REALITY AND CULTURE a volume in Interpretation and Translation IT Edited by Michael Krausz VIBS Volume 270 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum 5REHUW$'HO¿QR Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Roland Faber Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon Daniel B. Gallagher William C. Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry Brian G. Henning Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Olli Loukola Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Hugh P. McDonald Adrianne McEvoy J.D. Mininger Danielle Poe Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višļovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods Amsterdam New York, NY 2014 Edited by Patricia Hanna REALITY AND CULTURE Essays on the Philosophy of Bernard Harrison Cover illustration: "Emanation I," painting by Michael Krausz. 2013. 30" x 40" Cover design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 978-90-420-3819-6 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1066-9 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam New York, NY 2014 Printed in the Netherlands Interpretation and Translation (IT) Michael Krausz Editor Other Titles in IT Michael Krausz. Oneness and the Displacement of Self: Dialogues on SelfRealization. 2013. VIBS 258 Michael Krausz. Interpretation and Transformation: Explorations in Art and the Self. 2007. VIBS 187 Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing. - Ludwig Wittgenstein CONTENTS EDITORIAL FOREWORD xi MICHAEL KRAUSZ FOREWORD xiii PATRICIA HANNA AND DOROTHY HARRISON PREFACE xvii PROLOGUE: Reality and Culture 1 BERNARD HARRISON Part One: LITERATURE AND REALITY 31 ONE What Do Humanists Want? 33 JOHN GIBSON TWO Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Bernard Harrison's "Social Practices" 49 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN THREE Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of Literary Art 65 RICHARD ELDRIDGE Part Two: THE CONSTITUTION OF THE MORAL LIFE 79 FOUR Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 81 LEONA TOKER FIVE From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 97 ALAN TAPPER SIX Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 113 EDWARD ALEXANDER x REALITY AND CULTURE Part Three: LANGUAGE AND PRACTICE 129 SEVEN Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 131 DANIÈL MOYAL-SHARROCK EIGHT Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 147 PATRICIA HANNA NINE Bernard Harrison's "World" 171 MICHAEL KRAUSZ TEN Meaning, Truth, and Practices: A Conundrum 181 DENNIS PATTERSON ELEVEN Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 185 MICHAEL MORRIS EPILOGUE: Replies and Reflections 203 BERNARD HARRISON WORKS CITED 249 APPENDIX: Selected Publications of Bernard Harrison 265 ABOUT THE AUTHORS 271 NAME INDEX 275 SUBJECT INDEX 281 One WHAT DO HUMANISTS WANT? John Gibson 1. Introduction Here is a difficult philosophical trick, to be performed in the following order: First, deny that literature in any interesting way refers to, or represents-is about-anything real. Next, turn to language itself and endorse many of the linguistic idealist's claims about the objects of reference and the nature of representation. Then, go on to insist, with the stoutest of relativists, on the irreducible social grounding of concepts, indeed that human cultural practices, and not any sort of commerce with extra-cultural "reality," account for how thought and language gain a purchase on the world, such as they can. Next, insist in some intelligible way that you are, nonetheless, a realist and a literary humanist. Last, assert wholeheartedly that language, especially in the context of works of literary fiction, is saturated with the real and worldly, so much so in fact that looking at words in the context of literature is among the best routes available for exploring and coming to understand our world: our real world. At first glance, this may strike us as equal parts ill advised and mad. Yet, the above is a fair statement of Bernard Harrison's standing philosophical project. Over the course of his career, he has managed to make it appear not only sensible but a marked improvement over the competition (Harrison, 1975; 1991; 1993; 2006; 2007; Hanna and Harrison, 2004). His work is, at heart, motivated by a desire to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and language, and he has struggled to do so in those areas of contemporary thought that would prefer it remain banished. He has never carried out his project as a reactionary or contrarian, pointing us, as some philosophers do, back to Greece and away from France. He is inspired by much of the philosophy and literary theory that is most conspicuously at odds with his project- Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, for example. He has devised powerful ways of enlisting the philosophy of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein to show how even a poststructuralist can speak like a kind of realist and humanist without betraying her basic principles (Harrison, 2009). His is a philosophy of rapprochement, forward-looking rather than conservative. It has the welcome consequence of showing us that much of the space that currently separates philosophy and literary studies, even analytic and continental philosophy, can be overcome without destroying what is distinctive to each. 34 JOHN GIBSON I will not attempt to do justice to the grandness of Harrison's project here. But I do hope to give a sense of its seriousness. I will concentrate on his philosophy of literature, though to understand Harrison's thought in this area of philosophy is to understand it in virtually every area. In particular, I want to consider his anti-representationalist view of how literary language engages with reality. As done on such occasions, I will also air a few worries and raise a few questions. But my basic goal here is to highlight what is novel about Harrison's work. 2. Harrison's Humanism Since the mid-1970s, Harrison has been struggling to defend a broadly humanistic view of the value of works of literary fiction and of the powers of human culture more generally. The timing has been right, since, of