In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Further ReflectionsCharles AltieriI see now that I was wrong in lumping Robert B. Pippin with other philosophers who adapt literary experience to philosophical purposes.1 And I was probably too taken with Walter Benjamin to appreciate fully Pippin's version of Proustian sensibility. I can invoke no authority to explain why I did not see adequately that tone is so central to J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. So I am very (...) grateful to Pippin not only for pointing out my inadequate reading but also showing how, as critics, we both—for the most part—emphasize conditions of experience rendered by great literary texts. But I cannot apologize for some features of my argument, so I hope to refine them in this response.Pippin is not interested in providing explanations for texts or even, at his best, in using philosophy to extract "meaning." He limits himself to a subset of literary texts that engage philosophical thinking. Within these limits he proposes to do philosophy by literary means. That is, he wants to develop philosophically the particular situations eliciting philosophical concerns. His goal is not to stabilize the arguments underlying the text but to make more fully articulate the particular line of reflection carried out by the text and projected as a means of engaging thought on the part of the audience. Philosophy by other means becomes an engagement with literary practices concentrating on how the ways that thinking is handled in the text can take on a kind of concrete universality. This move toward generalizability does not depend on universals provided by argument (since, if one follows Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty, the fictive cannot be said to provide any knowledge of objective conditions, despite Pippin's wavering on this point; see p. 240). Rather, [End Page 260] generalization occurs by fleshing out dramatic particular occasions that establish significant perspectives on cultural problems, especially those involving transformations in cultural life, like understandings of self-knowledge, the consequences of imperialism, and the ways language becomes increasingly difficult to trust for communicative purposes.The philosophical task for Pippin is to provide a language for why the situation in a literary text might matter beyond the details that give it much of its power. G. W. F. Hegel showed how works of art can embody modes of thinking that provide articulate moments shaping what before them had been isolated undercurrents marking fissures in cultural life. Pippin wants to revive this ambition to produce philosophically articulate moments that bring out cultural and ideological tensions formative for modern reflective lives. This desire, I think, springs largely from Pippin's commitment to preserve Hegel's way of reading literature so that he can provide an alternative to Hegel's argument that once the universals established in an Absolute become increasingly visible, the significance of art for understanding culture will diminish substantially.Pippin has explored two alternatives for defending a Hegelian approach capable of preserving the cultural importance of the arts: in visual arts by providing languages for social critique, and in literature by actually dramatizing the significance of how texts can engage and establish processes of thinking that address pressing philosophical concerns. In effect, only by showing how Hegel was wrong that philosophy could establish a possibility of knowing an Absolute that would render art a minor player in civilization's capacity for self-awareness could criticism show how art becomes possibly the only vehicle we have to honor the spiritual complexities experience can make manifest.But even when I am led to agree for the most part with Pippin's claims about literature as philosophy, his focus on cultural relevance bothers me because that focus provides constant temptations to minimize the complex experiences works produce. So I think I have to try again to articulate what I think I can save of my efforts to distinguish literary experience from Pippin's enlightened philosophical ways of engaging literary texts. Let me propose three features of my original argument that seem still worth considering. First, I will simply assert that Pippin's theorizing of two factors necessary for interpreting intentions—as authorial purposiveness and as historically based recontextualizations of the work—makes it very difficult... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Robert B. Pippin's Philosophy by Other MeansCharles AltieriRobert Pippin's book is terrific in many ways.1 He not only makes Hegel's aesthetic theorizing lucid; he makes it extremely attractive, especially in his account of how artists double the sensuous world so that an artwork embodies the presence of the spirit's labor. And he proposes a forceful case that Hegelian thinking can honor the contributions art makes to philosophy, (...) given that a major challenge for philosophy is to capture "its own time reflected in thought." Hence G. W. F. Hegel treats works of literature "not as examples of an ideal or moral commitment or the expression of general norms, but as criterial aspects of just what it could be to espouse or avow such a value or, more important, … for such a value to lose its grip on its adherents" (p. 222, emphasis added).The opening of his second essay, on J. M. Coetzee, elaborates this claim by making two assertions—"that fiction can be a distinctive form of thought, even a form of knowledge," and "that such knowledge is relevant to, has a bearing on, the sort of knowledge that philosophy, or at least some version of philosophy tries to achieve" (p. 240). Modern literature, in particular, offers this knowledge largely because it is obsessed with problems of self-reflection that are also basic to the age's philosophical concerns. Hegel shows that in modernity, self-consciousness must establish new imaginative relations between subjectivity and what seem objective conditions in order to address the inherent tensions and senses [End Page 234] of contradiction inevitable when persons face historical change on this large a scale. And Pippin's essays on literature show how significant, and how disturbing, the need for understanding these efforts at shaping identity can become.II want first to register the kinds of observations Pippin's approach can develop for particular works of art. Then we will have a framework for clarifying and assessing his arguments, in ways that his dealing with art, especially modern writing, may help us dialectically stage how his views can be sublated. Pippin performs a minor, yet brilliant, example of sublation in his essay on Immanuel Kant's hatred of tragedy. Kant's aversion is based on his belief that we "cannot make ethical sense" (p. 35) of how tragedy contradicts anything reason can assert. (And in denying the power of moral reasoning, tragedy also denies the presence of the divine in human life.) This observation then becomes a difficult dilemma for philosophy: either we dismiss tragedy or we expand what counts as philosophy. But Pippin finds in philosophy the expansion he needs by deploying Friedrich Nietzsche's argument against Kant: what we "need in our response to tragedy is not understanding but strength" (p. 36).The issue of tragedy deepens in Pippin's first essay on literature, about Henry James's What Maisie Knew, but largely because of what Pippin does not address. Pippin emphasizes how James thinks Maisie demonstrates to herself and to others that she can ultimately understand her position regarding her dangerously charming parents and caregivers. In Maisie's final choice to leave with her caregiver nurse, Mrs. Wix, she takes responsibility for her relationship to her entire social circle and demonstrates to its members her capacity to free herself from them. She thereby satisfies Hegel's demand that self-knowledge can reasonably be claimed only when one acts on that knowledge; and is capable, when challenged, of standing behind what she has determined. For she then accomplishes two feats. Her action presents self-knowledge not as a report of an inner state but as "a reflexive stance taken up for reasons in a social world" (p. 171). And it does so in a context of "social contestations" rather than settling for a limited projection of herself to herself (p. 164). However, I claim later that while James is certainly impressed by Maisie, her knowledge does not prevent the tragic consequence of dooming her to a life where her multiple virtues are not [End Page 235] likely to be realized. At times, literary texts show how self-knowledge... (shrink)

