsome, pleasantly mannered, and attentive to her, to be
of good character, and Darcy, who declines to dance with her, negatively. Of
Wickham she says: “There was truth in his looks . . . His countenance, voice, and
manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue” (pp. 15,
154). Clearly she is focused on superficial appearance. With Darcy in conversa-
tion, she is witty, but also overly aggressive and defensive.
The verdict after first meeting Darcy mistakes his reserved manner for pure
disdain and snobbery and is based on his inadvertent insult to her appearance
and her resentment of his stereotyped social class. And speaking negatively of
him to others both assuages her wounded pride and, as she later admits, provides
“an opening for wit to have a dislike of that kind,” again self-centered motives.
She admits that in making Darcy the constant brunt of her humor, “she meant to
be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him” (p. 168). She
constantly misjudges his motives, misperceiving his interest in her as intent to
ridicule. Finally, she blames him for the shortcomings of her relations, for judging
the behavior of her family members negatively, when such judgment is war-
ranted. She is once more guilty of the immature cognitive errors of mislabeling,
having a narrow self-centered perspective, and failing to take adequate account of
motives and intentions.
Having rushed to judgment of Wickham and Darcy, she persists, remaining
selectively biased in taking in evidence, failing to note inconsistencies in Wick-
ham’s hostile testimony regarding Darcy (he says he would not speak ill of or
avoid him and then does both). She refuses to blame Wickham or change her
positive opinion of him even after learning of his pursuit of the recently rich Miss
King (p. 115). And she continues to misjudge Darcy’s motives even after
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

changing her opinion of him, thinking, for example, that her sister Lydia’s
elopement will separate them when it actually helps to bring them together.
But, as noted, Elizabeth is not a child, nor is she a simple character. Her
reactions and judgments are more complex than those of a child, and when she is
not personally involved with another character, her judgments are more accurate,
and her behavior reflects some already acquired moral values. She quickly sees
through Caroline Bingley’s hypocrisy, as her sister Jane does not, and she
immediately recognizes Mr. Collins as the pompous yet sycophantic fool that
he is. Her rejection of his marriage proposal demonstrates a refusal to place
material comfort over personal integrity, and even her rejection of Darcy’s
first proposal shows that her judgment of his moral character, however
mistaken, is more important to her than great wealth. She is equally shocked
by her friend Charlotte’s marriage for money and Lydia’s elopement for
sexual passion. And she knows in the abstract that knowledge of character
requires long and careful unbiased perception. She notes that Jane’s having
known Bingley for two weeks is insufficient for such judgment of character
(p. 15), and she expresses this ironically in praising his handsomeness as an
accomplishment or moral virtue.
Yet, as indicated, she cannot help judging Wickham and Darcy in just the way
she disinterestedly condemns. When personally involved, her judgments remain
self-centered and focused on salient appearances and stereotypes, the cognitive
marks of moral immaturity. She fails to note contradictions in the statements and
attitudes of both Wickham and herself (she is embarrassed by the behavior of her
family members but cannot recognize Darcy’s criticisms of them as warranted),
and she cannot balance Darcy’s good qualities against his shortcomings.
Emotionally, we find similar symptoms. While she feels strongly for those within
her narrow circle, empathically sharing the pleasures and disappointments of her
sister Jane and feeling sympathy for her friend Charlotte, she misreads both her
own feelings and others’ and projects her emotional perspective onto others who
do not share it. She projects her own values onto Charlotte and therefore cannot
imagine her acceptance of Mr. Collins, mistaking Charlotte’s encouragement of
him as kindness in distracting his attention from her. She ascribes her own
feelings to Charlotte despite the fact that, unlike her, Charlotte is plain and
completely lacking in other prospects for escaping a life of loneliness and material
want. In relation to Darcy, her misperceptions of his character are matched by
misreadings of both his feelings and her own. Feeling both antagonism and
attraction to him, she is unaware of the attraction and projects her antagonism
onto him, refusing to recognize his attraction to her, perhaps out of fear of
disappointment.
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

Thus, early on in the novel we find all the marks of both cognitive and
emotional moral immaturity in Elizabeth, and the typical interaction between
the two types of moral deficiency. Self-centered misperception and social stereo-
typing leads to lack of empathy, which blocks correction of the misperceptions.
And her attitudes toward rules of socially acceptable behavior are equally mixed
and mostly immature. She implicitly knows when such rules must be violated for
more weighty moral reasons, but her acknowledgement of their force on other
occasions is less than ideal. Her long walk to tend to her sick sister justifiably
ignores norms of the time, but at other times her barbed wit exceeds the bounds
of etiquette (while entertaining the reader). The sharp sense of humor, along with
the ability to quickly perceive weaknesses in others which she can attack with
sophisticated irony, she inherits from her father (and from Austen). What she
cannot internalize from her parents is proper respect for social norms. Lacking
the usual parental rules as guidance, her moral development must be fueled by
other sources.

4.
Before describing what those catalysts are in Elizabeth’s case, we may note again
the complex abilities involved in mature moral judgments, especially judgments
of other people’s characters, the focus here. I have said that we experience
Elizabeth’s moral growth in tending to share her early judgments (although we
may well have an inkling of the outcome early on). We, along with her, must
engage in the difficult task of interpreting the behavior of the other characters,
including prominently their judgments of each other, to discern the morally
relevant features of their behavior. We must judge them by how they judge
others, and this again requires both empathy and fine-tuned perception. The
process is well illustrated by our reaction to the lively exchange between Elizabeth
and Darcy on the character of Bingley (p. 123). We react to their assessments of
Bingley’s easily persuadable disposition and assess them accordingly, as they
react to each other’s assessments and Bingley reacts to them.7
As these characters are themselves complex, our developing assessments of
them cannot be black or white. When Elizabeth rejects Darcy’s first proposal, for
example, we must feel ambivalent toward both: anger toward her for continuing
to misjudge him, approval for rejecting him on principle, and sympathy for
seemingly losing a chance at great happiness; anger at him for continuing to

7
Compare Jan Fergus, “The Comedy of Manners,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 123.
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

express snobbery in the proposal itself and for being confident of her acceptance,
sympathy for being rejected, and satisfaction that his supercilious attitude has
been brought home to him, however painfully. As these mixed feelings guide our
judgments at this turning-point in the novel, we recognize the difficult task faced
by the characters in developing the capacity for mature and accurate judgment
themselves.
Large steps in the developmental process are often initiated by momentous
events in a life, especially those that challenge a person’s self-image, reveal major
errors in earlier judgments, or broaden the circle of those demanding respect. So
it is in this novel. Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth following her rejection of him has all
three effects, although the developmental process it prompts is slow and extends
over the second half of the novel. Indeed, the initial effect is to slow her usual
judgmental process. In a break with her previous practice, on a solitary walk she
reflects long and carefully on the letter itself, reinterpreting earlier events (as we
reinterpret the earlier text) and beginning to correct its earlier narrative, espe-
cially regarding the relation of Darcy to Wickham. Once more, moral perception
involves interpreting actions and language in order to judge character, so that
Elizabeth’s moral maturation is epitomized in her changed judgment of Darcy’s
character.
The complete reversal is brought about gradually through a series of events
and new perceptions following the letter: her perception of the unpretentious
beauty of Pemberley in contrast to the ostentation of Lady Catherine, the
testimony of Darcy’s housekeeper as to how he treats dependants, his changed
manner toward her aunt and uncle, and finally his humbling actions in the Lydia
affair. By taking account of this broader base of evidence, expanding her per-
spective beyond its initial centration on his reserved appearance and insult to her,
she comes to consider and better appreciate his motives and justifications for
criticizing her mother and younger sisters and separating Jane and Bingley.
So we see the marks of moral maturity emerge: the ability to weigh conflicting
evidence, overcome stereotypes, and take into account hidden motives and
intentions. But again the process is gradual and proceeds in steps. Having
changed her feelings toward Darcy, gradually becoming concerned for his inter-
ests, she must still learn to infer motives more accurately and to act on her moral
perceptions. As noted earlier, she continues to misjudge his reactions to Lydia’s
elopement and to Lady Catherine’s interference, and, having learned of Wick-
ham’s true character, she fails to act on her knowledge by warning her family to
avoid him, a failure she later bitterly regrets (pp. 205, 270). Despite the mutual
reinforcement of judgments, feelings, and actions, these are all separate steps on
the path to moral maturity, as Austen dramatically illustrates. They are prompted
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

by the necessity of recognizing the different perspective and demand for respect
of another person and subsequent changing of self-image and broadening of
one’s own perspective.
Elizabeth expresses her own change of self-image in perceptual terms, noting
that she had been previously morally “blind” (p. 156). The change in perceptions
and feelings brings other changes symptomatic of greater moral maturity. She
comes to know better when social rules must be adhered to and when they must
be ignored. She is unrestrained in her rebuke of Lady Catherine and seeks to find
out Darcy’s secret role in the Lydia affair when she knows that it is not socially
permissible to seek such confidential information. Yet she restrains herself when
Bingley’s sister continues to provoke her in the presence of Darcy and his sister.
And the aggressive wit that amused us in the first half of the novel when used as a
weapon becomes much toned down in the second half: “how heartily did she
grieve over . . . every saucy speech she had ever directed towards him” (p. 243).
This makes for a less charming remainder of the novel but for a more morally
responsible character.

5.
As noted, Darcy undergoes a somewhat similar transformation, although from
the opposite social perspective. I can be briefer here, since his development, as
opposed to Elizabeth’s, takes place mostly offstage. We see his transformation
through her eyes, our evidence of his change being his letter to her and his actions
toward her family. Because we see it only second- or third-hand, it is likely to
seem somewhat less believable than the change in her. His initial judgments are,
like hers, self-centered, superficial, based on stereotypes, and defensive, in his
case an excuse for social ineptitude based on natural reserve and shyness. Blinded
by her social class, he cannot see Jane’s true good nature or motives. Thinking her
a social climber, he keeps Bingley from her, blind also to the consequences of his
action. He finds country people boring, and despite early attraction to Elizabeth,
his disdain for her family prevents his seriously considering her a possible match
(pp. 31, 38). When he does come to consider a proposal to her, he cannot
conceive that he might not be accepted.
He admits that while, unlike Elizabeth’s parents, his parents taught him rules
of proper conduct, they never encouraged empathy with those of lower social
classes (pp. 206–7). He clearly comes to recognize, and we therefore see, that
knowing what is right and internalizing social rules are not sufficient for moral
maturity: we must also feel for those affected by our actions and act accordingly.
But, like Elizabeth, he has even before his transformation some rudiments of
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

sound moral character, as we see from his embarrassment at his aunt’s treatment
of Charlotte (p. 130). He is, like Elizabeth, a young adult, partially socialized but
still requiring further moral development. He is less quick to judge character than
is Elizabeth from the beginning, ending the discussion of Bingley’s character by
pointing out that correct judgment of an action requires full knowledge of
motives and circumstances (p. 149).8 It is his empathic feeling for others different
from him that most needs maturation. He immediately contrasts with Wickham,
having a rougher exterior but better interior character, but his character too is not
fully developed until the end of the novel.
His perspective, initially limited to a narrow circle of upper-class family and
friends, begins to broaden through the encounters with Elizabeth, who addresses
him as a person and indeed as an equal and adversary, unlike the usual syco-
phantic language of Mr. Collins and Caroline Bingley, who see him only as a most
desirable catch. Attracted rather than repelled by his sharp exchanges with
Elizabeth, his real change is again prompted by the first climactic event in the
novel, his first proposal and her rejection. Although inept, ultimately insulting,
and still focused on her social class and family, he shows himself in his emotion-
filled language for the first time here capable of strong feeling (in clear contrast to
Mr. Collins’ proposal). Her refusal, like his letter to her, provokes serious self-
reflection, and the consequent moral transformation is again a slow and some-
what painful process (p. 275). It takes him a long time, for example, to admit his
moral error in keeping Jane from Bingley (p. 278). But after seeing from the
Gardiners as well as from Elizabeth that members of the middle class need not be
coarse or sycophantic, his focus shifts from his own social status to the needs of
others. Ultimately, he is willing to sacrifice his own family honor to save
Elizabeth’s family from disgrace.
It is a common assumption that, as in Austen’s closest other novel, Sense and
Sensibility, each of these main characters exemplifies one of the title properties: he
pride and she prejudice.9 This assumption is reinforced by their accusations to
each other: “Your defect is a propensity to hate everybody” (said by Elizabeth to
Darcy), “And yours is to willfully misunderstand them” (p. 43). But in fact he also
misunderstands her and Jane, and she is proud of her intelligence, wit, and
capacity for quick judgment. Both early exemplify both vices, and these defects
in them all derive from a morally immature, narrowly focused, self-centered, and

8
The import of this passage is noted also by Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 149.
9
See, for example, Stuart Tave, “What Are Men to Rocks and Mountains?” in Harold Bloom, ed.,
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (New York: Infobase, 2007), p. 39.
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

superficial perspective. Unable to perceive inner character or motives, their

judgments are based on superficial appearances and social stereotypes. Their
misperceptions causally interact with their lack of empathy for those outside their
narrow circles, and these are all the marks of the morally immature.
Their hypercritical judgments of other characters change as their hypocritical
judgments of themselves do, prompted by at first witty and then frank and angry
exchanges with each other, ultimately forcing recognition of the other’s very
different perspective.10 In the climactic first proposal scene, both violate social
norms of courtesy that previously partially constrained their exchanges. The
shock to his self-image produced by her brutal frankness is clear: “And this is
your opinion of me!” (p. 144). The shock to her self-image comes with his letter
that immediately follows. The transformative broadening of perspectives, aided
by subsequent exchanges with other characters to whose testimony they become
open, occurs, as noted, gradually, as both characters recognize. Darcy, speaking of
Elizabeth’s criticisms: “it was some time before I was reasonable enough to allow
their justice” (p. 275). And in regard to her: “how gradually all her former
prejudices had been removed” (p. 276).
Neither immediately acts on their changed perceptions, she failing to reveal
Wickham’s character and he failing to reveal his prior actions to Bingley. Their
moral journey is symbolized, as is often the case in this sort of novel, by their slow
physical journeys from place to place, the low point occurring at the Netherfield
ball (as its name implies), and the culmination at Pemberley. The slowness of the
developmental process, emphasized by Austen, once more underlines the num-
ber of distinct capacities she recognizes to be required for full moral maturity.

6.
Austen’s awareness of these distinct capacities is indicated as well by her depic-
tions of the minor characters, all of whom remain defective in one way or
another. They are not always simple caricatures, as are Mr. Collins and Lady
Catherine, but even when complex, they do not change, and each represents
some form of stunted moral growth. Jane is a naturally kind person, but she lacks
the capacity for accurate moral discrimination, as she mistakenly ascribes her
own good motives to others. For this reason she can be easily taken advantage of,
as her father points out, and she might inadvertently allow others to be exploited

10
Compare Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), pp. 173–4.
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

as well. She cannot recognize the hypocrisy of Caroline Bingley, and even after it
becomes painfully obvious, she attributes it to affection for her brother instead of
interest in Darcy (p. 111). Similarly, she cannot discern the lack of character in
Wickham; she feels shame for Lydia and thinks she must be miserable when she
is happy as a lark (p. 134); and she cannot even see how obviously foolish Mr.
Collins is, fully defending Charlotte’s choice to marry him. Benevolence or
natural kindness without moral perceptiveness is shown here to be insufficient
for moral maturity, as Jane could not be relied upon to defend possible victims of
the unscrupulous. Even empathy must be properly discriminating if it is to lead to
correct moral judgment, as Austen shows here.
Mr. Bennet suffers from a different kind of stunted moral development.
Originally all passion and no thought or perception in his choice of a wife, his
disastrous marriage leads to a suppression of all emotion, the adoption of a
detached, cynical attitude toward the world, and a retreat to the safety of his
library. He is quick to perceive the foibles and weaknesses of others, and we
delight in his ironic wit in ridiculing them, but he suffers from an acute inability
to act, even to protect the vital interests of his family. Even in the face of Lydia’s
potentially catastrophic elopement, he makes only a feeble effort to ameliorate
the situation and withdraws with great relief. He makes light of Jane’s distress and
shows emotion only one time in the novel, when he believes Elizabeth to be
making the same mistake that he did in choosing a spouse. His only release
otherwise is the acerbic wit with which he attacks even his own wife and younger
daughters. The final ingredient in full moral development, strength of will to act
on one’s moral perceptions, is completely lacking in Mr. Bennet.
The other minor characters make neat contrasts. While Lydia and Mrs. Bennet
are all self-centered emotion and completely lacking in judgment, Charlotte and
Mary judge without any feelings to animate or guide their responses. Mrs.
Bennet’s judgments are all based on the single motive of marrying her daughters
into money, as her changing attitudes toward Darcy show. And the wealth she
seeks for them is not to guarantee their security, but to acquire superficial
material possessions, such as clothes and carriages. Her atrocious manners
mirror Lady Catherine’s from the opposite side of the social spectrum, showing
that social stupidity is not restricted to any one economic class. Lydia is described
as “having high animal spirits,” as “untamed, unabashed, and wild,” and more
significantly, as “silly” (pp. 135, 173), the latter term indicating the moral
immaturity that encompasses the other characteristics as well. She is not
restrained by any social conventions, not because she is critical of them or
sensitive to their justified exceptions, but because she has not reached the stage
of recognizing them at all.
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

On the other side of the emotional spectrum, Mary can only mouth inanities
from the books she reads in situations that call for empathy or other moral
emotions. Even in reaction to Lydia’s disgrace, she can only paraphrase from her
stock of moral epithets: “she continued to console herself with such kind of moral
extractions” (p. 214). Her piano playing is mechanical and by rote, complement-
ing her bookish pedantry and equally revealing of her lack of emotional devel-
opment. Charlotte is more complex. While her acceptance of Mr. Collins
sacrifices all feeling to a cold recognition of her meager life prospects and
therefore appalls Elizabeth, her self-perception and grasp of her situation is not
unrealistic. She is physically unattractive and without economic means for the
future, which does not make the prospect of sleeping with Mr. Collins any less
repulsive, but does make her more of a tragic than a morally undeveloped
character.11 Her chief roles in the novel are both to condemn the social situation
of women like her and to bring out the moral immaturity of Elizabeth in failing to
accurately empathize with her.
The most one-dimensional characters are the highly comical Mr. Collins and
Lady Catherine and the villain of the story, Wickham. They too, of course,
exemplify lack of moral development: Mr. Collins, with his obsequious, over-
wrought manners and language, and Lady Catherine, with her intolerable,
overbearing, self-centered interference. His total lack of moral feeling is most
comically portrayed in his proposal to Elizabeth, in which he lists the “violence of
my affection” last among his many reasons for marrying (p. 81). Lady Catherine
exemplifies not only lack of empathy and manners, but humorously illustrates
again the requirement of will and action when she declares that she would have
been a great musician if she had ever learned to play (p. 130). And both lack social
skills connected with moral maturity: he being both overly aggressive on rare
occasions (for example, in his advice never to forgive Lydia) and overly submis-
sive more often; she being always overbearing.
Finally, Wickham is devoid of moral motives entirely, despite his polished
manners and acute perceptions of others’ vulnerabilities to serving his own
interests. He quickly senses Elizabeth’s early dislike of Darcy, knows that Darcy’s
character will make him reluctant to expose their history, and uses both bits of
knowledge to his advantage. He acts from both strong emotions (compulsive in
his gambling) and accurate perceptions, but they are entirely self-centered and
narrowly focused. He also exemplifies the typical cognitive distortions of the

11
Most critics nevertheless blame Charlotte for lack of feeling. See, for example, Susan Morgan,
“Intelligence in Pride and Prejudice,” in Harold Bloom, ed. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (New
York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 96–7.
 ALAN H . GOLDMAN

morally stunted, seeing himself as a victim and blaming Darcy for his own self-
destructive actions. Each of these characters, then, illustrates one or more symp-
toms of underdeveloped moral personality, making clear again Austen’s themat-
ization of the nature of full moral development.

7.
Just as the life-changing events in the lives of these characters are the sorts of
events we readers experience in our lives, so for Austen the arena for moral
activity is not that of heroic acts toward strangers, but the meaningful intimate
personal relationships into which we enter. The most intimate and intricate of
these relationships is marriage, which, despite the doubts of feminist critics, at its
best makes a perfect match between a social institution and our deepest personal
needs and moral capacities. Pride and Prejudice therefore ends with the marriage
of Elizabeth and Darcy as the culmination of their moral development, the main
theme of the novel. At the end we get no real description of their married life, just
a brief review of their now broadened circle of friends. But we can surmise that
their union will be a rare complete success, since it is based on a solid foundation:
equal intelligence, shared values and mutual interests (reading, music, nature),
complementary personalities, self-respect and respect for each other based on a
history of reciprocal growth, and deep emotional attachment.
Austen describes this deep bond as based on “gratitude and esteem” (p. 206).
As a ground for a loving relationship, this description will sound cold and
detached to readers accustomed to romantic novels. But for Austen such
cognitively based emotion is deeper than sexual attraction based on appear-
ance, and it epitomizes mutual understanding and appreciation of character,
the moral foundation that for her must ground a successful relationship. Such a
relationship once more marks the individuals’ arrival at full moral maturity. In
this novel this consummation of the moral growth of Elizabeth and Darcy
contrasts with the marriage for money of Charlotte and the marriages for
sexual passion of the Bennets and Lydia. The former is devoid of feeling and
a symptom of the oppression of women. The latter are blind. Both are again
marks of moral immaturity, absent the kind of necessity that might explain
Charlotte’s marriage.
Only a proper mix of knowledge-based perception and emotion, both
empathic and affectionate, produces a solid basis for a lasting, mutually beneficial
relationship. Only the kind of marriage founded on mutual respect and esteem,
following criticism and self-examination, fulfills the highest possibility of inter-
personal relationship for autonomous, morally mature individuals. Their
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 

marriage is then a fitting end to the novel as the culmination of Elizabeth’s and
Darcy’s moral development.

8.
I will end this discussion with a brief summary. Moral maturity, we noted,
requires first, decentered or broadly focused perceptiveness that can weigh such
nonsuperficial properties as intentions and distant effects; second, empathy with
persons having different values and motives; third, an accurate self-image and
strength of will to act on reflective moral judgments; and fourth, the critical
acceptance of social rules along with the capacity to make exceptions when
necessary. Morally immature subjects remain fixated on superficial properties
related to themselves, ascribe their own feelings to others who might not share
them, fail to obey rules when they should and obey them when they should not,
blame others for their failures and shortcomings, lack social skills, and lack the
resolve to do what is right at the expense of their other self-regarding interests.
The moral development of the main characters in Pride and Prejudice, along with
the deficiencies of the minor characters, demonstrate Jane Austen’s awareness of
all these factors, only partially captured in later theories of moral development
and judgment. She is also aware of the mechanisms behind such development,
principally the broadening of interactions with other persons demanding respect
and calling into question one’s own initially self-centered perspective.
In dramatizing throughout the novel the development in ordinary circum-
stances of her fictional characters with whom we imaginatively engage, Austen
allows us to retrace our own moral growth and to identify contexts in which we
exercise full moral maturity and those in which we fail to do so. In addition to
seeing the interaction among perceptions, feelings, and will, we come to see
proper pride, acceptance of social convention, and use of humor as means
between morally defective extremes: pride as ego strength between the self-
centered vice and moral weakness; critical acceptance of rules between blind
obedience and wanton lack of discipline; and humor toward others and oneself
between a cynical or hostile detachment and a dull or self-important gravity. We
come to see all these necessary components of moral maturity most clearly by
seeing what is missing when Austen’s characters act in morally immature ways.
As she most succinctly summarizes: “Thoughtlessness, want of attention to other
people’s feelings, and want of resolution, will do the business” (p. 102).
 14
The Breadth of Moral Character
Daniel Brudney

“Forster is Austen’s most distinguished heir.”

Alistair Duckworth1

“We expect a normal, or morally literate, agent to be able to take in and

respond to the moral facts of her world accurately.”
Barbara Herman2

1.
Kantian thought has often been served with a long bill of indictment. A few of the
particulars are: the requirement to universalize the maxim of one’s actions can
lead to unacceptable consequences for conduct; to see morality as purely a matter
of acting from duty is to starve the moral soul; the Kantian focus on reason and
rule application ignores perceptual aspects of the moral life and misleadingly
splits the person into opposed cognitive and affective realms.
The Kantian response has differed down the decades. Sometimes heels are dug
in and it is pressed that only reason, quite divorced from variable and unreliable
sentiments and variable and unreliable perceptions, can give us consistent and
reliable moral outputs. Recently, there has been a different strategy. It has been
claimed that, properly understood, Kant’s view is not vulnerable to most (or even
any) of these criticisms. Kant has been read to be more subtle and sophisticated
than his critics have seen.

1
Alistair M. Duckworth, Howards End: E. M. Forster’s House of Fiction (New York: Maxwell
Macmillan International, 1992), p. 134.
2
Barbara Herman, “Can Virtue Be Taught?” in Moral Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007), p. 120.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

In this chapter I look at Barbara Herman’s reading of Kant, especially in her

excellent Moral Literacy. Herman’s Kant is in fact subtle, sophisticated, and
challenging. Kantian thought has sometimes been said not to get at the depth
of moral character. Herman tries to show how it can.3
Herman explores the conditions for a will to be good. A good will executes
what practical reason prescribes, but practical reason prescribes for a specific
situation and that situation must be accurately described. Herman urges that
part of moral virtue is an awareness of the morally relevant features of a
situation. One must avoid moral “aspect blindness.”4 A person of moral virtue
sees what is morally relevant and so can provide a sufficiently accurate
moral description. For Herman, this is a condition of the goodness of the
person’s will.
Herman also claims that Kantian practical reason need not operate against or
in parallel to one’s desires (depending on whether they point away from or
toward the morally required action). Rather, practical reason can operate through
one’s desires. The content of one’s desires can be informed by reason, be
rationalized, and so, contrary to the standard picture, the Kantian need not
split the person into two opposed realms.5
My focus is on Herman’s first strategy, although I say a bit about the second.
My central claim is that by focusing on the conditions for virtuous willing
Herman has started down a path that ultimately leads away from Kant. Through
discussion of two characters, Fitzwilliam Darcy and especially Henry Wilcox, in
two great English novels, Pride and Prejudice and Howards End, I argue that an
adequate account of what it is not to be morally blind accords a fundamental role
to a capacity that pushes us outside Kantian ethics.6
Proper moral conduct requires accurate description of the moral situation.
I will leave aside the question of whether accurate description by itself makes
clear what is to be done or whether, instead, the description simply sets the stage

3
See Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993) and Moral Literacy. At least one reviewer has used the metaphor of depth to talk
about Herman’s work. Adrienne Martin writes, “For Herman . . . character is in a sense deeper: it has
to do with one’s evaluative commitments and how they shape one’s motivational resources.” See
Adrienne Martin, “Review of Moral Literacy,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, September 5,
2007, emphasis in original.
4
See Barbara Herman, “Making Room for Character,” in Moral Literacy, p. 19: “The possibility
of a moral form of aspect blindness has posed special difficulties for Kantian theory.”
5
See ibid.
6
References are to Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin Classics, 1996) and to
E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Vintage Books, 1921).
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

for rule application.7 The point is that accurate description is crucial to virtue,
and in two ways. Clearly, it is relevant to getting the right outcome. In addition,
accurate description of moral phenomena seems, at least in the normal case, to
require a stance or way of relating to others that is itself laudable. Keeping for the
moment to a Kantian picture, to be the sort of person who sees what is involved
here and now in treating another as an end in herself is likely to require a
disposition generally to regard and to treat human beings as ends in themselves.
Whether this Kantian thought fully captures the needed stance toward others—
whether the virtuous person also relates to others in ways that go beyond the
Kantian picture of morality—is the question.
At stake in my examination of these novels, especially of Howards End, will
be the capacities that must be well functioning if moral description is to be
well functioning. If one (or more) of these capacities, when well functioning,
is substantially independent of (Kantian) reason, then a virtuous character
will need more than a well-functioning (Kantian) reason. I suspect that to the
ordinary person this will seem unsurprising. To the Kantian moral philoso-
pher, it presents a problem. A neo-Kantian such as Herman handles the fact
that moral judgment involves several elements by expanding the role of
reason, by arguing that it can inform other elements. Through examining
the character of Henry Wilcox I argue that this can only go so far. There is
more to moral description than can be fitted into a Kantian’s philosophy.
Ultimately, breadth rather than depth is the right spatial metaphor for moral
character.
I have chosen to provide a literary rather than a philosophical challenge to
Herman because I think that, if my reading is convincing, my example from
Howards End is likely to be more compelling—less likely to be discounted—than
a constructed philosophical example. Here, I take for granted the premise that
literature (at least “good” literature) provides compelling examples of moral
psychology. Indeed, I assume something stronger: that esthetically successful
literary characters capture what is “typical” of human psychology such that,
unlike an actual case, the literary character cannot be dismissed as aberrant
and so philosophically irrelevant. This assumption—the relevance of literature
premise—is admittedly puzzling. It is also unavoidable if moral philosophers are
to make use of literary characters in their reflections.8

7
I am skeptical about this claim, but here I do not press the point. What I press is that accurate
description requires at least one robust moral capacity that is not fundamentally filtered through the
exercise of a Kantian (or even a neo-Kantian) conception of reason.
8
I have discussed this issue elsewhere. See my “Styles of Self-Absorption,” in G. Hagberg and
W. Jost, eds, A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

Much of this chapter discusses a character in Howards End as a counter-

example to Herman’s view, and so the philosophical payoff may seem mostly
negative. Moreover, I mostly keep out of sight the usual alternatives to a
Kantian view. The occasional Aristotelian chord is struck, but the focus is on
what is lacking in Herman’s neo-Kantianism. Why not also present a positive
account that links reason more closely to desire and emotion? Most straight-
forwardly, to do so would make this a different (and much longer) chapter.
Beyond that, I think there can be a useful role for a philosophical discussion
that stays close to the literary phenomena. Moral philosophy is often driven
by simple (to the point of simplistic) pictures of human life. Granted the
relevance of literature premise, detailed reflection on literature can give us a
sense for the interconnections of the moral life. It can point to overlooked
data about that life that are both of intrinsic interest and lay the foundation
for subsequent theorizing. Of course, this presumes that such reflection is
done well.

2.
Among Herman’s goals in Moral Literacy is to incorporate within a Kantian
picture John McDowell’s Aristotelian claim that the proper moral agent has a
“sensitivity” that enables her to pick out what is to be done amidst the chaos and
confusion of ordinary life.9 Herman acknowledges that it would be false to the
moral life to assume that all relevant facts and considerations are simply given,
with the moral work being done solely in the application of a moral rule. Moral
work is also done in describing the world in such a way that a moral rule can
be applied.
A key feature of Herman’s proper moral agent is that she registers what
Herman calls the “salience” of important moral facts, registers their moral
relevance.10 Failure of such recognition amounts to a blindness to some moral
feature of a situation. This is moral aspect blindness.

“Two Differences Between Law and Literature,” in Martha Nussbaum and Richard Strier, eds,
Shakespeare and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For a discussion of
the idea of “typical” characters, see György Lukács, The Historical Novel (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1969).
9
See John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in McDowell, Mind, Value, & Reality (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
10
Herman, “Making Room for Character,” p. 1. See also Herman, “Responsibility and Moral
Competence,” in Moral Literacy, p. 98. For a more general discussion of the concept of moral
salience, see Herman, “The Practice of Moral Judgment,” in Herman, The Practice of Moral
Judgment.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

Now, moral aspect blindness is a large area with many subdivisions.11 I might
register that my conduct causes psychological distress yet fail to see this distress
as a moral consideration, as something I ought not to cause. Or I might miss not
the moral relevance of psychological distress in general but that, here and now,
I am causing someone such distress.12 Lawrence Blum gives the example of a taxi-
driver ignoring an African-American to pick up a white person, and the white
person not noticing.13 Perhaps I barely register the homeless people on my walk
to work. Examples could easily be multiplied. Moreover, at issue is not only
whether I am aware of someone or something or even see that there is a moral
issue to be raised but, crucially, the way that I describe things. A concentration
camp guard might describe his conduct as “doing his duty,” “dealing with sub-
humans,” “protecting the purity of my race,” and so forth. From his point of view,
he has overlooked nothing in this description. What a person does and doesn’t
see, and how she describes what she does see, are profoundly expressive of her
moral character.
A second noteworthy feature of Herman’s moral agent is that her desires have
been shaped by moral considerations.
An incentive is present in the deliberative field in what we might call a normalized or
rationalized form—as a possible motive—to the extent that its representation and affect-
ive significance have been transformed from that of an impulse or an intentional
disposition into a rational value.14

Through proper moral development the agent’s desires become reason-

responsive in the sense that reason guides her as to which desires to endorse,
and so, over time, only some desires become, for her, possible reasons for action.

11
Herman’s own leading example is rather extreme:
Imagine that neurotic and psychologically abusive parents cause a child to have a
disposition to casual cruelty toward intimates. We later find an adult who gets it
wrong about what is fun, what is danger, what it means to trust and be trusted;
someone who seeks and betrays intimacy . . . someone who also gets unacknowledged
pleasure in the distress he orchestrates. (Herman, “Responsibility and Moral Compe-
tence,” p. 92.)
12
See Herman, “Responsibility and Moral Competence,” p. 100.
13
See Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), pp. 36–7.
14
Herman, “Making Room for Character,” p. 19. Herman also puts it that the agent’s desires
have become “socialized”, p. 15; see also p. 23. Having stages to the moral life—where each is part of
and not merely preparatory for that life—is not implausible. Rules must apply to something, and
that something might have its own standards for how it is to be made ready for rule application. If
I am cooking a dish, it might take sensitivity on my part—tasting and sniffing—before I reach the
point where I apply the rule, “Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes.” Surely, both sensitivity and rule
application can be parts of the various stages or facets of a moral judgment.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

For instance, the impulse to steal my neighbor’s automobile does not arise; that is,
the option of stealing the automobile does not present itself as something for
which countervailing reasons are needed.15
Let’s assume, then, (a) that Herman’s proper Kantian moral agent registers all
the morally relevant facts, that is, sees these facts as moral considerations under
the proper description (there is no moral aspect blindness), and (b) that the
maturation of this agent’s desires have led them to be reason-responsive, to be
already informed by moral considerations. Herman’s idea seems to be that, given
these assumptions, either it will be sufficiently clear what the right thing to do is
or, if there is unclarity, what now comes into play is a more or less traditional
Kantian account of universalizing a maxim or not treating others as a
mere means.
In this chapter my stress will be on moral salience and whether conflicting
perceptions of it can be adequately handled in Kantian terms. Herman is well
aware of the presence, in most modern societies, of competing cultural beliefs and
attitudes. Perceptions of salience may differ. Yet Herman notes that there is
usually a significant degree of agreement in moral judgment.
[A]ll moral judgment in fact takes place within the framework of a community of moral
judgment. The rules of salience that identify the features of our circumstances that require
moral attention, as well as the regulative principles that set the deliberative framework, are
social rules acquired through participation in a moral community. Even the most basic
moral facts—what counts as a harm that sets a moral claim, what counts as conditions for
a valid agreement—are a function of social practice.16

In Howards End we will see a situation in which “what counts as a harm that sets
a moral claim” is in dispute not across cultures but within a culture and, more
importantly, within a marriage. I will argue that to handle this case properly
requires more than Kantian reason.