course, these years have been the hardest on the humanist. Humanism has become anathema, in fact a whipping boy, in much of the work that now goes by the name of "theory." In academic areas that embrace Theory-English and Comparative Literature, most notably-humanism is associated with a kind of bad faith, a yearning to keep near myths about the human and its place in the world we know to be bunk. Harrison does not take issue with many of the worries that underwrite contemporary anti-humanism. This is why he has been one of humanism's most able defenders. He is with anti-humanists in respect to much of what they decry, yet he shows that their complaints lead us not to abandon humanism but just those unfortunate habits of thought that humanists can easily shake. To get the obvious out of the way, Harrison is not a humanist in any of the following senses: He does not gush about the sovereignty of reason or the harmony of human mind and natural world. He does not wonder whether the poet or the scientist is more godlike. He is aware of the inherent limitations of our "epistemic situation." He can openly and fully acknowledge the horrors of the twentieth century and the extent to which entirely human failings underwrote them. Apart from the last of these senses (see Harrison, 2006), he does not go on about these things, but he does offer an alternative to those characteristic sages of late modernity who take "humanism" to mean something midway between "imbecilic" and "evil." Harrison has helped philosophers to see how to divorce a defense of humanism from a retreat to Enlightenment and Romantic exaggerations about the human and its place in the world. In his hands, humanism cannot be reduced to any of the facile, straw man positions it is currently rumored to champion. So what is humanism for Harrison? I will put it baldly here, adding detail in the following sections. Humanism, in respect to both literature and life, is at root what we have if we find that we can tell a certain kind of story. The story can be told in a number of ways, but that what interests Harrison will conclude with a vindication of the role of art in human life and begin with an What Do Humanists Want? 35 account of those aspects of language and culture that make the production of this art possible. The story will insist that coming to understand how art makes meaning possible is a condensed and purified version of the story of how human culture more generally does. In other words, it will be a story of how certain of our cultural practices are capable of conjuring out of our various sayings and doings a sense of a shared world: a site of not uniform but at least shared, public paths of thinking, feeling, valuing, and living. Now a humanist need not give pride of place to art when telling this story. But humanists, Harrison included, tend to find the work of art to be the best image we have of how our human practices can conspire to make a particular achievement possible. Explaining what this achievement consists in is where the philosophical work begins. But the achievement, whatever else it does, reveals that human language and culture can on occasion give us access to something worldly enough: a realm that is both human in origin yet sufficiently deserving of the name "real" to dispel the sense that it is a mere projection of human thought and speech. Somewhat like Wallace Stevens's supreme fiction (1942), the achievement will consist in the yoking together, in the case of art, of the world and the imagination, or, in the case of our "everyday" practices, of the practical and the real (more on this below). At times, this achievement will strike us as successful enough as to justify our sense that there is something of substance, something more than just made-up, fictive, or chimerical, in this shared world made available to us through the gift of acculturation. This is humanism and not, or not just, realism because it emphasizes from beginning to end, and with a reasonable amount of optimism, the ability of human practices to create what the traditional realist thinks we in some way only find or discover. This is not to say that humanists of this sort take reality to be completely "constructed," whatever this would exactly mean. It is rather to say that certain of our creations open up, as a Heideggerian would put it, avenues through which reality can disclose itself. Consider the practice of measurement-one of Harrison's favorite tropes-by virtue of which thoroughly human inventions such as pounds, kilos, and stones allow the world to reveal to us something about how it is. The world is not, of course, itself made of pounds or kilos or stones (at least of the sort relevant here), and it would be silliness to argue about which of these units of measurement is "right" or gets closer to reality as it "really" is. But the ability to talk about ways in which things in the real world are can only get afoot on account of the creation of tools such as these. Likewise, many of our cultural practices employ human creations that set the stage for a kind of revelation, not in any splendid metaphysical sense, but to the extent that these practices render intelligible questions about how the world is and is not. This is what sets the stage for the whole cultural enterprise of articulating a sense of our world. Without the ability to ask the worldly questions these hu36 JOHN GIBSON man creations make possible, thought and talk about reality are impoverished to the point of incommunicability (see Hanna and Harrison, 2004). Like the idealist or anti-realist, the humanist acknowledges that the world we are bound to have is a thoroughly human world. But the humanist refuses to see this as a kind of barrier or congenital deficiency in our worldly condition, as something merely human or merely cultural or merely conventional. It is human in origin but-or so the idea goes-this does not preclude but grounds the possibility of inheriting something "real," a world of the sort orthodox realists think only an act of cognitive or linguistic transcendence will bring to us. This is a thought that Hilary Putnam captures well: What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being