Abstract:This paper is an analysis of Plato's use of the embassy to Achilles in Homer's Iliad book 9 as a literary template for Crito's mission to persuade Socrates to escape from prison in Athens. Plato's purpose is to elevate the nature of a hero by contrasting the impulsive, impetuous, mercurial temper of Achilles with the steady, thoughtful, deliberative, calmly rational argument of Socrates. Plato shows, in a volley fired at the poet, how the philosopher is more meaningfully heroic than the (...) warrior, for where the warrior aims selfishly at securing his own honor, the philosopher aims at political virtue. (shrink)

Abstract:Taking my title from "Lingering in the Woods," one of Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, I present a study of Stanley Cavell's style of writing. While a dominant Anglo-American style of philosophical writing seems to be motivated principally by a desire for argumentation, a Cavellian, lingering style aims at thorough expression and description of the human experience. Traces of this style can be found also in Ludwig Wittgenstein's writing. After reopening the debate that arose from some responses (...) to The Claim of Reason, I conclude with a close reading of Cavell's "Excursus on Wittgenstein's Vision of Language.". (shrink)

Abstract:In Plato's Ion, Socrates dismisses the "inspired" creations of poetic or other art as genuine forms of knowledge or techne, foreshadowing his later suspicion and (even) condemnation of the human value of art in such later dialogues as Republic. I argue that while Socrates raises a serious issue, this ancient case for inherent opposition or contradiction between inspiration and knowledge rests upon some failure (or unwillingness) to appreciate that epistemic capacities and concerns often have different forms and purposes in the (...) nonliteral, figurative, and rhetorical sphere of poetic and other literary arts from those of more literal or factual knowledge. (shrink)

Abstract:This study links Homeric and Machiavellian outlooks in Henry James's The Ambassadors. We first relate Lambert Strether's embassy seeking Chad's return to Woollett to what Alexander Pope famously designated the "Embassy to Achilles," i.e., the Achaean effort to induce Achilles's return to battle. Achilles impassionedly rejects the embassy's hypocrisy; he will not be bought. We then find Chad Newsome conspiratorially excluding Strether from the family fortune via intended marriage to Mrs. Newsome. Contrary to Achilles's forthrightness and integrity, Chad and his (...) Parisian circle adopt a post-Machiavellian ethos of deceit as the norm. (shrink)