3.
Now to the two novels. In each we find two sisters, one beautiful, one intellectual;
no effective father figure (in Howards End, the sisters’ father is dead); a foolish
and interfering mother/aunt; an immediate and misbegotten brief romance—in
Howards End, very brief—between the beautiful sister and a young man whose
family disapproves; a scandalous sexual escapade by a sister (a third sister in Pride

15
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
16
Herman, “Pluralism and the Community of Moral Judgment,” in Moral Literacy, p. 39.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

and Prejudice); and an immense symbolic role played by a country estate of

which the intellectual sister eventually becomes the mistress.
I thus gloss the later novel as a rewrite—a critical rewrite—of the former. One
could take this in various ways: in terms of the larger social canvas on which
Forster paints (in terms of the “condition of England” question just before World
War I); or, as a technical matter, in terms of a narrative voice that moves in and
out of the character, allowing for a deeper delving into the characters’ psycholo-
gies (in terms of the use of what is called “free indirect style”).17 My focus will be
on the nature of the moral failing of the male protagonists in the novels. That
failing is simple enough in Pride and Prejudice, more difficult to specify in
Howards End. The difference in the failings is, in the end, what makes the first
novel a comedy and the second in large part a tragedy.18

4.
Elizabeth and Darcy are both decent people, and their misunderstandings are
essentially evidentiary. In principle, even had they not fallen in love, they could
have eventually taken in all the evidence and agreed on various facts: Jane does
love Bingley, Wickham is wicked, Darcy had been ungentleman-like. To be sure,
pride and prejudice contribute to epistemic infelicity. Darcy may have believed in
Jane’s indifference to Bingley in part because, confronted with Mrs. Bennet and
Elizabeth’s younger sisters, he desired to believe in it. Elizabeth acknowledges
that her injured pride (due to an earlier insult to her beauty) made her prejudiced
against Darcy and so culpably negligent re Wickham and his slanderous tales.
And Darcy’s pride keeps him from realizing how rude he has been to Elizabeth, as
it has kept him from publicizing Wickham’s vices (and so protecting potential
future victims such as Lydia). Nonetheless, in all cases, once the information is
made available, judgments converge. James Wood remarks that
Austen’s heroines do not change in the modern sense, because they do not really discover
things about themselves. They discover cognitive novelties . . . As the novel moves for-
ward, certain veils are pierced and obstacles removed, so that the heroine can see the
world more clearly.19

17
See the discussion in James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Geroux,
2008), pp. 3–38.
18
I should acknowledge a caveat about linking these particular novels: the Austen characters to
whom the sisters in Howards End, Helen and Margaret Schlegel, most closely correspond are
Marianne and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility.
19
See James Wood, “Jane Austen’s Heroic Consciousness,” in Wood, The Broken Estate (New
York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 33.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

What it is for an Austen heroine—except, perhaps, for Emma—to see the world
more clearly is to learn new facts, not to change her basic moral vision.
We can find in Pride and Prejudice instances of both moral aspect blindness
and the rationalization of desire. As it plays a smaller role in this chapter, I start
with the latter. It is most evident in Darcy, beginning when Elizabeth says that, in
making his marriage proposal, he has markedly failed to behave in a “gentleman-
like manner” (PP, 188). His mortification at the justice of the remark (he says he
was “tortured” by the truth of Elizabeth’s assertion; PP, 347) prompts a process of
desire change. Darcy has made offensively plain that he has not wanted to be in
love with Elizabeth, has fought against his desire. “In vain have I struggled. It will
not do. My feelings will not be repressed” (PP, 185). As Elizabeth puts it, he tells
her “that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against
your character” (PP, 186). Yet by the novel’s end Darcy is happily in love. What
has changed? Not his objections to the characters of Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Bennet,
and Lydia. Those were well founded and remain so. Yet his conduct is now
impeccably gentleman-like. To put things in Herman’s terms, we can say that
Darcy has seen what reason in fact requires and his desires have been changed
accordingly.
Of course, Darcy’s principles are not Kant’s. Still, I am taking reason-
responsive desires to be, in effect, principle-responsive desires—one starts with
a principle (or principles) and, over time and in light of experience and rational
reflection, one’s desires come into accord with one’s principle (or principles). The
idea of reason-responsive desires need not pick out a unique content for practical
reason. (Herman makes this very point.)20 Darcy starts with the principle that he
ought to conduct himself like a gentleman, comes to see that he has failed to do
so, and eventually comes to see a more adequate way to specify what gentleman-
like conduct requires. Eventually, he brings his desires and his conduct in line
with his new understanding of what the principle requires. At the end of the
novel he says, “I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and
conceit” (PP, 349). He has come to see that he was affected by pride and conceit.
In seeing this he has come to see what his good principles truly involve. This
process has changed his desires, specifically, his second-order desire with respect
to his feelings about Elizabeth.
The mechanics of this change are less than clear. Being mortified by the
recognition of his own rudeness seems insufficient to produce the transformation
we see. (Perhaps Darcy’s encounter with the Gardners has made Elizabeth’s

20
See Herman, “Making Room for Character,” p. 21: “Neither the idea of a deliberative field nor
this way of thinking about rational character belong in any special way to Kantian ethics.”
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

family less objectionable.) Putting this question aside, one feature of Darcy’s
transformation is worth remarking. One evening at Lady Catherine’s, just prior
to the infamous marriage proposal, Elizabeth teases him with not having danced
at a Merryton ball. Darcy protests that at the time he knew no one. Elizabeth
dismisses this excuse and asks Darcy’s cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, “why a man of
sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill-qualified to recom-
mend himself to strangers?” Fitzwilliam answers readily. “It is because he will
not give himself the trouble” (PP, 171). What is remarkable about Darcy in the
novel’s second half is not only that he searches for and finds Lydia, and that he
spends money on the Bennet family’s behalf. It is that he makes a serious effort to
“recommend himself” to others, to change how he relates to them—and in doing
so, he does not seem merely to be tugging the laboring oar. Often enough, he
seems to be enjoying himself. Of course, he is driven by his love for Elizabeth, but
he loved her before his transformation. His commitment to principle, now
properly understood, enables him to overcome pride and conceit, to have new
desires and a new relation to his love for Elizabeth. Although not Kantian, the
structure of change is what Herman has in mind.
I have spent time on the rationalization of desire because I think that Pride and
Prejudice shows a way in which Herman is correct about the moral life, specif-
ically, she is correct that principle can inform desire. We thus need not accept the
picture of the Kantian as immutably split between them. On the other hand,
I think the concept of moral aspect blindness takes us beyond Kant.
Turning now to that concept, in Pride and Prejudice it comes in two forms:
corrigible and incorrigible. Elizabeth and Darcy, in their different ways, display
corrigible moral aspect blindness. Incorrigible blindness is displayed by the
foolish characters, most notably Collins and Lydia. (There are also characters
who never display moral aspect blindness, such as Wickham and Mr. Bennet.
Each of these knows the proper moral description of the phenomena. They are
wicked or negligent, but never blind.)21
As an example of Elizabeth’s blindness, consider her initial positive assessment
of Wickham. She overlooks several suspicious features of his conduct: his flirta-
tions with many women, his defamation of Darcy to a person he has just met, his
proved-to-be-false insistence that Darcy’s presence would not deter him from
attending a ball. In her initial assessment Elizabeth ignores these phenomena.

21
Among those who seem not blind but still morally problematic, Charlotte is the most
interesting case. By the novel’s end we are left unclear whether her decision to marry Collins should
count as sad but prudent or as a piece of callous imprudence with respect to her own possibilities.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

Still, eventually she registers them, her blindness is remedied, and the facts take
their proper toll on her assessment.
Darcy’s moral aspect blindness is less to others’ conduct than to his own. Most
obviously, he is initially unaware that his manner of proposing marriage is highly
insulting (PP, 188). Here, too, however, the blindness can be corrected. Indeed,
he recognizes his mistake as soon as Elizabeth reproaches him for it.
Where the moral aspect blindness is incorrigible, Austen has interestingly
different ways to characterize what makes it so. Collins is clearly foolish, but he
is also self-important and mercenary. Lydia is described as ignorant and foolish
but also as “the most determined flirt” (PP, 223). Both Collins and Lydia are
culpably (and incorrigibly) blind to things of moral importance. Herman’s
concept of moral aspect blindness can provide a useful way to chart some of
Pride and Prejudice’s moral geography.

5.
Misunderstandings in Pride and Prejudice revolve around misinterpretation of
phenomena but the phenomena themselves are the same for all. Character is
shown in how one interprets the phenomena. Take the early scene in which
Mr. Bennet reads to his daughters the letter sent by Mr. Collins. Three
comment on it, thereby revealing something of their characters. Jane glosses
it charitably, seeking to make Collins a decent sort; Elizabeth notes the
pompous style and absurd content, concluding that it is unlikely that Collins
is a “sensible” person (PP, 63); Mary pedantically focuses on a metaphor. Each
daughter interprets the same text. The words are shared, are common prop-
erty. The words’ meaning is not.
The distinction between text and meaning is rife throughout Austen’s novel. If
we take the world as our text, confusion obtains either when the presentation of
the text involves deception (Wickham’s lies about Darcy), when there is inad-
equate evidence to grasp the text’s meaning (why Bingley leaves Netherfield,
Darcy’s uncertainty as to whether the placid-seeming Jane really loves Bingley) or
when pride or prejudice keeps a character from seeing the text’s meaning clearly
(Elizabeth’s failure to see the impropriety of Wickham’s early conduct). However,
in Austen’s novel it makes sense to aspire to a clear text—new evidence and new
arguments can be effective. Darcy begins to change when he recognizes that his
conduct has been ungentleman-like. Elizabeth changes when she reads Darcy’s
rendition—his attempt to provide a clear text—of his conduct with Bingley and
Wickham. (Indeed, Elizabeth explicitly asks herself which version is true, which
is the clear text—Darcy’s or Wickham’s; PP, 198–203.)
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

Howards End is importantly different. Early in the novel the Schlegels, too,
respond to a composition, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which they hear at the
Queen’s Hall. Forster writes of their responses that one might be like “Helen, who
can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can only
see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds
the full score open on his knees” (HE, 31). No doubt, there are differences between
a letter and a symphony. The point is that the Schlegels are not depicted as hearing
the same notes and interpreting them differently but as having fundamentally
different experiences. Their perceptions are already interpretations.22
Here, Forster is adopting the “impressionistic” method, used by contempor-
aries such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. One depicts elements of character
by showing the impression that events make immediately, perceptually (Forster’s
choice of music rather than words facilitates this). The premise of the method is
that there is something systematic in the way an individual registers the world. To
present a moment of perception is to present an aspect of a character. On the one
hand, this is merely to note a feature of the development of novelistic technique.
On the other hand, in Howards End nothing plays the role of a shared text, a
shared basis by reference to which evidence can, in principle, bring the characters
to agreement. Rather, the characters constantly describe the world differently.
Their perceptions differ, and when there is disagreement it is harder—in the
novel it is often impossible—to bridge the gulf.
I will use Herman’s term, “sensibility,” to refer to that aspect of moral character
that Forster’s technique brings out.23 Sensibility is what registers moral salience.24
Of course, with Forster, a sensibility captures a wide range of things that a
character finds pleasing or displeasing. It might seem to go beyond the strictly
moral scope of Herman’s concerns. In fact, how far the scope of a sensibility
should be thought of as “moral” is part of the issue. The entire range of our
perceptions could affect what we take to be morally salient. We should not, ex
ante, restrict the moral relevance of what a sensibility delivers.

22
The Forster passage is not a perfect parallel to the Austen passage because, as Martha
Nussbaum has pointed out to me, part of the characters’ different responses to the symphony
reflects different degrees of musical education. Only Tibby is “profoundly versed in counterpoint.”
Still, even if Tibby could put counterpoint aside (and that he cannot is relevant to who he is), he
would not see heroes and shipwrecks; and even if Helen were versed in counterpoint, she would
never bring the score to the performance and would likely always see heroes and shipwrecks.
23
To some extent, Austen seems aware of the dimension on which Forster focuses. Indeed, the
filtering aspect of a character is as old as the presentation of caricatures (it goes back at least to
Theophrastus), and it is prominent in Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Bennett and Lydia exemplify it.
They see the world through a foolish filter. We should be wary of assuming an incapacity on
Austen’s part, as if she didn’t have certain colors in her palette.
24
I thank Candace Vogler for this phrase.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

6.
Elizabeth and Darcy ultimately find their interpretations in agreement. The
background for such agreement is both a shared text and a common sensibility.
To be sure, there is also agreement in social status. Elizabeth defends the
propriety of Darcy’s interest in her by noting, “He is a gentleman; I am a
gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal” (PP, 337). Being in the same class
helps them to see things the same way.25 In Howards End the Schlegels and
Wilcoxes all reside in what is by the Edwardian period the quite broad category of
the “gentle.” (And Leonard Bast tries to reside there or at least to seem to do so.
“This story deals with gentlefolk or with those who are obliged to pretend that
they are gentlefolk”; HE, 45.) Yet the sensibilities of the Schlegels and the
Wilcoxes (and of Leonard Bast) are profoundly different. Because their sensibil-
ities are similar and a shared text is available, Elizabeth and Darcy’s disagree-
ments can be dissolved by evidence. The Schlegels and the Wilcoxes have no
shared text. Forster is careful to show that Wilcox descriptions are sometimes
plausible and Schlegel descriptions occasionally wrong, but Forster’s basic stress
is on the different worlds the two families live in. Take Margaret’s jump from a
moving automobile to comfort a woman whose cat the automobile has killed.
Charles Wilcox sincerely describes her jump as a question of having “lost her
nerve” (HE, 215). Nothing she says could dislodge this description.26 Again and
again the two families differ in their descriptions of events, and so of one
another’s characters, and there is no remedy for this difference.

7.
In Pursuits of Happiness Stanley Cavell quotes Milton’s remark that a “meet and
happy conversation” is the “chiefest and noblest end of marriage.”27 Cavell sees as
crucial to the Hollywood comedies of remarriage the capacity of a couple to
engage in the right kind of conversation. This functions as a criterion for whether

25
Pride and Prejudice suggests that what it means to be a gentleman has become a matter of
dispute. Mrs. Bennet is not a lady; her brother, Mr. Gardiner, is a gentleman; Catherine de Bourgh
has the title “Lady” but is hardly one.
26
Charles is explicitly sexist in his description (“Miss Schlegel had lost her nerve, as any woman
might”; HE, 215), but Forster presents women in the novel whose sensibility is thoroughly Wilcox-
ian (HE, 212–15). The difference in sensibility is contingently, not essentially, gendered. Note that
Forster insists that “Charles was absolutely honest” (HE, 215) in his appraisal of Margaret.
27
See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981),
p. 87. The passage is from John Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in The Works of John
Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), volume III, part II, p. 391.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

the pair are meant to be married. We can go back to Shakespeare, as Cavell notes,
and trace a line from plays such as Much Ado About Nothing all the way to, say,
The Awful Truth, a line in which couples who begin with lively, often hostile
conversation (Cavell’s phrase is “hot hostility”)28 end in marriage or remarriage.
Pride and Prejudice would be in that line. From the start, what charms us about
Elizabeth and Darcy is their (frequently barbed) conversation. It is this that
shows that each is fit for the other. The content of their conversation, and not
the mere fact of a marriage, is what makes the novel a comedy.
By contrast, Howards End is mostly a tragedy, even if the final scene contains
consolation and a ray of anachronistic hope. What makes the novel tragic are the
death of Leonard Bast and the breaking of Henry Wilcox, but the tragic tone
already appears when Henry and Margaret marry. For they do not converse, they
do not understand one another, or at least, as Margaret is well aware, Henry does
not understand her: “There are heaps of things in me that he doesn’t, and shall
never, understand” (HE, 174).
It is not that Henry’s conversation falters merely with Margaret and might
have blossomed with some other woman. He converses with nobody. By contrast,
Margaret converses with many people, especially Helen (as Elizabeth Bennet does
with Jane). Like the other Wilcoxes, Henry uses words merely to exchange
information and deliver opinions.29
Two observations, one by Helen, one by Margaret, are relevant here. Helen’s is
vague, Margaret’s more pointed. Both try to identify something missing in
Henry. According to Helen, with the Wilcoxes “the little thing that says ‘I’ is
missing out of the middle of their heads” (HE, 234). The Wilcoxes have desires,
that is, can say “want,” but cannot say “I want.” Helen’s point is hardly that the
Wilcoxes lack egotism. Rather, it seems to be that they fail to see how asserting
their desires entangles them with others who also have desires—and so the failure
to say “I” displaces them from the moral notions associated with living with other
needy and desiring human beings: “‘I want’ must lead to the question, ‘Who am
I?’” and so to Pity and to Justice” (HE, 234). Perhaps the thought is also that if
one cannot say “I,” one cannot say “thou,” and then one cannot achieve either
intimacy or a grasp of moral relatedness.
As for Margaret, she says of Henry that he “never noticed that Helen and
Frieda were hostile, or that Tibby was not interested in currant plantations” (HE,
187). In general, he is blind to the subtleties of human relationships. He “never

28
Ibid., p. 88.
29
It could be hoped that conversation, conversing with another, might change (convert?) those
who converse. That happens with Darcy (and Elizabeth) but seems impossible with Henry.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

noticed the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation, the finger-
posts, the mile-stones, the collisions, the illimitable views” (HE, 187). When
reproached about this, he snorts, “I’ve no intention of frittering away my strength
on that sort of thing” (HE, 187). Herman invokes blindness as a key category in
the moral life. Howards End insists that in important ways Henry is blind. Is this
moral blindness?

8.
Forty years before Howards Ends Matthew Arnold published Culture and
Anarchy, with its condemnation of the sensibility of the English middle class,
what he calls “the Philistines.”30 This was a stock theme of nineteenth-century
social criticism, and it is Forster’s territory as well. 31 On the one side, we have the
family that values art and the life of the mind (consider Arnold’s Hellenism/
Hebraism contrast, and note the name of Margaret’s sister as well as her praise of
Margaret: “You mean to keep proportion, and that’s heroic, it’s Greek”; HE, 194).
On the other side, there is the bustling materialist family, always in a hurry to get
somewhere and to do something. Actually, Forster is more appreciative of the
Wilcoxes than Arnold is of the Philistines. The novel often notes that one
couldn’t get on without the Wilcox type of person, and the only Schlegel male
alternative to Henry and Charles is the pathetically self-absorbed Tibby. Forster is
hardly unequivocal in his praise of the Schlegel sensibility. Still, he finds the
Wilcox sensibility deeply deficient. Moreover, and this is the point, Forster sees
this as a moral deficiency in the sense that it is essentially connected to making
one’s own life and others’ lives bad. It can even lead to the death of the innocent
(Leonard Bast), although this is merely the dramatic element needed for the plot.
More generally, a Wilcox life is, in Arnold’s famous phrase, “an illiberal, dismal
life.”32 Forster sees it as a moral flaw in Henry that he leads such a life and is ready
to condemn Margaret to leading one.

30
See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), in The Works of Matthew Arnold in Fifteen
Volumes (London: MacMillan and Co., 1903–4), vol. vi.
31
For a wonderful discussion of this theme, see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society,
1780–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
32
See Matthew Arnold, Friendship’s Garland (1871), in Arnold, Works, vol. vi, pp. 378–9: “Your
middle-class man thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilization when his letters are
carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if
railway-trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it is nothing that the
trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at
Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.” Arnold is complaining about
the delight of the middle class at being able to move so quickly via the new train system although
they have no adequate conception of the point or value of moving so quickly from one place to
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

In an earlier article I made use of the category of orientation. I said that one’s
“orientation involves what one notices and puts stress on in the world, finds
salient. It involves the descriptions under which one perceives things.” I also
characterized an orientation as “a way of living, a basic stance or attitude toward
the world.”33 Writers on philosophy and literature often invoke such things
as a “vision of life,” “views of the world,” a “general picture.”34 The category of
orientation was intended to make such talk a bit more precise. The goal is the
same with “sensibility.” As I use it here, adapting it now from Herman, a
sensibility is less idiosyncratic than an orientation. In the earlier article
I argued that one character in a novel had an esthetic orientation and another a
theatrical. This was supposed to capture the specific ways in which these specific
characters described and responded to the world (via intentions, beliefs, attitudes,
feelings, actions). Here, I take a sensibility to capture a way of responding to and
living in the world that is common to some group. The scope may remain vague
(the Wilcox family? some large chunk of the Edwardian middle class?), but
within the relevant group there is basic overlap. Members of the group describe
the world in common categories and agree in judgments about what falls under
those categories: they speak the same moral language. Conversely, members of a
different group (e.g., Schlegels) might have a hard time grasping the first group’s
descriptions and might often disagree with its judgments. Assuming that we can
talk of a Wilcox sensibility, what is its flaw?

9.
On Herman’s account, moral aspect blindness presupposes a shared social
practice yielding shared judgments, but crucial to Forster’s complaint is that
the Wilcox sensibility is that of a large part of England. It is the sensibility, so to
speak, of the man on the Clapham omnibus. Henry does not consider blindness
to “lights and shades” to be moral blindness. Margaret does. One cannot support
Margaret here merely by invoking ordinary practices, in this case, Edwardian
practices, for they will be on Henry’s side. Statistically, the Schlegels are outliers.

another. In Howards End, in 1910, Forster makes the same complaint about the middle class and the
motor car.
33
See my “Styles of Self-Absorption,” in G. Hagberg and W. Jost, eds, A Companion to the
Philosophy of Literature.
34
See Cora Diamond, “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels,” in Philosophical Investiga-
tions, vol. 16, no. 2 (1993), p. 134; Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 30 (1956), p. 38, reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics,
p. 79; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 3.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

Now, Margaret insists that Henry is never selfish or petty, and in general tries
to do the right thing as he sees it. In his own way, he is fair-minded. Put
differently, unlike Charles, Henry’s ego does not get in the way. Put yet differ-
ently, we must see in Henry a person whom someone like Margaret could choose
to marry. Of course, all that said, Henry is deeply sexist, regards the servant
classes as beneath him, and holds to a social Darwinist view of the world. Yet
Darcy, too, is surely a sexist and regards the servant classes as beneath him.
Darcy’s good principles are not at that level. We are closer in time and institu-
tions to Henry’s world, and so less inclined to cut him slack about his problematic
social views, but to focus on them is to miss how he differs from Darcy as well as
what is at issue between him and Margaret.35
Let’s look at the novel’s crucial moment, Henry’s refusal to allow the pregnant
and unmarried Helen to spend a night at Howards End. The novel roundly
condemns his decision. What is his moral failing here? Has he wrongly weighted
the competing reasons? Given too little weight to Helen’s needs or to Margaret’s
feelings compared to what might seem slight and hidebound considerations
(what the villagers will say, his conception of piety to his first wife). Or does
his sexism blind him to the parallel between his affair with Jacky Bast and Helen’s
pregnancy by Leonard Bast, and so he fails to see that accepting forgiveness for
the first should lead to bestowing forgiveness for the second (HE, 308)?
Margaret does stress an inconsistency on Henry’s part, as well as a narcissism
or willed blindness that lies behind it, behind his refusal to recognize the parallel
between his actions and Helen’s. Margaret’s explicit charge is that Henry fails to
connect the novel’s two bits of sexual immorality. Nevertheless, I think we see
more deeply into what morally ails Henry if we do not put the central weight
there. Something is at stake beyond the violation of Edwardian sexual mores.36
And being consistent is hardly the issue. After all, Henry could have made his and
Helen’s misstep equal by seeing his own as equally bad, been filled with remorse

35
Some readers will focus on Henry’s suppression of his first wife’s dying note that would have
bestowed Howards End on Margaret. This bit of Forster’s plot seems to me to ring false. Should a
scrawled note by a dying woman to give a major piece of property out of her family to someone she
had met a few times (someone who had never even been to Howards End) be considered an
authentic statement of intent? The reason for legal formalities in wills is in large part to keep
momentary impulses—even intensely felt impulses—from having the practical consequences of
long-held and fundamental convictions. Given the full array of circumstances as he knew them, as
well as his paternal responsibilities as he felt them—and abstracting from the reader’s too easy
contempt for the Wilcoxes—should Henry really have offered Howards End to Margaret at that
time? Is that what “being straight” would really have demanded?
36
I thank Mark Hopwood for help with this and the following paragraph. I should note that, for
this chapter’s purposes, I am working within Margaret’s evaluation of the immorality of Helen’s
conduct. Obviously, attitudes about such things have changed since the Edwardian era.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

and a readiness to do penance, and then, in all consistency, forbidden Helen to

stay at Howards End. To get Henry to see that he is in fact like Helen would be
useful only if it could get him to be more than merely consistent.
Let me put the point another way. Margaret says that Henry had been forgiven
and so he should forgive. But what is wanted is not an admission that, having
been forgiven, he owes something. What is wanted is forgiveness in the right
spirit. Margaret forgave out of love. That is what is wanted but that goes well
beyond a demand for consistency.
Actually, I think that Henry’s deepest failure, in this scene and elsewhere, is his
treatment not of Helen but of Margaret. At the novel’s key moment, Margaret
declares, “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry!” (HE, 308). But
although Margaret is referring to the connection of principle between two sexual
peccadilloes, in rejecting Helen’s request what Henry is really blind to is the
emotional connection between Margaret and Helen. It is that whose import he
ignores. He is rejecting, without understanding, less Helen’s than Margaret’s
request. His is a failure not of principle but of sensibility. (Schlegels and Wilcoxes
do not agree on “what counts as a harm that sets a moral claim.”)37 Henry does
not see how his refusal to let Helen stay at Howards End is a great harm to
Margaret: all else aside, Helen is Margaret’s very dear sister, Helen deeply wants
to spend the night at Howards End, and Margaret deeply wants to make this
possible. Henry’s greatest deficiency is in having a view of the world that inhibits
him from understanding what would count as a harm to his wife and so set a
moral claim on him. This amounts to a failure of knowledge which is, in context,
also a failure of love.

10.
The Wilcox flaw is talked of in different ways. At one point what is at issue is said
to be love (HE, 186–7). Perhaps Henry doesn’t love Margaret enough. Yet the
same passage suggests not that he doesn’t love her enough but that he doesn’t
know how to love her properly, that his upbringing has even made him “a little
ashamed of loving a wife” (HE, 186). Later, the narrator asks whether the
Wilcoxes are capable of affection, and roundly asserts that they are. They “were
not lacking in affection; they had it royally, but they did not know how to use it”
(HE, 329). The idea that the Wilcoxes lack knowledge of some kind is pressed
elsewhere. Henry is said to be “stupid” (HE, 155, 292) and “obtuse” (HE, 187),
and related terms are used about the other Wilcoxes.

37
Herman, “Pluralism and the Community of Judgment,” in Moral Literacy, p. 39.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

The thought seems to be that Henry’s problem is one of practical reason, where
this involves more than means/ends rationality (that the Wilcoxes, at least the
males, have royally). It might, for instance, involve the intelligent ordering of
one’s affections so that they take the proper objects in the proper way. Failure of
such ordering tends to be shown by Charles. In his beating of poor Bast we can
see a perverse variation on Darcy making things right re Wickham and Lydia
(dealing with the bounder who has seduced the heroine’s sister).38 Practical
reason is needed for many things. Among them is to know how to punish the
right person at the right time in the right way. (There are other invidious
variations on scenes from Pride and Prejudice. Compare Margaret’s visit to
Henry’s office with Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley. The characters of the men
are seen through the places they have organized, the way they make their living,
and how they treat those in their employ.)
I have been using Aristotelian terms. Noël Carroll has provided an Aristotelian
gloss on Howards End.39 He finds in the novel a “virtue wheel” and details some
Schlegel/Wilcox contrasts:
A virtue wheel or virtue tableau comprises a studied array of characters who both
correspond and contrast with each other along the dimension of a certain virtue or
package of virtues—where some of the characters possess the virtue in question, or nearly
so, or part of it, while others possess the virtue, but only defectively, or not at all . . . [The
Schlegels] are all imaginative, though only Margaret seems to be imaginative in a virtuous
way, since only Margaret perceives the necessity of tempering imagination with
practicality . . . Helen and Tibby, in turn, illustrate, as Aristotle might have predicted,
two ways in which the virtue of imagination can be defective.40

According to Carroll, the Schlegels are imaginative (although only Margaret

properly so); the Wilcoxes are not imaginative. This doesn’t tell us enough. The
kind of imagination needs to be specified. Henry may or may not be generally
unimaginative but his particular flaw is that he never understands Margaret’s

38
This is a place where Forster, at times nostalgic for the values of old England, understands that
bringing them straightforwardly into the modern world can generate tragedy.
39
Gilbert Ryle has done the same for Austen’s novels. See Gilbert Ryle, “Jane Austen and the
Moralists,” in Ryle, Collected Papers: Critical Essays (London: Hutchinson, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 276–91.
Ryle talks of Austen’s “wine-taster’s technique of matching [major figures] not only against one
another but also against nearly all the other characters in their little world” (p. 277). Each Austen
novel, he says, takes a moral topic (sense versus sensibility, the proper form of persuasion) and
presents characters on a virtue/vice spectrum. With Pride and Prejudice, “almost every character
exhibits too much or too little pride, pride of a bad or silly sort or pride of a good sort, sham pride or
genuine pride and so forth” (p. 278).
40
Noël Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60, no. 1 (2002), p. 12, emphasis in original.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

feelings, never sees her “lights and shades” and so is blind to their importance.41
Consider the following passage from Adam Smith:
When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief
I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if
I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer
if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons
and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account.42

This is an attempt to see and to respond to the other through the other. Smith
describes an act of sympathetic imagination. Had Henry done this with Margaret’s
feelings, if he had tried to respond “upon [her] account,” he might have weighted
her feelings more heavily. The exercise of sympathetic imagination is about
registering particular lights and shades not only for the thrill of “the illimitable
views” (HE, 187) but to get right what is going on, to get the description right,
specifically, the description of the situation that involves the other person and her
feelings. The novel suggests that sympathetic imagination—the capacity to
imagine things from the other person’s perspective—is a basic moral capacity.
That Henry lacks it is a way to characterize his (and the general Wilcox) moral
failing, his form of moral aspect blindness.

11.
On Herman’s picture, the proper moral agent has desires, but in the course of a
proper moral development these have been rationalized, changed to accord with
reason. Over time, through the rationalizing process, desires become aligned with
moral requirements. That is why I don’t desire to possess the nice car I see on the
street and so don’t have to resist that desire. On this picture, although reason
cannot act alone, it has the major role among the constituents of a virtuous
person. Desire is necessary if one is to act virtuously, but desire simpliciter makes
no contribution to being virtuous. Reason is what virtue is about.
Can sympathetic imagination be seen as similarly rationalized? There are two
questions here. Can reason—that is, Kant’s practical reason—inform imagin-
ation? And would such imagination have an independent value in the moral life
or, like desire, would it be valuable only as guided by reason’s hand?

41
Henry thinks of Margaret as “a clever little woman” (HE, 187), but part of his not speaking her
language is that he doesn’t grasp or value her form of “cleverness.” By contrast, Darcy begins by
praising Elizabeth’s “fine eyes” (PP, 27), but soon grasps the value of her intelligence, wit, and
decency. He appreciates her in the full sense. But they speak the same language.
42
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), part VII, section iii, chapter 1, para. 4, p. 374.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

Starting with the first question, Kant, himself, urges us to develop if not a
sympathetic imagination at least our capacity for sympathy. His claim seems to
be that by visiting sickrooms and debtors’ prisons (Kant’s examples) we can
“cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings in us,” where this seems
to mean that we can increase their effectiveness, in terms both of the frequency
with which we feel compassion and the motivational efficacy of such feelings.43
Let’s grant that in this way we can strengthen our natural capacity for
compassion. We can overcome our natural tendency to ignore others’ pain.
Still, here it does not seem that compassion is being rationalized. Rather, on
this picture compassion seems to be a non-rational capacity that, by resonating to
others’ pain, can help to bring about morally proper conduct, and, therefore,
reason tells us to do those things that strengthen it. It is a muscle that can help in
moral lifting and so should be stronger rather than weaker.
That is not what sympathetic imagination involves, at least not in Howards
End. Henry is fully aware that Margaret is in great distress about Helen. His
failing is not that he cannot see her distress but that he cannot understand it—he
can register its force but not grasp its meaning. And if he registers only the force
with which Margaret feels something, it will be unclear why he ought to give way.
(Ought one always to give way to one’s spouse’s strong feelings?) Margaret’s
feelings are not in the least bit irrational. Given her history and relationship with
Helen, they are almost obligatory. To see this—to see not that he should give way
but why he should do so—Henry would have to understand Margaret, and that
would involve more than merely resonating to the force of her feeling.
I am urging that sympathetic imagination involves knowledge and judgment.
Yet isn’t there a parallel to desire? Here, too, a natural capacity needs training to
operate in the morally proper way. Can’t we make use of Herman’s model?
Put differently, could there be a more complex picture such that Kantian
reason informs compassion so that, as a being with “rationalized” compassion,
I am compassionate in the right way, to the right extent, in the right context? The
question is precisely whether Kantian reason is sufficient for this task, or whether
its proper performance, indeed its capacity properly to “rationalize” compassion,
already presumes the exercise of sympathetic imagination. To quote Kant again,
he says that it is our duty to “cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic)
feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on
moral principles and the feeling appropriate to them.”44 Now, a sympathy based

43
See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 205.
44
Ibid.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

on moral principles can keep us from acting from sympathy in a way that violates
morality. It can also help motivate us to do what is morally appropriate. But it
does not seem able to facilitate accurate description of the moral situation.
In an earlier article Herman imagines a sympathetic person finding “someone
struggling, late at night, with a heavy burden at the backdoor of the Museum of
Fine Arts.” Absent intelligent judgment, the sympathetic fellow will help the thief
rather than call the police.45 Herman is surely right that a competent moral agent
needs not just sympathy but also reason if she is to discern the details of the moral
context and to be able properly to balance conflicting moral considerations. My
point about Henry is different. Henry must grasp what specifically Helen means
to specifically Margaret, must grasp what is involved in this woman’s, Margaret’s,
feelings for her sister. This does involve rational capacities and judgment, but it
seems different from the rationalizing of desires. Reason’s task here does not
consist in making imagination consistent with the demands of moral principle.
There is no analogue of training my desires to take as object only what is morally
acceptable, nor of ensuring that sympathy does not blind me to relevant moral
considerations. The task here is to get the moral data accurately on the table so
that, eventually, principle can do its work.
Think of the requirement to take rational nature as an end. According to
Herman, that requirement limits what we should learn to desire. Perhaps it also
limits what we should learn to imagine. Yet it cannot guide us in grasping what
counts as a harm to Margaret, what counts as the kind of harm to which Henry
should give proper weight. In his understanding of his wife, Henry is not failing
to see Margaret as an end. He is failing to see what it is for him specifically to care
for (to love) her specifically. Rational capacities are surely involved in seeing this,
but what is needed goes beyond what falls under Kantian practical reason.
Herman, herself, frequently insists that the moral life is difficult and complex,
and that accurate moral description is an achievement.46 My claim is that to
handle such complexity Herman will have to stray far from Kant. Let’s take the

45
See Barbara Herman, “On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,” in Herman, The
Practice of Moral Judgment, pp. 4–5.
46
Here are a few representative passages: “[M]uch of the work of moral judgment takes place
prior to any possible application of rules in the eliciting of the relevant moral facts from particular
circumstances” (“Making Room for Moral Character,” p. 1); “[M]oral judgment will have no
purchase on a maxim unless it is described using morally salient concepts prior to any use of the
categorical imperative. And these concepts, like the others an agent uses, will be social and local”
(“Training to Autonomy,” in Moral Literacy, p. 144); “The structure of the deliberative field is
determined objectively by the norms of rational deliberation, and subjectively by the agent’s grasp of
factual and evaluative connections. Moral error comes from mistaken representation either of
formal elements of the field, or of the facts judged to be salient” (“Moral Improvisation,” in Moral
Literacy, p. 280).
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

following passage from Herman: “But while it is neither arbitrary nor contingent
that pain and suffering figure centrally in moral thought, how they count, and
whose pain and suffering counts, may be, to some extent, an open question.”47 To
see how Margaret’s “pain and suffering counts,” Henry will have to exercise
imagination. This will require intelligence. He will have to think about Margaret,
who she is, what Helen has meant to her, and so forth. There is no formula for
how to do this, not even much in the way of rules of thumb, and certainly nothing
that flows simply from the value of rational agency. It concerns properly grasping
and responding to what a Henry James character calls “the personal quantity.”48
In one of the few places in which Herman unduly simplifies the moral
phenomena, she remarks:
If I see your need as a source of frustration and pain for you, which I am drawn to
alleviate, then I see you as a vulnerable sentient creature, and myself as provider of a
benefit. If, by contrast, I see your need as an obstacle to your effective agency, as making a
claim on me that derives from the value of rational agency per se, then it is not just your
need that I see differently, but you, and so myself in relation to you. Moral action
expresses the sense of relation.49

This division into the sentient creature and the rational agent misses what Henry
needs: a way to grasp and respond to the rational sentient creature, Margaret, his
wife. Elsewhere, Herman notes that moral action expresses the sense of a very
specific relation between specific agents.50 Yet nothing about the value of rational
agency per se can help Henry to get right his specific relation to Margaret. In
Howards End sympathetic imagination plays a more robust and independent role
than that played by desire as Herman construes it. Sympathetic imagination is
shown as a distinct and distinctively valuable component of the virtuous person.