mappers of something "language independent" is fatally compromised from the very start. (1990, p. 28) Stanley Cavell is also worth mentioning here, in a passage I suspect Harrison admires: For Wittgenstein, philosophy comes to grief not in denying what we all know to be true, but in its effort to escape those human forms of life which alone provide the coherence of our expressions. He wishes an acknowledgment of human limitation which does not leave us chafed by our skin, by a sense of powerlessness to penetrate beyond the human conditions of knowledge. The limitations of knowledge are no longer barriers to a more perfect apprehension, but the conditions of knowledge, überhaupt [anyway], of anything we should call knowledge. (1969, pp. 61–62) Like Putnam, Harrison urges that the connection between the human and the real is more direct, more immediate, than can be captured by talk of language or thought as reaching out to a fully independent world. The connection to the world that most matters must in some sense be internal to our practices, woven into the fabric of thought and language, at least on occasion and to some not insignificant degree. To regard reality as utterly "language independent" is to relegate the very thing we wish to possess to a place wholly beyond us and so beyond the realm in which we speak, think, and create works that, frequently and fundamentally, struggle to be expressive of the world in which we find ourselves. As a few millennia of Western philosophy have shown us, inseparable from this picture is the skeptical idea that, "as far as we know," we never succeed in accessing this realm in our attempts at representing and knowing it. This thought will lead most reasonable minds to conclude that we therefore have little business invoking the notion of "reality," except, perhaps, as a kind of regulatory ideal or fiction of convenience. What Do Humanists Want? 37 For Harrison, as for Cavell, the trick here is to find a way of thinking about human practices and conventions that does not make them appear bound to always fall on the unflattering side of the line that divides the real from everything else. Combining the two ideas, Harrison's humanism wishes to see what we call reality not as existing in an elsewhere that we can, at best, represent from afar-giving it then a connection nearly as tenuous as one gets from a solitary act of reference-but as something we can find within those very practices that give us a purchase on the world. It urges that, if we can see it as such, we will find that our experience of human culture and its most exemplary products will be an experience of something sufficiently real to satisfy the wish for worldliness that animates humanism. It will not be a surprise that what contrasts with humanism in Harrison's work is what he calls the "prison-house" view of language and, one might add, of mind and culture more generally. Much of his work shows how a great amount of the philosophy of language we have inherited from last century (though with roots in Plato and Locke; see Harrison, 1993) leads to such a view, unawares or not. It is a view that fashions a sense that what keeps us trapped here is, despairingly, much of what makes up the human world: all the practices and conventions we stand upon whenever we direct our mouths or minds toward the world. Of course, if we have a view of this sort, in all sorts of obvious ways, it will wreak havoc on our sense of the value of practices that are content to retreat into human language and thought, exploring the words, feelings, and perspectives that constitute our human way in the world. In short, it is very bad business for our understanding of both language and art. Humanism, for Harrison, is what we have not when we find a way out of this prison-house but when we discover that there never was one at all. If talk of "projecting," "constructing," and "fictionalizing" are intelligible here, it is not in respect to what we call reality but to the sense of human minds, languages, and cultures as prison-houses that keep it from us. I have said little here about how our practices and pursuits might be seen as grounding this more internal, immediate commerce with the real. I will discuss it in the next section, when I turn explicitly to literature. But to give a sense of the possibilities this kind of humanism opens up, I conclude this section with the following challenging but intriguing passage. Here Harrison is commenting on the philosophical significance of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (1927): Mr. Ramsey is a creature of pure textuality. He is an insubstantial pageant. His tissues are the tissues of words which have conjured him up. Must we then treat him as having nothing at all to do with reality? Well, not necessarily. For the tissue of words which constitute him are not just tissues of words. Behind the words are the system of practices which give life and meaning to the words. Those practices interact with reality in multifarious ways. They link us each to the complex, commonplace 38 JOHN GIBSON world to which we all share common access. . . . The textuality which constitutes Mr. Ramsey's personality is, then, not a textuality of words alone, but a textuality of practices. And since we share those practices, and are also in part constituted as individuals by them, the practices out of which Mr. Ramsey is constructed link him not merely to the reality of the world present to all of us as the condition of our speaking a common language, but to the reality which we constitute: to us, as readers. (Harrison, 1993, p. 42) This is how a humanist of the sort just described wishes to speak. Now on to seeing what it means to speak like this, and precisely how one can get away with it. 3. Practice, Literature, Life As should be clear, a defense of literary humanism turns out to be a defense of humanism tout court, since on this particular battleground, all of what conspires to put literature in need of such a defense is precisely what puts so much of human culture in need of it. In this respect, the literary work of art turns out to function as what Wittgenstein calls a "perspicuous representation" of