Abstract:Contenders for serious, let alone worthwhile, philosophical works consisting entirely of jokes are hard to find. Tom Stoppard's comedy Dogg's Hamlet, built from the materials of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, might be one. Wittgenstein could only use previously acquired language to argue that social performance is a necessary prerequisite for the process of learning that meaningful language in the first place. But Stoppard's audiences can experience the inadequacy of a static, constative theory of language; then they can self-consciously undergo a (...) socialized process of meaningful language acquisition. And that new language allows new jokes; so: did Stoppard put the wit into Wittgenstein? (shrink)

Abstract:What is the relationship between philosophical understandings of the infinite and their narrative expressions? This article explores the infinite in two aesthetic paradigms: the horror of the infinite in classical Greece, and Romanticism's glorification of the unlimited. It argues that these two approaches paved the way for a third, a "relational infinite" that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. To illustrate this third paradigm, I draw on the works of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and on other (...) fictions of the fantastic genre that make the boundless and endless a key element of the plot. (shrink)

Abstract:Though critics have long recognized the influence of Søren Kierkegaard on poet W. H. Auden, the understanding of Auden's debt to Kierkegaard has primarily focused on the most famous aspects of Kierkegaard's thought: the "stages of life" and "leap of faith." By recovering the depths of Auden's reading of Kierkegaard, this article redefines their relationship: Kierkegaard's most lasting impact on Auden consisted in his views on the public, literary vocation, and necessity of indirection. In redefining Auden's debt to Kierkegaard, I (...) also seek to recover Auden's continued commitment to public poetry in his supposedly private later career. (shrink)

Abstract:This article recovers a submerged philosophical debate between Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Russell's concern with immediate experience ("acquaintance") underscores a dilemma troubling literary modernism generally and modernist abstraction in particular. In "Prufrock," acquaintance with reality marks an epistemic failure whose social form is the "etherization" gripping the city and everything in it. The conversation between Russell's philosophy and Eliot's poetry is grounded in but exceeds the men's real-life acquaintance. Rather (...) than influence, at stake is a circulation of ideas between philosophy and modernist poetry and the questions of knowledge raised by both. (shrink)

Abstract:What does it mean to recognize something as a work of art? In this paper, I approach the question, first, through a discussion of Stanley Cavell's likening of the recognition of artworks to the recognition of persons; and, second, through a discussion of the tendency, especially during the artistic period of Modernism, to compare artworks not to persons but to monsters. My claim is that, far from contradicting Cavell's insight, the comparison of artworks to monsters sheds light on the structure (...) of aesthetic recognition as Cavell correctly understands it. (shrink)

Abstract:I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity that are (...) hallmarks of continental philosophy and neopragmatism, and with it greater need to explore philosophical stances through fiction. (shrink)