12.
My claim has been that a virtuous person has at least one basic moral capacity
(but maybe more than one) that is not reducible to or in some sense informed or
structured by Kantian practical reason. But perhaps this misses Forster’s point.
We could read his novel as depicting not an independence but an interdepend-
ence of multiple morally important elements. Henry is stupid; he lacks imagin-
ation; he does not love Margaret properly; his sensibility is amiss. Moreover, he

47
Herman, “Contingency in Obligation,” in Moral Literacy, p. 306.
48
See Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 33.
49
Herman, “Training to Autonomy,” in Moral Literacy, p. 133.
50
Herman, “Moral Improvisation,” in Moral Literacy, p. 298.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

refuses to change, will not give himself the trouble to use his imagination (HE,
187; by contrast, Darcy finally gives himself the trouble to be nice to people).
These elements could be seen as intertwined. If Henry is properly to appreciate
Margaret, he must adopt the Schlegel sensibility so that he can use his imagin-
ation properly (see lights and shades); yet to do this, he must will to do it, and he
cannot do that unless he grasps the value of the Schlegel sensibility. And to grasp
its value would be to become a person with the capacity and disposition for
sympathetic imagination—which would be already to have acquired the Schlegel
sensibility.
Henry’s flaw is simultaneously a case of will not and cannot. It is not that
Henry understands what he needs to do and doesn’t do it. His problem is not
weakness of will. Rather, he cannot see what he needs to do. From one angle this
is merely a fact about him. From another, it is a function of his unwillingness to
take steps that would give him a new insight, an unwillingness that is itself a
function of his lack of knowledge. The situation seems frustrating because it
seems as if there is something Henry could do, but in fact there is nothing he
could do.51
Howards End can be read either as highlighting the range and independence or
the range and interdependence of what goes into moral judgment. I favor the
interdependence reading. Yet note that, on either interpretation, the novel comes
down solidly on the side of virtue pluralism against virtue monism. Virtue
monism says that the virtuous person need have only one fundamental moral
capacity. If that capacity is sufficiently robust, one can be virtuous. Virtue
pluralism says that multiple well-functioning capacities are needed for virtue.
A monistic Kantian would say that commitment to Kantian principle (the
traditional ideal of a good will) is both necessary and sufficient for virtue.
A pluralistic Kantian would see such commitment as necessary but not sufficient.
The distinction is scalar, and the extreme monistic pole is difficult to accept.
Neo-Kantians, for instance, Herman, insist that the moral life involves more than
commitment to principle.
Yet one cannot move far along the scale toward the pluralistic pole and still
remain much of a Kantian. If one says that not only commitment to principle but
also the proper exercise of capacities A, B, C, and so on are crucial for virtue, one

51
I have not addressed a question that arises here. Henry does not attempt to exercise sympa-
thetic imagination, but presumably one could sincerely attempt to do so and yet be less than perfect
at it, perhaps much less. What is the moral requirement here: merely the sincere attempt or also
considerable success? The Kantian will say the first, the Aristotelian the second. Even with the
Kantian, however, and even if Kantian practical reason requires the sincere attempt, what seems to
be in play is a capacity whose proper exercise and value are independent of Kantian practical reason.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

no longer gives principle the distinctive role that it has in Kant’s work. The vision
of proper character in Howards End seems a significant step toward the plural-
istic pole. If we accept my reading of the novel and accept that it is a great novel
and accept that great literature is revelatory of the moral life, then the novel poses
a problem for a Kantian and even a neo-Kantian picture of virtue.

13.
So much, then, for my critique of Herman on moral aspect blindness. In the final
two sections I indulge in a pair of brief speculations about the interconnections of
our moral capacities.
I have argued that Henry is deficient in love, in practical wisdom, and in
sympathetic imagination. Are these deficiencies internally connected? Novelists,
such as Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford, and Forster, often link them. They ask
whether the capacity imaginatively to understand others is a condition of moral
decency and a feature of moral intelligence. Interestingly, although James’ villains
show great subtlety in human relations, they lack that concern for others that
would enable an appreciation of the other person, where “appreciation” means
simultaneously understanding and valuing—the novels suggest that valuing is
part of understanding. As in Howards End, it is unclear whether to describe such
Jamesian characters as lacking in intelligence, in love, or in something that
involves both: in The Golden Bowl Charlotte Stant, the villain, is said to be
“stupid” while Maggie Verver, the heroine, does everything for “love.” (Interest-
ingly, Charlotte admits a failure of imagination, remarking that she cannot get
into Maggie’s skin.)52
At issue is how far love, of some kind, is a condition of accurate description.
I want to approach the topic via some famous remarks of Iris Murdoch’s.53
Murdoch, following Simone Weil, stresses being attentive, really looking. The
enemy, she says, is fantasy, flightiness, laziness, narcissism, prejudice. In
Murdoch’s well-known daughter-in-law/mother-in-law passage, the mother-in-
law acknowledges several possible sources of inattention and urges herself to

52
For the reference to Charlotte’s stupidity, see Henry James, The Golden Bowl, p. 533; for
Maggie’s invocation of “love,” see p. 379; for Charlotte’s confession that she cannot understand
Maggie, see p. 236. For a discussion of these issues, see my “Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl
and Moral Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 16, no. 2, Winter 1990.
53
An excellent article on Murdoch and morality is Kieran Setiya, “Murdoch on the Sovereignty
of Good,” Philosophers’ Imprint, vol. 13, no. 9, 2013. Setiya closes with a promissory note for future
work to explicate the nature of Murdochian love.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

“look again.”54 The result is a different and, we are led to believe, more accurate
description.
Murdoch insists that what is needed is “a just and loving gaze directed upon an
individual reality,” and that “[t]he love which brings the right answer is an
exercise of justice and realism and really looking.”55 So attentiveness is tied to
love and justice. That it is tied to justice seems unexceptionable—giving justice to
another surely requires being accurate. But Murdoch’s claim is that one needs a
just and loving gaze—a gaze that is accurate because or through loving.
At stake could be either a necessary or a sufficient condition, but let’s limit
ourselves to the former. If the claim is true, the upshot is that virtue, to work
properly, needs sympathetic imagination (for accurate description), and such
imagination, to work properly, needs love.
There are Christian resonances here, but consider a pair of secular claims
about human moral psychology.
(1) Really looking involves sympathetic imagination.
(2) Properly to engage in sympathetic imagination requires something like
love or concern for its object.
The first seems not especially controversial. To redescribe the daughter-in-law,
the mother-in-law must see things, at least to some extent, from the former’s
point of view. She must imagine the daughter-in-law as doing X with intent
A and attitude M rather than with intent B and attitude N. And if this is not to be
mere fantasy, the mother-in-law must try to see things from the actual daughter-
in-law’s actual point of view.
The second is more puzzling. Why should love or concern lead to accurate
description? One might have thought that accuracy is enhanced by keeping one’s
emotions out of things. Of course, there are obvious ways in which love can
facilitate accuracy. If C cares about D, C will likely be moved to understand D’s
feelings; and if C cares about D, C probably knows D, and so can better
understand D’s feelings. Still, Murdoch clearly sees love as crucial to accuracy
via more than such contingent features. Maybe the effective exercise of sympa-
thetic imagination usually requires Murdochian love. Let’s assume that someone
could imaginatively grasp what another is like from a desire to prompt nuanced
and particularized torment, but that such a case would be highly atypical. Still, if a
malicious virtuoso of imagination is conceivable, it would be good to show that
such a person would be non-standard in more than a statistical sense.

54
See Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 17.
55
Ibid., p. 91, emphasis in original.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

Now, Hume and Kant both assert a motivational asymmetry between good
and evil. Hume claims that we have some, even if not much, disinterested
concern for others, and that this can be at least weakly motivationally efficacious.
What he stresses is that we have no disinterested malice.56 Kant says that we can
act out of commitment to morality but not out of commitment to immorality.57
Both the sentimentalist and the rationalist insist on a motivational asymmetry.
Can we piggy-back an epistemic asymmetry on the motivational?
Suppose (i) that descriptive accuracy tends to require a non-distorting exercise
of the imagination. Suppose (ii) that self-interest and narcissism, as well as
malice, tend to distort imaginative accuracy because they tend to generate merely
partial and one-sided descriptions: one’s focus is on what is tied to oneself.
Suppose (iii) that there is a disinterested benevolence that facilitates imaginative
accuracy. Think of this as a generosity of spirit that overcomes egotism, undoes
self-absorption. And suppose, finally, (iv) that, as Hume says, there is no disin-
terested malice. We then get our epistemic asymmetry.
(i) and (ii) seem plausible, but (iii) and (iv) are the key. Here, I can merely note
that (iii) and (iv) seem to be not only premises of Murdoch’s view but in line with
important strains of Western philosophical thought. They are not philosophically
outlandish. Still, that is not justification (moreover, there are dissenters about
(iv), e.g., Nietzsche).
Let me sum up this section. I have argued, through Howards End, that accurate
moral description requires proper exercise of sympathetic imagination. Now, if
one accepts that argument, and if such proper exercise requires something like
love or concern, then a virtuous person must be not just a person of reason and
imagination but also, in some sense, a loving or concerned person.

14.
I have been pressing the thought that the moral life involves multiple elements in
intricately connected ways. That will not surprise anyone who looks at ordinary
moral experience. At issue in day-to-day life tends to be a range of capacities—the
capacity to notice; to describe well; to shake oneself free of one’s anxieties and
obsessions; to balance competing considerations properly; to express oneself
forcefully or delicately as the case may be; and many others. Finding the proper

56
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), p. 114.
57
See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. Allen Wood and
George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 58.
 DANIEL BRUDNEY

principle and applying it properly might also be crucial, as might having the
proper desire to the proper degree. The point is that to act well usually involves
having multiple capacities functioning well together. This is not quite the ancient
idea of the unity of the virtues. Rather, it points, as I suggested at the beginning, to
the breadth of a good moral character.
This prompts a final bit of speculation. Suppose that moral virtue requires a
range of more or less equally fundamental capacities.58 Then what bite would be
left to the old question of the source of moral judgment? Near the beginning of
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals Hume comes close to seeing that,
given a sufficiently complex account of moral judgment, the question is a rather
odd one.
The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or
odious, praise-worthy or blameable . . . depends on some internal sense or feeling, which
nature has made universal in the whole species . . . But in order to pave the way for such a
sentiment, and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that
much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn,
distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and
ascertained . . . [I]n many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite
to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may
frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude,
that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species, and demands the assistance of our
intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence on the human mind.59

Hume recognizes that an actual moral judgment involves the interwoven exercise
of many capacities—let’s say, feeling, reason, imagination—yet he cannot let go
of the impulse to find what pronounces “the final sentence.” Suppose, pace
Hume, that it is reason. Then human beings turn out to be fundamentally allied
to rational beings whose feelings, etc. might be very different from our own (God?
angels? rational bats?). Suppose instead, with Hume, that it is sentiment. Then we
turn out, in principle, to be fundamentally allied to other sentient beings, that is,
beings without rational capacities. In either direction, however, we are surely
talking about very distant relatives. If human moral judgment and the actions

58
In an earlier article, I used the model of a mammal’s body. Several organs are vital—necessary
for functioning—and so not to be ranked against one another in importance (the liver is not more
necessary to survival than the heart). Moreover, there can be bi-lateral interaction. Bad kidney
function can overstrain the heart, but a weak heart can undermine the kidneys. On this organic
picture of virtue, one capacity can causally affect another (reason can tell us to develop our capacity
for sympathy), but causal relations are of many kinds and no vital moral capacity is more important
than any other. See my “Lord Jim and Moral Judgment: Literature and Moral Philosophy,” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3, Summer 1998.
59
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 75–6.
 THE BREADTH OF MORAL CHARACTER 

that follow from it require the well-functioning of capacities A, B, C, etc., isn’t the
interesting question what those capacities are and how they interconnect? Why is
it crucial to determine who else is in our family tree? Or, rather, if all these
capacities are needed for moral judgment, doesn’t that mean that the most
accurate way to think of human beings is as a true hybrid and not more decisively
of one bloodline than the other? Isn’t it then pointless to ask about the central
strain of our moral lineage?
 15
Learning To Be Good (or Bad)
in (or Through) Literature
Mitchell S. Green

I. Introduction, and Some Types of Knowledge

and Learning
Harlequin romances are fiction but not, according to most accounts, literature.
Other works, such as Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglas, an American Slave,
are literature without being fiction. Accordingly, in what follows I shall use
‘literary fiction’ to refer to fictional works of a sufficiently high caliber to count
as literature. I am in no position to say what achieving this standard consists in,
but plausible criteria will include the depiction of complex yet compelling
characters, creative use of language, innovation in the use of formal features
such as plot, provision of insight into some of life’s large themes, and a high
degree of beauty or features enabling experiences of the sublime.
No one of these features would appear to be either necessary or sufficient for
a fictional work to count as literature. However, many serious readers feel
confident that provision of insight is one condition that tends, ceteris paribus,
to make a fictional work into literature. By contrast, being entertaining is less
likely to be invoked as a condition tending to make a fictional work into
literature. A reason for this asymmetry may be due to our view that while
achieving insight into life’s large themes is apt to make us better people, being
entertained is not. Reading of the challenges faced, with varying success, by
Hamlet, Huck Finn, Aladdin, Jane Eyre, and Alexander Portnoy will, one would
like to think, prepare us for the moral struggles that we non-fictional characters
face. By contrast, while being entertained by a novel might have some thera-
peutic value, it does not seem apt to help me cultivate virtues or to cast aside
some of my vices.
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

This confidence in the ethical value of literary fiction is, however, vulnerable
to two types of challenge. One type raises an in-principle doubt about the
prospect of coming to learn about right and wrong by reading about what
fictional characters do. It has seemed to some authors impossible to gain
knowledge about the actual world from events that occur in a fictional one
precisely in virtue of its fictionality. A related, in-principle objection starts with
the observation that since our primary response to fiction is not belief, but
rather “make-belief,” gaining knowledge from fiction except adventitiously is
out of the question.
Another type of challenge does not raise a problem in principle, but rather
contends that as a matter of empirical, experimentally validated fact, literary
fiction lacks strong epistemic credentials. Many intellectuals are content to think
that engagement with great literature is likely to be morally uplifting. However, if
we ask what the experimental or observational evidence shows, convincing
answers are not easy to find. What’s more, our attempts to find answers may
well reveal a confirmation bias in which we depend on anecdotal evidence of
readers whose lives were changed for the better after encountering Kerouac, Zola,
or Marquez, or Woolf. We all too often ignore those readers whose lives were not
so changed, and forget to ask ourselves how many lives were unimproved by
engagement with good or great literature, or how many of those readers
unmoved by great literature would instead have been improved by spending
their time on the road or in a soup kitchen.1
In what follows I will expound and reply to the in-principle skepticism about
the capacity of literature to improve readers. After establishing that there is no
such bar to literature being a source of knowledge, I consider some ways in which
it can have epistemic worth. I will then examine some comparatively empirical
questions addressing whether literature has the capacity to improve or corrupt
us. Building on an account of empathy developed in earlier work, I will argue that
sustained engagement with literary fiction can change us morally. It is a further
question, which I leave open, whether such engagement is more likely to make us
better or worse people.

1
G. Currie (2013) expresses a similar worry in writing, “We are poor at knowing why we make
the choices we do, and we fail to recognize the tiny changes in circumstances that can shift us from
one choice to another. When it comes to other people, can you be confident that your intelligent,
socially attuned and generous friend who reads Proust got that way partly because of the reading?
Might it not be the other way around: that bright, socially competent and empathic people are more
likely than others to find pleasure in the complex representations of human interaction we find
in literature?”
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

Before proceeding, it will be helpful to map out some of the terrain that
knowledge and learning inhabit. We may distinguish among at least two types
of knowledge. One is knowing-that, such as occurs when we know that the
Aurora Borealis is caused by collisions between gas molecules in the Earth’s
atmosphere and charged particles released by the sun; the other is knowing-how,
such as occurs when we know how to tie a slip-knot, how ostracism feels, or how
the Aurora Borealis looks. Performing an action does not imply that one knows
how to do so; my lucky first try might result in a slip-knot, but it is only if I can
reproduce that performance with reasonable consistency that I can count as
knowing how to tie this kind of knot. Also, knowledge-wh (where, how, who,
etc.) seems to cut across the knowing how/that boundary: I might know where
Vladivostok is due to my knowing that it is a city in the Russian Far East; on the
other hand, I might know where my pen is, not because I have any idea where it is
on the globe (I’ve been kidnapped, and now have no idea where I am), but
because I know how to locate it at the bottom of my backpack.2
Correlatively with our distinction between knowing that and knowing how, we
may distinguish between learning that and learning how. The former yields an
intellectual competency that one might display in answering a question. Learning
how covers a wider area, including manual, technical, and emotional skills. (I can
learn how to sew a pattern, how to operate a lathe, and how to empathize with a
parent whose child is gravely ill.) Learning how includes learning that as a special
case, since if I’ve learned that P, I now know how to answer the question, Is it the
case that P? In some cases, such as achieving fluency in Mandarin or playing an
arpeggio, learning how may take years of painstaking effort. Also, I might learn
how to do something without knowing that I am doing so. At some point in my
youth I must have learned how far to stand from a person while speaking with
them. I happen to have learned about norms of personal space in an Anthropol-
ogy course in college, but I might have gone my entire life without being aware
that I knew how to adhere to such norms.
I will assume that virtues and vices can be learned. I might learn to be more
generous with my time and other resources by coming to appreciate the effect
that such generosity can have on the well-being of others. Or I might learn to be
cruel by watching cruel behavior in others, acquiring a taste for it, and developing
my own ingenious ways of causing others to suffer. As with norms of personal
space, I might acquire these skills without knowing that I am doing so. In the

2
Recent years have seen increased interest in the question whether knowing how is reducible to
knowing that. I’ve argued (Green ms) that if there are good grounds for reducing knowing-how to
knowing-that, there are equally good grounds for a reduction in the opposite direction.
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

cruelty case for instance, I do not need to think of myself as learning to be cruel;
instead I might find myself developing a fondness for doing that sort of thing,
where the demonstrative refers to what is in fact an instance of putting someone
on the conversational defensive by making them uncomfortable. While one
might hope that we and others will concentrate our efforts on learning to be
good, vice can also be cultivated and even refined.

II. Fiction and Supposition

An objection to the possibility in principle of gaining knowledge from fiction
might go as follows. When writing a work of fiction an author is permitted to
make things up: who the characters are, what their personalities are like, what the
historical moment is, even what laws govern the natural world. In so doing
the author is not purporting to describe how things are, and this is attested to
by the fact that we would not ask the author how she knows her characters have
the features she ascribes to them. Granted, such genres as “hard” science fiction
require the writer to imagine worlds that do not violate the laws of physics, and
historical novels must maintain large-scale fidelity to the known historical facts.
However, constraints such as these leave considerable leeway for the author’s
imagination. Accordingly, it is one thing to say that we know, in the world of
the work of fiction, that Jane Eyre is an orphan. It would be a confusion to
infer anything from this about what holds outside the fictional world created
by Brontë.3
The skeptic about the possibility of gaining knowledge from fiction might
qualify her view with a further concession. For often works of fiction are set in a
certain historical context: Post-Revolutionary America, Han Dynasty China, etc.
A character described as living on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1792 will need to
be drawn in a way that accords with the likely constraints on life there, and
knowledgeable readers might well take exception to the accuracy of such por-
trayals if improperly drawn. At the same time, when such portrayals have passed
muster with editors and reviewers in such a way as to leave their implicit
historical claims unchallenged, a reader might learn something from the work

3
Stolnitz for instance writes, “Art, uniquely, never confirms its truths. If we find that stubborn
pride and ignorant prejudice sometimes keep attractive men and women apart, we find evidence for
this truth about the great world in the great world. The fiction does not and cannot provide the
evidence” (J. Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992),
p. 196). While Stolnitz does not assert that it is by virtue of being fictional that a work of
fiction cannot provide evidence, that claim is a natural interpretation of what he is assuming in
the passage quoted.
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

of literary fiction, such as the habits of the Indians that traded with White settlers
in Pennsylvania, or the diet of peasants in Han China. However, the skeptic
might point out, this kind of “learning from fiction” is a pallid substitute for what
proponents of literary cognitivism (LC) normally claim novels can provide. For
proponents of this view suppose that fiction is crucial to the transmission of
knowledge, while on the present suggestion, fiction is valuable primarily as a
device for heightening the vividness and emotional power of the historical
narrative being spun.
Let us accordingly define LC as follows:
Literary Cognitivism: Some works of literary fiction are potential sources of knowledge in
a way that depends crucially on their being fictional.4

LC is neutral on the question whether the knowledge that literary fiction provides
is knowledge-that or knowledge-how; one possibility is that what is provided
simply varies from one case to another, while some literary works provide both.
Also, a denier of LC might take issue either with the fictional nature of literary
fiction or instead with its literary nature.5 Let us first consider the former source
of skepticism, reserving the latter for Section IV.
If the objection to LC on the ground of fictionality were cogent, it would also
show that it is impossible to gain knowledge from the process of supposition for
the sake of argument. After all, one who employs this method of reasoning is
allowed to suppose what she wishes, including propositions that imply contra-
dictions. Yet we routinely use suppositions in order to establish knowledge-
claims, either in the form of conditionals, or as negations of propositions that
have been shown, under the scope of their supposition, to imply a contradiction.
Further, such knowledge claims are not restricted to philosophy. Everyday
reasoning is replete with suppositions (“What if we try to catch the 7:16 to the
coast?”, “Suppose Manchester United beats Liverpool”). The same may be said
for scientific reasoning. Galileo used a thought experiment to argue against the

4
LC is to be distinguished from a thesis that implies LC but also asserts that the knowledge
literary fiction provides is not available through any other means such as journalism, memoir, or
research in social psychology. (We might call this literary cognitive uniqueness.) I do not find this
claim plausible, but will not argue against it here since we may remain agnostic about it while
discussing other important issues. Also, discussion of these topics often is put in terms of the idea of
“messages” in art. I avoid this terminology because it makes it difficult to ask whether the author’s
message is justified, and elides the distinction between types of information conveyed.
5
I will not explore the possibility of a view suggesting that even though the literary and fictional
natures of literary fiction are, individually, unobjectionable, the combination of these two features
makes for trouble.
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

view that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones; Schrödinger’s cat, Maxwell’s
Demon, and the twin paradox are other famous cases.6
Just because one has stipulated a proposition to be true in a fiction, then, it
does not follow that one cannot also gain knowledge from the inferential process
that ensues. Whether knowledge is thereby gained depends on how one reasons
with the supposed content. In the case of supposition for the sake of argument, if
one reasons cogently under the scope of a proposition P, and concludes that Q,
one can assert that if P, then Q, no longer under the scope of the supposition of
P. Formal systems that permit supposition for the sake of argument, known as
natural deduction systems, also employ the rule, Reiteration, which permits one
to restate propositions that had been previously established under the scope of
the newly supposed material. Properly executed suppositional reasoning in a
formal system permits establishment of new claims no longer under the scope of
any supposition. It is, accordingly, a source of knowledge.
The use of suppositions in formal systems is a rigorization of an activity that
we engage in in everyday life. Indeed, one can also reason informally with
suppositions for the sake of argument without running afoul of any objection
in principle to the possibility of gaining knowledge therefrom. “Suppose we take
the 3:17 train to Union Station. Then we can catch the 4:35 from there to the
coast, getting there in time for the ferry unless there is some delay.” In this
reasoning we “reiterate” such background knowledge as train arrival and depart-
ure times, and that a ferry runs from a coastal town to the island that is our
destination. Further, from such reasoning we may conclude that if we take the
3:17, we will be able to catch the ferry, barring any delays. Suppositions such as
the proposition that we take the 3:17 to Union Station are a species of fictions,
though likely not literature. Yet it would belie confusion about the nature of
reasoning to object that since you can suppose pretty much anything you wish,
it’s impossible to use this method to formulate a viable plan of action.
The itinerary-planning discussion imagined is a type of thought experiment.
Many thought experiments also purport to yield knowledge rather than plans.
Galileo used one such experiment to argue that it is not the case that the heavier
the body, the faster it falls. Schrödinger used another with the intention of
providing a reductio of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In philosophy, we are asked to contemplate Nozick’s experience machine, and a

6
By construing them as arguments, Norton (1996) provides a compelling account of the
epistemic value of thought experiments. Carroll (2002) also observes that thought experiments in
philosophy are a species of fiction, and argues that since we don’t object in principle to their use in
philosophy, it is not clear what the basis would be of an objection to their use in literature.
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

common response is one of revulsion at the prospect of a life consisting of

synthesized pleasures; on the strength of this revulsion we might reject hedonic
utilitarianism. A trolley-car scenario might lead us to reject act-utilitarianism.
Another thought experiment asks whether you would survive being incinerated
on the condition that a molecule-for-molecule replica of you is built somewhere
else in the universe. Our responses to these scenarios enable us to refine and in
some cases revise our views on questions in ethics, personal identity, and the like.
While a particular attempt at establishing a conclusion from a thought experi-
ment might fail (perhaps the thought experiment was under-described, or belies a
subtle incoherence, or does not generate the conclusions that its author intended
it to), we do not object in principle to such forays into the fictional.
A supposition might establish that something is so, but it may also show how
to do something. Imagine animated demonstrations of how to change an auto-
mobile’s oil filter, how to perform CPR, or how to talk to a child about the death
of a parent. In each case the animation, albeit fictional, shows how to do
something, and a proper appreciation of the work will, with practice, enable
one to learn how to perform the act in question. With some practical demon-
strations, whether one takes them as guides for one’s own behavior will in turn
help determine the sorts of vices or virtues one cultivates. This is facilitated by the
fact that we sometimes provide practical demonstrations unwittingly of such
things as: how to alienate a friend, condescend to a teenager, or exhibit false
humility. In the latter case, the comedian Harris Wittels has isolated a form of
false humility in his book, Humblebrag (2012), which details ways in which
we use social media for self-promotion under the guise of modesty or lament.
Whether an example of humblebragging is real or fictional, one can learn to spot
the behavior in others, and then identify that same behavior (or at least tendency
thereto) in oneself.7 Accordingly, fiction can show us not just that something is
so, but also how to do something, with the latter category encompassing behavior
of ethical significance.
Finally, a hypothetical scenario may be used to support a conclusion, but it
may also be used to pose a question. A middle-school math problem might read,
“Natasha rides her bike at 14 mph for 33 minutes. How far has she traveled by the

7
In a review of Wittel’s book, Henry Alford writes, “There’s great solace in rolling your eyes
heavenward in the presence of a sympathetic conspirator, and in developing with that conspirator a
series of nonbitchy jokes fueled by the humblebrag and its creator. But in the end, the real challenge
is to realize that falsely modest people are probably trying to combat their own perceived weakness.
We then need to try to cultivate a tolerance devoid of condescension, possibly taking a cue from
Victoria Gotti, who, when asked about her husband, John Gotti, once said, ‘All I know is, he
provides.’ ” The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2012.
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

end of her ride?” The initial supposition naturally leads to a question, which is in
turn an opportunity for intellectual progress. So too, while thought experiments
in science and philosophy are typically produced with a didactic aim, we often
pose more open-ended thought experiments with an object of getting our
interlocutors to reflect on an issue and possibly to clarify, refine, or elaborate
their positions. In some cases this reflection is largely a matter of taking note of
one’s own affective response to a supposed situation; in others it is a matter of
asking oneself what should be done; in yet others it is a matter of asking what one
would do in such a situation.
We may summarize these three types of thought experiment as didactic
(supposing P, Q), directive (supposing P, do Q), and interrogative (supposing
P, Q?).8 I do not claim that all fiction conforms to one or more of these structures;
further, a single work may exhibit more than one such structure at different
points. I do, however, suggest that a non-negligible number of works of literary
fiction exhibit at least one of these three structures, and that appreciating the
structural features of those that do so sheds light on their epistemic value.

III. Telling, Asking, and Showing How in Literature

Thought experiments in science, philosophy, and everyday life are fictions, albeit
usually terse ones. They are potential sources of knowledge for all that. Such
thought experiments are not in general literary fictions, since they tend to lack the
distinguishing features of literature: normally a philosophical thought experi-
ment does not build dramatic tension, comprise finely crafted prose, or exhibit
compelling characterization. But on the present construal of doubt about LC, it is
the fictionality of literary fiction that critics of LC appeal to. Hence if that appeal
to fiction were cogent, it would also show that we cannot acquire knowledge from
thought experiments in science, philosophy, and everyday life.

8
Another objection to the possibility of gaining knowledge from fiction emphasizes the role of
make-believe. On some accounts, when reading a work of fiction we are to make-believe rather than
believe what we read. Proper engagement with Jane Eyre requires that we make as if there is a girl
named “Jane Eyre” who is an orphan having to find her way in nineteenth-century England, etc. This
perspective accounts for why, when we engage properly with fiction, we do not ask how the author
knows the things she says. Further, while knowledge may be related in some close way to justified
true belief, the same may not be said for justified true make-believe. Accordingly, literary fiction’s
role is to engage the imagination, and it is not in the business of providing knowledge. However,
while it is true that readers of fiction engage their imagination, it does not follow that they do no
more than this. After all, thought experiments in science, everyday life, and philosophy engage our
imagination but in some cases also justify beliefs. The question is, then, whether, since some of our
engagement with literary fiction takes the form of make-believe, all of it does. I do not know of a
cogent argument for this stronger conclusion, and in fact I will argue against that conclusion.
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

In what follows I’ll proceed on the premise that thought experiments in

science, everyday life, and philosophy can be sources of knowledge. Further,
when we seek knowledge from these sources, it is normally appropriate to appeal
to a body of background knowledge to aid our reasoning. In an everyday
conversation aimed at determining who might have taken the car keys, we can
appeal to a set of propositions that all interlocutors accept, and are aware that one
another accept. This is known as Common Ground (CG) and in the present
example will include such propositions as that car keys are needed to start cars,
and that a key can’t be in two distinct places at the same time. An intuitive test of
whether a proposition is in CG is whether a speaker can felicitously presuppose it.
In the present example we might do this with such remarks as, “The car is gone,
so someone other than the cat must have taken the keys.”
With the notion of presupposition comes that of accommodation. In everyday
discourse, we often indulge a speaker whose utterance presupposes rather than
asserts a proposition by silently entering that proposition into CG. Someone I’ve
not met before comes late to a pre-arranged meeting, remarking, “I’m very sorry
but my car broke down.” The use of a genitive in her utterance presupposes
rather than asserts that she has at least one car, and unless I have evidence to the
contrary I will automatically accept that this speaker owns a car. Assuming that
other interlocutors do the same, and that we are aware of one another doing so,
this proposition will now be part of CG.9
A scientific writer may appeal to CG among her audience, just as a philosopher
can, though how much either writer can assume will depend on how accessible
they want their work to be. Generally, the more material is in CG, the more
exclusive the audience. By contrast, a philosopher or scientist aiming to reach a
wide audience will be at pains to make the most minimal possible demands on
CG, that is, to presuppose as little as possible. She may also try to add to CG by
asserting or presupposing a particular content. She will be more likely to succeed,
however, if she can establish those contents by argumentation, show them to be
self-evident or to follow from what is already in CG, or (if the audience is
sufficiently deferential) invoking her status as an authority.
The notion of CG was introduced by philosophers such as Stalnaker (2002)
with the purpose of explaining real-time conversation. On his conception, CG is
an evolving entity to which all interlocutors can contribute propositional con-
tents, and any member of the conversational group can demur from another’s

9
A more detailed discussion of the role of presupposition, accommodation, and CG than is
possible here may be found in M. S. Green, “Conversation and Context,” in E. Zimmerman et al.,
eds, Wiley Companion to Semantics (Wiley: forthcoming).
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

proffered contribution to CG and call for a defense of that claim. Although face-
to-face, real-time conversation was the initial domain of application for CG, that
notion may be applied to the relation between an author and her readers as well.
An author whose readers are her contemporaries, and members of the same
society (or even subculture), will share substantial common ground with them,
and this is what makes references to politics, culture, and the like possible in
literary fiction. It also helps explain why reading literature from a different epoch
or radically different culture can be so challenging.10
Appreciation of CG also enables us to understand some aspects of genre.
Picaresque novels, noir detective stories, magical realism, Gothic fiction,
coming-of-age stories, fables, allegories, political satire, and splatterpunk are all
literary genres with distinctive sets of norms. It is, one hopes, commonly accepted
among an author and her readers that there are no ghosts. However, what makes
her work fall into the genre of Gothic fiction is that the denial of any supernatural
phenomena can no longer be invoked from CG into the world of the work.
Although one can appreciate the norms of a genre without liking that genre, one
who takes issue with Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot on the ground that there are no
vampires simply fails to grasp the norms within which his work was composed.
Likewise, it is common ground among an author of a Magical Realist novel and
her audience that people are not—as happens in Márquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude—born with the tail of a pig, and don’t survive by eating dirt from the
floor of their hut. However, these bits of background knowledge are held in
abeyance in the worlds of such fictional works. In addition, then, to carrying
stylistic norms and characteristic plot structures, genre acts as a filter on CG.11
This feature of genre seems to have no analogue in everyday conversation.
We have seen that nothing about fiction per se precludes its use in the
acquisition of knowledge. That does not itself show that literary fiction contains
anything of epistemic worth. But I will argue that under the right conditions it
can do so. As a first step, consider some examples of literary fictions exhibiting
didactic, interrogative, or directive features. I argued in Green (2010) that
Huxley’s Brave New World is naturally read as a reductio ad absurdum of the
view that pleasure hedonically construed is sufficient for happiness. Voltaire’s
Candide is a frontal assault on Leibniz’s theodicy. Skinner’s Walden Two argues

10
Clark (1996) provides a rich account of common ground with particular attention to the ways
in which speakers are sensitive to how it shifts from one group of interlocutors to another.
11
I do not assume that every work of literary fiction falls straightforwardly into an identifiable
genre. Particularly with the most innovative such works, soon after their appearance audiences are
often at a loss to know their genre-categorization.
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

for a certain ideal of group living based on behaviorism and a focus on the
communal good. Here are some further examples:
(1) Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975) asks us to imagine a situation in
which we find ever-more compelling evidence for supernatural goings-on,
and depicts intelligent, scientifically informed characters finally concluding,
over their naturalist scruples, that there may be vampires about. The novel is
plausibly read as compelling readers to ask themselves whether there are any
epistemic situations in which rationality would oblige them to give up their
naturalistic scruples and believe in the supernatural. In so doing, the novel has
an interrogative dimension.
(2) Regarded as the first novel in Arabic, Ibn Tufail’s early twelfth-century The
Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan
(selections repr. in McGinnis and Reisman, 2007) tells the story of a feral child
raised by a gazelle on a desert island. After the gazelle dies, the child uses his
reason to discover ultimate truth in seven phases of seven years each. When as an
adult he makes his first contact with civilization by meeting a castaway named
Absal, he realizes that while dependence on material goods and imagery may be
necessary for most people to live normal lives, these things are to be eschewed by
those seeking enlightenment. Toomer (1996) argues that in exemplifying the
empiricist idea of a tabula rasa, Tufail’s novel influenced Locke and thereby the
course of English-speaking philosophy. For our purposes, this novel is clearly
didactic.
(3) Flaubert shows how Emma Bovary convinces herself that her incipient
affair with Rodolphe is justified. Flaubert writes,
At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she again
felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves rustled and the reeds whistled.
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been
so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured
her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had
come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which
she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy,
delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her
thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through
the interspaces of these heights.
Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of
these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that
charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and
realised the love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women
whom she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up burst forth in full
joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without anxiety, without trouble.