culture itself and the challenges we face when we attempt to offer a philosophical justification of it. All that makes the literary work of art seem powerless to touch the real is in effect what has all along made the basic manner in which the human confronts the world appear essentially the same. The arguments that lead one to doubt that literature could ever successfully represent, yield knowledge of, or state truths about reality are of a piece with the very arguments that lead one to wonder whether any human practice can. What philosophy needs is a perspective that allows one to escape the circle of argumentation that makes both literature and human practice more generally look so degraded from the standpoint of reality. This is what Harrison gives us. Before outlining how Harrison tries to pull this off, let me state more clearly just what is at stake in respect to a defense of literary humanism. When called upon on to defend literary humanism, one is asked to justify the cultural role literature has served in virtually every corner of the world, and since stories were first told. The reason all this talk about truth, knowledge, and reality is thought to be so important here is that these are the terms we have traditionally employed when attempting to vindicate the cognitive, moral, and educative power of literary works of art. A theory of literature that implies, as many do, that literature can have no direct, intentional, or significant commerce with the real appears to pull from underneath us the very ground on which we have always made sense of the value of literature. Literary humanism, as an aesthetic expression of the humanist's general wish for worldliness, is the struggle to find philosophical grounds for attributing to literature the kind of cultural power it has habitually been thought to What Do Humanists Want? 39 enjoy. True, modernity is reputed to be less reliant on the arts of any form as viable instruments of knowledge or tools of communication (all that business about the ascendency of science, technology, and capitalism's "culture industry"). But even if one accepts this, there is room to desire, with the literary humanist, to show that the old stories are still worth telling and new ones worth devising. But precisely why does one face a serious philosophical challenge when defending literary humanism? As Harrison has shown, there is a powerful tension between our commitment to this deceptively innocent thesis of literary humanism and our understanding of language itself. So the attempt to defend literary humanism takes the form of a genuine philosophical puzzle in his work. Thus, what one finds in Harrison is something that the philosophy of literature always searches for in its struggle to get a bit of respect from philosophy at large: a set of hard problems to be solved, a good paradox, and a clear point of continuity with the work that has guided the great traditions of the twentieth-century. Harrison's contribution has been to show that overcoming these problems requires a radical refashioning not only of our understanding of how literature works but of how language (and those aspects of human practice that sponsor it) itself does. His strategy is, in effect, the Humean one of offering a skeptical solution to a skeptical paradox. Unlike traditional defenses of literary humanism, Harrison does not struggle to find a way to assert what the skeptic denies, namely, that literature can represent reality or state truths about it. Rather, he embraces the very skeptical claims that threaten literary humanism, and he reveals that a vindication of it never required affirming these claims in the first place. It is worth saying a bit more about these skeptical arguments. I outline one of the many one could choose from, since it the one with which Harrison has been most concerned and which is arguably most challenging to literary humanism. Since I will be dispensing with it rather quickly, I will not attempt to make it as compelling as the skeptic would wish. What I ask the reader to consider is not quite the soundness of the argument but the frame of philosophical mind to which it would appeal. It should be a familiar frame of mind, and, while misguided, natural enough, given entrenched philosophical views about what must be the case for language or thought of any sort to be informative of reality. Call it the problem of "representationalism." To see the problem, begin by asking what so much as infuses a sentence with aboutness, what manages to tether it to something beyond itself? An altogether common, and intuitive, answer is: reference. When one asks what it means to refer to the world in speech, the standard response is, simply put, that one attempts to represent it, as I do when I say, "my friends laugh at me even when I am not telling a joke." In this case, I use my words to bring before you a picture of how things (often) stand in the world, at least in my corner of it. 40 JOHN GIBSON Generally, representation explains-and an enormous range of competing accounts exists-how language can describe the world. Namely, language can hold up a mirror to the world, for example, by conveying a proposition that pictures or otherwise configures a sense of the sorts of relations we take to obtain in the world (my friends laughing on occasions I would prefer they would not). It is here that questions of truth and falsity become intelligible and hence that the unceasing debates about realism, anti-realism, relativism, and idealism gain traction. For once we say that language claims its worldliness through the act of representing reality, then one must ask under which conditions these representations are successful and how we can ever know this. It is commonly on this foundation of what we can call "representationalism" that questions of our access to (or occlusion from) truth and reality are fashioned, indeed, rendered intelligible. Here is the rub: literary humanism wishes to see literature as about reality. The problem is not that we have little reason to believe that its representations are ever successful or that we can never quite know whether literature gets reality right. Against the