Abstract:Can I (and you) talk sensibly about William Shakespeare's works? Some historicists see insuperable barriers in trying to understand utterances from different times and cultures, and some skeptics see such barriers in trying to read other minds. In Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous utterance about not understanding a talking lion, is the early modern Englishman Shakespeare one of those lions? Or can a magic key see past such barriers in one of the critical systems that we are offered? I argue that the (...) answer to both questions is no. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Charles AltieriRobert B. PippinIam very grateful to Charles Altieri for his attentive reading of and thoughtful critique of Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts.1 Let me proceed immediately to his main and quite important criticism of the approach defended there. It is this: "My one huge problem with Pippin's perspective is that I cannot accept his insistence that the (...) distinctive form of thinking elicited by works of art is best treated as a mode of knowledge." And he offers a contrasting perspective: "Instead I propose that art should matter to society primarily as the achievement of constructed, specific, individual experiences that embody resonance and authority. Then we can claim that their capacities to engage audiences in particular imaginative situations dramatically stage responses to the historical conditions on which Pippin dwells." This is a densely stated alternative, and I am not sure I fully understand it or why stating it this way thereby shows why art "should matter to society" (art may do this, but why is that important?), but I have much to say by way of clarification before getting to the alternative.First, I meant the title to be as dialectical and so as paradoxical as it sounds. If the means are "other," then we have left philosophy altogether; if the other means are still philosophical, then they can't count as "other." By dialectical I mean simply the avoidance of such dualisms, while not collapsing distinctions through some sort of resolutive reductionism. The idea is to avoid two terrible examples of philosophical approaches to the arts that putatively avoid such dualisms: either provocative or illustrative. The former sees literature especially as embodying issues like moral dilemmas that can be understood to pose, to provoke, philosophical [End Page 249] questions that traditional philosophy should then take up and discuss on its own. (Examples are the way Samuel Beckett's plays, or Albert Camus's The Stranger, are sometimes taught.) The latter, the illustrative, sees literature, again paradigmatically, as providing something like the flesh and blood of abstract philosophical issues, instantiating and illustrating a particular philosophical approach, like moral sentimentalism. (Charles Dickens is often cited.)These are surely examples of what Altieri cites as, and quite rightly rejects, as "appropriating those [aesthetic] experiences for philosophical explanation." I want to reject such "appropriationism" too. In my first chapter, on philosophical criticism of the arts, the idea I defended was that attention to the philosophical value of literature (I will stay with this art form for a while) is attention to literature as a form of reflective thinking itself, in no need of appropriation by philosophy—even though, I claim, there can be a form of philosophical criticism. The point of such criticism is to illuminate that dimension of the work itself, something philosophically significant that the work can do but traditional philosophy cannot.This is couched within several qualifications. Such attentiveness can be valuable, but not for just any work of great literature. Some literature is great without being concerned with any aesthetic modality of "thinking." One can surely admire Samuel Richardson or Anthony Trollope or William Makepeace Thackeray and admit that their value stems from other qualities in the prose, plotting, and psychologically astute portrayal of characters. And for many other reasons, any of the arts can be said to be valuable even if a case can also be made for their bearing on philosophy.And finally, the concept of "philosophical knowledge" is quite complicated. Surely some philosophers, like G. W. F. Hegel, believe in such a thing, but I don't. As Altieri rightly points out, no Absolute exists. What interests me is the relevance of Hegel's claim that a sensible and affective modality of collective self-knowledge can be embodied in many great works. But the collective self-knowledge embodied in fiction is not like discursive or analytic or even speculative knowledge. I see no strict distinction between the object of interrogation and the interrogation itself. That is, the "self" in question (e.g., who have we become?) is what it is by virtue of its own self-interpretation. Self-knowledge in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The World as I Found It:Possibilities and Peculiarities about Speech and ConversationDavid WemyssIn November 2002, a series of tutorials was advertised within the University of Cambridge. Neville Critchley—a lecturer in philosophy with a reputation for preferring literature—placed advertisements on college notice boards saying he wanted to hear from students not just philosophically or intellectually intrigued by language but literally made unwell by it. Four young people replied, one of (...) whom subsequently provided me with an account of what passed in Room C28 at Emmanuel College. Almost thirteen years afterwards, the account was published under the title "The Weighing of Our Words."1Richard Salisbury, who had prepared the account, died in September 2016. His later piece, "A Report on Experience,"2 was published in October 2018—and that was believed to be the last literary production connected with the 2002 tutorials. However, it transpires that Richard's wife, Carole, who had organized the publication of "A Report on Experience," was also in possession of an intriguing recording from June 2016—just months before Richard's death. Carole discovered an audio recording, on a set of old-fashioned, reel-to-reel tapes, of a meeting in the Bedford Hotel in Bloomsbury, London, between her husband and Neville Critchley—fourteen years after they had last met. The conversation was [End Page 210] clearly intended to be transcribed and published, and I remain grateful to Carole for her help and friendship in arranging this.INeville Critchley and Richard SalisburyBedford Hotel, Southampton Row, LondonJune 2016Neville Critchley:Sitting here in Bloomsbury, I'm remembering the story about T. S. Eliot hiding in the lavatory at Faber and Faber to avoid small talk with colleagues as they left the office together in the evenings.Richard Salisbury:I think quite a lot of people do things like that. But I'm a good bit worse.NC:You have some remarkable illustrations of how much worse.RS:Before moving to Edinburgh (where I met David Wemyss, of course) I had a brief but enjoyable stay in Oxford, doing legal work for the city council there. One day, it was announced that my entire team, from senior executives down to administrative assistants, and one or two hangers-on, had been invited to Westminster for an "exchange of ideas" with civil servants there who were interested in a project I'd set up—to do with parking charges, of all things! Anyway, the plan was to go through to London by luxury coach as a day trip, but I could only think of the fragmented conversation on the journey—especially the conducting of conversations looking over my shoulder or half-standing up, or perhaps getting stuck for too long with one of my less-congenial colleagues. Carole found the answer: if I took the day before the visit as a holiday, and the day after too, I could be in London for the professional appointment but avoid the bus completely. I needed a reason, of course, but London being London I knew I'd easily find a concert that would sound like a convincing explanation for wanting to combine personal and professional objectives. Bruckner 8 did the trick. I needed a couple of nights in a hotel—here at the Bedford actually!—but it was well worth it. I'm never reluctant to have a day or two in Bloomsbury, having stayed here for six months, but the real motivation was the desperation to avoid my colleagues outside the carefully premeditated conversational tramlines I usually had in place. [End Page 211]NC:And that's just one of the many—quite different—ways in which you would characterize why you, like Eliot, would hide in a lavatory to avoid talking to people! But to an everyday, well-adjusted person, that would sound monstrous. Claustrophobically intropunitive—or narcissistic. There's even a case for suppressing the transcript of this interview, or destroying it altogether—but I don't think you'd like that! You assume completely that I'll bring it into existence. It'll be a middlebrow literary accomplishment—a literary coup that marshals the chaos of your experience... (shrink)