Here the author not only tells us what thoughts and images pass through Bovary’s
mind; he also shows us how one might rationalize one’s infidelity. (She had
suffered so; she had never really known love before; she was transcending the
quotidian, etc.) But Flaubert does not condemn Bovary for so doing, and in so
refraining permits the reader to be carried along with her thoughts and perhaps
be swayed by them. Those readers who find poignancy in Bovary’s suicide at the
end of the novel might look upon her life as a tragic ideal, and pattern their own
after it. Perhaps they will be grateful to Flaubert for showing them how to live
fully. Even if readers do not go this far, they may still appreciate the author’s
success in showing how to justify adultery to oneself. As such, on at least one
interpretation, the novel has a directive dimension.
Be it didactic, directive, or interrogative, literary fiction that conforms to our
suppositional model needs to rise to a standard of credibility if it is to produce
knowledge. That standard consists of two components: cogency of reasoning
within the supposition, and accuracy of material reiterated from CG. First of all,
inferential steps made within the fiction might be challenged. Return to our case of
the conversation planning a train journey: an interlocutor might object: “But the
3:17 gets into Union Station at 4:34, not leaving us enough time to catch the 4:35 to
the coast.” Similarly, scrupulous readers are on the lookout for ways in which an
author’s “inferences” might be challenged: a reader of Stephen King might demur
that the characters could reasonably have adhered to their naturalist scruples
further before succumbing to belief in the supernatural; Flaubert’s readers may
challenge his suggestion that Emma Bovary would have rationalized her infidelity
in anything like the way in which he portrays her as doing. That we are engaging
with a work of fiction does not relieve us of an imperative to be vigilantly skeptical.
A second potential epistemic defect of literary fiction concerns CG. An author
of a literary fiction will perforce draw on CG in developing her narrative—about
human psychology, laws of physics, technological possibilities, and social norms.
But here is another potential source of error: if the author takes as CG among
herself and her readers, say, a certain psychoanalytic theory of the human mind,
her fictional work will provide knowledge only if that theory is correct. If not,
then the author and her readers will merely take themselves to have transmitted
and received knowledge (respectively). So too, if an author takes her characters’
actions to flow in large part from such general character traits as generosity,
perseverance, or fidelity, the epistemic value of her writing will be difficult to
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

assess until we resolve the challenge to character-trait based explanations of

behavior flowing from recent experimental social psychology.12

IV. Fictional Assertion and Narrative Transportation

I turn now to the question whether the literary nature of literary fiction vitiates or
limits its epistemic value. Our beliefs are influenced by fictional works in quite
various ways, some of which might call the epistemic credentials of those beliefs
into question. The result is that even if a work of literary fiction proceeds
seamlessly in support of a didactic, interrogative, or directive conclusion, readers
might come to the work with such gullibility as to call into question the
transmission process that proceeds from the author and ends with them. Here
are two phenomena attesting to such gullibility:
(1) Fictional assertion and belief-manifestation: People’s beliefs are influenced
by assertions made by fictional characters. In one episode of the television drama
E.R., for instance, a character asserts that post-intercourse emergency contracep-
tion is possible. Brodie et al. (2001) show that viewers of this episode change their
beliefs about contraception after viewing it, although the effect persisted for only
a couple of weeks. Marsh et al. (2003) report a similar effect that holds for
incorrect as well as correct information. What is more, subjects who gleaned
information from stories tended to think that they were aware of this information
before their exposure to the story. Also, a character may manifest a belief rather
than assert it, and we would expect that consumers of a fictional work experien-
cing a character who acts as if they believe that P, for many propositions, P, will
tend to accept P as true unless they have reason to think otherwise. An actor on E.
R. might portray a character who, while making no assertion to this effect,
behaves as if she believes that post-intercourse contraception is possible, and
that is enough for viewers to adopt this view.
(2) Narrative transportation: With this notion being defined in terms of
imagery, affect, and attentional focus, researchers have shown that the extent of
transportation predicts the degree to which consumers of a narrative adopt
beliefs suggested by a story as well as their evaluation of protagonists. This is
independent of whether readers take the story to be a description of fact or to be
fictional. Green and Brook (2000) is a watershed study, and much research has
followed.

12
J. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2002) is a trenchant exploration of this challenge.
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

In light of these two phenomena, we can readily see how literary fiction may be
used in the service of propaganda. Provide vivid imagery, manipulate the reader’s
emotions in the right way, get them caught up in the exploits of one or more
characters, and they’re hooked: it will take great effort and a cultivated skepticism
not to be persuaded by the dominant themes of the fictional work, and to emulate
some of the characters that inhabit it.
Here, however, literary fiction would seem to have just as much potential to be
helpful as harmful. We need have little doubt that some readers of Joyce Carol
Oates’ Zombie (2009) may be inspired to follow the example of its main charac-
ter, Quentin P., and attempt to kidnap young men for the purpose of using them
as sex slaves. Others will treat the novel as a window into a psychosis that they are
not at all likely to emulate. At the same time, the young field of Entertainment
Education (E-E) seeks to harness the belief-forming power of entertainment
media to change attitudes for the greater social good. Proponents of E-E seek
to influence screenwriters, novelists, and other creators of fiction to embed in
their work messages of social value. This includes messages about honor killings
on television shows in India (Singhal and Rogers, 2004), and media promoting
the use of contraception to combat HIV/AIDS in Tanzania (Tufte, 2004).
To appreciate the epistemic credentials of messages conveyed in a way inspired
by E-E, recall our observation that genre acts as a filter on CG. Appreciation of
the genre with which one is engaged thus enables one to grasp those respects in
which the world of the fictional work is supposed to conform to reality, and those
in which it need not do so. A drama about a hospital emergency room needs to be
reasonably accurate in its portrayal of the technologies and procedures available
in that setting. By contrast, who comes into the E.R. with what gunshot wound or
allergic reaction, and the family dynamics of these patients, are at the discretion
of the screenwriter so long as she maintains fidelity to human psychology and the
kinds of cases that present themselves in emergency rooms.
Even if knowledgeable screenwriters and novelists incorporate well-justified
and reasonable messages into their works, it may be felt that the weak link for
epistemic purposes is the audience. For we have seen evidence suggesting that
readers’ beliefs are highly susceptible to influence by what they encounter in
fiction, and this effect persists even when they are warned beforehand that
fictional works contain factual errors. From this perspective, it might be con-
cluded that readers can easily gain beliefs from fiction, but that acquiring
knowledge therefrom is another matter entirely. They will only get the latter,
the objection goes, if they do so by a reliable process. However, a “veracious”
fictional work might seem at best like a genuine barn in a county of mostly
barn facades.
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

Friend (2014) responds to this challenge by noting that some processes of

belief-transmission from author to reader may be sufficiently reliable to provide
justification. Friend suggests that competence with a genre enables a reader to
know which representations are likely to be accurate and which wholly or
largely invented by the author. Applied to the E.R. case, and put in the
vocabulary of this chapter, this would be to say that when a nurse behaves as
if a certain procedure is a standard response to rape, the screenwriter is in effect
reiterating that assumption from CG; and if it is not already in CG, then the
audience is expected to accommodate that assumption so that it becomes part
of CG. In this respect fiction is no worse off than historical writing or
journalism, simply because fiction often has a journalistic or historical dimen-
sion. Complementary to this, Friend contends that the more skilled a reader is
with a particular genre, the more reliable will be the beliefs she forms from her
engagement with such works.
Friend’s is a testable claim, and it is a question for the empirical study of
readers’ responses to fiction whether experience with a genre makes readers more
vigilant in reading works falling within it. No studies appear to have been done
with this question in mind, and until the issue is settled we may remain guardedly
hopeful about Friend’s resolution. But our inquiry thus far also enables us to
refine her hypothesis. Vigilance in the consumption of literature is not just a
matter of competence with the genre of which a given work is a part. It is also a
matter of sensitivity to critical commentaries on work one reads: book reviews,
critical essays, even online discussion fora are potential sources of challenge and
correction to works of literary fiction. Epistemically vigilant communities are
particularly apt to spring up when the work in question concerns a topic that
generates strong interest: gay marriage, organ donation, and autism are cases of
this kind. Accordingly, it would also be important to determine whether readers
who do their homework about the literary fiction that interests them are as
gullible as are other readers.
Consistent with the framework developed so far, we should also expect that
those works of literary fiction that we don’t know how to place within a genre
to be ones from which it will be difficult to gain knowledge. Sometimes we are
simply ignorant of the work’s genre because we are unaware of its provenance,
or it is designedly cryptic; in yet other cases the work may be pathbreaking, but
as is so often the case with great works of literary fiction, it may not easily fit
into established genres and instead may eventually constitute its own. In such a
case we may be moved and fascinated by the work, but cannot expect to gain
much epistemic value from it, at least until a body of criticism has grown
around it.
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

V. Empathy and Mindreading

Subject to empirical confirmation, then, I’ve hypothesized with Friend (2014)
that under certain conditions, beliefs we form on the basis of our engagement
with fiction may be sufficiently reliable to count as justified. We have yet to
elaborate on the status of these beliefs when they pertain to the inner lives of
fictional characters, particularly the affective aspects of those lives. I will offer a
partial account of this process by appeal to the phenomenon of empathy, which,
following Green (2008,) I conceptualize as follows: in empathizing with another,
I imagine feeling as that individual does. For instance, if another feels shame,
I might empathize with her by imagining feeling ashamed as well. The primary
targets of empathy are the emotions and moods of others; it is less clear whether
it is possible to empathize with others’ cognitive and experiential states. Also,
I come closer to empathizing with another’s emotion if I can find a stand-in for
that emotion’s object. Another’s shame might be about her physical defect,
modest origins, or improper behavior, and if I can imagine feeling ashamed
about one of my own physical defects, say, I am likely to be more successful
empathizing with hers. Also, my ability to imagine feeling shame might depend
on drawing on a memory of an earlier experience in which I felt shame myself, or
it might depend on hearing another’s description of her shame and imagining
those circumstances befalling me. In addition, nothing in principle prevents me
from empathizing with a member of another species, and I might empathize with
former, or perhaps even future, stages of myself. Finally, on the present concep-
tion, empathizing with another’s emotion permits but does not require experi-
encing that emotion. Notwithstanding the tantalizing prospect of method
empathizing, it would be permissible but supererogatory to bring myself to feel
shame in order to empathize with yours.
Perhaps as a residue of a tradition in esthetics traceable to the Enlightenment,
we tend to think of activities of the imagination as easy compared to the serious
business of cognition. As a result, I might convince myself that I can imagine
what a person’s experience is like but still miss the mark by a wide margin. In
criticizing a junkie for her destructive addiction, I may fail to appreciate its all-
consuming nature; that’s why I’m tempted to tell her that if she only had enough
willpower she could quit. Yet in so doing I may be failing to appreciate how
things feel to her. Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting (1993) contains a scene in
which the main character Renton tries to kick his heroin addiction. He is locked
inside his bedroom, and the reader is privy to his hallucinations, which include
watching a friend’s recently deceased infant climb across the ceiling. After only a
few pages of this one begins to appreciate what a horror the withdrawal process
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

must be. In taking the withdrawal scene as accurately depicting the kind of thing
that a junkie must go through, we are implicitly accommodating the author in the
sense of that notion sketched in Section III. Accordingly, on the assumption that
this novel’s heroin withdrawal scene is an accurate portrayal of what that
experience feels like,13 I can use my experience of that scene to cultivate know-
how: I learn on its basis how to imagine experiencing heroin withdrawal. With
heroin making a strong comeback in the U.S.A. at the time of the writing of this
chapter, my experience with Trainspotting gives me a better shot at empathetic-
ally appreciating those in the grip of this devastating drug today.
A work of literary fiction, then, can show its readers how an experience feels—
what that experience is like. Assuming, again that the transmission of informa-
tion is reliable (the author knows whereof he speaks, the reader is vigilant,
familiar with the genre, etc.) this is reason to think that a reader can learn what
that experience is like from reading a work of fiction. That learning process will in
turn result in her knowing what that experience is like. As a result, the reader will
be in a position to empathize with an individual—be she fictional or real—who is
undergoing the experiences so described. This phenomenon has been independ-
ently confirmed for literary fiction specifically by Comer Kidd and Castano
(2013), whose studies show that those who read such literary work
exhibit enhanced performance on standard tests of both affective and cognitive
Theory of Mind.
We sometimes overestimate our capacity to empathize with others. We may
feel torn over the question whether empathy is appropriate in certain cases. Even
supposing I could empathize with the impulses felt by a pedophile, I might
choose to refrain from doing so lest I become acquainted with sexual attraction
toward a child. Empathic success in such a case might be dangerous, and
psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and others empathize with certain of their
patients at their peril. So, too, with Quentin P., the main character of Zombie.
Carol Oates describes him as yearning for intimacy with a lover who will not
resist him, and in the process we come to appreciate how his aim is not so
unfamiliar after all. The narrator speaks eloquently about the intimacy he craves,
and one can forget just momentarily that Quentin P. seeks to achieve that
intimacy by using an icepick to lobotomize the men he picks up for sexual
encounters. Empathetic engagement with this work might help us to understand
why the fictional Quentin P., and perhaps the real-life Jeffrey Dahmer on whom

13
What would gainsay the claim of accuracy here? Not new findings in cognitive neuroscience or
social psychology. Rather, challenges will come if anywhere from the experiences of other veterans
of, or seasoned witnesses to, heroin withdrawal.
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

the story was loosely based, behave as they do. But a reader might go a step
further and, on the strength of this empathy, unearth in herself a desire to possess
another. Depending on what form this possession takes, acting on this desire may
well carry her across a moral boundary. Nothing in the literary fiction prevents
such a response; accordingly, caveat emptor.14
More generally, we tend to think of empathy as a virtue, but whether being
empathetic tends to make us behave more or less virtuously depends in part on
whom I am empathizing with. After all, if I am surrounded by cruel people, my
efforts to understand them might acquaint me with cruelty in such a way as to
entice me into cruelty as well. One would expect similar results from surrounding
myself with cruel fictional characters, and so likewise for many other vices.

VI. In and Through

Novitz (1995) usefully distinguishes between what he terms messages in and
messages through art. He motivates this distinction with the case of the South
African novelist André Brink, whose Afrikaans novel Kennis van die Aand (later
translated as Looking on Darkness) portrays a romantic relationship between a
woman of color and a white man. The relationship is portrayed as being loving
and mutually respectful, and it is plausible that Brink intended his novel to
suggest that such relationships are possible in fact and not just in fiction. The
Afrikaans government banned the novel soon after its publication. Brink
responded by never writing again in the Afrikaans language. Novitz argues that
in so doing Brink is offering a rebuke to the Afrikaans government, making clear
that he will not be complicit in that government’s manipulation of Afrikaans
culture. However, Novitz rightly observes that this message is not one that can
be found within any of Brink’s literary works. Rather, it is a message that
is discernible only through consideration of his entire post-Kennis van die
Aand oeuvre.
While we have seen reason for abjuring talk of ‘messages’ in literary fiction,
Novitz’s distinction is still useful for our purposes. To take another case, Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is naturally read as a prequel to Jane Eyre,
although narrated from the perspective of Mr. Rochester’s ostensibly insane wife.
One does not appreciate the significance of this work by just reading and
engaging with Rhys’s story. Nor does one do so if one reads it as an entertaining
alternative view of a dominant narrative, such as one finds in Scieszka’s The True
Story of the Three Little Pigs, in which the famous story is retold from the wolf ’s

14
For an overview of some issues pertaining to morally problematic literature see Keiran (2006).
 MITCHELL S . GREEN

point of view. Instead, in showing how Mr. Rochester’s “madwoman in the attic”
came to be the way she was, Wide Sargasso Sea calls out to be read as a challenge
to a dominant, imperialist narrative treating those of Caribbean origin as subal-
tern. One appreciates the force of this challenge not in either work, but through
the reading of them both, and only then in a certain order.
We said earlier that one can learn how to do something without being aware
that one is doing so. We have also argued that our empathic capacities will be
exercised in reading about fictional characters, and in reading about them we
might find ourselves emulating such characters, perhaps without being aware of
the fact that we are doing so. Accordingly, one can learn to be good through
fiction by emulating fictional characters who are good, either in a single work or
in a series of such works. But something similar would seem to be the case when
we emulate characters who are not paragons of virtue. Sam Spade, for instance, is
a resourceful and hardheaded private detective in such Dashiell Hammett stories
as The Maltese Falcon (1930). He is ultimately concerned to protect himself,
however, and so has a character that is in keeping with the noir genre of the
novels he inhabits. It is tempting to emulate Spade, however, and one wonders
how many readers of Hammett have, without knowing it, traded gallantry for
Spade’s flinty cool.
We are now in a position to collect together the various lines of thought we’ve
been pursuing so far. Much literary fiction offers thought experiments, either of a
didactic (supposing P, Q), interrogative (supposing P, Q?), or directive (suppos-
ing P, do Q) kind. Given a particular genre and the filtering effect it has on CG,
readers may learn from literary fiction by accommodating material that passes
through that filter. Further, cogent development of a didactic fiction shows, and
thereby enables readers also to learn that something is so; cogent interrogatory
fiction will oblige readers to draw out consequences of their own commitments,
or to articulate the boundaries of their concepts; cogent directive fiction will show
readers how to do something, including how to imagine an emotion or other
experience. Now given the literary dimension of literary fiction, which may lead
readers to conflate those elements in fictional works that are reiterated from CG
with those that are not, there is much scope for literary fiction to confuse and
misinform. But in agreement with Friend (2014) we have urged—subject to
further empirical confirmation—that vigilant readers who are competent with
the genre of the work before them need not be misled; it is also to be hoped that
such readers will be mindful of critical commentary on the works that interest
them. What is more, we know (Comer Kidd and Castano, 2013) that readers of
literary fiction improve their empathetic abilities for a brief period after doing so.
But empathy is itself morally neutral, and we may empathize with the vicious as
 LEARNING THROUGH LITERATURE 

well as the virtuous. It stands to reason that through repeated exposure to a

particular work (multiple readings of Madame Bovary), or to many similar works
within a genre (Hammett’s Sam Spade series), we may learn to be good or bad
through literary fiction. Literary fiction, while meriting some of the humanist’s
zeal, is a double-edged weapon in the defense of humane inquiry.
PART VI

Historical Genealogies of
Moral-Aesthetic Concepts
 16
In Praise of Aristotle’s Poetics
Humberto Brito

1.
The readers of Aristotle’s Poetics were always gripped by his mysterious if nearly
apocryphal remark about tragic katharsis (P, 1449b28). The abiding dissent on
catharsis shows that we have been widely unanimous on what there is to talk
about. The debate has been set in the terms of rival Aristotelian configurations of
an ameliorative function of tragedy, taken as a specific case of the rewards of
mimesis. In a sense, we have come to expect a very particular type of apology for
poetry, and such expectation directs philosophers’ attention in a specific way. As
I intend to go in a different direction I will begin by drawing a contrast whose aim
is to help breaking the spell of a post-Renaissance quest,1 which guides our usual
ways of thinking about the Poetics.
The function of a tragedy (say, to produce a given effect) is not to be confused
with the purpose of describing a poiêtikê technê (to capture the modes of
correctness in the craft knowledge of poetry, judging not only from Aristotle’s
very attempt to describe them in the Poetics, but from Nicomachean Ethics VI.4
as well, where he examines craft knowledge). My aim is to focus on the latter and
review some of its merits. By contrast, the accounts that we are usually given
more or less explicitly extol the function of tragedy, focusing on certain types of
goods ascribed to mimetic stuff, as though it was obvious that this sort of apology
directed Aristotle’s intention. He does praise mimêsis in many regards, and
partly because of that we have come to understand the Poetics as an apology of
certain mimetic artifacts. Even if this is right, why was Aristotle interested in
describing such artifacts to begin with? In the standard, post-Renaissance, let us

1
See Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis, Ancient Texts and Modern Problems
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), especially “An Inheritance Contested:
Renaissance to Modernity,” pp. 344–81.
 HUMBERTO BRITO

call it injunctive, view of the Poetics, tragic poetry was meant to produce some
beneficial kind of change in the world, and then there have been many (and
sometimes irreconcilable) ways of construing it. Injunctive Aristotelianism in
this context is defined by the assumption that Aristotle meant to endorse the
goods of mimetic art.
Attempting to capture Sophocles’s “poetic correctness” in Oedipus Rex as
exemplary of a specific sort of poetry no doubt requires describing the adequate
sort of response relative to which Sophocles’s reasoning could be considered
correct. It was correct because, say, “this is the right way to bring out such and
such emotions in people (like us), as well as a catharsis of such emotions.” Does it
necessarily follow, however, that such effects were to be sought after? Under-
standing T, including its effects, does not necessarily entail any sort of animus
toward the utility of bringing more T’s into existence. (Compare with “a good
chair is such and such.” Must anyone care for having a larger number of good
chairs around to make sense of this?) Answers to the question “what is ___?”
need not go injunctive about their objects. On the other hand, it is plausible that
Aristotle found in poetic craft adequate (albeit implicit) explanations for certain
difficulties we expect to find in inquiries in moral psychology, in ethics and
politics, and perhaps even in metaphysics. As craft (technê), tragic poetry must
involve true reasoning concerned with its making. As socially embedded and
highly regarded intellectual practice poetry provided fine explanations for such
difficulties, which tie in with, but are not exhausted by, the peculiar pleasures
people derived from it. Making the craft knowledge of poetry explicit under
the vocabulary of a poiêtikê technê could thus be considered an attempt at a
fresh terminology expanding the reach of Aristotle’s systematic idiom. Whereas
the injunctive strand has always tended to praise the rewards of mimêsis (and
especially those of tragedy) by speaking of its cognitive, moral–psychological, and
its sociological rewards, we may praise poiêtikê technê as a meta-methodological
exploration.
One need not speculate on Aristotle’s intentions or even provide any philo-
logical evidence so as to make this proposal reasonable. The Poetics relies on a
basic methodological claim that can be taken at face value. An inquiry into the
causes of poetry and into the technical features of its genres is also an inquiry into
the normative aspects of certain poetic practices in certain contexts. For Aristotle
to be right about his object there must be some way to capture the explanatory
continuum that bridges (among other things) the technical aspects of the repre-
sentation of action and character in tragedy, the kinds of pleasure people more or
less obviously draw from it, their nature as mimetic rational animals, as well as
the presence of shared moral dispositions in human communities. Poetry as craft
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

and tragedy as a genre are not detached from the context in which they emerged
as a practice, as indeed we gather from Poetics 1–5. The glory days of Attic
tragedy had long passed. It is not beside the point, perhaps, that Aristotle should
address an old-fashioned art form. An ethos of the past is possibly easier to grasp
if one needs to connect certain technical tricks and principles with the way such
principles pandered certain communal feelings in the right way. If we are to make
sense of the Poetics, the methodological claim that such continuum is graspable
must be taken for granted. In taking it for granted though, one acknowledges eo
ipso the desirability of dealing with a number of subjects with the same vocabu-
lary. That is to say, we thereby commit not only to the desirability of explaining a
number of things as part of a continuum, but also to the desirability of finding
some vocabulary that makes this continuum intelligible. In this sense at least, any
interpretation of Aristotle’s poiêtikê technê must already embrace some version of
its explanatory rewards.

2.
Let us start by identifying a basic assumption any theory of Aristotelian katharsis
must hold, and one which is a matter of commonsense naturalism. Any such
theory presumes that some causal connection must exist between tragedies and
people so that a (shared) reaction can take place. Aristotle would no doubt
subscribe to that, and commentators rightly take it for granted. However, that
is often construed in the Renaissance-like assumption that katharsis is the
regular, necessary, effect of perfect tragedies. At least, we have been told many
times that if certain technical conditions are met in terms of plot construction,
there will be an adequate psychological response in an audience.
Adequacy in this sense typically means that there is something wrong or
lacking in those in the audience at t, and that this state is fixed by a tragedy at
t1. The transition from t to t1 is described as a change which is good in some
regard; the emotional and intellectual responses it involves are considered
adequate as relative to the sort of events that a proper tragedy is supposed to
portray; as well as to the mimetic nature of the stimulus that is bound up with the
context of a performance to some extent,2 which somehow makes it pleasurable
and not painful to watch certain terrible things take place.3 Granted, a tragedy

2
I shall be following Halliwell’s translation, Aristotle Poetics, Longinus on the Sublime, Demetrius
on Style (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995).
3
The issues concerning this idea are secondary to my argument, so I will only deal with them in
passing in Section 4. For excellent discussions of these issues, see Halliwell, “The Rewards of
Mimesis: Pleasure, Understanding and Emotion in Aristotle’s Aesthetics” (AM, pp. 177–206);
 HUMBERTO BRITO

might then be said to work as a pill. A pill is designed to achieve its function
necessarily, i.e., a good pill does not fail to do its work. Analogously, in the
injunctive view one cannot think of a good tragedy failing to deliver its proper
effect. A disanalogy begins to emerge as soon as we realize, however, that the
work of a pill is indexed to specific illness profiles, whereas the work of a tragedy
is not.
However, many have tried to outline such a profile4 for Aristotelian tragedy
and we have even conceived of a universal profile, assuming that catharsis is a
necessary effect of a certain type of tragedy. Insofar as necessary it must affect
everyone in the same way indiscriminately. Perhaps because this is such an
implausible conception we were always inclined to picture Aristotelian tragedy
as a rare, treasured, species with even rarer specimens. Since only the rarest
specimen achieves katharsis any attempt to pin down what that means seems to
require a full consideration of the technical inquiry conducted by Aristotle in
the Poetics. It is quite symptomatic that the debate on katharsis began around
five centuries ago as a translation issue.5 Depending on how one chooses to
render the word, one is making qualifications on what tragedy is for, and
thereby making qualifications on what it is that we lack which a good tragedy
is somehow meant to supply. Of course, that requires a complete assessment
not only of Aristotle’s argument on poetry, but also of his ethics and psych-
ology to begin with. The trouble with any attempt to render katharsis
adequately, therefore, is that it is always a ticket into some picture of human
moral psychology.
That attempt has led to a collective inquiry into tragic perfection (the ancestor
of an “Aristotelian aesthetics”), which began as a quest for some universalizable
poetic therapy. The Italian schools were divided just over what type of therapy it

Martha Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity,” in Essays on
Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. A. O. Rorty (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), hereafter abbre-
viated EAP; Nehamas, “Pity and Fear” (EAP, pp. 291–314).
4
For example, take how the debate between allopathic versions of a “purgation” theory of
catharsis and homeopathic versions of catharsis as “purification” involves different accounts of
the moral–psychological profile of the spectators of tragedy. An interesting aspect of these debates is
the tacit acknowledgment that different ways of describing tragic catharsis ipso facto entail claims on
moral psychology. In other words, this suggests not only that a theory of art should not to be
detached from an account of morals and rationality, but also that it already is, in a sense, a theory of
morals and rationality. However, as Jonathan Lear has shown in “Katharsis” (EAP, pp. 318–20), the
slightest qualifications regarding the moral profile of the spectators of tragedy seem to lead to
conceptual dead ends.
5
For an excellent account of this issue, see Daniel Javitch, “On the Rise of Genre-specific Poetics
in the Sixteenth Century,” Making Sense of Aristotle: Essays in Poetics, ed. Andersen and Haarberg
(London: Duckworth, 2001), pp. 127–44; hereafter abbreviated MSA.
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

could be in virtue of doctrinal differences concerning the kind of moral infirmity

Aristotelian tragedy was meant to fix.6 The early modern injunctivists who
restored the Poetics have also to some extent spoiled it for us. That tragedy
would fix something was for them beyond any doubt. They embraced a narrow
sense of causality as the exceptionless production of an effect according to a law—
a damaged version of Aristotle’s concern with aitiai, which Lessing’s famous
dictum that the Poetics was as infallible as Euclid’s Elements7 has done little to
clarify. The assumption of a necessary causality resembling some natural law has
been in place since the first translations and commentaries, and it prevailed in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentaries. With the peculiar exception of
Gerald Else,8 specialists generally assume that catharsis is the effect necessarily
produced by any good tragedy.
However, Aristotle does not seem to go as far as his modern readers. “A tragedy,”
he puts it, “is mimesis of an action” with features such as it accomplishes “through
pity and fear ( . . . ) the catharsis of such emotions” (P, 1449b25–8). Now, from
“A causes B” it does not follow that “A necessarily causes B.” To be sure, it is in the
nature of a well-structured tragedy to cause a certain effect in a normal audience,
but does that mean every person necessarily? I cannot think of any such audience,
and I wonder if there would be anything normal about it. Even so, the notion that
“A necessarily causes B” is behind what I will now outline (perhaps too schemat-
ically) as the standard configuration of the injunctive comparative readings of
Poetics 4 and 9. Twentieth-century scholars since Else and Golden typically have
read these chapters alongside each other, in a way that could be roughly para-
phrased as a series of steps (1–6).

(1) As a rule, people enjoy learning and understanding things (manthanein),

and wondering at things (thaumazein) (P, 1448b14; R, 1371a20ff; M,
980a1).
(2) Specifically, as also stated in Rhetoric, we enjoy what we learn and grasp
(manthanein kai syllogizesthai) from imitations (P, 1448b15ff; R, 1371b9),
so this must be essential to the pleasure humans have in (tragic) poetry (P,
1448b9–14).

6
See Cave, “The Afterlife of the Poetics” (MSA, pp. 197–214) and Halliwell, “10. Influence and
Status: The Nachleben of the Poetics”; “Appendix 5, Interpretations of katharsis,” Aristotle’s Poetics
(London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 350–4.
7
G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie nos 77–8.
8
See G. F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957),
hereafter abbreviated APTA.
 HUMBERTO BRITO

(3) Since poetry somehow represents the universal (ta kathoulou; P,

1451b5–10), what people learn from good tragedies is universal in some
respect.
(4) Hence, if catharsis is the necessary effect (the proper end) of the perfect
kind of tragic plot—that which best represents the “universal”—then it
somehow ties in with a “clearing up” of something universal in some
respect, say, some general truth about “human condition”; and such
“clearing up” seems to be at once intellectual and emotional.
(5) By analogy with Aristotle’s remarks in Politics VIII.7 about the role of
“cathartic” and “ethical” melodies in education,9 it is assumed that tragic
catharsis would also let people train their emotions by the contemplation of
practical possibilities, thus preparing them for moral life by enabling them to
“suck the juice without biting the rind” (to borrow Else’s metaphor, p. 451).
(6) Or perhaps this is so even if, as Jonathan Lear has shown recently, the
spectators of tragedy which Aristotle may have had in mind were no
longer in need of moral training—in which case not-biting-the-rind can
only mean that in tragedy “We imaginatively live life to the full, but we risk
nothing” (p. 334).
The family of interpretations of Poetics 9 illustrated by Lear’s proposal that
tragic mimêsis allows us to experience possibilities “outside the plain” (and “the
relief of ‘releasing’ . . . emotions in a safe environment,” p. 334) lends a modal
twist to Aristotle’s famous distinction between poetry and history, as if fiction
(that is to say, imaginative, fictional, possibilities) is only what he really has in
mind. One should note, however, that Aristotle’s distinction has less to do with
fiction, or with fiction only, than with an implicit theory about the function of
imaginative possibilities in the apprehension—indeed, the representation—of
character (êthos). It has to do with the kind of unity of character that a good
tragedy represents and allows us to re-present. Aristotle says that poetry repre-
sents “universals,” and history “particulars”; and yet “‘Universals’ means the
kinds of things which it suits a certain kind of person to say or do, in terms of
probability or necessity: poetry aims for this, even though attaching names to the
agents” (P, 1451b7–10). Aristotle thereby recasts the criteria he had just adopted
for the definition of character in Poetics 6. “Character,” as he puts it there, “is that
which reveals moral choice—that is, when otherwise unclear, what kinds of thing
an agent chooses or rejects (which is why speeches in which there is nothing at all
the speaker chooses or rejects contain no character” (P, 1450b9).

9
Lear has shown that such view is erroneous in “Katharsis,” EAP, pp. 318–20.
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

For Aristotle the êthos is disclosed in the choices expressed in a person’s

actions, in what one chooses or avoids to say or do, and such choices and actions
typically emerge as proper to the “sort of ” (hoios) person that one is (NE,
1120a31; 1146a6, 12, 32).10 Thus the “universal” feature of what poetry represents
is that, for the most part, this “sort of ” person should act in such and such way
(i.e., “the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say”). However,
Aristotle presses the point that tragedy “is mimesis not of persons11 but of action
and life”:
happiness and unhappiness consist in action, and the goal is a certain kind of action, not a
qualitative state: it is in virtue of character that people have certain qualities, but through
their actions that they are happy or the reverse. So it is not in order to provide mimesis of
character that agents act; rather, their characters are included by the sake of their actions.
Thus, the events and the plot are the goal of tragedy, and the goal is the most important
thing of all. (P, 1450a15–22)

Character is a quality of persons but what makes their happiness or misery comes
from their actions. A decent or even a prudent person might well become
miserable. The main purpose of tragedy is therefore to adequately represent the
structure of actions, namely actions of a certain kind, that is to say, actions in
which one’s misfortune is brought upon him or her “not through evil and
depravity, but through some kind of error” (P, 1453a9–15). Whereas the point
of tragedy is not to represent persons, it nevertheless specializes in representing
persons as agents, and only qua agents may persons display qualities. (“Tragedy is
a mimesis of action, and it is chiefly for the sake of action that it represents the
agents,” P, 1450b9.) The representation of an action, or of a complete action, is
therefore what gives intelligibility to character. A choice cut off from the whole
story that explains it (as relative to what a certain kind of person would choose)
makes little sense for Aristotle. It would not be rightly depicted and therefore it
would not properly show us the “sort of ” agent we have before us. In other words,
we must be able to place an agent’s choices in the context of a complete action,
captured under a reasonable narrative; the agent’s qualities are thus made
intelligible as proper to the “sort of ” agent that one is, i.e., as one who acts
consistently in such and such ways (P, 1454a25). By presenting an action as a
complete, unified (i.e., self-explanatory) whole, a properly constructed plot
therefore facilitates the apprehension of a unity of character. Even inconsistent

10
I chose to borrow the expression “sort of” from Irwin’s entry for character in the glossary to his
translation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Pub-
lishing Company, 1999), p. 319, instead of using, e.g., “kind of.”
11
In his translation (p. 51, note b), Halliwell explains: “I.e. not of personal qualities per se.”
 HUMBERTO BRITO

characters (as Euripides’s Iphigenia in Iphigenia at Aulis, Aristotle explains)

should thus be portrayed as “consistently inconsistent” (P, 1454a27) according
to necessity or what happens for the most part. So imaginative action possibilities
help us understand the “kinds of things which it suits a certain kind of person to
say or do” provided that the poet is able to pull off the kind of unity of action best
attained by an adequate plot—one which coheres “in terms of probability or
necessity,” i.e., a rational, self-explanatory, whole. Hence, plot is the soul of
tragedy, so to speak (P, 1450a38).
In brief, the modal inflection, which often arises in the interpretations of
Aristotle’s distinction between poetry and history, turns it into a distinction
between fiction and non-fiction, which helps explain why the debate about tragic
catharsis has centered on the benefits of a fiction-related activity, construed in
terms of certain established expectations about the rewards of mimêsis, conceived
as universally transmittable. The Poetics 4–9 configuration thus became the basic
notional axis of injunctive–Aristotelian fictionalism in the recent decades. While
there is no need of restricting Aristotle’s distinction to fictional possibilities, by
doing so we tend to lose sight of how Aristotle addresses a major philosophical
difficulty here: how to describe character (i.e., how to describe the qualities of
agents) adequately. As we have come to expect a certain kind of apology for
poetry, the attempts to attach ethical significance to Aristotle’s reference to
“universals” in the Poetics have been (I think rightly) dismissed as too moralistic,
didactic, views of catharsis. But if we turn to the view that the Poetics is an inquiry
not into the function of tragedy stricto sensu, but primarily into the modes of
correctness of a specific, and philosophically exciting type of craft knowledge,
under a description of which the function of tragedy is best captured, we shall
understand that from Aristotle’s perspective (unlike Plato’s) at least a few trage-
dians had it right. It is not that a good tragedy uncovers timeless truths of
humankind; it is not that it clarifies and (somehow) ameliorates our moral skills;
it is not even whether tragedy is a useful thing for “people like us,” and that there
should be more of it. The point, I submit, is rather that some tragedians knew
how to explain things that philosophers had a really hard time pinning down.
They made certain basic methodological problems for ethical philosophy look
easy to solve. For instance, they knew the right way to portray character and
action, how to make an êthos intelligible, how to explain that for the most part a
person acts consistently in such and such way, as only a “sort of ” person would.
In the words of Quine: “sophia yes, philosophia not necessarily.”12

12
W. V. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 193.
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

In other words, the art of tragedy involves true reasoning concerning the
portrayal of action and character, in Aristotle’s view. Making this knowledge
explicit by means of a technical account of tragedy affords Aristotle not only a
model for his own descriptions of the virtues (which typically come across
embodied in “sorts of ” agents),13 but also a way of clarifying the explanatory
continuum that must exist between an account of the principles of representation
of action and character in tragic poetry, and the reality of a shared, moral,
reaction effected without verbal explanation (i.e., “even without speech” P,
1456b5) in the spectators of a good tragedy. Traditionally, the Poetics has been
either praised or disparaged as Aristotle’s endorsement of types of pleasure
associated with mimêsis, and seen as his guide to how to bring them about with
a view to some other end. Thus the very purpose of poiêtikê technê was histor-
ically conflated into the putative function of Aristotelian tragedy. By contrast,
I want to focus on Aristotle’s moderate optimism about craft knowledge (NE,
VI.4) and his treatment of what he calls in passing a “standard of correctness” in
poetry (P, 1460b14), whose explanatory rewards go beyond the example just
given. We lack a reading along these lines that may capture the explanatory
continuum that is given intelligibility by Aristotle’s description of poiêtikê technê.
Part of that reading will be attempted in what follows.