backdrop of representationalism, literary humanism appears to fail the test of worldliness before these questions can even be intelligibly raised. For literature, it turns out, does not even attempt to represent reality and so it refuses to engage in the very activity that would permit us to raise the question of its worldliness in the first place. As Harrison argues, much philosophy of language leads to the view that it is: not that the statements which figure in works of fiction are false, but something rather worse, that the statements which figure in works of fiction are, as it were, dummy statements, incapable of being assigned any truth-value, either true or false. (2009, pp. 226–227) Works of imaginative literature-the sort obviously at issue here-are works of fiction. Note: even if we think that literary language is in some way representational and truth-bearing, the directionality will still be all wrong for literary humanism. Literature represents, if anything, and as Harrison would put it, imagined worlds and not the real one, and so, at best, it can articulate fictional rather than worldly truths. When John Milton writes, "So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay/Chained on the burning lake," (2005, ll. 209–210) something is surely pictured, but one won't find it in the real world. And even if one could find it there, it wouldn't show that Paradise Lost (ibid.) was referring to or otherwise representing it. The great poem, presumably, is here representing a link in a narrative chain, a happening in the fictional story it tells, and we wouldn't call for corrections to Paradise Lost if the real Satan confessed that Hell had actually treated him better than this. The point is, literary humanism appears to run painfully afoul of both how philosophy of What Do Humanists Want? 41 language tells us words become worldly and what so much philosophy of literature tells us fictional stories are about in a basic "metaphysical" sense. Harrison's solution to these puzzles seems altogether obvious, once put, though I am unaware of any philosopher of literature before him who hit upon anything resembling it. It is at this point in the defense of literary humanism that one plugs in all the talk about cultural practices I discussed above. There is no use denying that there are such things as representational and referential uses of language. But the crucial question is often overlooked: what sorts of prior connections between language and the world must already be in place for linguistic reference or representation to be possible? It is here that one explores the role of cultural practices, described above, in creating the conditions that make it possible to speak about the world, practices that bestow us with the very tools, standards, and criteria that render questions about the reality intelligible. What this opens up is an awareness that there are two ways in which language encounters reality, one on the level of reference and the other on the level of cultural practice. What we will find when exploring the cultural mode of encounter would appear to be much more interesting for the humanist, for it is here that one sees at the most fundamental level all that goes into what we call the human world. That is, an insight into the structure of our cultural practices can show us how these practices are disclosive of human reality by revealing: the ways in which our practices have devised for us a specific kind of world, the human world, whose nature determines the scope and boundaries of what for us counts as a human life. (Harrison, 2009, p. 221) Among much else, we find how our culture and its conventions are expressive of human interests, our interests, and so exploring these conventions will help cast light on the array of shared concepts, values, and meanings that act as the raw material with which we articulate a sense of our world and, of course, ourselves. We can now see that this conception of culture and its significance for philosophy is what is at stake in the passage on To the Lighthouse quoted in the previous section. It explains how Harrison can get away with the bold claims he makes on behalf of humanism, even as he embraces some of the convictions about language and literature that would appear at odds with it. In Inconvenient Fictions, his earliest statement of this view, Harrison describes this insight into the basic intermingling of culture and language in terms of an insight into constitutive language: It is time to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Literary language, the language of narrative fiction and poetry, is, root and branch, constitutive language. As such it is non-referential and it makes no statements. . . . It is a language occupied solely with itself, in a sense. The mistake 42 JOHN GIBSON promoted by the Positivistic vision of language is to suppose that this sense can be absolute. Language is everywhere hopelessly infected by the extra-linguistic: the relationship between its signs runs ineluctably by way of the world. So there is, just as the critical humanist has always maintained, a strong connection between language and Reality; only it does not run by way of reference and truth. Rather, it permeates the thickness of the language we speak. (1991, p. 51) This passage strikes me as decisive a rejection of representationalism-and the traditional formulations of humanism that are premised on it-as one could hope for. When we find ourselves in the presence of exemplary literary achievements, we come into contact with constitutive language in the sense that in these works we see language showing us its structure, casting in relief the particular coming together of words, deeds, and values that constitute our practices and so our basic alignment with our world. Works of imaginative literature may not represent anything real or actual. But the forms of cultural activity in which both we and creatures of literary fiction engage are as a rule common, and this is what supports the humanist's conviction that in one way or another literature nearly always concerns itself with life. Even in a work of dazzling satire or modernist experimentation that has humans doing