3.
In the previous section I have considered the reasons why Aristotle describes plot
(mythos) as the soul of tragedy. Now, the best kind of tragedy is that “whose
essence is reversal and recognition” (P, 1455b30; see also 1450a34–5). It is then as
if reversal-with-recognition were the soul of the plot. Recognition (anagnorisis),14
he explains, is “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (P, 1452a29) which ought
to be tied in with the crux of any plot: i.e., with the change (metabolê) that bridges
a plot’s entanglement (desis) and its dénouement (lysis). I would go so far as to
say that the Poetics is mostly about trying to make this “change” in the plot
explicit, Aristotle’s roughest structural distinction, which depends on a transition
“to the opposite direction of events,”15 named reversal (peripeteia).

13
See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1985,
2003), especially chapters 12–15.
14
For a comprehensive survey of this concept see Cave, Recognitions. A Study in Poetics (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988).
15
1452a22. In a note to his translation, Halliwell suggests (and I agree) that this “change to the
opposite direction of events, as already stated” refers back to 1452a4: “contrary to expectation”
(p. 65, note c).
 HUMBERTO BRITO

It is significant that in Aristotle’s opinion this reversal-and-recognition

structure should not occur ex machina. The apparent, gratuitous, stipulative-
ness of certain narrative solutions is an inexcusable evidence of irrationality one
expects from “bad poets” only (P, 1451b35). “There should be nothing inex-
plicable16 in the events; if there is, it should lie outside the play,” (P, 1454b6)
Aristotle argues, while giving examples of what he considers irrational (alogon).
Specifically, he refers to certain typical authorial gestures by means of which the
plot’s solution is quite noticeably detached in an explanatory sense from the
chain of events that ensues from its knot.17 This is the case whenever recogni-
tion is “contrived by the poet, and hence inartistic”: “For example, Orestes in
Iphigenia causes recognition of his identity” by saying “what the poet, not the
plot, wants” (1454b35). (Let us not forget that the poet “should say as little as
possible in his own voice,” P, 1460a7. I take this as evidence of Aristotle’s
distaste for stupidity, certainly milder than Plato’s.) Such sort of explanatory
bailout is inadmissible in the particular sense that it is artistically unconvincing,
i.e., disappointing. The job of a plot is to grow expectations in people, which are
primarily expectations of good explanations. Bad explanations are anticlimac-
tic. We all expect a good ending in the sense of an adequate explanatory
closure. So the chain of events which culminates in a recognition scene should
rely on, or be one with, a well-formed inferential chain from desis to lysis,
thereby forming a self-explanatory whole (i.e., a complete action in accordance
with necessity and probability).
The classic example of this type of inferential chain which Aristotle calls
“complex tragedy” is brought together in the Sophocles scene where “the person
who comes to bring Oedipus happiness, and intends to rid him of his fear about
his mother, effects the opposite by revealing Oedipus’s true identity” (P,
1452a24–5), thus leading to his recognition that he is the accidental causer of
his own misfortune. Now, for Aristotle this is “awesome” (P, 1452a5). As Oedipus
progressively confirms his worst suspicions, the spectators are in awe by their in-
sync-recognition (i.e., a recognition geared to the course of events) of the causes
of the action. In a sense, they too confirm their expectations, which are integral to
the emotional response whose “clearing up” Aristotle calls katharsis. There is no
“clearing up” unless the doubts about “what is pitiable, terrible, important, or
probable” (which must be “evident without direct statement,” P, 1456b5) are

16
Halliwell translates this as “irrational,” and he explains: “I.e. grossly contrary to what is
plausible or intelligible” (p. 81, note i).
17
Aristotle provides many examples of such kind of technical stupidity, from ex machina
reversals (P, 1454a36–1454b5) to inadequate types of recognition (P, 1454b20–1455a15).
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

conclusively clarified,18 i.e., they must be sure, and not merely afraid, that such-
and-such that is pitiable and terrible was the case. In a sense, that which the
spectators merely expected must become explicit as something that either hap-
pened or not, was averted or not. Unmistakably, Oedipus Rex and Iphigenia in
Tauris each stand for one of the options. Either way, the explanatory closure
releases the spectators from the type of anxiety they were in because of the type of
story they have been watching, judging from Aristotle’s definition of “tragedy.”
Remember that it is “through pity and fear” that a complete plot—one in which
nothing is left to explain regarding what causes pity and fear—accomplishes “the
catharsis of such emotions” (P, 1449b29). In other words, it is in the course of
unfolding itself, i.e., of explaining the causes of the action, that a plot inspires pity
and fear. Once a conclusion is reached, a release occurs, and the tension is over,
but not the emotion.
Aristotle insists that a certain type of self-explanatory recognition scenes tie in
with the release of an emotional overload. This overload is aroused perhaps by
the momentarily undefined (nay, open-ended) expectations spectators hold
concerning the imminent violation of certain bonds, possibly committed in
ignorance. In this sense, their fears are bound with, e.g., Oedipus’s own “fear
about his mother”; and of course, neither is in the void. We learn in Rhetoric
that pity involves fearing certain possibilities at the sight of some undeserved evil
(R, 1385b2–6), and fear is attached to expectations (R, 1382b13). As such, pity
and fear seem to be inherently rational, for Aristotle, at least to the extent that
they are based on expectations of possibilities construed according to necessity
and likelihood. The job of a tragic plot is therefore to produce and clarify
expectations in this particular sense, according to the definition of tragedy.
Let us not jump to the conclusion that Aristotle was thereby endorsing the
rewards of a certain kind of experience allowed by this play with expectations by
means of mimêsis. Yes, people generally take pleasure in learning and inferring
things from imitations. There is, however, something odd and perhaps redundant
and counterintuitive in extolling a given type of thing merely because it causes us
to react in accordance with what we are. (Praising mimesis is a funny approach to
Aristotle’s naturalism.) Conversely, there is nothing odd or counterintuitive to
entertaining the thought that the vocabulary of poiêtikê technê casts light on
certain aspects of rationality. It is interesting that to outline the “change” that

18
I am using the word here in a sense not so different from Leon Golden’s, but entirely devoid of
its Kantian undertones (of course, some version of Aufklärung is what he always meant by
“clarification”). See “Catharsis,” TPAPA, vol. 93, 1962, pp. 51–60; “Mimesis and Katharsis,” Classical
Philology, vol. 64, no. 3, 1969, pp. 145–53; “The Clarification Theory of Catharsis,” Hermes, 104,
1976, pp. 437–52; “Toward a Definition of Tragedy,” The Classical Journal, vol. 72, no. 1, 1972.
 HUMBERTO BRITO

most seems to capture his attention Aristotle resorts to an analogy which he also
uses in passing in Metaphysics: when “the difficulty of our thinking points to a
‘knot’ in the object,” overcoming it is like to “untie a knot” (M, 995a29 ff).19 The
untying of the knot in a plot seems to coincide with an explanatory closure “in”
the spectators. (If we take it that this closure unifies the action represented as a
self-explanatory whole, thereby meeting the requirements for an adequate rep-
resentation of character, we may also admit that this closure is what ultimately
enables the apprehension of a character as a “sort of ” agent.) As also noted by
Lear (p. 328), we should bear in mind that just as the activity of the teacher is
performed on the student, the poet’s activity is performed “on some patient—it is
not cut adrift from some subject, but is of A on B” (Ph, 202b5).20 That is to say,
that the poet’s agency occurs in those who are acted on, in the spectators.
Aristotle does mention in Poetics 24 that Homer mastered the art of leading
“our mind” into false inference (P, 1460a25), namely in scenes of discovery which
depended “on the audience’s mistaken reasoning” (P, 1455a13). It follows, one
may suppose, that adequate recognition scenes entail some correct reasoning on
the part of the spectators. There appears to be a well-formed inferential chain
implicit in the pleasure produced by a good tragedy.
On the other hand, we are told in the Rhetoric that some people are no longer
able to experience fear and pity, so—a necessary ingredient notwithstanding—
understanding the story is not a sufficient condition for catharsis. By definition,
for those who are not able to fear or pity (which includes a great number of
people, R, 1385a3–5, 1385b19–1386a3) there will be no catharsis. Hence, cath-
arsis cannot be a universal reaction, and need not be construed as the necessary
effect of tragedies, not even of perfect ones. Indeed, this line of objection has not
been taken into consideration by any injunctive interpretation that I am aware of.
Of course, we need not have such restrictive notion of causality, in which the
modern, injunctive picture is typically rooted. It suffices to say that any given
response was for Aristotle a common dispositional response: say, the normal
response of most people to representations of certain kinds of events, regardless
of any theory about what they ought to experience, or what they ought to be like
in order to experience something of the sort.
Characteristically, most theories of catharsis are about what people ought to
feel in the theater, or ultimately about why they ought to feel this or that in the
theater. This misrepresents the purpose of a poiêtikê technê as an explanation of

19
Aristotle, Metaphysica, trans. W. D. Ross, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon (New
York: Random House, 1941); hereafter abbreviated BWA.
20
Aristotle, Physica, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. J. Gaye; in BWA.
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

the causes of what people felt to begin with, namely the awe, the pity and fear, and
the catharsis thereof, as they had emerged in an old-fashioned art form. In this
sense, Aristotle’s poiêtikê technê is less a guide into how the mimetic arts might
improve us than an inquiry into the causes of a common ethos: i.e., an inquiry
into the causes of certain shared expectations. Granted, a technical account of the
job of a certain kind of plot also helps to unpack the connection that seems to
exist between the pleasure drawn from “Dramatic turns of fortune” (R, 1371b10)
and the pleasure drawn from inferential activity, as Aristotle pairs them in
Rhetoric:
Learning things and wondering at things is also pleasant as a rule; . . . since learning and
wondering are pleasant, it follows that such things as acts of imitation must be pleasant—
for instance, painting, sculpture, poetry—and every product of skillful imitation; this
latter, even if the object is not itself pleasant; for it is not the object itself which here gives
delight; the spectator draws inferences (‘that is a so-and-so’) and thus learns something
fresh. Dramatic turns of fortune and hairbreadth escapes from perils are pleasant, because
we feel all such things are wonderful. (R, 1371b4–12)

That “the object itself ” is not what “gives delight” (and therefore that what is
more pleasurable in mimetic artifacts is not predicated on its material mimeti-
city) possibly means that the delight is attached to the ideas that it gives us (“even
if the object itself is not pleasant,” e.g., “such as the forms of the vilest animals and
of corpses,” as famously said in Poetics 4). “The spectator draws inferences (‘That
is so-and-so’) and thus learns something fresh,” Aristotle explains, rephrasing
another oft-debated passage of Poetics 4: people enjoy likenesses “because
through contemplating them it comes about that they understand and infer
what each element means, for instance, that ‘this person is so-and-so’”; or as
Halliwell put it elsewhere, “that the man there is so-and-so.”
That the man there is so-and-so (houtos ekeinos) is possibly21 a placeholder for
the apprehension of “universals,” i.e., for what I described as the apprehension of

21
Here I do not agree with Halliwell, and the issue is well worth a long note. Halliwell explains
the following about houtos ekeinos in a note to his translation: “I.e. in a portrait—a deliberately
rudimentary instance of an interpretive process which could take more complex forms,” p. 38, note
a. He develops this idea further in “Aristotelian Mimesis and Human Understanding,” MSA,
pp. 87–107, where he offers an explanation of houtos ekeinos that would serve as an objection to
the interpretation I will propose. In his view, in the context where it appears houtos ekeinos can only
refer to individuals, and not to types, i.e., not to “sorts of ” agents. However, the perception of
likenesses qua likenesses presumes a certain degree of conceptual generality. Even though it is
applicable only to individuals, we may argue that houtos ekeinos applies to the recognition of
individuals as (in a sense, belonging to) “sorts of ” agents who are “so-and-so,” i.e., whose choices
and actions are “so-and-so,” etc. In that sense, this would be a minimal way of pinning down the
apprehension of character, which is integral to the apprehension of action as a self-explanatory
whole. Another way of suggesting that this passage relates to what I have been describing as a
 HUMBERTO BRITO

a unity of character, the perception that X is a “sort of ” agent who makes choices
and acts in a way which “suits a certain kind of person,” as we have learned from
Poetics 6 and 9. One could say that X is revealed as “so-and-so” by the spectators’
recognition in the course of a sort of contemplative scorekeeping. This allows
them to apprehend (or re-present) the action as a causally unified whole, as soon
as the “knot” gets untied. That “inferring” resembles “a sort of rest or coming to a
halt” (DA, 407a32), as Aristotle puts it in De Anima, suggests an inferential
soothing or a feeling of satisfaction in removing the pain caused by the knot in
the object. Perhaps this is what commentators have in mind when they mention a
“cognitive pleasure” implied in Aristotle’s views in Poetics 4. One should not place
too much hope on its epistemic value, though, for feeling right does not necessarily
make us right—as we learn from Homer’s unrivaled ability in leading us into false
inferences (P, 1460a25). However, the ecstatic scorekeeping, which finally allows
the apprehension of a self-explanatory whole, must be in sync with the events
(since “the pleasure which comes from fear and pity through mimesis” is “built
into the events” (P, 1453b14)). So it would make little sense to isolate a “cognitive”
pleasure from the emotions (i.e., the expectations) which it brings out. Those
emotions are evidence that we roughly understand what is going on. In tragedy
there is no such thing as dry inferences. What we have is all at once: wonder, fear,
pity, and the apprehension of moral elevation. In fact, it is as if under a certain type
of description the nobility of certain kinds of moral behavior were immediately
self-evident for most of the people, regardless of matters of opinion or the varying
degrees of intellectual sophistication of the spectators (P, 1448b14). (A similar
argument might of course be made for the case of comedy.) For Aristotle it is
actually as if too much “language” (or “diction,” lexis) got in the way of, or easily

recognition on the part of the spectators would be to say that houtos ekeinos abbreviates something
like “This man here is so-and-so, say, the son of X and Y, the true causer of his own misfortune,” etc.
Even so, that would be the same as the anagnoretic apprehension of the action as a self-explanatory
whole, which I take to be one with the apprehension of moral nobility in a tragedy. Nevertheless,
Halliwell argues that in the passage I am discussing Aristotle can only be taken to mean the
identification of human figures in very precise artistic painting. I do not see why we should not
accept this. Indeed, the examples Aristotle draws from painting typically conflate the recognition of
human figures in painting into the apprehension of êthos in painting by analogy with the appre-
hension of êthos in poetry: “in fact, the works of the most recent poets are lacking in character, and in
general there are many such poets (as with Zeuxis’s relationship to Polygnotus among painters:
Polygnotus is a fine depicter of character, while Zeuxis’s painting contains no character)” (P,
1450a25ff; Aristotle will underestimate Zeuxis realism for basically the same reason in P,
1461b10ff). All the same, this is not incompatible with Halliwell’s general point that the pleasure
of tragedy “arises from the exercise of our capacities for both understanding and feeling in the
engagement with the imagined possibilities which art represents,” EAP, pp. 255–6.
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

spoiled the, apprehension of an explanatory closure required by the pleasure

drawn by the spectators.22 In a sense, this closure is silent and obvious.

4.
Given the promissory note in Politics that he would deal with catharsis more
explicitly once he addressed poetry (1341b38), we would have expected at least a
definition. Nevertheless, perhaps the reason why Aristotle does not explain what
he means by katharsis in the Poetics—a lapse so atypical that we readily take it for
a philological problem—is rather that it does not matter much how we describe
the psychology of catharsis (let alone its sociology or its ideology). Perhaps all he
needs for the sake of a definition of tragedy is to hint that a shared reaction takes
place, and that some “clearing up” is shared by some “us.” For my purposes,
anyway, it is enough that Aristotle’s picture relies on that assumption.
The very assumption of a shared reaction means not only that rational animals
are able to share expectations, but also that they share expectations about certain
things. Pity and fear are not and cannot be in the void: they are already the
expression of something that must preexist in a given context. There is the sense,
of course, in which these emotions are geared to the contemplation of the
representation of certain events in a given context: say, the context of a perform-
ance. However, Aristotle does not attach much significance to the performative
aspects of tragedy, and he takes for granted (as we should) that people know all
too well what a tragedy is. Although the “spectacle is emotionally potent,” it “falls
quite outside the art and is not integral to poetry: tragedy’s capacity is independ-
ent of performance and actors” (P, 1450b16; see also P, 1453b7–9), and it might
also be attained by reading the story or listening to it (P, 1462a16). Still, the
emotional shifts of tragedy, and thus the pleasures attached to them, are geared to
a mimetic act (the very unfolding of the plot), which qua mimetic is often said to
transform painful things into pleasurable ones. There is little room in Aristotle’s
picture for the idea of a transformation though, since we cannot think that there
was ever anything painful to begin with. In his picture the representation of the
vilest animals and corpses, to quote the classic example, is already pleasurable as
such. As in poetry, this is basically pleasurable in virtue of the ideas and emotions
that we get from it (“The spectator draws inferences,” etc.). Only in a derivative

22
As I have emphasized before, this should be attained “without verbal explanation” (P, 1456b4);
moreover, the lexis element (“style” or “language”) should be balanced, neither too ordinary or
banal, nor too confusing or too embellished. Clarity is always the mark. See Poetics 22,
esp. 1458a17–32.
 HUMBERTO BRITO

sense is there any pleasure in “execution or color” and like causes (P, 1448b18).
Analogously, the pity and fear from tragedy are no different from the usual pity
and fear, nor less appropriate, except that in tragedy we have pleasurable pity and
pleasurable fear. How so? In part it has to do, I think, with a commonplace
categorial proficiency people generally display. In Aristotle’s picture there is
something inherently pleasing to the emotions given to us by mimetic artifacts.
The unpleasant thoughts that are caused by a tragic plot, by the mimesis of an
action, seem to be pleasant unpleasant-thoughts, if that makes sense.
Although I am not concerned here with the reasons for this, we should bear in
mind that, judging from his disregard for the spectacular aspects of tragedy, it
must have little to do with any sense of a safe, performative, environment. We
might grant that being acquainted with fiction entails in certain familiar contexts
an assumption of being safe from the misfortunes that befall those lives over
there, so to speak. Pity and fear are all about other people, about how those others
(not I or my kin) are going through some hardship, as we also learn in Rhetoric
(R, 1385b2–6). Only in a derivative sense does it follow, however, I think, that
pity and fear are in part rooted in an assumption of knowing that we are safe,
either because we know we are amongst spectators or bystanders. What matters is
that those are emotions felt toward people like us, or perceived as such—in fiction
as in ordinary life. It is a bit odd to conceive that pity and fear are pleasurable in
tragedy because we know that such-and-such is make-believe, since its being for
real is quite immaterial in Aristotle’s picture: again, it matters only that such-and-
such misfortune befalls people like us. Even so, this does not provide by itself an
adequate explanation for its pleasurableness. The beginning of a much larger
answer might go along what follows. While we take pleasure in the representation
of the vilest animals Aristotle also acknowledges that some imitations can be
repulsive (say, the source of unpleasant unpleasant-thoughts: P, 1452b33–5), and
it would be no less odd to suppose that their being fictional would make them any
less repulsive. However, imitations that are the source of such unpleasant
unpleasant-thoughts are only so because they are bad ones, i.e., because they
are badly made in some respects. Conversely, however, this appears to suggest
something that we suspected all along, even if it does not explain it altogether:
that there is something intrinsically pleasurable in good art.
Nevertheless, there is another sense in which pity and fear about certain kinds
of events do not arise in the void. Such emotions are shared by or within a
community, and in this last, communal, sense, what a good tragic plot brings
about is indeed an expression of something already there. In that sense, describ-
ing the causes of pity and fear in tragedy, or describing the causes of a shared
reaction, in other words, describing a poiêtikê technê, is therefore a way of giving
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

intelligibility to a common ethos, of putting its presence under rational descrip-

tion. This is a further reward of the sort of understanding of the Poetics I am
proposing. If we turn our attention to the very notion of putting together such a
vocabulary, it becomes apparent that the existence of common dispositions is
made explicit by describing a given technê, i.e., by describing how the principles
the poets explore illustrate a continuum from the way we think alike to the way
we feel alike.
To believe Aristotle, people are able to apprehend and converge on represen-
tations of êthos, regardless, for example, of their capacity to learn or to under-
stand things in general (P, 1448b14). Commentators have therefore suggested
that tragic poetry should be used in education as a means to the good life.
Although Aristotle would not be altogether contrary to this, the point in describ-
ing a poiêtikê technê (which we have good grounds not to restrict to tragedy) is
describable along different lines. Notwithstanding the conceivable long-term
sociological rewards of engaging citizens in imaginary action-possibilities, so
neatly allowed by adequate poetry, and regardless of the benefits of tragedy to
their private moral lives, of course, we might also entertain the strictly philo-
sophical hope that a technical account of poetry gives rational visibility to a
continuum of processes within a space of expectations. Some of these processes
were discussed in the previous sections. Now we should inspect whether and how
a poiêtikê technê casts light on the idea that certain groups of animals involved in
certain kinds of practices in a given chunk of space-time seem to share expect-
ations about similar animals. Remember that, for my tentative purposes, the only
thing I care to draw from Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is that something is
shared by an “us.” One can hardly miss the plural form us that overshadows
the Poetics, reappearing here and there in such familiar expressions as our soul,
men like us, or better than us and worse than us, etc. However, how similar are
similar creatures?
Aristotle’s shifts from an ethnocentric to a universal sense of this plural—say,
from the “we-as-Athenians” (as opposed to “they-as-barbarians”: P, 1458a20ff) to
“we-as-animals so-and-so”—are apparently reckless and even shocking. For
some reason, both senses are equally acknowledged, which makes sorting them
out an even more delicate task. We are far from surprised at being defined as a
rational species, as suggested in the aforementioned passages of Poetics 4 where
Aristotle conflates pleasure and inference, mentioning a natural desire to learn,
which echoes the very opening line of the Metaphysics. On the other hand,
Aristotle’s most obvious qualification of the species in that same chapter is rather
that “man is the most mimetic of all animals, and it is through mimesis that he
develops his earliest understanding” (P, 1448b6–8). It is as if the budding of logos
 HUMBERTO BRITO

in nature was ultimately caused (explained) by a hyper degree of mimetic

capability. (Aristotle makes a similar case about our hyper degree of memory
in the beginning of the Metaphysics. Memory capability and mimetic capability
seem to go hand in hand in the Animalia.) Saying that certain beings are rational
and that such beings are super mimetic are not mutually exclusive definitions,
however. Perhaps these are rather mutually heuristic hypotheses about the nature
of such creatures. Halliwell observes that the same argument in favor of degrees
of mimesis as an explanatory criterion for understanding or for the natural
possibility of logos is put forth by Pseudo-Aristotle in the Problemata, whose
author seems to be quoting straight from Poetics 4. It is suggested in the
Problemata that the reason one should place more trust in a human being than
in another animal is not that humans alone know how to count (as Plato had told
Neocles), nor that we alone believe in gods, but that humans are the most
mimetic animals, which “enables them to learn and understand” (Pr, 956a11–14).
What is striking here is that Pseudo-Aristotle should even place some trust in
other animals to begin with. Trust, it seems, is not restricted to arithmetically
gifted animals that fear gods, but is extendible in a lesser degree to godless,
numberless (we might add: more or less predictable, language-devoid) creatures.
There can be no trust where there are no expectations in the first place, even if
these are very crude. Mimesis—or in fact a higher degree of mimetic capability—
thus seems to be what ultimately accounts for the very possibility of construing
and sharing complex expectations, such as those required by the establishment of
stronger, more complex and enduring ties of trust, even if these are mostly
imperceptible or taken for granted. In her book Moral Prejudices, Annette
Baier remarks, “We inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere,”
and that we “notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted.”23
One could possibly argue that humans’ hyper-mimetic nature is what best
accounts for the existence of communities of dispositions, of which Baier’s
atmosphere of trust is a perfectly adequate example. Perhaps logos is ultimately
relative to ways of transforming a space of expectations into a space of reasons:
ways of making a common ethos (i.e., shared expectations, dispositions, and
reasons) explicit. However, no such notion of logos would begin to make sense
unless we think of a community (ethnos) that shares the common reasons that it
sustains. And this requires the existence of some societal form we might refer to
as, say, “We-as-Athenians.” Indeed, that which seemed a mere grammatical
obscurity suddenly turns into the raison d’être of Aristotle’s shifts from a
universal to an ethnocentric plural. The high degree of human mimeticity is in

23
Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 98.
 ARISTOTLE ’ S POETICS 

part what grounds the establishment of just the kinds of ties that sustain
communities of rational animals. In a sense, which the Poetics helps to clarify,
the response that tragedy produces in “people like us” is not quite what we have
come to call esthetic, unless by that word we mean the expression of common
expectations (indeed, of common reasons) explored by poets. After all, “the poets
follow, and pander the taste of, the spectators” (P, 1453a34).
A reasonable objection to the cognitive, ethical, and sociological hopes posited
in an Aristotelian “esthetics” by different strands of the injunctive view would be
that such project is at odds with Aristotle’s seeming lack of taste, which has
puzzled many readers since the Renaissance. How come only two of the thirty-
two tragedies mentioned in the Poetics actually survive the test of catharsis?
Historically and for pedagogical reasons we have been always typically inclined
to attempt to extrude a certain model of the perfect tragedy from Aristotle’s text.
However, we should not dismiss Aristotle’s obvious fascination with an enor-
mous quantity of what he calls technical errors, which may not be a symptom of
lack of taste at all. The technical compliments paid to his favorite tragedians are
certainly just as explanatorily useful as are his censures on technically flawed
tragedies. For instance, describing the technical mistake which consists in repre-
senting “decent men . . . changing from prosperity to adversity” for “this is not
fearful not yet pitiable but repugnant” (P, 1452b33–5) is no less revealing as to the
way creatures like us share certain moral dispositions. Moreover, focusing on
Aristotle’s censures will also let us clarify one of his most mysterious remarks in
the Poetics, namely that “poetry does not have the same standard of correctness
as politics” (P, 1460b14).
In Poetics 25 many formulas are tested for that idea: e.g., that an impossibility
“is acceptable if the poetry achieves its goal” (P, 1460b25); “impossibility should
be referred to poetic needs” and that “Poetic needs make something plausible
though impossible preferable to what is possible but implausible” (P, 1461b9–12);
or that irrationalities “are sometimes not irrational, since it is probable that
improbable things occur” (P, 1461b13–15), whereby Aristotle recalls Agathon,
in whose opinion it was “probable that many things infringe probability” (P,
1456a24–5). As long as the proper end of poetry is attained, verisimilitude may
well be sacrificed—a mistake we cannot afford in politics—and this principle
guides poetry’s standard of correctness. The interesting twist here is that,
although this concession explains that poets can lure us into recognizing or re-
presenting “impossible” or “irrational” things (one of Homer’s strong suits,
apparently), a shared reaction may still take place. It follows that regardless of
the truth or falsity, or irrationality, of what is represented “in our minds,” or of
what our response is an expression of, such is still the expression of the presence
 HUMBERTO BRITO

of an (active) community of emotions, dispositions, or orientations toward the

world. If my claim about the purpose of a poiêtikê technê makes sense, it also
follows that describing the technical causes of a shared reaction is ipso facto a way
of giving intelligibility to the very existence of a common ethos. On the other
hand, it also follows, in third place, however, that a common ethos can be both
erroneous and an expression of a fact of the world. That it can prove erroneous
ultimately raises a suspicion about the moral realism traditionally ascribed to
Aristotle’s views in the Poetics. And although his concessions to the standard of
correctness in poetry may give way to the slight possibility of collective delusions
(Houdini’s, not Homer’s, strong suit), there is no reason to sound the alarms.
Away from injunctive Aristotelianism we have come to understand that the
causal connection between art and people is not like a natural law, and hence
there is no reason to worry about universal delusions.
Finally, there is perhaps one last reason for Aristotle to give technical priority
to recognition-with-reversal (P, 1452a30). As we saw, reversal consists in the
“change to the opposite direction of events . . . and one in accord . . . with prob-
ability or necessity” (P, 1452a23–4), one that goes against (or in an odd sense, lets
down) our usual expectations about the world. By acknowledging that “fearful
and pitiable matters . . . arise above all when events occur contrary to expectation
yet on account of one another” (P, 1452a3), Aristotle not only hints that no one
normally expects that a person is the accidental causer of her own misery, but also
that we are typically stunned at discovering the frailty of our own expectations.
Nevertheless, recognition-with-reversal allows us to clarify not only the expect-
ations a given story had us anxious about, but also that we had any expectations—
perhaps opaque expectations. To conclude, it also reveals that even opaque (and
yes, even impossible) expectations seem to be inherently intelligible, at least in that
they are formed secondo il verisimile o la necessita.

Acknowledgments
This chapter has had many versions. This final version could have not
been written without the generous comments of Miguel Tamen, Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht, Sara Eckerson, Alberto Arruda, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, and
Richard T. Eldridge. (Its preparation was made possible by the generous support
off the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia, through the research project
entitled Intention, Action and the Philosophy of Art, PTDC/FIL-FIL/1166733/
2010.)
 17
Shaftesbury as Virtuoso
Or, the Birth of Aesthetics Out
of a Spirit of Civility

Martin Donougho

Based on his occasional appeals to ‘disinterestedness’, Shaftesbury has been seen

as a precursor of modern aesthetics, a view now taken to be anachronistic.
I attempt instead to place Shaftesbury in a much earlier context, that of the social
mechanism of aesthetic ‘distinction’, which I would trace all the way back to
Italian court life in the late fifteenth century. To the objection that this reduces art
and aesthetics to sociology I reply that, on the contrary, such an angle on the
historical formation of talk about art helps explain how certain practices acquire
their value as art. Aesthetic distinction, with respect to individuals or to institu-
tional practices, defines both import and importance.

1. Preliminaries
R. G. Collingwood’s account of Romantic expressivism in Principles of Art1
includes under ‘pseudo-art’ something he dubs courtesy meaning, symptomatic
merely of (a) the high esteem in which a given practice or product is held, or else
(b) the emotive attitude of the user. Far from discounting this aspect, however,
I suggest that it provides a convenient name for a key factor in art (or rather, in
according something the status of art). It is a matter less of semantics—what ‘art’
means, or even the necessary and sufficient conditions for its definition—than of
pragmatics—what is done, for whom, and in what context, when the ‘is of artistic
identification’ (Arthur Danto) gets invoked. It is this element of aesthetic dis-
tinction, of self as well as of art or artwork, that I emphasize in what follows.

1
R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938).
 MARTIN DONOUGHO

A second remark, on Paul Oskar Kristeller’s classic essay ‘The modern system
of the arts’ (1951/2).2 Citing the ‘amateur’ tradition in fine art—as outlined by,
for example, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528)—Kristeller proceeds to
describe how that tradition incorporated the arts into its training practices, even
if these were not clearly demarcated from such martial arts as fencing and
archery.3 Unlike many aestheticians nowadays, Collingwood and Kristeller his-
toricize art and the arts—one privileging Romantic Art, the other stopping short
of Kant and the Romantic break with the ‘fine arts’ (although a late essay
addresses the surprisingly recent origin of the notion of ‘creativity’4).
A third remark, concerning an author much less familiar than Collingwood or
Kristeller: Preben Mortensen, whose Art in the Social Order: The Making of the
Modern Conception of Art (1997) comes close to my own approach.5 Mortensen
views art as a social formation, historical through and through. He goes beyond
even Arthur Danto in holding that there is nothing ‘essential’ that remains
constant through various instantiations: it just so happened that certain institu-
tional practices were brought together as ‘art’ (in a modern sense of the word
which Mortensen summarizes by listing its constituent features: intrinsic value,
uniqueness, free and individual creation, expression of a subjective truth, com-
prising chiefly sculpture, painting, music, imaginative literature, architecture).
That these practices were institutionalized as such was, the author contends,
more than contingent however. It was largely due to an emergent conception of
self-presentation in the early eighteenth century, which is to say, in a world—le
monde—of other-directed social expectations after the decline of feudalism. This
‘culture of politeness’ (as Lawrence Klein terms it6) conditioned notions of taste
and norms of behaviour, and did so tacitly, via bodily discipline rather than
intellectual instruction. (Mortensen alludes to Bourdieu’s theory of ‘habitus,’ that
is, bodily control and demeanour without explicit ideas or rules. ‘Beliefs are

2
In his Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1964, revised 1990), pp. 163–227. Its normative status has recently come under rhetorical fire
in James Porter, ‘Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ reconsidered’, British
Journal of Aesthetics 29.1 (2009): 1–24.
3
Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton (1959), ed. Daniel
Javitch (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2002).
4
Only in the 1960s did the dictionary register the term! See P. O. Kristeller, ‘ “Creativity” and
“Tradition”,’ Journal of the History of Ideas (1983): 105–11; reprinted in the 1990 edition of
Renaissance Thought and the Arts. See also Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, ‘Creativity: History of the
Concept’, Dialectics and Humanism 4/3, (1977): 48–63.
5
Preben Mortensen, Art in the Social Order: The Making of the Modern Conception of Art
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).
6
Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural
Politics in Early Eighteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
 SHAFTESBURY AS VIRTUOSO 

present as a “state of the body”. . . . Values given body can “instill a whole
cosmology”’.7) He pays special attention to the role of Mandeville and Shaftes-
bury in articulating a theory that sponsors production and reception of art. As
ideas of ‘doux commerce’ took hold, art became less of a luxury good than a
constituent part of the refined, civilized, gentlemanly-cum-genteel life in society.
Keeping up appearances did not seem at odds with morality. Edmund Burke
could write: ‘Manners are of more importance than laws . . . they aid morals, they
supply them, or they totally destroy them’.8 By the end of the eighteenth century
this sentiment no longer sounded paradoxical.
Mortensen’s book makes a persuasive case: all the more surprising that few
seem even to have taken note of it (perhaps philosophers don’t like being pressed
on to Neurath’s boat, a vessel continually under repair, no coastline in sight).9
There’s just one problem with his book, in my view. The original rooting of ‘art’
and aesthetic discourse in a novel and specifically modern ‘presentation of self ’
(Erving Goffman) is to be found not in the eighteenth but in the fifteenth century,
less in England than in Italy, and not in a middle-class public sphere so much as
in the aristocratic court—the world of the courtier, in short. Harking back to
Collingwood on ‘courtesy meaning,’ we may say that ‘art’—whether as concep-
tion or as norm (or category in use)—comprises a practice that fuses self and
world, subject and object: it obeys a pragmatics of performance rather than a
semantics of observation or regulation. It does so, moreover, in a mode of
‘honesty’ or decorum without appeal to explicit rules. The model and mode are
classical—Aristotelian phronesis or Ciceronian conversation—but its value in the
modern world lies in the fact that value is ascribed, not given; it exists in the eyes
of others, subject to negotiation, rather than derived from some fundamental law
or authority (religious, political, or ontological). Castiglione (or at least his
character, Count Ludovico) recommends the virtue of sprezzatura—noncha-
lance, effortless grace—as substitute for divine or natural grazia.10 My larger
argument discerns a continuity from the courtier figure through later models of

7
Mortensen, p. 179, citing Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990).
8
Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), quoted by Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to
Civility: Changing Modes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), p. 43.
9
Jason Geiger reviewed it briefly in British Journal of Aesthetics 40/4 (2000): 510–12.
10
The Count: ‘and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all things a certain
sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort
and almost without any thought about it’ (Book of the Courtier, }26, p. 32). See Harry Berger, Jr., The
Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
 MARTIN DONOUGHO

civility, for example, English ‘gentleman,’ French ‘honnête homme,’ the man of
taste or ‘discretion’ (Gracián), the Romantic ‘beautiful soul,’ up to the late
nineteenth-century aesthete and twentieth-century modernist or even postmod-
ernist. It is a line secured by common thematic emphases: a measure of ‘raillery’
(as it was called), the application of habitus (tacit and somatic self-regulation
without rules), a natural artfulness (nature as art/art as natural), and ultimately a
formulation of aesthetic autonomy, up to and beyond Kant. To these features
I should add something harder to grasp: the unfolding of a certain problematic—
call it ‘neo-pastoralism’—or the ironic suspension of reality or world; a mimetic
or fictive replication of ‘world-ness,’ which serves to suspend state, religious,
temporal, or other authority in the interests of a novel (call it ‘aesthetic’)
normativity. If to some this presents an ‘irrationality problem,’11 in other respects
the aesthetic line displays a positive rationale, the reason of judgment, ‘gusto,’
good sense.
My larger argument would tie the mechanism of aesthetic distinction to what
Norbert Elias called ‘the civilizing process,’ the importance of which is acknow-
ledged even in the various critiques levelled at his pioneering work.12 Elias
registers a fundamental psychic shift in the mode of self-control from the twelfth
century on, as European feudalism gradually waned. (We might call it ‘civiliza-
tion and its contents,’ inasmuch as it historicizes Freud’s ideas on the superego.)
It moves from medieval courtoisie to a broader notion of ‘civility,’ first in relation
to court authority—the behaviour required of a courtier in relation to the
prince—later in society at large, and finally as a general notion of ‘politeness.’
Much of this comprised bodily comportment and demeanour—‘the presentation
of self ’—via proscriptions on belching, farting, spitting, picking one’s nose in
public, or blowing its contents on the floor, but then further against even
mentioning such things (I apologize for bringing them up—not very polite of
me). In volume 2 of The Civilizing Process Elias attempts to tie this large-scale
personality shift to structural changes in society, in the first place as the trans-
formation of the nobility from a class of knights into a class of courtiers.13
Roughly the argument goes as follows: strong and constant moderation of
one’s drives was hardly needed in feudal society, yet as a warrior regime waned

11
Alfred Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem in Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur
Kritik der Urteilskraft (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923). He links irrationality with the emergence of an
independent notion of mundus or ‘world.’ See my ‘ “Melt Earth to Sea”: The New World of Terrence
Malick’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 25/4 (2011), 358–74.
12
Translated as The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process (London: Urizen, 1978),
and State Formation and Civilization, vol. 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). For a recent approach, see
Benet Davetian, Civility: A Cultural History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
13
State Formation and Civilization, p. 236.
 SHAFTESBURY AS VIRTUOSO 

knights were forced to develop habits of foresight and self-observation, habits

that were gradually internalized; over time such habits spread from aristocracy to
middle-class noblesse de robe, and much later constituted an important tool in
imperial expansion, e.g. in Colonial America (table manners as tyranny,
perhaps).
That must suffice for the larger backstory—but what’s my story? I see Shaftes-
bury ensconced in this tradition of mannerly behaviour, a pragmatics of per-
formance, which he specifically identifies with ‘virtuosity.’ He both writes about
the ‘moral virtuoso’ and in his writing practice exemplifies or enacts virtuosity. In
what follows I shall address:
(1) the context of virtuoso culture,
(2) the ethical–aesthetic doctrine Shaftesbury seems to avow, and finally,
(3) the pragmatics of its presentation, in the various works later collected as
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711).14

2. Virtuoso Culture
That Shaftesbury tried to revive the virtuoso model for the eighteenth century is
well known. In Sensus Communis (1709) we read: ‘Everyone is a virtuoso of a
higher or lower degree. Everyone pursues a grace and courts a Venus of one kind
or another. The Venustum, the Honestum, the Decorum, of things will force its
way.’15 And a little earlier in the same work:
By ‘gentlemen of fashion’ I understand those to whom a natural good genius or the force
of a good education has given a sense of what is naturally graceful and becoming. . . . Of all
other beauties which virtuosos pursue, poets celebrate, musicians sing and architects or
artists of whatever kind describe or form, the most engaging and pathetic is that which is
drawn from real life and from the passions. (p. 62)

Feeling the need to apologize for his resort to artists and ‘the rest of the virtuoso
tribe’, he declares, ‘I am persuaded that to be a virtuoso, so far as it befits a
gentleman, is a higher step towards the becoming a man of virtue and good sense

14
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opin-
ions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); citations to this
edition. I have also consulted Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 2001).
15
Characteristics, p. 64. Section 3 begins (p. 65): ‘And thus, after all, the most natural beauty in
the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth’. (It has been conjectured that the line
was familiar to the Keats of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’)
 MARTIN DONOUGHO

than the being what in this age is called a scholar’ (Soliloquy, or, Advice to an
Author [1710], p. 148).
Shaftesbury returns to his topic in Miscellany III, itself a self-conscious reflec-
tion on Soliloquy, in other words, a conversation with his previous work of ‘self-
discourse’ or ‘self-correspondence’. Anticipating ridicule of such a ‘Greek’ mode
of dialectical philosophizing transposed to the modern age, he draws a parallel
with the ‘raillery’ aimed at ‘the virtuosi or refined wits of the age’, about whom he
remarks:
In this latter denomination we include the real fine gentlemen, the lovers of art and
ingenuity, such as have seen the world and informed themselves of the manners and
customs of the several nations of Europe, searched into their antiquities and records . . .
observed the situation, strength and ornaments of their cities, their principle arts, studies
and amusements, their architecture, sculpture, painting, music and their taste in poetry,
learning, language and conversation. (p. 405)

Such persons are not to be laughed at, Shaftesbury rejoins, although when their
antiquarian interests are too narrowly focused—on the minutiae of insect life,
say, or worse, on rarity for its own sake, or on collecting monsters for cabinets of
curiosity—they do indeed become merely ‘inferior’ or ‘mock’ virtuosi. Where,
however, the philosopher-virtuoso concerns himself with larger, more practical
or public matters, he is to be considered a man of sense, a man of the world. That
is what Shaftesbury understands by his well-known (even notorious) declaration:
To philosophize, in a just signification, is but to carry good breeding a step higher. For the
accomplishment of breeding is to learn what is decent in company or beautiful in arts, and
the sum of philosophy is to learn what is just in society and beautiful in nature and the
order of the world. . . . Thus, according to our author, the taste of beauty and the relish of
what is decent, just and amiable perfects the character of the gentleman and the philoso-
pher. (p. 407)

A word or two about the figure of ‘virtuosity’ and what has lately been dubbed
‘virtuoso culture.’16 The word ‘virtuoso’ came to England from Italy, where it
designated learned lovers of arts and antiquities, and it was first introduced in the
1634 edition of Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman, probably following

16
See the work of Brian Cowan, e.g. ‘An open elite: the peculiarities of connoisseurship in early
modern England’, Modern Intellectual History 1.2 (2004): 151–83, and especially The Social Life of
Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), e.g.
pp. 10–14. Cowan disputes the classic account by Walter Houghton, ‘The English Virtuoso in the
Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 3/1–2 (1942): 51–73 (cited as ‘Houghton’),
which assumes that the figure was moribund by the end of the century despite Shaftesbury’s attempt
to revive it. See also Marjorie Hope Nicolson, ‘Virtuoso’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New
York: Scribner, 1973), IV, pp. 486–90, which takes up the cause of the ‘virtuosa.’
 SHAFTESBURY AS VIRTUOSO 

discussions about Italian practices among the followers of the Earl of Arundel.17
Walter Houghton tells us that:
The virtuoso is the product and fusion of two traditions, of the courtier and the scholar: he
is, as we say, the gentleman-scholar. In England, the assimilation of Italian culture shows a
progressive development, starting with a concern for practical studies, moral and political,
in Elyot’s Governour, expanding in the Elizabethan period to studies of ornament, the
accomplishments and entertainments of the courtier, as Elyot was supplemented by
Castiglione, and finally in the early seventeenth century . . . arriving at the pursuit of
learning in itself for curiosity, delight, and reputation (Houghton, p. 58).

Peacham registers this outcome and the emergence of a new type of courtier-
become-scholar: learning not for social ornament but for pleasure and distinc-
tion, a life predicated on moneyed leisure, lived not at court but rather on one’s
country estate. The type emerged in the reign of James I, a time of relative
prosperity and circulation of luxuries, when gentlemen’s sons no longer felt the
pressure of public service found in Elizabeth’s time. (Young Prince Henry
became a leading collector of medals before his early death in his teens; he
employed his own band and even played the viol.) Houghton mentions Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as capturing something of the typical Jacobean
melancholy (Houghton, p. 64).
A last observation: The virtuoso follows the courtier model in distinguishing
himself from any common rules or given laws: ‘honnêteté,’ practised in private
salons rather than at court, involves finesse and feel, a je ne sais quoi whose value
lies precisely in its being tacit, learned and displayed through bodily practice and
gesture rather than study or science. The chevalier de Méré (1607–84)—exemplar
and theorist of ‘honnêteté’—instructed his friend Blaise Pascal in the secrets of the
je ne sais quoi—Pascal’s ‘l’esprit de finesse’—whose value was all the greater
because immeasurable. We find it also in the ‘no sé que’ of Baltasar Gracián,
author of works such as El Discreto (1646) and El Criticón (1651, 1653, 1657).18
In the next generation Shaftesbury takes up the je ne sais quoi, while associating it
more with love and what he disdained as ‘effeminacy,’ a trait by nature unsuited
to penetrating (in manly fashion) beyond sensuous appearance to what Pascal
calls ‘l’esprit de géométrie.’ He assures his readers that there is nevertheless an
intelligible order of numbers beyond (if also implicit in) the subtleties of sense,
even though we have no express criterion for determining its nature.

17
Houghton, ‘The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century’, 52.
18
Jeffrey Barnouw deals with the je ne sais quoi in his ‘The Beginnings of “Aesthetics” and the
Leibnizian Conception of Sensation’, in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art,
ed. Paul Mattick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 52–95, at p. 63f. (Pascal and
Méré), p. 68f. (Bouhours).
 MARTIN DONOUGHO

3. Confessing Professing (or, Doing the Numbers)

Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was published in 1711, when
its author was forty and ailing (he died just two years later). It proved an instant
success, and came to enjoy the highest reputation throughout the century besides
exerting a huge cultural influence (e.g. on the sentimental novel). Its later
eclipse—at least as a work of philosophy—is due no doubt to its mixed mode
of address, including a volatile dose of humour and irony (philosophically hard to
take). Locke and later Hume succeeded in finding a conversational style soberly
fitted to epistemology, and even Berkeley’s dialogues are (as Shaftesbury has it)
‘formist’ in their alignment to argumentative content. Shaftesbury’s more
extravagant play with genre (besides treatise he tries out soliloquy, dialogue,
and miscellany), along with his frequent resort to raillery and his extended
reflections upon dialogue, humour, and enthusiasm, make him hard to take
with proper philosophical seriousness. Moreover, it is always difficult to separate
ethical and aesthetic issues in his writing. Hence its salience for eighteenth-
century ethics and aesthetics has at least until recently been obscured; even
when acknowledged it has been distorted by anachronistic reading of him as
anticipating (for example) empiricist ethics, aesthetic disinterestedness, or Kant-
ian theodicy.19
The Inquiry, his first and most orthodox-looking publication, remains the
source of the usual expositions of Shaftesburean ‘ethics.’ Its tone is impersonal,
serious, objective, and formal. Lawrence Klein applies Bakhtin’s expression
‘monological’ to capture such self-consistency—though of course, self-
consciously to present one’s performance as monological is already to ‘discourse
with oneself ’, in dialogic mode, as we shall see.20 In the miscellaneous reflections
on his previous productions he writes of the Inquiry, now placed fourth in the
revised order of 1711:
It is in his following treatise that he [our author] discovers himself openly as a plain
dogmatist, a formalist and man of method; with his hypothesis tacked to him and his
opinions so close sticking as would force one to call to mind the figure of some straight-
laced professor in a university. (p. 396)21

19
For an excellent treatment, doing full justice to such predecessors as Cumberland, Cudworth
and Locke, see Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
20
Klein, Shaftesbury, p. 50, note 6.
21
Miscellany III, at the close of which, gearing up for Miscellany IV, he remarks, ‘But the reader is
now about to see him in a new aspect, a formal and professed philosopher, a system-writer, a
dogmatist and expounder. You have a defendant who is confessing’ (p. 418). It is hard to know
whether we should sympathize with such ‘feigned seriousness’ (p. 433) or laugh good-naturedly at it,
 SHAFTESBURY AS VIRTUOSO 

Even the epigraph from Horace—‘Putting play aside, let us turn to serious
things’—sounds playful, to my ears anyway.22 But seriously, just what is the
professed philosophy presented in the text, about which we (faithful to the
author) can afterwards turn ironic, reflective, even critical? I outline its main
ideas or positions.
(1) Shaftesbury followed Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists in criticiz-
ing Hobbes and Locke (his own tutor) for making virtue depend on external
sanction: ‘’Twas Mr Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and
virtue out of the world, and made the very idea of these . . . unnatural, and
without foundation in our minds’.23 If we are virtuous because we fear sanction,
whether earthly or divine, there is no merit in our actions. We ought rather to act
on our own will and desires. The influence of Cudworth and others is clear: moral
obligation comes from within, that is, from our creative ‘Promethean’ existence
as self-determining or autonomous beings. As such rational beings we—to
employ a favourite word of Shaftesbury’s—‘author’ our lives.
(2) Shaftesbury views certain feelings (such as kindness) as ‘natural’, with
proper ‘foundation in our minds’, rooted in an inner or ‘moral sense’. Moreover,
moral sense supplies not just an immediate motivation but also reflection upon
our feelings, plus criticism and judgment as to whether they are fitting; con-
science is precisely such self-reflection, a conversation with oneself (one’s better
self, we might even say). To be a rational agent is to be capable of exercising this
second-order approval or disapproval of our first-order sentiments, of comparing
them and envisaging how they might contribute to a coherent life.
(3) Book 2 of the Inquiry goes a little more into what makes sentiments
natural or unnatural. Some affections, it is claimed, are oriented to the public
good (not necessarily by intended design but rather in effect or tendency), while
others are ‘self-affections’, concerned with just the individual self and its private
good. Unnatural affections display neither tendency. Shaftesbury expressly allows
that too intense a concern with the self can also be unnatural and lead to misery.
A natural good such as love of life may well invert into fear of death and so

especially when our author continues: ‘So to his philosophy I commit him. Though . . . I intend still
to keep him in sight and convoy him, the best I am able, through the dangerous seas he is about
to pass.’
22
Inquiry 163: Satires 1.1.27. In Miscellany IV we read that the ‘affected gravity’ should not be
taken as implying any ‘raillery’, for the humour would then be abusive, not fit for a gentleman, etc.
(p. 433). Yet why even raise the spectre of satire if there weren’t something truly haunting the text?
Perhaps a delicate double game is being played, no less serious for being playful.
23
Cited by Darwall, at p. 177. My account of Shaftesbury’s ‘doctrine’ owes much to his
excellent book.
 MARTIN DONOUGHO

dominate one’s daily experience that general unhappiness results; similarly with
desire for food or sex, love of comfort or of honour or leisure—surfeit can pervert
what is naturally ‘good.’24 Or society (culture, ideology) might corrupt our
natural feelings, whether of self-love or benevolence, and lead to disorder. In
sum, it is in our general interests to be moral, Shaftesbury contends.
(4) Shaftesbury thinks humans for the most part sociable; they take pleasure
in giving pleasure. ‘If eating and drinking be natural, herding is so too. If any
appetite or sense be natural, the sense of fellowship be the same . . . Nothing is so
delightful as to incorporate’ (Sensus Communis, pp. 51, 53). Shaftesbury inaug-
urates a discourse of ‘sympathy’ which many others—Hutcheson, Hume, Rous-
seau, Smith—would then take up. In a remarkable passage he writes of how we
gather delight
from the very countenances, gestures, voices and sounds, even of creatures foreign to our
kind, whose signs of joy and contentment we can anyway discern. So insinuating are these
pleasures of sympathy, and so widely diffused through our whole lives, that there is hardly
such a thing as satisfaction or contentment of which they make not an essential part.
(Inquiry, p. 204)

We take pleasure in others’ pleasure—that is, by participating in their good—but

we also take pleasure in ‘the actual love, merited esteem or approbation of others’
(p. 204); still such esteem should be ‘merited’, not vain.
If Hume tries to strike a balance between practical sociability and theoretical
scepticism, Shaftesbury lies in many ways closer to Smith’s figure of the Impartial
Spectator; he holds up a pocket mirror to ourselves and our otherwise fragmented
sentiments and beliefs.25
(5) Shaftesbury’s observations could well be taken as empirical in mode. Yet
underpinning his claims is a robust metaphysics which needs brief examination.
On the one hand, the natural law tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf (via
Cumberland or Cudworth) worked strongly on his thought, as his notebooks
attest. On the other, we may observe the related ‘ethical naturalism’ of the
Stoics—or rather, the Neostoic version which took hold in the seventeenth
century and continued into the eighteenth (Shaftesbury was not the sole benefi-
ciary: Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, and even Kant are all indebted).
Renaissance Neostoicism no doubt modified the original Stoic ideas, in part to

24
Inquiry, pp. 216–19.
25
John Mullan helpfully discerns the differences between Hume and Smith in his Sentiment and
Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), p. 44f. The mature Hume of the Enquiry moved away from sympathy towards the spectator’s
viewpoint. For Smith, society is itself a mirror in which the individual can observe whether his
sentiments are in sync with others’ generally.
 SHAFTESBURY AS VIRTUOSO 

square with Christianity (the line is sometimes termed Providentialism), yet the
continuities are clear. Grotius took up the Stoic idea of oikeiosis and applied it to
his social contract theory, stressing the dual aspects of self-preservation and
sociability, each a mode of adaptation or fit between individual and environ-
ment.26 Shaftesbury is similar. He took issue with the French Augustinian
reaction to Neostoicism, forever on guard against the opposing notion of
amour propre—theatrical or other-regarding pride—which it saw as dangerously
close to self-love. Shaftesbury viewed that reaction in turn as dangerously close to
religious enthusiasm—his chief bugbear, early and late.27 Within limits, all told,
the art of pleasing others wasn’t dishonest but could prove the true Honestum.
Shaftesbury’s Platonic leanings can be gauged in his view of the affections as
naturally tending to the good of the whole. Our dispositions mirror the inner
harmony of the universe. What Soliloquy calls ‘the moral artist’ imitates the
divine maker, being ‘a second maker, a just Prometheus under Jove’ (p. 93).
The Moralists has Theocles distinguish between beautiful (but dead) forms, then
forms that form (in their intelligible operation upon the world), and finally a third
order ‘which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which
form’ (p. 323). This supreme, sovereign beauty is what our moral lives and
actions align themselves with: ‘the beautifying, not the beautified, is the really
beautiful’, we read (p. 322). Regardless of what agents intend, their natural
affections—self-love included—tend to be functionally suited to promoting the
public interest, Shaftesbury maintains. In addition, moral sense continually
checks on whether particular motives do in fact tend towards our (particular or
general) good; and it can, when cultivated, gauge whether motives are liable to be
disordered and dysfunctional. ‘Natural’ affections may, we’ve noted, become
twisted, perhaps by the interference of formalist systems or the prevailing
atomistic culture; yet reflection and conscience can monitor and perhaps coun-
teract the danger. The rational aim overall is Stoic self-control, that is, allowing
one’s ‘governing principle’ to rule one’s life. Shaftesbury calls his system ‘theism’
because it puts a creative ordering principle at its centre; we shouldn’t assume
that an orthodox Christian God is meant. His Providentialism has to do with the
economic workings of the universe rather than the ends of some transcendent

26
For a clear survey, see Christopher Brooke, ‘Stoicism and “oikeiosis” ’, Grotiana 29.1 (2008):
25–50, especially 33. See also Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius
to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), chapter 2, ‘Grotius, Stoicism, and
Oikeiosis’.
27
See Christopher Brooke, ‘Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustianian Origins’,
The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
pp. 94–123.
 MARTIN DONOUGHO

deity.28 Moreover, even to converse about such cosmic order constitutes a social,
performative, indeed creative act, rather than a ‘formist’ witness to some inde-
pendent truth. Nevertheless, just how is that to be carried out?

4. Mixing it Up
Shaftesbury always mistrusted the systematic or dogmatic approach, famously
declaring: ‘The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system.’29 If
appeal to external authority (God or system) was suspect, so too was resort to
introspection as the authentic path to self-knowledge. Shaftesbury preferred
conversation or dialogue. Even the Inquiry is at least tacitly an address, a
discussion with oneself as much as with others, its serious demeanour a pose or
mask—which is not at all to say that it is intended (or even that it tends) to
deceive. Sensus Communis, an essay on the freedom of wit and humour in a letter
to a friend, speaks—partly in jest—for ‘raillery’ as a force which can leaven
society, though one that if abused can also separate and exclude. ‘Defensive’
rather than ‘gross’ raillery (or ridicule) is called for; ‘wit is its own remedy’ (p. 31).
Shaftesbury concludes the essay by declaring that if he has laughed inappropri-
ately he will be laughed at in his turn (p. 68); if we can’t laugh at ourselves, the
remedy might become the disease (p. 28). One takes the risk of laughter as a
preemptive avoidance of excessive feeling or enthusiasm; passion is unreason-
able. If conversation oils society’s wheels, humour is ‘the very life of such
conversations’ (p. 37). It is all the more strange that some have found in Shaftes-
bury’s resort to the fictional letter a ruse to avoid embarrassingly direct address to
the reader30—as if publishing a self-styled ‘letter’ were itself the sending of a letter.
In fact his aim is precisely not to keep readers in their appointed place but to put
author and reader on equal footing, as becomes yet plainer in his deployment of
genres such as soliloquy, dialogue, or miscellany. Yet at the same time he faces a

28
The classic account by Jacob Viner—The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in
Intellectual History (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1972)—discerns two lines: the
‘sentimental school’ of which Shaftesbury was a prominent member (as was Adam Smith) and the
‘selfish school’ leading to hedonic utilitarianism; see pp. 65–81.
29
Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, p. 130. Shaftesbury’s epigraph from Persius (Satires, 1.7)
runs: ‘No need to inquire outside yourself ’—the point being that we should converse with ourselves,
in interior dialogue or dramatic presentation.
30
David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-century
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 20, following David Marshall, The Figure of
Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), e.g. pp. 25, 40. For a corrective, cf. Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British
Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
p. 29f.
 SHAFTESBURY AS VIRTUOSO 

rhetorical dilemma: does his writing lead upwards, to the Platonic sun of truth, or
does its irony replicate itself in indefinite scepticism?
Michael Prince has asked why the eighteenth century so often resorted to
dialogue—whether in philosophy, theology, or the novel—surmising that it
responds to a time of social unrest. It voices anxiety while at the same time
seeking a provisional consensus. Metaphysicians and sceptics alike employed the
form; revival of interest in Plato (especially on beauty) circa 1730–70 was
matched by anti-metaphysical dialogues, typically set in a coffeehouse, street,
or stagecoach (Prince, pp. 15–19). Prince depicts a Shaftesbury torn between the
poles of classical decorum and modern ridicule. I’d counter that the split is rather
portrayed in his characters. The Moralists plays it out in the persons of Philocles
(narrating the events, as the urban and urbanely amused sceptic) and Theocles
(the friend he visits, Neoplatonist and landed aristocrat). Shaftesbury, presumed
author of the piece, plays both metaphysician and sceptic, or perhaps neither.
Clearly the role of author is accorded no special privileges. Indeed, with dialogue,
we are told, ‘the author is annihilated, and the reader being in no way applied to,
stands for nobody. The self-interesting parties both vanish at once. The scene
presents itself as by chance and undesigned’ (Moralists, p. 90). It does so by
design, we might say.
In fine, such generic ‘mixing-it-up’ serves only to amplify the ethical theme
presented, namely, that practical or aesthetic judgments do not just flow ‘natur-
ally’ from one’s given character but are as much products of urbane cultivation,
habit, criticism, and discussion (let me interject: ‘wouldn’t you agree?’). In other
words, reflection on one’s affections (desires and beliefs) often comes about
through conversation, with oneself and with others, in dialogue or presentation
of dialogue. The moral sense enjoys no special authorial privilege just because the
agent asserts his self-authorship. Shaftesbury’s motto was: ‘to correct our
taste’31—an open-ended process, beginning from wherever we various interlocu-
tors just happen to be. He appeals to a culture of politeness (including a gentle
poking fun) as a way of constituting ourselves as moral virtuosi. Presentation of
self is also self-formation, indeed self-generation: Shaftesbury alters the Delphic
command—‘Know yourself!’—first into ‘recognize yourself!’ then further into
‘divide yourself!’ . . . ‘be two’ (p. 77), that is, become social. The philosopher holds
out to us ‘a kind of vocal looking glass’ (p. 78) in practising his ‘mirror writing’
(p. 89). Shaftesbury wonders about the gulf between immediate grace and

31
Second Characters, p. 114. This point is emphasized by Dabney Townsend in ‘From Shaftes-
bury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience’, Journal of the History of
Ideas 48/2 (1987): 287–305, at 289.
 MARTIN DONOUGHO

thoughtful reflection, and about the ‘injudicious affectation of grace’ which then
appears ‘graceless’ (p. 85), but he finds no salvation in prefaces, epistles, or
addresses to the reader, as if these could simply cut through the veils of self-
presentation to ensure an immediate social transparency. Philosophical conver-
sation is an ethical–aesthetic practice aimed at the formation of self, character,
persona. Drawing on a long European tradition of ‘ars culture’ it attempts to
establish a new natura, Hans Carl Finsen observes.32 Rhetoric here provides
more than a fixed, classical model to be imitated: it generates the very speech acts
by which a virtuous character is shaped and projected into a verbal, social role. It
operates eminently by criticism (which represents the voice of civilization) and
by appeal to models (the dialectical essay, without fixed standpoint). This is
imitative bootstrapping of an exhilarating order. It certainly inspired critics and
theorists in France and Germany.

5. Conclusions
I have argued that Shaftesbury’s virtuoso model continues a line of aesthetic
distinction stemming from fifteenth-century Italy. It is true that ‘virtuoso culture’
faded from view over the next century, displaced (a) by a market economy, for
example, in painting, whereby the system determines and constitutes individual
artist and collector,33 and (b) by a growing emphasis in poetic theory on the
reciprocity of image and medium which culminates, David Wellbery suggests, in
Lessing’s Laocoön.34 Even so, the formal and practical features of Shaftesburean
wit survive and flourish, in particular its stress on self-reflexivity, autonomy, and
self-expression, in and as sociability. Writing under Niklas Luhmann’s aegis,
Wellbery explicates Shaftesbury’s ‘wit is its own remedy’ as a process of self-
observation and openness to others’ observations of oneself; hence Luhmannian
‘second-order observation’. I hear a distant echo in Kant’s discussion of the
judgment of taste fifty years later. Section 40 of the Critique of Judgment speaks

32
‘Funktionswandel des Selbstgesprächs. Rhetorische Strategien bei Shaftesbury und Johan Jakob
Engel’, Orbis Litterarum 59 (2004): 366–89, at 370. Finsen adds (371) that rhetoric already had at its
disposal the Ciceronian terms negligentia diligens and dissimulatio artis akin to the je ne sais quoi
Shaftesbury himself cites.
33
Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), e.g. p. 51f. Pears is adduced by Niklas Luhmann as
demonstrating the emergence of a properly differentiated art system: Art as a Social System
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 81.
34
Wellbery traces the shift towards self-observation in Dubos, Gottsched, Breitinger, Baumgar-
ten, and beyond in his ‘Aesthetic Media: The Structure of Aesthetic Theory before Kant’, in Bender
and Marrinan (eds), Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 199–209, at 205–6 (for Shaftesbury).
 SHAFTESBURY AS VIRTUOSO 

of the reflective maxim whereby each aesthetic judgment tacitly invokes the
universal court of a virtual sensus communis: the individual judge puts itself on
the line in a way not open to a theoretical or practical subject necessarily subject
to moral law or cognitive categories.35 Kant’s productive genius pursues individ-
ual freedom even further, it’s true, and inaugurates what in Romanticism would
become singular, formative, imaginative Art (instead of plural fine arts); even so,
reception has creatively to interpret the ‘aesthetic idea’ animating the artwork.
The Romantic artist/critic continues the pragmatics of self-observation—this
dialectical dance between system and individual, work and perception-cum-
production; so-called ‘Romantic irony’ simply makes explicit the formal dynamic
of self-distinction. S/he is the one who might best register and enact Shaftesbury’s
maxim: ‘divide yourself ’.

35
Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 174–5.
Following the second maxim (sc., of judgment), the individual thinks in the position of everyone
else, from a putatively ‘universal standpoint’.
 18
Fate, Philology, Freud
Jules Brody

Oedipus’s basic error was to have viewed evil as a problem, whereas he learns to
his grief that it is actually a mystery, an irresolvable paradox, a natural contra-
diction between the mutually exclusive possibilities of self-determination and
predetermination, between freedom of the will and divine omniscience. This is
the quandary as it is perceived by philosophy and religion. In the domains of
religion and theology Fate is indeed a mystery. Ill-equipped as I am to elucidate
mysteries, I will move the discussion to a firmer ground, where the concept of
Fate is merely a problem, where scholars, those who “traffic in words,” as Goethe
calls us, stand a fighting chance.1
My major concerns will be: (1) to determine what words mean in the texts
where they are found; (2) to examine the connections among the contextual
meanings of the words which we translate variously as Fate, Necessity, Destiny,
and so forth; and (3) to examine the connection between the linguistic and
literary expressions of the idea of Fate, and human behavior as described in the
writings of Sigmund Freud.
It is an intriguing fact that in his reflections on tragedy Aristotle does not use
any of the several words for Fate in ancient Greek. He is, moreover, probably the
only critic on record who fails to evoke to the notion of Fate in speaking of
Oedipus the King. Although completely absent from the Poetics, the idea of Fate is
a constant theme in Freud. And if Freud evokes this problematic notion recur-
rently, at times along with Schicksal, Notwendigkeit, or Anankē, he presumably
had as good reason for doing so as did Aristotle not to mention it at all.
Another dimension of the problem has to do with Sin, which is related to Fate
in familiar theological contexts. In the book of Samuel (2 Sam. 11), for example,

1
Johan W. Goethe, Faust, trans. Louis Macneice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960),
p. 200.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

we are told how David saw Bathsheba bathing, sent for her, made her pregnant,
and arranged for her husband Uriah to be killed at the front. Bathsheba then
became David’s wife and bore him the son that they had conceived together. At
this point, the Lord sends the prophet Nathan to confront David with his
transgression. At the end of Nathan’s indictment,
David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan answered him, “The Lord
has laid on another the consequences of your sin, you shall not die, but because in this you
have shown your contempt for the Lord, the boy that will be born to you shall die.”

A week later, on the day when the boy was to be circumcised and named, this
prediction was fulfilled, the Lord’s declaration or fatum was realized, and David’s
sin was punished.
David sinned against the Lord, and acknowledges his responsibility:
This is the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, to you: “I anointed you king over Israel . . . I
gave you the daughters of Israel and Judah; and, had this not been enough, I would have
added other favors as great. Why, then, have you flouted the word of the Lord by doing
what is wrong in my eyes?”

We are not dealing here with mere carnality. David does not say that he has
sinned against Bathsheba or Uriah, but against the Lord. His sin consists in
having violated a contract, in having exceeded a conventual limit, in having taken
one more woman than he had been allowed.
In a roughly contemporaneous story, Agamemnon uses the prerogative of his
position to lay claim to Achilleus’s concubine, Briseis, who had been duly
awarded to him as a prize for his valor in battle. Agamemnon denies personal
blame for this action:
I am not responsible,
But Zeus is, and Destiny, and Erinys the mist-walking
Who in assembly caught my heart in the savage delusion. . . .
Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things.2

This, clearly, is no longer the same mental and moral universe in which we were
able to understand the David story. Here, there is open acknowledgment of
wrongdoing, but with no admission of responsibility or feeling of guilt. I am
not aitios, I am not responsible, says Agamemnon. I did what everyone says I did,
but the cause lies elsewhere. The witnesses to Agamemnon’s speech, Achilleus
included, all seem satisfied with this explanation. Achilleus, in fact, used the same

2
The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),
19: 87–90.
 JULES BRODY

way of reasoning to explain Agamemnon’s act to Thetis, his mother: “Zeus of the
counsels has taken his wits away from him” (1.412). Helen offers a similar
explanation to Hector (6.342ff.): “all this trouble has arisen, she says, because
of the bitch that I am and because of Paris’s atē, his delusion” (atē is one of the
several words that Agamemnon used in describing his own behavior). On Paris
and me, Helen concludes, “Zeus has set a vile destiny” (6.357: kakon moron).
According to E. R. Dodds, these are not the private rationalizations of indi-
viduals. He attributes such explanations of irrational behavior to an underlying
belief in what he terms “psychic intervention”: an atē, a fate, a doom, or a
delusion is visited upon a person with no implication of “moral guilt” or
punishment. To think otherwise would be “a fantastic anachronism.” When
Agamemnon blames his moira—his portion, or lot, or destiny—when he claims
that Zeus or some avenging Fury has put a doom on him, he is simply endorsing a
widely received distinction between “normal actions and actions performed in a
state of atē.”3
Dodds traces the belief in “psychic intervention” to a millennial “habit of
thought,” to “an intellectualist approach to the explanation of behavior.” As a
typical example of this tendency he cites the Socratic paradoxes: “virtue is
knowledge” and “no one does wrong on purpose.” “If character is knowledge,
what is not knowledge,” so Dodds argues, “is not part of the character, but comes
to a man from the outside.” It has often been noted that the normal verb in
ancient Greek for “I know” (oida) is the past participle of eidenai, “to see.” What
we cannot see and do not know must lie outside of human experience. Such
things can be known only by those who see beyond the limited vision of men, by
Zeus and the far-seeing Apollo. When someone acts in a way contrary to what he
knows, “his action is not properly his own but has been dictated to him. In other
words, unsystematized, non-rational impulses, and the acts resulting from them
tend to be excluded from the self and ascribed to an alien origin” (pp. 16–17).
Although he locates Greek fatalism within a coherent religious system, Dodds
explains its origin not in ideological or theological terms, but as a function of
behavioral and psychological concerns.4
This is a far cry from our usual way of describing how our minds work and
explaining our behavior. Ours is an ordered world, governed by ethical and moral
beliefs, founded on principles of individual and collective responsibility. When

3
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951),
pp. 5–7.
4
This development follows the argument of “Agamemnon’s Apology,” the opening chapter in
Dodds’s book.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

faced with the need to explain or excuse a regrettable action, we may admit fault
or guilt in any number of ways: I was unaware of your feelings, I acted selfishly,
inconsiderately, there was a breakdown in communication. Or we might think to
relate our misdeeds to bad temper or some unconscious purpose: What made me
do a thing like that? What came over me? How could I? What got hold of me?
When we resort to such modes of self-scrutiny, we are, at one level, admitting
wrongdoing, while, at another, we are dissociating ourselves from the regrettable
and regretted act. By asking “What made me do a thing like that?” we are
pointing to an agent or agency outside the Self, as if we actually were the passive
object in a process in which our better judgment tells us we were engaged actively.
We are saying in effect “I didn’t mean it” or “I couldn’t help it.” Oratio vultus
animi. Language is the mirror of the mind. Sooner or later we say what we mean.
And what do we mean when we say, for example, that we were seized with panic,
crippled by anxiety, laden with guilt, carried away by emotion, filled with anger,
gripped by fear, smitten with desire, driven to despair? Why, in fact, do we fall in
love, sink into despondency, or fly off the handle? Why do we never claim to be
caught in the throes of understanding, driven to insight, overcome by virtue, or
consumed with honesty?
Because, in spite of ourselves, we are incurable dualists. There lies deeply
embedded within our psychic organization the belief that we are naturally and
actively rational and intelligent, but only accidentally and passively angry, envi-
ous, fearful, or desperate. It is because we think of ourselves as having an inside
and an outside that we are able to say that we are “beside ourselves” with grief or
anger, or “I lost my cool,” “I lost my head.” These are strange but, at the same
time, quite logical expressions, which strongly suggest that a dualistic model
seems to be quietly at work here.
To “keep one’s head” is a metaphor not only for rationality but for the
hierarchical, cephalic dispensation that is inherent in our basic conceptions of
social, political, and military organization. The body politic is “headed” by a
“chief of state” (“chief” < Latin caput = head), just as an army “corps” is presided
over by “captains” and “chiefs of staff,” just as a “chief executive” or “chief of
state” heads our government. We conceive of our institutions on the implicit
model of a head or brain ruling a body.
Consider this statement from Chaim Kaplan’s Warsaw Diary on the behavior
of the German military in occupied Poland: “Anything founded on insanity must
not last long.”5 This, of course, is one of the guiding thoughts of civilized
societies. We view irrationality, barbarism, bestiality, especially when manifested