very unhuman things, the light it casts can have a powerful ability to highlight, even if associatively and negatively, what we do and how we are. Harrison's various readings of King Lear (Shakespeare, [1603] 1947), Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, [1603] 1954), To the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1927), and the holocaust fiction of Aharon Appelfeld show compellingly that this idea can be fleshed out both philosophically and critically. What we find is that the dramatic core of literature, when successful, is nothing but the dramatic core of life: of those forms of activity and interaction we call culture (see Gibson, 2006; 2007). In this respect, the dramatic and not the mimetic would seem the more appropriate category for literary humanism. This is one way of putting the insight embodied in still fashionable narrative accounts of the self. If we are, in some way, made of stories, then stories and the dramatic encounter with life they explore, function as a common currency of communication when we attempt to call attention to the sorts of doings, suffering, and happenings that constitute the human world. (Keep in mind that even Anton Chekhov's explorations of all that is mundane and tedious in domestic life are the stuff of drama, so this argument casts the net sufficiently wide.) A fictional story may not represent any actual truth, but, if Sigmund Freud was correct, the stories we offer of ourselves rarely do either. At any rate, what matters is not the representational but the dramatic quality of the story and its ability to confess something of significance about the shared cultural stage upon which human lives, fictional and real, are carried out. Harrison captures this idea nicely when he tells us that the value of literature resides: What Do Humanists Want? 43 in the power of its medium, language, to summon up and display . . . through its deployment in the medium of a fiction, the nature of the human practices and choices which found the conceptual distinctions it enshrines, and which simultaneously found, along with them, a world; a world which is not only the world in which we live, but that world-and its founding words-made flesh in us: the world which exists only in us, the world of whose values and assumptions we are the living bearers;- and which is not, moreover, a static world, but a world constantly in a slow, glacier-like flux of change, one of the motivating forces of which, of course, is great literature. That is why great literature is, or should be, important to us. (2009, p. 224) From this vantage-point, traditional, representationalist brands of literary humanism seem hopelessly conservative, even paradoxical, implying as they do that the reality we want is external to us and hence to the world we constitute, which can seem more a plea to escape the human realm than to find a way to exult in our acceptance of it. In this respect, traditional humanism leaves us feeling, as Cavell would put it, "chafed by our skin," failing to see that the reality that matters to a humanist is not extra-literary or even extra-linguistic at all and so that reaching it does not require any act of transcendence. The world the humanist should want is given expression in the very culture with which literary works are so intimately bound. The only form of skepticism that could pose a threat to this brand of humanism would be the kind that denies that literature is ever about anything at all. This would be the stripe of linguistic and literary skepticism that urges that all meaning is impossible, that the very idea of content is a myth, and that texts themselves do not really exist. While this form of skepticism still has a few practitioners, even those in Theory will acknowledge that it smacks of the 1980s and so, of a moment past. Harrison's humanism offers powerful resources for attacking this form of skepticism, but I shall stop the story here. I hope that what I have said gives a fair sense of how viable Harrison's humanism is for the contemporary scene, a scene in which concerns with ethical criticism, selfhood, aesthetics, and the seriousness (and not, or not just, playfulness) of literature are happily on the horizon again, in both philosophy and literary studies. 4. Representation without Representationalism? I find all of this convincing and a massive step forward in how we conceive the project of humanism. This in large part, I believe, because I agree with Harrison that representationalism has acted as kind of undetected virus in traditional humanism, which, once identified, explains why humanism seems to be in an ever more risible position the more philosophers and literary theorists 44 JOHN GIBSON pay serious attention to the nature of literary language. So I agree with Harrison wholeheartedly that we would do best simply to lose it and rebuild on new ground. I also agree that Harrison's practice-based humanism is the foundation on which to build. In fact, I think the power of the insight into the workings of cultural practice that Harrison uncovers accounts for the lion's share of literature's most meaningful ways of engaging with reality. What I find myself less comfortable with is relinquishing all talk of representation. It strikes me that we have two ways to respond to Harrison's powerful critique of representationalism. One, Harrison's, is to show that we can move forward without any significant notion of literary representation. The other is to devise a properly literary notion of representation that decisively cuts all ties with representationalism. I make no claim that the latter can actually be done-it is possible that we shall find that we cannot have representation without representationalism-but it is worth briefly exploring the prospects for a reformed notion of representation. It is important to recall that the term "representation" has always had an independent aesthetic usage, though in fairness to Harrison, one of those central usages, Plato's theory of mimêsis, in all sorts of obvious ways plays directly into representationalism. Unfortunately, in the contemporary philosophy of literature, we are trained to think of representation not