5
Chaim Kaplan, Warsaw Diary, trans. A. L. Katsch (New York: Collier, 1973), p. 20.
 JULES BRODY

on a cosmic scale, as aberrant or accidental, and, therefore, short-lived. An entire

civilization, as it were, lost its head. And when the madness was spent, life
returned to normal, and the validity of the vertical, dualistic, cephalic model
was duly reasserted. The demon was exorcized, the alien frenzy was expelled;
sanity, rationality, and intelligence reclaimed their natural and rightful place in
the conduct of human affairs. There may be reason to suspect that the cephalic
model, which informs the founding myth of civilized man, is more an ideal than
a reality.
Plato, as the codifier, if not the inventor, of what I call here the “cephalic myth”
marks the great divide between two radically different systems of thought. For the
present purpose we might postulate three essential historical divisions: (1) a pre-
Platonic period running from Homer through the Greek tragic poets; (2) a post-
Platonic period lasting to the end of the nineteenth century; and (3) a final
“psychoanalytic” period that begins with Freud’s discovery of the Unconscious.
This tripartite scheme has the virtue of delimiting the three essential ways we
have of representing our mental processes and activity. Moreover, this division
presupposes that we are at the same stage of biological evolution as pre-Platonic
men, and honors the conviction that our intellectual capacities, inasmuch as they
are biologically contingent, are still the same in us as they were in the time of
Agamemnon. What has changed drastically are the ways in which we have
learned to represent and conceptualize our mental activity. Although we have
lived for some time now in the psychoanalytic age, we continue to think and
speak in Platonic, cephalic terms, as if Freud had never written a line.
The dominant characteristic of the pre-Platonic age, in the words of Bruno
Snell, is that it lacked a “concept of any vital center which controls the vital
system, of what has been known since Plato as ‘the mind’.” Snell goes on to say
that “[t]he belief in the existence of a universal, uniform, human mind is a
rationalist prejudice.”6 Snell stresses that, in Homer, the parts of this so-called
“mind” that we label as “will,” “intention,” “purpose,” and the like, are viewed as
extrinsic to human thought and behavior: “Men who interpret their own mental
processes along these lines,” Snell concludes, “consider themselves a battleground
of arbitrary forces and uncanny powers” (p. 22).
Freud’s studies of myth formation follow a simple, commonsensical approach.
Whereas myths were treated, historically, as if they had been revealed by the gods
from on high, Freud took the position “that they were projected onto the heavens

6
Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. Thomas
G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover, 1953), p. 16.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

after having arisen quite otherwise under purely human conditions.”7 Focusing
on this “human” content, Freud saw in the etiology and functioning of myth the
same relation between the manifest and the latent that he observed in dreams:
“The manifest is there but it is ambiguous; the meaning lies below; from the point
of view of this latent lower content, the manifest is accidental and inconsequen-
tial.”8 Here, as often, Freud states systematically what the poets and the philo-
sophers had always known intuitively: “Was der Mensch als Gott verehrt ist sein
eigenstes Innere herausgekehrt” (“The god to whom a man shows himself devout,
is his own soul turned inside out”).9 Or Xenophanes, more simply: “If the ox
could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox” (Dodds, p. 181).
If the essence of myth making is anthropomorphic projection, how may we
describe the manifest content of the fatalistic Homeric myths? For the post-
Platonic reader, the paradox of Homeric religion has been aptly put by the
pseudo-Longinus, probably a Jew writing in the first century CE, the presumed
author of the Treatise on the Sublime. According to “Longinus,” Homer, in the
Iliad, with “his legends of wounds suffered by the gods, and of their feuds,
reprisals, tears, bonds, and all their manifold passions, seems to have made
gods of the men concerned in the Siege of Troy, and men of the gods.”10 Or, as
Paul Mazon puts it, “Dans ce poème de chevalerie, rien de moins chevaleresque
qu’un dieu.”11
Both these descriptions of the manifest content of Homeric theology share in
the cephalic perspective and reflect its implicit religious attitudes. From the
psychoanalytic standpoint, however, we must ask another kind of question:
since myth is not handed down from above, but projected outward and upward
by human minds, since myth is by definition psychologically purposeful and
utilitarian, we must ask why a community or civilization would forge a concep-
tion of divinity whose main properties are synoptic knowledge, limitless power,
immortality, and rampant irrationality. Freud addresses this question in the same
way that he dealt with the rise of Judaism and Christianity. In evolving his

7
Sigmund Freud, The Theme of the Three Caskets (1913), in SE, vol. 12, p. 292. Quotations from
Freud refer, as here, to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans.
James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 24 vols.
8
A. L. Kroeber, “Totem and Taboo in Retrospect,” in Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Bruce
Mazlish (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 47.
9
Johan W. Goethe, Gespräche, ed. F. W. Biedermann (Leipzig: Von Biedermann, 1909), vol. 2,
p. 255. Quoted in translation by Snell, p. 31.
10
Longinus on the Sublime, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1935), p. 63.
11
Paul Mazon, Introduction à l’Iliade (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1942), p. 296.
 JULES BRODY

religious systems, man has always attributed to his gods “everything that seemed
unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him.”12
In Freud’s view, the invention of religion signals a new intellectual awareness
and a momentous act of comprehension. In inventing his deities, whatever their
specific properties, man is saying that there are certain things he cannot have and
certain things he may not do. In a typically evolutionist manner, Freud sketches
out the probable stages in the growth of religious thought. In his reconstruction,
he postulates a primal “time without religion, without gods.”13 This is the
animistic phase, in which the universe was populated with spirits who could be
appeased and controlled through ritual and magical gesture. “At the animistic
stage, men ascribe omnipotence to themselves.”14 At this stage, there is a belief in
“the omnipotence of thought” (die Allmacht der Gedanken). At the second or
religious stage, men cede a part of their omnipotence to the gods “but do not
seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the
gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes.” The third and final stage is
the scientific (die wissenschaftliche Phase): “The scientific view of the universe
no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged
their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities of
Nature.”
This observation leads Freud to this dazzling conclusion: the creation of spirits
or gods marks “man’s first theoretical achievement” (p. 93). When our forebears
voluntarily handed over part of their omnipotence to gods, and sacrificed part of
their freedom of action, Freud continues, they made “a first acknowledgement of
Anankē [Necessity] which opposes human narcissism.”15 For Freud this acknow-
ledgment marks an assertion of mental maturity, a cardinal, decisive moment in
the process and in the progress of Civilization itself. The theoretical achievement
that Freud heralds here signals the crucial step from the human claim of “the
omnipotence of thought” to the anguishing thought of human impotence.
Freud’s luminous speculations on the advent of Civilization have been put to
major use in Robert Lenoble’s profound inquiry into the evolution of the idea of
Nature. He advances the paradox that at the magical or animistic stage, the
greatest taboo of all is ignorance: “A ce stade, précisément, la pensée ‘n’ignore’
rien, elle ‘sait’ tout.”16 So-called primitive man is driven by an extreme, radical

12
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in SE, vol. 21, p. 91; hereafter abbreviated
Civilization.
13
Freud, The Question of a Weltanschauung (1933), in SE, vol. 22, p. 164.
14
Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), in SE, vol. 13, p. 88 (Freud’s italics).
15
Freud prints the word Anankē in Greek characters.
16
Robert Lenoble, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’idée de nature (Paris: Albin Michel, 1969), p. 41.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

craving for logic and causality. Disease, disappointment, natural calamity, mili-
tary defeat, all forms of adversity and disaster, in short, are explained as divine
punishment of crimes or as divine revenge for prior offenses. From the need for
such causal connections, Lenoble infers that the primary thought-content of
animism is man’s protest against his painful experience of the external world.
This protest is prompted, in turn, by the desire on the part of primitive man to
replace what he feels as a threatening otherness with a population of spirits, as
close as possible to his own in their psychological motivation (p. 44).
In the animistic mind nothing is allowed to happen by chance. In the absence
of the “true reasons,” the primitive mind will find “good reasons.”17 In a thought-
system committed to the omnipotence of thought, the thought of human
omnipotence is taboo. The breaking of this taboo, in Freud’s analysis, entails
two consequences, which in the common-sense view may seem completely
disconnected. The first is the creation of a fatalistic theology founded on the
admission of ignorance of the causes of human suffering. The second conse-
quence is the possibility of scientific explanation: “Science only begins after it has
been realized that the world is unknown” (Totem and Taboo, p. 91).
If animistic thinking denies existential chaos, fatalistic thinking must be seen,
conversely, as the denial of existential order. In the words of Philip Rieff, “God,
according to Freud, is the positive projection of the act of renunciation.”18 If this
is so, what exactly is projected and what is renounced? Homer’s word for “man”
is brotos, from the Indo-European root-verb, “to die.” Men, by definition, are
“those who die.” And gods, by opposition, are athanatoi, “those who do not die.”
At the animistic stage, men thought of themselves as naturally immortal: death
was not yet a fact, but a mystery that had to be explained. This is why all primitive
cultures evolved myths of the origin of Death. In the Homeric theology, death
had become a fact; it is treated no longer as a problem or a mystery, but a reality.
The gods can be called athanatoi only when men have renounced the belief in
their own immortality.
This is the first projection and the first renunciation. The immortals, however,
are also jealous, violent, devious, vain, cruel, arbitrary, sexually promiscuous,
materially self-interested, imperialistic, and vindictive. They hold a monopoly on
the freedom to act without rational restraint or moral constraint, in exclusive
pursuit of their personal desires. This is the basis for the second projection and

17
Frederick J. Hacker, “Freud, Marx, and Kierkegaard,” in Freud and the 20th Century, ed.
Benjamin Nelson (New York: World, 1957), p. 130.
18
Philip Rieff, “The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud’s Thought,” in Psychoanalysis and
History, ed. Bruce Mazlish (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 44.
 JULES BRODY

the second renunciation. In their affective life, the immortals are credited with all
the prerogatives and pleasures that men must deny themselves. The immortals
move in a parallel society, theoretically governed by a set of ethical understand-
ings, but subject in practice to political deals and pragmatic trade-offs. In a word,
the immortals’ society contains “everything that seemed unattainable [to man’s]
wishes, or that was forbidden to him” (Civilization, p. 91). The immortals
represent an existential reality, made up of all those forces which are experien-
tially present in the world, but which prove unmanageable to men once they have
accepted the painful thought of their impotency. The immortals are as free as
Nature and as free as Death, and, as such, they constitute what could be called an
is-system.
By contrast, the Platonic, Judaeo-Christian, monotheistic, cephalic theology
could be described as an ought-system. This theology builds on a historical
scheme in which God has a “moral” purpose.19 In elaborating this theology,
men project onto the heavens what they seek but do not find in the world: order,
justice, providential design. In this ought-system, men owe a debt to God.
Transaction between the human and the divine levies on an intricate network
of obligations. A compact of rules and laws is accompanied by a detailed price list.
Under this dispensation, life here on earth is no longer self-enclosed, as in the
Homeric theology; it is, rather, a redemptive process by which the immortality
that had been only provisionally renounced may be, finally, “bought back.” While
the is-system affirms chaos, the ought-system requires causality. In one way, post-
Platonic monotheism marks a moral advance over an earlier polytheistic fatalism.
In another way, this ostensible moral progress signalizes a psychological retreat
to the premises of the pre-Homeric animism.
The ought-system posits order in the world and freedom in people, while the
is-system posits freedom in the world and order in people. In the Homeric is-
system, order can be disturbed only by the irruption from without of the
irrational. Snell has said that “Homeric man has not yet awakened to the fact
that he possesses in his own soul the source of his powers” (p. 21). While this
statement may be descriptively accurate, psychologically speaking, it is naively
anachronistic. Snell’s proposition could be more correctly restated in this way:
Homeric man has awakened to the fact that his powers are limited, his vulner-
ability great, his place in nature perilous, and his mortality certain. The insight
underlying these realizations is both primitive and positive; it is completely at one
with Freud’s vision of the mind as a maze, and not as a vertically structured

19
S. Kürner, “Necessity,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed.
P. P. Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1973).
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

hierarchy, and with his vision of the world as an existential chaos, and not an
essential order. In Homeric theology, where the irrational demon controls from
without, as in Freudian psychology, where the Unconscious controls from within,
the freedom and autonomy of the human mind goes down as the first casualty.
At this point, I must shift my ground from Fate to Philology. Since language
and words are the lifeblood and the staple currency of psychoanalytic investiga-
tion, Freud, however, will not be far behind. When we use words like “fate” and
“destiny,” we usually are voicing some grandiose, ideological, cosmological, or
theological concern. Etymologically, however, we are dealing with a simple and
familiar metaphor. At its origin, “fate,” from Latin fatum and, ultimately, from
the verb fari, “to speak,” denotes a spoken word. In human affairs, the fulfillment
of Fate is thought of as the enactment of a prediction. Thus, our tendency to
connect Fate with the idea of oracular pronouncement rests on a solid etymo-
logical basis. Fate is a logos that spells out a preordained pattern of action and
events that lends shape and structure to human existence. In Latin, logos is ratio,
a pattern or exemplary model. And it is understandable why the Romans should
have seen a false, but intuitively sensible, etymological connection between ratio
(reason, pattern, order) and oratio (speech).20
A similar link between the spoken word and cosmic order is reflected in the
rabbinic periphrase for God: “He who spoke and the world was.” Benveniste
suggests that Greek dikē (justice) may be cognate with Latin dico (to speak).21
And if this relation is true, our primary notions of morality and legality are the
product of a fatum, an authoritative, oracular pronouncement.
We are dealing here with what linguists call “surface structure.” The revolu-
tionary insights of Richard B. Onians have much to teach us about the deep
structure of the concept of Fate.22 His prodigious learning and intellectual daring
put Onians squarely in a class with Damaso Alonso, Ernst-Robert Curtius, Mario
Praz, and Leo Spitzer. And yet his book has been virtually ignored by classicists,
philosophers, and philologists, at least in the world of Anglo-Saxon scholarship.23
This sorry fact notwithstanding, as a French colleague once said to me about

20
Leo Spitzer, “Ratio>Race,” in Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1948).
21
Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. E. Palmer (Coral Gables:
University of Miami Press, 1973), pp. 385–8.
22
Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the
World, Time and Fate, New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and Kindred Evidence, also of Some
Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). See part
3, chap. 2, pp. 310–42.
23
For the deeply sympathetic and understanding reception in France, on the other hand, see
Jules Brody, Oedipus Tyrannus: A Textual Approach (Buffalo: SUNY Department of Classics, 1985),
pp. 74–5n2.
 JULES BRODY

Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, “C’est un livre qu’il faut
avoir lu.”
Here are some of Onians’s most impressive discoveries. We will remember
how, in the speech with which I started, Agamemnon declines all responsibility
for his avowed misdeeds. It was Zeus, my moira, my destiny, it was Erinys, a fury.
What could I do? It was the god who accomplishes all things. The fault lies
elsewhere, he continues,
Delusion is the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed
Who deludes all: her feet are delicate and they step not
On the firm earth, but she walks the air above men’s heads
And leads them astray. She has entangled others before me.
(Iliad, 19:91–4)

Now, the Greek verb pedao that Lattimore translates here as “entangled” means
literally “to bind” or “fasten” with a rope or chain. Onians, however, shows that
we are dealing here not with a mere literary metaphor but a religious idea. For
Onians this process of entanglement by atē is the surface manifestation of a deep
metaphorical structure. He cites in support of his position a passage from book 13
of the Iliad, which describes the rivalry between Zeus and Poseidon, who back
opposing sides in the war:
These two had looped over both sides a crossing
Cable of strong discord and the closing of battle, not to be
Slipped, not to be broken, which unstrung the knees of many.
(Iliad, 13:357–60)

Most readers of Homer tend to visualize this rope or cable as an instrument in

a tug-of-war, with each god and his allies pulling in his respective direction.
For Onians, however, the underlying idea is one of circumscription, encircle-
ment, limitation, enclosure. As the noose or loop is placed around the
opposing armies, as the knot is fastened and tightened, an area of activity is
roped off, a bond is placed upon the combatants, a boundary is drawn around
them. The warriors who are thus encompassed within the bond of Fate stand
ready to enact the definitional and definitive event in human existence: they
prepare to “meet their end” or, in the specific terms of the Homeric image,
they are about to be closed off and hemmed in behind the final pale of human
life: Death.
In the terms of another Homeric image, the fate of the men who are locked
here in battle lies, as we say, “in the lap of the gods,” or as the Greeks would have
it, on the knees of the gods. The gods in question, however, are served here by
none other than the three moirai, Lachesis, Klotho, and Atropos, the weavers and
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

spinners of Fate, whose function is to fasten the bond and tie the knot of Death.
Lachesis allots a portion, selects the threads, and weighs them in her scales. These
threads are then spun into a rope by Klotho, literally the spinner, and, finally,
woven or bound together by Atropos, the one who cannot be pushed back or
turned away.
In Plato’s Republic (10:614–21), the myth of Er pictures these three moirai, in
an updated version of their archaic function, as determining and assigning the
fates of reincarnated souls. In Plato, the spinning and weaving of Fate partake of a
complete cosmological vision which pictures the universe as revolving on the
spindle of Anankē and encircled by a chain (desmos) of light. Onians links this
image, in turn, with earlier cosmological conceits. He reminds us that Homer
imagined Okeanos as a watery boundary placed around the Earth, in the form of a
coiled serpent. In Orphic lore, Chronos was the mate of Anankē, whose name he
connects etymologically with anchein, “to strangle” (p. 332). In early Greek
thought, the idea of human destiny as a circumscribing bond is but the earthly
counterpart of a cosmic Fate. Time and Necessity, like the waters of the sea, were
thought to contain the universe, binding it together, according to a semblance of
physical Law.
Since in the archaic imagination Fate and Death are conceived of as supernat-
ural bonds, the urge to escape one’s fate will resort to a process of counter-
binding. Archaeologists have unearthed effigies of men and gods with their limbs
bound in an effort to stem the influence of an unfriendly divinity or a hated
enemy. This, according to Onians, is the motive behind the Roman practice of
defixio: the nailing or piercing of the effigy of a powerful, fearsome adversary. The
same could be said of the voodoo practice of sticking pins into images or
simulacra. The purpose in such cases is not to hurt, but to immobilize an
enemy, inhibit his powers, or restrict his area of activity. Onians points to the
example of Odysseus, who has himself tied to the mast of his ship in order to
resist the spellbinding song of the Sirens, whose name derives from the Greek
word seira, “rope.”
In much the same way that we speak of “weaving a tale” or “spinning a yarn,”
the Greeks thought of certain magical incantations as esthetic defixiones that are
visited on victims. Just so do the Furies sing their hymnoi desmioi; just so does
Aphrodite cast her spell by binding her zona, her belt or girdle, around those
whom she holds in the thralls of love. Odysseus, seeking to escape the spellbind-
ing Sirens’ song, is reminiscent of Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, the
throttler or choker. Onians prefers to call this hybrid monster—whose name
derives from sphingo, “to bind” or “to tie”—the “tight-binder.” In Oedipus the
King, the Sphinx holds Thebes in the grip of a deadly riddle which Oedipus
 JULES BRODY

famously looses or “solves.” As the priest of Apollo tells him, “you are the one
who untied the knot and undid the bond of the cruel singer.”
One might even see an ironic connection between Thebes delivered from the
Sphinx’s spellbinding song and the baby Oedipus exposed on a mountaintop, his
ankles bound together, freed by a herdsman, eventually to be captured again in
the grip of Fate. As a result of the piercing and binding of his ankles, Oedipus
became known as the man with the swollen foot.24 This rapprochement becomes
all the more compelling when we consider that his father’s name, Laios, means
left-handed or left-sided—compare French sinistré, “disabled”—and that his
grandfather’s name, Labdakos, means “lame.” It cannot be an accident that
these three fate-ridden men should share an impedimentum, an incapacitation
of the feet.
In the Oedipus story, the undoing of the bond of Fate shares a psychological
motive with the attempt of Sisyphus to suspend or immobilize Thanatos. The
binding of Death has been the subject of extant plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides, as well as many others that have not survived. The Bacchae
provides a spectacular example. Pentheus has imprisoned a group of Bacchantes
and has had their hands tied together. The others, he says, “I am going to hunt
out . . . Once they’re fast in iron fetters, I’ll put a stop to this outrageous Bac-
chism.”25 But with the god’s intervention, their fetters “fell off their feet” and their
prison door flung open (lines 446–50). Dionysus breaks his chains and escapes.
The unbound god proceeds to bind Pentheus, catching him in a net. As Pentheus
goes off to witness the Bacchic rites, Dionysus says that he “is walking into the
net” (line 848). But Pentheus is not trapped in any which way. Dionysus insists
that he be dressed ritually in a peplon—Agamemnon was wrapped in a peplon
when he met his fate—and that he wear a mitra, “headband.”26
Caught up in a hunter’s net, his body enrobed in the ritual garment, his head
encircled with the mitra, Pentheus is made to act out in dramatic fashion his
circumscription by the very forces that he had sought to shackle and repress. The
messenger reports that at the moment of his death, Pentheus “tore off the
headband from his hair, that his wretched mother might recognize him and
not kill him” (line 1115). Although not usually thought of in this way, The

24
On the etymology of the name, see Brody, Oedipus Tyrannus, pp. 20–1.
25
Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (London: Penguin Books,
1973), lines 226–32.
26
Onians does not cite this example, but gives many other instances where wrapping or
encircling the head symbolizes the act whereby a person’s status or destiny is changed: the crowning
of kings, the garlanding of heroes, the placing of fillets around the heads of brides as they assume the
bonds of matrimony; see too the institution of the wedding band.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

Bacchae, much like Oedipus the King, is a tragedy of Fate, dealing with the
powerlessness of men in the face of divine and natural forces and illustrating
the countervailing power of nature and divinity to hem in and vanquish their
hubristic acts. In the Oresteia, the imagery of hunting, nets, entrapment, encircle-
ment, bondage, and the like is pervasive and systematic.27 Here are some of the
more telling examples:28
(1) When Agamemnon decides to obey the oracle and sacrifice Iphigenia
“[n]ecessity’s yoke was put upon him” (line 217).
(2) Zeus enmeshed the walls of Troy in “a binding net (diktuon) that none
might outleap the gigantic toils of enslavement and final disaster”
(355–60).
(3) Clytemnestra likens Agamemnon’s wounds to the holes in a fishing net
(diktuon 868).
(4) Cassandra is snagged in a net, like a hunter’s prey (1048).
(5) Cassandra’s prophetic vision of the death of Agamemnon: “What is that
thing? Is it some net of death? Or is the trap the woman there, the
murderess?” (1114–16).
(6) Cassandra compares Clytemnestra to a cow, and Agamemnon to a bull
ensnared in the folds of a woven garment (1125).
(7) Clytemnestra’s account of the killing itself brings this series of images to a
central focus: “How else could I . . . fence high the nets of ruin beyond
overleaping? . . . That he might not escape . . . , as fishermen cast their huge
encircling nets, spread deadly abundance of rich robes” (heimasi
1375–83). Aeschylus had used this same word (heima 921) for the cloth
or carpet that Agamemnon walks upon.
(8) The Chorus twice refers to Agamemnon’s body as caught in a spider’s web
(huphas 1492, 1516).
(9) Aegisthus describes the murder weapon, interchangeably, as peploi (1580)
woven by the Furies and the nets (herkoi) of Justice (1611).
In the Agamemnon, the description of every death—from the sacrifice of Iphi-
genia, enveloped in flowing robes and bound to the altar, to the sack of Troy and
the murder of Agamemnon—is inscribed in the same system of imagery. In The
Libation Bearers Orestes compares the manner of his father’s death to that of an

27
See the excellent study by Anne Lebeck, The “Oresteia”: A Study in Language and Structure
(Washington: The Center for Hellenic Studies, 1971).
28
Aeschylus, Oresteia, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, trans. Richmond
Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
 JULES BRODY

eagle “entangled in the binding coils of a deadly viper” (en plektaisi kai sper-
amasin 248). Told by the Chorus (527), that Clytemnestra had dreamed of having
given birth to a serpent, Orestes says: “I pray . . . that this dream is for me. . . . She
must be cruelly murdered. I turn snake to kill her” (540–50). As Clytemnestra
and Aegisthus “killed a man . . . by treachery, tangled in the self-same net (bro-
chos), they, too, shall die” (556–8). The confusion, if not to say the collusion, of
the serpentine and nodal imagery is now complete. At the play’s end, the Furies
descend upon Orestes “like gorgons . . . wreathed in a tangle of snakes” (1048–50).
In The Eumenides, finally, these serpentine creatures, come to entwine Orestes in
their coils, are compared to huntresses enveloping a fleeing faun in their nets. The
Eumenides describe themselves, alternatively, as singers bent on entrancing
Orestes in their spellbinding song.
Richard Kuhns has written that “the conclusion to the Oresteia in fact states
the conditions for the triumph of civilization over barbarism.”29 And this is
exactly what the trilogy is about. It is a retrospective dramatic enactment of the
evolutionary process at the end of which Aeschylus and his fifth-century audi-
ence already stood. This is also the ground on which we still stand today, and
where Freud stood as he pondered the conditions of the rise of Western
civilization.
Civilized existence as we know it began when men mastered the art of living in
cities, in precincts carved out of brute nature, enclosed by the walls that they built
to keep out wild animals and violent enemies. These fearsome extramural
outsiders, these étrangers, stranieri, or strangers, were the foreigners that the
Greeks called “barbarians.”30 These backward, subhuman creatures, who babbled
in incomprehensible tongues, were condemned to live outside the walls of the
polis in a contemptible, savage, “uncivilized” state of nature. This politicization or
citification of communal life was the earliest conciliation of the ancient antinomy
between phusis and thesis, between that which is born genetically and that which
is institutionalized, established, set in place by human agency. It is the resolution
of this archaic opposition that is enacted in the Aeschylean trilogy: the internal-
ization of the natural, deadly forces that, in earlier religious conceptions, had
been projected outward onto the heavens. The Furies are finally domesticated.
Their violence is contained within political institutions; it is integrated in the life
of the city state. This is the sense of Athena’s binding arbitration; it contained all

29
Richard Kuhns, The House, the City, and the Judge: The Growth of Moral Awareness in the
“Oresteia” (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), p. 79.
30
Alain Rey, ed., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Robert, n.d.) s.v. forain.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

violence, the human and the divine, within the boundaries of the polis and bonds
of Law.
What I have described as Athena’s binding arbitration, she herself calls her
thesmos or “decree” (Eumenides, 681). Where Lattimore translates “Men of
Attica, hear my decree,” Mazon’s French version gives us something much closer
to the root idea: “Ecoutez maintenant ce qu’ici j’établis.” Listen to what I am
setting down. The noun thesmos comes from the verb tithemi, “to set in place.” In
the broader mythological context, thesmoi are the province of Themis, the
goddess of Justice. As her name implies, she is the “fixed” or “steadfast” one,
charged with setting things in order and putting things right. More significantly
still, the name Themis is cognate with the English words “doom” and “deem,”
and thus is tied in with the ideas of making juridical distinctions and, ultimately,
as we are wont to say, of “laying down the law.” The concept of “law” itself
springs from this very same semantic field, and is etymologically connected to the
verb “lie.” The law is that which is laid down, and lies in place as a barrier.
These meanings, still alive in the German noun Gesetz and the verb setzen, are
the modern avatars of the Greek expression keitai nomos, “the law is laid down.”
The Greek word nomos, in turn, brings in yet further nuances. The verb nemo
harbors two ostensibly unrelated meanings: (1) to deal out or allot shares; (2) to
graze cattle. The noun nomos, accordingly, designates both a “law” or “custom”
and a piece of “pastureland.” But this apparent semantic divergence actually
bespeaks an identity, the same one that is shown in the English word “lot,” as in
the dual senses of “my fortunate lot in life” and “the vacant lot next door.”
The shared idea is that of allotment, whether of a portion of happiness or a tract
of land.
In the philological universe, the concrete, without exception, always precedes
the abstract. In the present instance, the thesmos or nomos, the Gesetz or the Law,
all hark back to the physical image of the lot in the topographical sense: a legal or
moral domain framed within fixed boundaries. When we lay down laws, we mark
off precincts and erect obstacles. When we break a law, we cross a line and
overstep a barrier. The lawbreaker is a transgressor, one who crosses over into
forbidden territory. If he is clever, rather than break the law he will find a way
“around it.” If caught he will be prosecuted “to the limit of the law.”
The idea of Law as boundary or enclosure may also be observed in a parallel
family of words: legality, obligation, religion, where the underlying metaphor is
not topographical, but nodal. The etymon here is Latin ligare, “to tie,” “to bind.”
Legality is a bond: when under an obligation, our hands, metaphorically speak-
ing, are “tied,” we are duty bound as by an oath or contract. Onians has
marshaled a compelling body of evidence to show that “the most fundamental
 JULES BRODY

terms in Roman law” look back to the notion of a delimiting or circumscribing

knot or bond (pp. 438–9), as in the English word “lien” and French lien and its
verb lier (<ligamen). This, too, is the thrust behind the concept of religion: a
system of thought in which behavior is contained in a network of obligations and
injunctions. Whereas in the secular domain of legality the transgressor is a
criminal, here he is a sinner.
This completes my inspection of what Leo Spitzer calls “the philological
circle.”31 The last link in the chain turns out to be joined to the first; our point
of arrival brings us back to our starting point: Fate. We will recall that the original
meanings of Anankē have their roots in the image of a serpent coiled around the
universe, or an encircling band of ether or light. What the Greeks called Anankē
was expressed by the Romans in the cognate notion of necessitas, Necessity, a
profoundly etymological translation. The root is found in the verb necto, “to tie,”
and the related noun nexus, “knot.” Similarly, our word “destiny” comes from
destino, to fix, fasten, or bind. When something is inevitable, necessary, destined,
or fated, we say, as Onians observes triumphantly, that it is “bound” to happen
(p. 333).
Like Fate, legality, obligation, and religion, the idea of Justice, as well, stems
from the common ground of restriction and containment. In its essential thrust,
Justice is a variant form of subjugation, containment under a yoke or within a
boundary. Latin ius and iustitia, in turn, go back to iungo, to join or bind
together. The administration of Justice is intended to check the activity of those
who would exceed the bounds or break the bonds of legal or religious obligation.
Laws are considered just when the bond they impose is perfect and unbroken,
when it encompasses all, indiscriminately. Although we know and agree that a
just legal system must be democratic, we somehow bridle when we hear the
bureaucratic defense: “If I made an exception for you, I would have to do it for
everybody.” But we also are miffed when the exception is made for somebody
else. Both instances of resentment, however, recognize implicitly that sooner or
later, in one way or another, we all crave favored treatment. Or, put in other
terms, the real function of law is not at all to proscribe and punish actions that we
purport to hate, but, rather, to prevent us from engaging in forms of prohibited
behavior that we love. The very concepts of law as barrier, bond, obstacle, may
be taken as evidence of an ancient, universal intuition into the adversative
relationship between our actual desires and the institutions we create to bridle
and inhibit them.

31
Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1948), pp. 1–39.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

Freud was the first to spell out the dialectical nature of this relationship, which
he extrapolated from Frazer’s research on the origin of primitive taboos:
The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; what nature itself
prohibits and punishes, it would be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish.
Accordingly, we may always safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes
which many men have a natural propensity to commit.

It was this insight that led Freud to what Rieff calls “the negative interpretation of
law.” Rather than assume “from the legal prohibition of incest, that there is a
natural aversion to incest,” Fraser concludes,
we ought rather to assume that there is a natural instinct in favor of it, and that if the law
represses it, as it represses other natural instincts, it does so because civilized men have
come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of these natural instincts is detrimental to the
general interests of society.32

In this way, Rieff goes on, Freud “transforms law into a negative expression of
instinctual individuality . . . Freud sets up a dialectic whereby the self craves its
own restriction.”33 Whereas other accounts of the rise of civilization must invoke
various forms of moral and religious transcendency, in Freud’s atheistic scheme,
civilization is seen as the result of the progressive recognition of the need
to repress.
In the terms and context of Freud’s triadic scheme: (1) at the animistic stage,
men knew no laws, but ascribed omnipotence and immortality to themselves; (2)
at the religious stage, there is an admission of human limitation and vulnerability,
an acceptance of mortality, and “a first acknowledgement of Anankē, which
opposes human narcissism” (Totem, p. 93); and (3) at the scientific stage, there
is the further and ultimate renunciation of otherworldly immortality. At this
point, “men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to
death and to the other necessities of nature” (p. 88). At this final stage, all the
constraints, taboos, and laws that had earlier been attributed to external powers
have been internalized. With the realization that he is living in a godless universe,
man represses himself.
In Freud’s lexicon the ultimate agency of repression is “frustration by reality
or, if we are to give it its true, grand name, the pressure of vital needs—Necessity
(Anankē). She has been a strict educator and has made much out of us.”34
Anankē, Necessity, and Fate represent those forces in life which cause deprivation

32
Frazer, quoted by Freud, in Totem and Taboo, p. 123.
33
Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), p. 247.
34
Freud, “Some Thoughts on Development and Regression,” in SE, vol. 16, p. 355.
 JULES BRODY

and inflict misery, with no hint of compensation or consolation. In the career of

Leonardo Da Vinci, Freud found a sublime example of the progress to the
scientific stage, where perception and acceptance of this sad truth become
possible:
The reflections in which he has recorded the deep wisdom of his last years of life, breathe
the resignation of the human being who subjects himself to Anankē, to the laws of nature,
and who expects no alleviation from the goodness or grace of God.35

The coming-of-age of humanity, its access to civilization itself, predicates a

collective resignation, identical with Leonardo’s, a resignation that stems from
the awareness of what, on the last page of L’Etranger, Camus calls “la tendre
indifférence du monde”: a recognition, on the part of Leonardo and, then, of
Freud, that the world entices us with the lure of happiness, but remains, ironic-
ally, deaf and opaque to our deepest needs and cravings. In one of those rare
moments when Freud’s writing soars off into cosmic vision, he observes “[t]he
last figure in the series [of authority figures] that began with the parents is the
dark power of Destiny which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as
impersonal.”
At the scientific stage, we recognize that the Moira of the Greeks has been
replaced by “the divine pair Logos kai Anankē [Reason and Necessity]; but all
who transfer the guidance of the world to Providence, to God, or to God and
Nature, arouse suspicion that they still look upon these ultimate and remotest
powers as a parental couple, in a mythological sense, and believe themselves
linked to them by libidinal ties.”36 In The Future of an Illusion, Freud once again
invokes this divine pair as he reasserts the objective, impersonal Weltanschauung
of the scientific stage. To the providential God, who promises the consolation of
immortality after death, Freud opposes Logos, intellect working relentlessly
within the confines of “external reality, Anankē”:
Our god Logos will fulfill whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will
do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new generation of men. He
promises no compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life.37

Under the umbrella of Anankē, Freud brings together all those elements in
civilized life—the frustrations of reality, the need to work, physical disease,
natural disasters, the animosity of others—all those forces which oppose or
impede our instinctual gratifications and our pursuit of happiness. To put it in

35
Freud, “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in SE, vol. 11, pp. 124–5.
36
Freud, The Economic Problem of Masochism, in SE, vol. 19, p. 168.
37
Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in SE, vol. 21, pp. 53–4.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

another way, he has demythologized and detheologized those agencies and

powers which, at the religious stage, had been attributed to the Divinity. He
has eliminated all libidinal connection between human desire and the external
forces that lie beyond its reach and ken. In depersonalizing and secularizing
Anankē, Freud has evolved nothing less than a sociology of Fate. And to the
extent that Anankē has been internalized within the human mind, he has given us
a psychology of Fate. Freud’s Anankē is an adversative obstacle, a purposeless
denial of human freedom, an impersonal barrier to human happiness. Anankē
cannot be changed because we are powerless to do so; it cannot be understood
because it has no meaning.
It is the natural inclination both of characters in stories of Fate and on the part
of those who comment on these characters and stories to seek purpose and
meaning in the face of ostensibly unexplained or unmerited suffering. (I could
cite in evidence most of what has been thought and written about tragedy.) They
search for a libidinal connection between the pursuit of happiness and the forces
that seem to oppose it. And in their attempt to make sense of apparently senseless
suffering, they are deluded into positing some causal link between Fatum and
Lex. They look for the logos behind the bond, the intention and purpose behind
the event. In Freud’s secular Fatology, all such libidinal links are severed. By
denying all intellectual or moral continuity between cause and effect, the atheistic
Freudian scheme invalidates one explanation, but does not replace it with
another. Anankē remains as natural law, but has no divine endorsement. As a
nexus of events and circumstances that binds men in repression, Anankē
describes not a cause but a condition. In Freud’s view of Necessity as secular,
morally indifferent, and democratic, guilt is a result, not a punishment; happiness
is a consequence, not a reward. In Freud’s no-fault world, the only failure is
denial: the urge to simplify and rationalize human existence by excluding the
inevitability of pain, suffering, and unhappiness. It is no accident that the word
“happiness” is connected etymologically to “happen” and “happenstance”: “hap-
piness” is a chance “happening,” a random event.
One might object that Freudianism, while claiming to face the world in all its
existential barrenness, actually substitutes one determinism for another. And it
might in fact seem that Freud replaces the tyranny of religious fatalism with the
equally merciless tyranny of the Unconscious. Existential honesty reduces us to
the sum of our acts, whereas deterministic Freudianism makes us the sum of
our thoughts and feelings, the most intimate of which we do not know and
cannot control. One of Freud’s most desperate patients once confronted him
with just this objection: “Why, you tell me yourself,” she said, “that my illness is
probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You
 JULES BRODY

cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?” This was
Freud’s reply:
No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But, you will be
able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your
hysterical misery (hysterisches Elend) into common unhappiness (gemeines Unglück).38

The patient complained and Freud agreed, as Heraclitus had said centuries
earlier, that “Character is destiny” (frag. 94). Freud’s answer was on the mark
and to the point: psychoanalysis promises not happiness, but self-knowledge.
Reason may well be a gift to humankind, but rationality is not. It is a conquest
and an achievement. The truth that it uncovers may often be painful to behold,
which prompted Ernest Renan to ask: “Qui sait si la vérité n’est pas triste? Ne
soyons pas si pressés de la connaître.”39 This process of self-scrutiny has enor-
mous implications. Yet it does no more than describe in other terms a rather
conventional idea. One of Freud’s disciples puts it this way:
The discovery of the unconscious mind opened the way to a new scientific outlook on
human destiny. The gods changed their dwelling-place, forsaking the heavens to abide in
the interior of man, and press upon him—as instincts—from within, instead of from
without. . . . Just as in our dreams our “will” (psychoanalysis would say the “id”) appears
as objective destiny and everything originates from ourselves, each one of us being his
theatrical director behind the scenes, in the same way our destiny in reality . . . is the
product of our interior, our “will.” That is to say, we really carry out actively what we
appear to undergo passively.40

Or in the words of Schopenhauer, “Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung” (“The world
is my idea”).41
The goal of the analytic process is to ascertain to what extent the world and the
misery we encounter in it are the result of our projections, the creation of the id,
the product of our personal psychic Vorstellung. Self-knowledge and rationality
acquaint us with our inner, unconscious determinisms. They tell us how we may
have participated unknowingly in the creation of our destiny. The role of
rationality consists not, as positivistic science tempts us to believe, in controlling
Nature, but rather in illuminating the ways in which our own nature, like external
Nature, control us. Ego strength and rationality, according to Erikson, result from
“the sense of having done one’s active part in the chain of the inevitable.”42 After

38
Freud, “The Psychotherapy of Hysteria,” in SE, vol. 2, p. 305.
39
Ernest Renan, Préface. Feuilles détachées, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris:
Calmann-Levy, 1947), vol. 2, p. 941.
40
Hacker, “Freud, Marx, and Kierkegaard,” pp. 90, 98–9.
41
These are the opening words of his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
42
Erik Erikson, Insight and Responsibility (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 119.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

analysis has put ego where id used to be, Anankē and the laws of Nature remain in
all their obdurate, intractable permanence. In this gloomy but luminous perspec-
tive, unmerited unhappiness, and senseless, purposeless misfortune are not a
problem, but a conclusion.
The profundity of Freud’s fatalism lies exactly here: human character and
behavior follow their laws, as do Nature and Anankē. It is the tragedy of Life itself
that these two sets of laws have no relation to each other. Nature is not a mother,
no father-figure attends to our welfare or our pleasure. We come uninvited into a
world that has not been expecting us, and that has made no provision for us. As
Freud comments grandly in Civilization and Its Discontents, “One feels inclined
to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included “in the plan
of ‘Creation’” (Civilization, p. 76). The laws of Nature bear no relation to our
desires. This for Freud is not a problem but a truth, not a question but an answer.
This is not a pleasant truth a or comforting answer, but as Charcot used to say,
“ça ne l’empêche pas d’exister.”43
Paul Ricœur sees this truth as the central, irreducible component of the
tragic vision. What tragedy offers us is “an unbearable revelation” (une révéla-
tion insupportable). Like Freud, Aeschylus and Shakespeare view as incontro-
vertible existential facts those elements in human behavior that people, as they
are constituted, want to see as arguable essential questions: “la vision tragique
du monde est liée à un spectacle et non point à une spéculation . . . Si le secret de
l’anthropologie tragique est théologique, cette théologie est peut-être inavou-
able, inacceptable pour la pensée.” This remarkable insight removes the prob-
lem of the tragic vision from tragedy, where it only seemed to reside, and
relocates it in people, where it really is. If there is a problem, it has to do with
our resistance to what Ricœur calls “la théologie scandaleuse implicite à la
tragédie.”44
In the critical literature that has grown up around tragedy, the resistance to this
“scandalous theology” takes the form of “flaw-hunting”: the search for those
elements of character that will allow us to make sense of tragic catastrophe, that
will render the tragic outcome acceptable and comprehensible. The effect of
“flaw-hunting,” according to Rossiter,
is to shift all blame from the universe (or to give that consoling impression), and it is popular
enough: both because of the ease with which “tragic weaknesses” can be diagnosed (or

43
Freud, “Charcot,” in SE, vol. 3, p. 13.
44
Paul Ricœur, Finitude et culpabilité (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1960), p. 200.
 JULES BRODY

devised)—when we know how the story ends; and, again, it re-establishes the comforting
belief that the universe is moral and the fates of tragic heroes somehow just.45

This critical gambit is, of course, a regression to the religious stage at which
the mind will not abandon the need to see a libidinal relation between character
and destiny.
There is a powerful moment in Camus’s L’Étranger where the prosecuting
attorney, indignant at Meursault’s remorselessness, asks him in desperation:
“Voulez-vous que ma vie n’ait pas de sens?” (“Do you want my life to be
meaningless?”).46 In one form or another, this is the very same question that
underlies most of what has been written about tragedy, in particular, and stories
of Fate, in general. After Freud and Ricœur, Northrop Frye is one of the few
writers on the subject to have faced up to the implications of tragedy’s scandalous
theology. The tragic hero, he tells us, “enters a world in which existence is itself
tragic, not existence modified by an act, deliberate or unconscious; merely to exist
is to disturb the balance of nature.”47 In this perspective, which is also Freud’s
and Ricœur’s, flaw-hunting must be denounced for what it is: a futile exercise in
the denial of a millennial existential paradox, a desperate last-ditch effort to
repress the suspicion that life and the human condition may in fact be devoid of
meaning.
It is the height of irony that the idea of the tragic flaw should have had its
origin in the Aristotelian notion of hamartia. Whatever this problematic word
may be taken to mean, it has nothing to do with such ideas as fault, vice, guilt,
moral deficiency, or the like. Hamartia is a morally neutral non-normative term,
derived from the verb hamartano, meaning “to miss the mark,” “to fall short of
an objective.” And by extension: to reach one destination rather than the
intended one; to make a mistake, not in the sense of a moral failure, but in the
nonjudgmental sense of taking one thing for another, taking something for its
opposite. Hamartia may betoken an error of discernment due to ignorance, to the
lack of an essential piece of information. Finally, hamartia may be viewed simply
as an act which, for whatever reason, ends in failure rather than success. The most
disconcerting element in Aristotle’s Poetics is his seeming indifference to just
those aspects of tragedy that have monopolized all subsequent discussion: ques-
tions regarding justice, metaphysics, religion, individual responsibility, and Fate.
Inasmuch as the corpus of his writings has become the encyclopedic repository of

45
A. P. Rossiter, “Shakespearean Tragedy,” in Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Laurence
Michel and Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 188.
46
Albert Camus, L’Étranger (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 99.
47
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 213.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

Greek culture in its entirety, we must wonder why and how Aristotle was able to
ignore so obvious and problematical a notion as Fate.48
Although the Poetics says nothing about Fate explicitly, it does suggest the
possibility of a parallel alternative to it.49 Aristotle approaches tragedy, like
everything in culture, life, or nature, from a teleological perspective, that is, in
terms of its telos or ultimate function. As he sees it, the telos of tragedy is esthetic,
its function to produce in an audience specific aistheseis or feelings, to bring
about what he calls the catharsis of such feelings. He was interested in character
only to the extent that it triggers action; he was interested in action only to the
extent that it brings about changes in fortune: the passage from happiness to
unhappiness, or the reverse. The function of these changes, in turn, is to arouse,
and finally to purge, the so-called tragic emotions of pity and fear. Aristotle’s
critical stance is staunchly structuralist, and his critical method is resolutely
inferential. Rather than construct theoretically, he insists on deducing empiric-
ally, from the available evidence, those dramatic structures that are apt to
produce the desired esthetic and cathartic effects.
For Aristotle, the best plots are not simple, but what he calls peplegmenoi,
braided, tangled, or, “complex,” in the usual etymological translation. The word
peplegmenoi is a gerundive form of the verb pleko, “to weave.” The Latin cognate
is plecto. The main strands of action that are woven together to form the complex
plot are Reversal and Discovery. These strands lead out of the story’s structure in
such a way as to make one action follow upon another, either according to
probability or necessity. Aristotle uses the expression “according to probability
or necessity” a few lines later in connection with the definition of Discovery,
which, as the word implies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge on the part
of those who are “marked for happiness or unhappiness.” The word that Bywater
translates here as “marked,” others render as “destined” or “fated.”
Taken literally, the word in question, horizo, means to delimit, to mark off, by
setting up a horos, a landmark or boundary. I would translate this passage
literally: “Discovery is a change from ignorance to knowledge on the part of
those who are bound for happiness or misery.” They are not bound by Destiny or
Fate, which the Poetics does not mention. Rather, they are bound or bounded by a
plot that has thickened, caught up in a tangle of events, enmeshed in a network of
circumstance that has been woven together in a complex, logical, sequential,
organic pattern according to Necessity (kata to anankaion). Aristotle’s ideal plot

48
Gerard F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963),
p. 306.
49
For a detailed treatment if this aspect of the Poetics, see Brody, Oedipus Tyrannus, pp. 59–74.
 JULES BRODY

is so constructed as to tie the protagonist in a tragic knot. The resolution of this

situation is fittingly called the dénouement. The word is French, but the idea has
its origin in Aristotle’s concept of plot-as-knot.
Unless Aristotle’s elaborate nodal vocabulary is to be taken as merely decora-
tive or arbitrary, it would seem right and natural to infer that he is using it to
implement his artisanal concept of plot as a key element in the working of tragedy
and Fate. In his audience-centered approach, he fastens attention on those
mechanisms and procedures that are calculated to produce the desired esthetic
response. Actions and events are woven together in an intricate web in illustra-
tion of a secular, morally neutral Anankē, a law of life that links human actions to
their inevitable consequences, a law that says that what is done cannot be undone.
Aristotle’s concept of dramatic necessity, as subsumed in his metaphor of the
“complex” plot, stands as the structural equivalent or morphological analogue of
the bond of Fate.
As a statement on the relationships between personality and behavior, on the
one hand, and event and circumstance, on the other, Aristotle’s analysis of
tragedy foreshadows the Freudian Weltanschauung at the scientific stage, where
all possibility of a libidinal connection between human desire and human destiny
has been foreclosed. Aristotle anticipates Freud’s view that the aim of life is
happiness, and, like Freud, he was intrigued by the processes that could thwart
this aim. From Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, we can infer that he saw life as
subject to potential shifts from happiness to unhappiness. We can also infer that
he viewed people, especially the great and the powerful, as inherently vulnerable
to disaster.
This is hamartia in its most general sense: the capacity for failure. At this
scientific, or as Else calls it, “practical” stage (p. 306), things happen and people
cope. This much is implicit in Aristotle’s careful distinction between poetry and
history. History is particular, not universal like poetry, because it deals with
specifics: what Alcibiades did or what events befell him. Poetry, on the contrary,
is not concerned with what has happened, but with the kind of things that can
happen, i.e., the kind of events that are possible according to probability or
necessity.50 The governing principle here, as in the distinction between the simple
and the complex plot, is the idea of probability and necessity. Aristotle would
have the tragic poet deal exclusively with the causal connections between actions
and their consequences, and to show how the protagonist participates in the
elaboration of his fate.

50
Aristotle, Poetics, chap. 9, 51a36–b15, in Else, Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 301–2.
 FATE , PHILOLOGY , FREUD 

Aristotle’s distinction between poetry and history coincides, finally, with the
distinction between fiction and life. In life, as recorded historically, he sees no
pattern, no probable or necessary connections. From the point of view of the
actor in the event, we are privileged to witness that aspect of human behavior that
is capable of exhibiting structure. In that slice of life, Aristotle asks the poet to
show us another practical reality: the genetic relationship between one event and
another, human activities as a set of interrelated facts. Aristotle knew about the
oracle in the Oedipus and the prologue to Euripides’s Hippolytus. He was
thoroughly conversant with the body of mythological data that illustrate Greek
fatalism. And since he said not a word about any of this, we must conclude that
he saw life as filled with situations and events that the mind does not devise, that
reason does not fathom, that morality does not explain, and that justice does not
require. He must have assumed, in short, that these are not the problems but the
conditions of life and the substance of history.
This is one reality, the one that he and you and I ordinarily perceive. Parallel
and discontinuous with this reality is one which says that when I kill a stranger on
a road or make a woman pregnant, my acts arise genetically out of choices and
entail consequences. When I ask a herdsman a question, I am stuck with what he
tells me. Whether I am well intentioned or not, my present and my future are
necessarily connected and continuous with each other. Whether or not God loves
me, whether or not looking at the gnarled roots of trees makes me nauseous, I am,
nonetheless, as the French Existentialists tell us, the sum of my acts. Because they
form a genetic and organic continuum, the consequences of my subsequent
moves are subject to a number of constraints. Although my freedom of action
may be theoretically unlimited, the situations that I have created with this
freedom restrict the number of possible outcomes. Given enough rope I can
hang myself. You may celebrate or mourn this event, you may or may not agree
that I deserve to die, but you may not deny that I am dead.
Aristotle and Freud, in their wissenschaftliche single-mindedness, both insist—
Aristotle by implication, Freud by assertion—that the conditions of life are
fundamentally incommensurable with the power of our desires and the facts of
our behavior. Our trouble is that before we are intellectuals or literary critics, we
are people who can never achieve more than a temporary or provisional atheism.
Our narcissism, our wish to see some libidinal connection between the facts of
our behavior and the conditions of our life, our yearning for pleasant or flattering
alternatives to metaphysical anguish, dupe us into believing that there is order in
the world and freedom in people, and that this cosmic order has a benevolent
connection to our personal freedom. In the scientific view of Aristotle and Freud,
there is freedom in the world and order in people. For Aristotle, the organization
 JULES BRODY

of human behavior is logical and morphological; for Freud it is psychological. In

both systems, however, the ordering principle of human behavior is the accept-
ance and internalization of Necessity.
What we instinctively tend to view as a natural antagonism between human
beings and Fate, Aristotle chose to ignore, presumably because he found such a
question intellectually uninteresting and philosophically unpromising. But Aris-
totle’s indifference does not prevent the question from arising. In the end, Freud
discovered that it is not really a question at all. While we in our narcissism insist
on regarding the alleged antagonism between us and Fate as if it were a primor-
dial mysterious dispensation, Freud concluded that it was a construction of the
human mind, the projection of a self that craves its own restriction, a self that, in
its passage from instinct to civilization, from the authority of love to the love of
authority, created self-serving fictions to account for the need to live in repression
and the ultimate need to die.
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Index

Abraham, Nicolas 157 empathy 113–14, 197, 237–9, 247–8,

actions: and explanations 72–4, 77–9, 80 250, 251
Aeschylus: Oresteia 353–5 moral aspect blindness 261, 262–3
Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 353 moral development 240–53
agreeableness 106–7, 108–9, 110, 111–13, 114 and trust 107, 111–12
Alford, Henry 288n WORKS
All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare) 176 Emma 4–5, 102–16
Alquié, Ferdinand 154–5, 168 Mansfield Park 107–8, 109
Althusser, Louis 180–1 Persuasion 7–8, 115, 194–208
Ambush at Blanco Canyon (Hamilton) 4 Pride and Prejudice 8, 9, 240–53, 259–63,
Amis, Kingsley 264n23, 265, 266
orientation in 220, 222, 224 Sense and Sensibility 107, 109
That Uncertain Feeling 216–26 Austin, J. L. 180
Anankē 340, 346, 351, 356, 357–9, 360–1, 364 authenticity 8, 144–5
animal rights 21–4 author, death of 226–34
Animalia (Aristotle) 322
animism 346–7 Bacchae, The (Euripides) 352–3
Antigone (Sophocles) 15–16, 19–21 Baeumler, Alfred 328n11
Apology (Plato) 186, 189 Baier, Annette 322
Apology for Poetry (Sidney) 191 Bakhtin, Michael 185
Appiah, Kwame Anthony 116 Barker, Francis 182
argument, limits of 139–52 Bates, Stanley 70n22
Aristotle 145–6, 362–6 Beardsley, Monroe 122n3
doctrine of the mean 60 Being and Time (Heidegger) 6, 141, 144
ethical character 4, 60–6, 70, 80n42 thrownness (Geworfenheit) 154, 159, 170–1
fate 362–3 belief 217–18
hamartia 362, 364 belief-manifestation 294
Heidegger on 140–2, 144 belief transmission 294–9: see also empathy
moral philosophy 139 Benveniste, Émile 349
and pleasure 306, 309, 315, 316, 317, Big Country, The (film) 4, 94–100
318–20, 321 Jim McKay 94, 95–100
poetic vision 6 Steve Leech 96, 97, 98
on poetry 85–6 Big Country, The (Hamilton) 94–100
WORKS Bildungsroman 195
Animalia 322 Blum, Lawrence 258
De Anima 318 Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy 192–3
Metaphysics 316, 321–2 Boke Named the Governour, The (Elyot) 331
Nicomachean Ethics 140, 141 Booth, Wayne 32, 33, 102, 105
Physics 316 Boswell, Marshall 209, 210–11, 214
Poetics 9–10, 85, 175, 179, 190, 305–24, Bourdieu, Pierre 326
362–4 Bradbrook, Muriel 183
Politics 310 Breton, André
Rhetoric 309, 315, 317, 320 and death 168, 170–1
Armin, Robert 183 Nadja 6, 153–71
Arnold, Matthew 267, 267n32 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
As You Like It (Shakespeare) 183 (Wallace ) 226–34
Austen, Jane Brink, André: Kennis van die Aand
conversation in 194–208, 266 (Looking on Darkness) 299
desire, rationalization of 261–2 Brodie, M. 294
 INDEX

Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre 9 thrownness (Geworfenheit) 154, 157, 159,

Broom of the System, The (Wallace) 209–16 160, 162, 167
Brown, Julia Prewitt 103 De Anima (Aristotle) 318
Burckhardt, Jacob 177n death 168, 170–1, 347
Burke, Edmund 327 Descartes, René 186–7
Bywater, Ingram 363 desire, rationalization of 255, 258–9, 261–2, 272
destiny 11: see also fate
Camus, Albert: L’Etranger 358, 362 dialogical identity 7
caring about characters 31–46 dialogue 337–8
Carroll, Noël 271, 287n in Hamlet 175–93
Castano, Emanuele 298 see also conversation
Castiglione, Baldesar 327 Diamond, Cora 16, 21–4, 30, 151
catharsis (katharsis) 305, 306, 307–8, 309, 310, Dickens, Charles 29–30
312, 316–17, 319, 363 Great Expectations 99
Cavell, Stanley 77n37, 265–6 Disgrace (Coetzee) 146–8
CG (Common Ground) 290–1, 293–4 disorientation 201
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Dodds, E. R. 342
Times (Shaftesbury) 329, 332 Donatus, Aelius 175
characters, caring about 31–46 Doris, John 103, 104
Charcot, Jean-Martin 361 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Notes from
Churchill, Winston 75 Underground 185
Clej, Alina 156 duality of fiction 38–9, 40, 42
Coetzee, J. M. 15, 146–50 Duckworth, Alistair 254
Disgrace 146–8
Elizabeth Costello 16, 148–50 E-E (Entertainment Education) 295
Life & Times of Michael K 44–6 Egan, Jennifer 136–7
The Lives of Animals 16, 21–4 Eldridge, Richard 40
Tanner Lectures 16, 21–4 Elias, Norbert 328
Cohen, Margaret 156 Eliot, T. S. 78
Cole, Thomas 95 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee) 16, 148–50
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 47, 181, 184 Else, Gerald 309, 364
Collingwood, R. G. 325, 326 Elyot, Thomas: The Boke Named the
comedy 90 Governour 331
Comer Kidd, David 298 Emma (Austen) 4–5, 102–16
Common Ground (CG) 290–1, 293–4 Emma 102–3, 104–5, 106–7, 109–16
Compleat Gentleman, The (Peacham) 330–1 Frank Churchill 105–7, 110–11, 112
conscience 144 Mr. Knightley 103, 105–6
consequentialism 62–3 emotions 3, 125–6
Consolation of Philosophy, The empathy 113–14, 197, 237–9, 247–8, 250, 251,
(Boethius) 192–3 297–9
conversation 265–6 Entertainment Education (E-E) 295
in Austen 194–208, 266 episteme 140
in Forster 266 Erasmus, Desiderius: The Praise of Folly 183
see also dialogue Erikson, Erik 360
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, see Shaftesbury, 3rd Etranger, L’ (Camus) 358, 362
Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) Ette, Ottmar 136
Costa, Paul T. 104, 106, 111–12, 115 Eumenides, The (Aeschylus) 354–5
courtesy 325 Euripides
Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant) 338–9 The Bacchae 352–3
Cudworth, Ralph 333 Iphigenia in Tauris 314, 315
cultures experimental psychology 103
and social information 92–3 explanations: actions and 72–4, 77–9, 80
and wheel of virtue 94
Currie, G. 283n fate 11, 340–66
atē 342, 350
Danto, Arthur 325 Fates 350–1
Dasein 141–4, 157–60, 162, 167 Freud on 340, 357–61
temporality of 159–60, 167 philology 349–56
 INDEX 

pre-Platonic age 344 Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure 36–8, 43, 46
in religion 341–9 hasard objectif 154–5
and sin 340–1 haunting 156–7, 162–5, 166, 170–1
fiction Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 153–4, 177n
knowledge from 285–9 poetische Auffassung 5, 131–6
and supposition 285–9 Heidegger, Martin 6, 129–31, 140–6, 165
see also literary fiction on Aristotle 140–2, 144
fictional assertion 294 Being and Time 6, 141, 144, 154, 159, 170–1
Finsen, Hans Carl 338 Dasein 141–4, 154, 157–60, 162, 167
Five-Factor Model (FFM) 104, 106–8, 113 and death 168, 170–1
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary 292–3 moral philosophy 139
fools, Shakespearean 183 thrownness (Geworfenheit) 154, 157, 159,
Ford, Ford Maddox 277 160, 162, 167, 170–1
Forster, E. M.: Howards End 9, 259–60, 264–77 time, conception of 159–60
Foster, Hal 164n31 Heraclitus 360
Frankfurt, Harry 31 Herman, Barbara 254, 255, 256, 257–9, 261,
Franzen, Jonathan 136–7 262, 274–5
Frazer, James 357 Hölderlin, Friedrich 130
free will 47, 48, 51 Homer: Iliad 341–2, 345, 350
Frege, Gottlob 122–3 Houghton, Walter 331
Freud, Sigmund 344–6, 357–61, 365–6 Howards End (Forster) 9, 259–60, 264–77
on fate 340, 357–61 conversation in 266
myth formation 344–5 Henry Wilcox 266–7, 268–72, 273,
on religious systems 345–6 274–6
Friend, Stacie 39, 296 Margaret Schlegel 265, 266, 268–9, 270
Frye, Northrop 362 moral aspect blindness 268–77
Schlegels 260n18, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 194–208 sensibility 264, 265n26, 267, 268
Gaita, Raymond 67–70, 71 Wilcoxes 265, 266, 267, 270–1
Galileo Galilei 286–7 Hume, David 279, 280
Gibson, John 35–6, 125
Goethe, J. W. von 183, 340 Ibn Tufail: The Improvement of Human Reason:
Goffman, Erving 327 Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn
Goldberg, Samuel L. 26–7 Yokdhan 292
Golden Bowl (James) 277 identity 153–71, 180–2
Goodman, Nelson 128–9, 130–1 Iliad (Homer) 341–2, 345, 350
Gracián, Baltasar 331 imagination/imagining 126–7, 272–6, 278
Great Expectations (Dickens) 99 Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in
Greenspan, Patricia S. 15–19 the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan, The (Ibn
grief 68, 69–70, 71 Tufail) 292
Grotius, Hugo 335 Ingarden, Roman 34
Guerlac, Suzanne 153n Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit
guilt 17, 18 (Shaftesbury) 332–4, 336
Ion (Plato) 191
Halliwell, Stephen 313n15, 314n16, 317n, 322 Iphigenia in Tauris (Euripides) 314, 315
hamartia 362, 364
Hamilton, Donald James, Henry 275, 277
Ambush at Blanco Canyon 4 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 9
The Big Country 94–100 Johnson, Claudia 102
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 3, 7, 175–93 Johnson, Kendall 164n32
Claudius 47–8, 52 Johnson, Samuel 105, 175
dialogic self in 175–93 Jonson, Ben 191
identity in 180–2 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 36–8, 43, 46
and moral agency 47–55
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 47–8, 51, 179 Kant, Immanuel 254–5, 273, 279
soliloqies 184–5 Critique of the Power of Judgment 338–9
spectator-actor relationship 175–9 Kaplan, Chaim: Warsaw Diary 343
Hammett, Dashiell: The Maltese Falcon 300 Kaufmann, Vincent 164n31
 INDEX

Kennis van die Aand Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 292–3

(Looking on Darkness, Brink) 299 Maltese Falcon, The (Hammett) 300
King, Stephen: Salem’s Lot 291, 292 Mansfield Park (Austen) 107–8, 109
Klein, Lawrence 326, 332 Marcus, Ruth Barcan 16
knowledge Margolis, Joseph 127
from fiction 285–9 Marsh, Elizabeth J. 294
knowing that/knowing how 284 Martin, Adrienne 255n3
thought experiments as source of 290–1 Marxism 183–4
Kristeller, Paul Oskar 326 Mazon, Paul 345, 355
Kuhns, Richard 354 Meno (Plato) 189
Méré, chevalier de 331
Lamarque, Peter 38, 39, 123–4, 130–1 metaphor, characters as 75–6
Lattimore, Richmond 350, 355 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 316, 321–2
LC (literary cognitivism) 286–9 Milgram experiments 88–9
Lear, Jonathan 308n4, 310, 316 Miller, D. A. 108
learning mimesis 86, 127, 305–6, 311, 312, 313, 315,
learning that/learning how 284 317–18, 319–20, 321–3
and pleasure 86, 315 mini-narratives 73
Lenoble, Robert 346–7 Miscellany III (Shaftesbury) 330, 332
Leonardo Da Vinci 358 Miscellany IV (Shaftesbury) 333n22
Levinas, Emmanuel 168–9, 188–9 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin): Le
Lewis, C. S. 185 Misanthrope 51
Libation Bearers, The (Aeschylus) 353–4 moral agency
Life & Times of Michael K (Coetzee) 44–6 ethical character, conception of 60–7
literary cognitivism (LC) 286–9 Hamlet and 47–55
literary experience: paradox/character in 59–82 perceptual acuity 67–8
literary fiction truth as need of soul 67–70
belief transmission 294–9 moral aspect blindness 257–9
and CG (Common Ground) 293–4 Austen 261, 262–3
definitions of 121–2, 282 in Forster 268–77
and fictional assertion/belief- moral description 255–6
manifestation 294 moral development 237–53
fictional literary representations 124–5 in Austen 240–53
literary characters, nature of 70n22 cognitive theories 238–9
messages in/through 299–301 moral/immoral behaviour 239–40
moral/ethical value of 1–2 process of 237–8
moral relevance of 139–52 psychological theories 238–9
and moral theory 15–30 moral self-reflection 8
and narrative transportation 294 Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, The
open-ended use 2–3, 16, 21–4 (Shaftesbury) 335, 337
thick use 2, 15–16, 19–21 Moran, Richard 126–7, 216–25
thin use 2, 15–19 More, Thomas: Utopia 183
and truth 5, 119–38 Mortensen, Preben 326–7
literary understanding 123–4 Murdoch, Iris 30, 277–8
Lives of the Animals, The (Coetzee) 16, 21–4 myths
Locke, John 105, 114, 115, 333 cephalic myth 343–4
Lolita (Nabokov) 44 Freudian myth formation 344–5
Longinus (pseudo-Longinus): Treatise on the Homeric myths 345
Sublime 345 origin of death 347
Looking on Darkness
(Kennis van die Aand, Brink) 299 Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita 44
love 277–8, 279 Nadja (Breton) 6, 153–71
Lukács, Georg 122n4 haunting 156–7, 162–5, 170–1
Lusty, Natalya 156–7 narrative transportation 294
Neostoicism, Renaissance 334–5
McCrae, Robert 104, 106, 111–12, 115 Nettle, Daniel 111, 113
McDowell, John 257 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 140, 141
 INDEX 

Nisbett, Richard E. 110 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 8, 9, 259–63,

Norton, John 287n 264n23, 265, 266
Notes from Underground (Dostoyevsky) 185 conversation in 266
nous 140 Darcy 247–9, 252–3, 260–2, 263, 265
Novitz, David 299 Elizabeth 243–7, 248–9, 252–3, 260–3, 265
Nussbaum, Martha 15–16, 19–21, 29 Jane 249–50
minor characters 249–52
Oates, Joyce Carol: Zombie 9, 295, 298–9 moral aspect blindness 261, 262–3
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 306, 314, 315, moral development in 240–53
351–2 rationalization of desire 261–2
Olsen, Stein Haugom 38, 39, 123–4, 130–1 sensibility 265
Onians, Richard B. 349–51, 352n26, 355–6 text and meaning 263
Oresteia (Aeschylus) 353–5 Prince, Michael 337
orientation 134, 135, 153n, 268 Problemata (Pseudo-Aristotle) 322
in Amis 220, 222, 224 Protagoras (Plato) 179–80
disorientation 201 Providentialism 334–6
reorientation 186, 194 psychoanalysis 156
Othello (Shakespeare) 4, 59–82
Iago 59, 60–2, 64, 80 quasi-emotions 125–6
Quine, W. V. 312
painting: ‘seeing-in’ experience 39–40
Pascal, Blaise 331 recognition (anagnorisis) 313, 314, 315,
Peacham, Henry: The Compleat 316, 324
Gentleman 330–1 religion 341–9
Persuasion (Austen) 7–8, 115 animism 346–7
Gadamer’s philosophical Christian theology 348, 349
hermeneutics 194–208 fate in 341–9
phenomenology 152 Freud on 345–6
phronesis 140, 141, 142, 144–5 Freudian myth formation 344–5
phronimos 140, 142, 143, 145 Homeric theology 341–2, 344, 347–8
Physics (Aristotle) 316 is-/ought-systems 348
Piaget, Jean 239 and responsibility 342–4
Plato sin 340–1
Apology 186, 189 Renaissance Neostoicism 334–5
Ion 191 Renan, Ernest 360
Meno 189 reorientation 186, 194
Protagoras 179–80 Republic, The (Plato) 176, 186, 190, 351
The Republic 176, 186, 190, 351 revenge 49, 78–9
Symposium 186 reversal (peripeteia) 313–14, 324
Theaetetus 183, 189 rhetoric 164, 338
pleasure 39, 62–3, 83–4, 136, 283n Rhetoric (Aristotle) 309, 315, 317, 320
Aristotle and 306, 309, 315, 316, 317, Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea 299–300
318–20, 321 Ricœur, Paul 361
and learning 86, 315 Rieff, Philip 347, 357
Shaftesbury and 331, 334 Rilke, Rainer Maria: Truth and Method 198
Poetics (Aristotle) 9–10, 85, 175, 179, 190, Robinson, Jenefer 32–3
305–24, 362–4 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 75
character 310–12 Ross, Lee 110
katharsis 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 316–17, Rossiter, A. P. 362
319, 363 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
mimesis 305–6, 311, 312, 313, 315, 317–18, (Stoppard) 47
319–20, 321–3 Rubio, Emmanuel 153n
recognition (anagnorisis) 313, 314, 315, Rutter, Benjamin 137
316, 324 Ryle, Gilbert 271n39
reversal (peripeteia) 313–14, 324
Politics (Aristotle) 310 Salem’s Lot (King) 291, 292
Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus) 183 Sartre, Jean-Paul 218
 INDEX

Schier, Flint 39, 40 psychological skepticism about character 87–90

Schopenhauer, Arthur 360 social psychology
Schrödinger, Erwin 287 situationism/situationalism 4, 84–9, 100–1,
Scieszka, Jon: The True Story of the Three Little 103, 104
Pigs 299–300 skepticism about character 87–90
Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 107, 109 soliloquies 184–5
sensibility 268 Soliloquy, or, Advice to an Author
in Austen 265 (Shaftesbury) 329–30, 335
in Forster 264, 265n26, 267, 268 sophia 140
Sensus Communis, an essay on the freedom of Sophie’s Choice (Styron) 15–19, 24–6
wit and humour in a letter to a friend Sophocles
(Shaftesbury) 329, 334, 336 Antigone 15–16, 19–21
Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Oedipus Rex 306, 314, 315, 351–2
Cooper) 329–39 souls 186–7, 188–9
and pleasure 331, 334 truth as need of 67–70, 80
WORKS spectator–actor relationship 175–9
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Stalnaker, Robert 290–1
Times 329, 332 Stecker, Robert 121n
Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit 332–4, Stolnitz, J. 285n
336 Stone-Richards, Michael 156
Miscellany III 330, 332 Stoppard, Tom: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Miscellany IV 333n22 Are Dead 47
The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody 335, Styron, William: Sophie’s Choice 15–19, 24–6
337 subjectivity 153–71
Sensus Communis, an essay on the freedom of supposition 285–9
wit and humour in a letter to a friend 329, surrealism 153–71
334, 336 sympathetic imagination 272–6, 278
Soliloquy, or, Advice to an Author 329–30, sympathy 273–4
335 Symposium (Plato) 186
Shakespeare, William
fools 183 That Uncertain Feeling (Amis) 216–26
identity 180–2, 185–6 Theaetetus (Plato) 183, 189
and trust 59–60, 61–2 theories 127
WORKS Thomasson, Amie 35n6, 38
All’s Well That Ends Well 176 thought experiments 286–91
As You Like It 183 Toomer, Gerald J. 292
Hamlet 3, 7, 47–55, 175–93 Torok, Maria 157
Othello 4, 59–82 tragedy 39, 86, 305–23, 361–4
Romeo and Juliet 75 Trainspotting (Welsh) 297–8
Twelfth Night 183 Treatise on the Sublime (Longinus) 345
Sheringham, Michael 155–6, 157–8, 167n, 168 True Story of the Three Little Pigs, The
Sidney, Philip: Apology for Poetry 191 (Scieszka) 299–300
sin: and fate 340–1 trust 67, 218, 322
sincerity 8 Austen and 107, 111–12
Singer, Peter 21 Shakespeare and 59–60, 61–2
situationism/situationalism 4, 84–9, 100–1, truth
103, 104 literary fiction and 5, 119–38
Smith, Adam 272 as need of soul 67–70, 80
Smith, Angela M. 113n Truth and Method (Rilke) 198
Snell, Bruno 344, 348 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 183
social information 83–101
common view 85–7 Utopia (More) 183
common view: modified version of 90–4
common view: skepticism about 87–90 velleity 52
cultures and 92–3 virtue monism/pluralism 276–7
factual information 91 virtuoso culture 329–31
normative 91–3, 101 Vorhandenheit 141
 INDEX 

Waldron, Mary 115 Wittels, Harris 288

Wallace, David Foster 225
Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men 226–34
The Broom of the System 209–16
Walton, Kendall 33–4, 35, 130–1
Warsaw Diary (Kaplan) 343
Wellbery, David 338
Welsh, Irvine: Trainspotting 297–8
western genre 94–100
wheel of virtue 94, 99–100, 271
Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 299–300
will: goodness of 255
Williams, Bernard 72–4, 78, 80n42
Wilson, Catherine 27n
Wilson, Luke 53n
Winch, Peter 187
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 48, 77, 77n37, 79, 178,
209–19
language games 180, 210–13
and Moore’s paradox 217, 218–19
Moran and 217–18
souls 187
Wallace and 209–16
Wollheim, Richard 39–40
Wood, James 42, 44, 260
words: nature of 70n22
Wyler, Willaim 94
Xenophanes 345
Zombie (Oates) 9, 295, 298–9
Zuhandenheit 141