only in mimetic terms but in terms even more suspicious: we conceive of representation as an essentially linguistic affair, as a mimetic employment of words. Of course, this would have been alien to Plato, whose theory of mimesis takes images and not descriptions as its point of departure. So from whence comes this tethering of the mimetic sense of representation to the linguistic? The story is complex, but it is easy enough to indicate what it will be a story of. For anyone working on this side of twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy, our concept of representation is filtered through the work of "high" analytic philosophy of language. Consider, just for one example, the overwhelming preoccupation with the nature of the proposition, itself perhaps the best image we have of a mimetically charged employment of words (hence the positivistic flirtation with the "picture theory" of the proposition). As philosophy of literature worked its way back into mainstream philosophy after a good half-century in the woods, it did so largely on the coattails of analytic philosophy of language, devising very sophisticated theories of fictional truth and reference by borrowing the resources of philosophy of language. This was in many respects for the good, but it also helps us to see why the philosophy of literature now finds itself with such an explicitly linguistic, mimetic notion of representation (Gibson, 2007). Even in theory the story is not so different, enlisting as theory has the kind of post-war Continental philosophy that, along with analytic philosophy, represents the great "linguistic turn" of twentieth-century philosophy. One cannot help but wonder what our notion of representation in contemporary What Do Humanists Want? 45 philosophy of literature would look like had it been devised in continuity with, say, the philosophy of fine art and not the philosophy of language. At any rate, one does have the feeling that it is a contingent fact of recent history that we philosophers of literature cannot help but talk like representationalists, in the sense given above, whenever we talk about representation. This clearly is not the place to launch a new theory of representation, and in fact I do not have one to offer. But let me say a few things that, with hope, will motivate an interest in reviving at least some talk of representation. Here is one reason I think we might wish to be able to speak of literature as having an essential representational power: if we give up all talk of representation, we will have a very difficult time telling a compelling account of what it means for a novel to succeed or, perhaps more importantly, fail in its attempt to offer a cognitively significant encounter with the world. The representationalist has always had an easy time with this: if a novel strives to be a mirror of the world, it can either succeed or fail to offer an accurate representation of the world-failure and success here are just modes of representational failures and successes. But if we turn in the other direction and banish all talk of representation, I fear we will find ourselves with a poverty of resources for speaking meaningfully about success and failure here. To motivate this criticism, consider Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Preface to Notes from Underground, where he makes the sort of authorial promise to illuminate reality that the humanist believes we should takes so seriously: It goes without saying that both these Notes and their author are fictitious. Nevertheless, people like the author of these notes may, indeed must, exist in our society, if we think of the circumstances under which that society has been formed. It has been my wish to show the public a character of the recent past more clearly than is usually shown. (2001, p. 95) Assume Dostoyevsky delivered what he promised: he succeeded in showing us something about this "public character of the recent past." Something inside of us is bound to speak up and ask what, exactly, can this mean, if not that he represented, in some way, this past accurately? Exactly what does he get right, and just how does he get it right, if not by representing it? Harrison's humanism offers us enough to see how he might build his response to this. He is clever enough to try to accommodate the sensible intuitions representationalism harnesses without accepting its ugly bits. He can say, for example, that this success will consist in the way literary characters: invoke features of a human world we share with them, which link our situation to theirs, allowing the emotions associated with the pressures 46 JOHN GIBSON of that common situation to flood from us into them, in such a way, that, viewed in them as in a glass (for the specular metaphor has always possessed a certain intuitive force, which it retains in this connection and to this extent), our own situation as inhabitants of, and as the bearers of natures formed by the pressures of, a certain human world becomes in certain respects clearer to us, because surveyable as a whole. (Harrison, 2009, p. 222) This is intriguing, but I would like to press Harrison on this notion of literature's invocation of a common world that we find in fictions. How, precisely, do we see a work as invoking our world if not for our ability to see, in some way, the work as representing our world? What so much as inclines us to establish this link between our world and the fictional world of a text, if not that we already see in its fictions, somehow, a representation of our world? The trick here is to refuse to allow representationalism, or any image of mirroring, to creep in when hearing these questions. I agree that no mirroring is going on here, certainly not in a linguistic sense. But it seems incautious, even a little perverse, therefore to conclude that no representing is going on, either. Perhaps the possibility of failure is more interesting than that of success here. Assume that Dostoyevsky failed-however hard it may be to imagine this-to show us the "character of the recent past"; assume that he did not deliver on his promise. In this case, what did he fail at, exactly? Harrison's solution turns on his idea of language, and hence of literary language, as infused with reality: reality, at least of the human variety, is "internal" to it. But this cannot mean that any literary work, because built of natural language, is by that very fact revelatory of this human reality. Harrison is surely aware of this problem. But I find it difficult to understand how his theory can help us overcome it. We need to leave room for this possibility of failure, and doing so would seem to require that we be able to say of certain novels, "that is not how we are" or that "human reality is not like that." Further, it seems to require that we be able to say this in respect to its representation of life and not, or not just, of how its language reveals or fails to reveal something about the relationship between our practices, our words, and our world. Harrison's theory strikes me as perhaps too general and too abstract to be able to capture the uniqueness and specificity of a particular novel's manner of getting us and our world right or wrong. Again, if these failures do not consist in representational failures, then in what, exactly? One response at Harrison's disposal would be to say that they consist in failures of language: novelists who fail to engage with reality have misused language. Novels that are humanistic failures are, say, extended strings of nonsense (of the Wittgensteinian, if not everyday, variety of "nonWhat Do Humanists Want? 47 sense"). But I very much doubt that Harrison would encourage such an interpretation of his theory of humanism. For if Dostoyevsky failed, certainly we would not want to say of an author with his mastery over words that he was misusing language, that he was, in his way, speaking nonsense? Again, we can see the allure of recourse to some conception of representation. It seems much easier simply to claim that he failed to represent reality aright. The language of his work is, as it were, in order; the representation he offered is not. One way of developing this plea for a literary-humanistic conception of representation might be the following: We might bite the bullet and concede that the language of literature represents nothing but fictions and fictions alone. But this is only to speak of a literary work viewed in utter isolation from the culture that has received it and done something with it. We can see the claim that a literary works represents reality as a kind of right a work has won and not as specifying something its language does. It would be the right, or privilege, to stand for us in a certain way, as a narrative that we put forth as embodying, even as announcing, what we take our way in the world to be, or at least one such way. If we view Dostoyevsky's story as a mere piece of language and look nowhere beyond it, the very question of whether it represents modern alienation might well be unanswerable, even unintelligible. But it is not, if viewed in terms of his masterpiece's place in a modern culture, certain members of which have embraced it and come to link it in all sorts of manifest and implicit ways to its self-conception. Indeed, it seems to me that the practice of criticism itself is one example of how these links are established. Moreover, all the various aspects of our culture, from classrooms to cafe conversations, help fill out this story of how a culture breathes into a certain literary work these points of connection to "reality" such that it becomes intelligible to speak of it as a representation of our world (Gibson, 2006). This is not to say that culture, rather than literary works, does all of the worldly work in creating a representation of life. It is rather to say that we should see the two as working in tandem if we wish to understand how a literary work can come to acquire all the forms of worldly significance we attribute to it. This seems to me to indicate one possible route for embracing representation without representationalism, since it promises to allow us to abandon all of the mimetic-linguistic baggage of the latter when explaining how fictions can represent the real. I'll stop here, before my point becomes a rant. But I hope my point, if necessarily inchoate, suffices to make one think that we might do well to reclaim for philosophy of literature a workable conception of representation. All of this has been more an expression of wonderment than a criticism of Harrison's work. It does not strike me that it would be inconsistent with his theory. But I do wonder whether he would accept this call for a reformed theory of 48 JOHN GIBSON representation. The question is just how Harrison would accommodate, if at all, this plea for a properly literary-humanistic theory of representation. 5. Conclusion Harrison's brand of humanism shows us that we have all we need to be humanists if we have access only to the kinds of cultural practice that relativists and anti-realists earn their bread arguing are all we have access to. His work helps us see that what humanists should want are modest but effective terms for justifying at least some of the culture we create and for praising at least some its products, literary works of art chief among them. It is a humanism one does not need to be ashamed of in public, not even in the presence of one's colleagues in English. It is sufficiently modest in its claims on behalf of the real that it should be acceptable even to those recalcitrant sorts who cannot tolerate talk about the real and worldly: apart from their native dislike of a kind of vocabulary, there really isn't much for them to take issue with. For those of us who suffer from a serious case of late-romantic longing for worldliness, it shows us how we can satisfy our desire without forgetting that we are modern or demanding that we ignore the better part of reason. To be sure, there are still many skeptics out there, and I've said nothing here about the recent, meteoric rise of post-humanism in literary studies, which, despite its bad press in philosophy, is not as silly as we would like to believe. But this is just to say that there is still work to be done, and I hope to have shown here that Harrison offers us very powerful tools for getting started on this work.