Abstract:This paper discusses Emerson's thoughts on the history and future of art in his 1841 essay "Art." I suggest that characterizing Emerson as a "functionalist" obscures the radical nature of his views and that Emerson ultimately sought the disappearance of the fine arts altogether through a merger of fine art with other creative activities. Emerson seeks to raise human creativity to a divine level and to incorporate beauty in the nature and actions of human beings themselves. I conclude with a (...) brief discussion of the relation between subsequent art movements and Emerson's ideas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie JacksonAvram AlpertThe African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing, by Jeanne-Marie Jackson; 232 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.The world of postcolonial literary studies harbors a well-earned suspicion of claims to promoting liberal ideals like civility, rationality, and individuality. The liberal worldview, after all, arose in (...) the same era as European colonial expansion. To many critics, this was not a coincidence: liberal ideals were often crafted in opposition to the peoples that Europeans were encountering around the world. Whereas these other peoples were supposedly bound to collective myths, unaware of the primacy of the individual, and condemned to violent passions, liberals claimed that Europeans used rationality to perceive the value of individual life, and, in so doing, had unlocked the key to promoting civilizational harmony. All that everyone else had to do to experience this new way of life was, in one of history's most wretched paradoxes, to succumb to colonial violence and join the empire of liberty. It is thus quite logical that anticolonial criticism would call into question the basic features of the liberal worldview.But in recent years, an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars—including Sankar Muthu in political science, Sanjay Subrahmanyam in history, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam in literary studies, and Ato Sekyi-Otu in philosophy—have come to question this consensus.1 Their challenge rests on an ironic problem of the critique of ideologies associated with colonialism: by criticizing topics like civility, rationality, and individuality as such, do we not play into the very Eurocentric idea that these ideas were invented by Europeans in the first place? As these scholars have shown across various disciplines, geographies, and time periods, this critique risks giving modern Europe too much credit. Ideals often associated with liberalism have antecedents around the world. Sometimes they are used to advance general equality and well-being; sometimes they subvert these ideals. As Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues in her trenchant new book intervening in these debates, The African Novel of Ideas, we thus need a criticism that is as much attuned to the critique of "false universalisms" as it is open to "the promise of one that is true" (p. 189).Throughout her book, Jackson argues that a reconstructed liberalism is not only fundamental to literature from Africa but that the critical neglect of this fact has distorted the general understanding of literature today. Critics—especially but not exclusively in the West—have become so accustomed to sniffing out hints of liberal, individualist ideology that they routinely cast aside the ways in which African philosophers and novelists have themselves sought to explore and transform these ideals. Jackson's argument is not that liberalism, as it stands, is a noble philosophy that has been unfairly jettisoned. Rather, she posits that African writers are developing a fundamental innovation by considering how they—who were so long exploited by European ideals—can nonetheless find [End Page 495] meaning in both alternative and emergent versions of these very same ideals. What their work emphasizes is the "process of getting from an African locality to its universal resonance" (p. 185). In other words, whereas Europeans had simply presumed that their view of the world should apply everywhere, the contemporary novelists and philosophers discussed in this book engage in thorough intellectual and conceptual labor to tease out how ideas generated in one place might speak (without force) to peoples around the world.Jackson advances this argument through an innovative mix of philosophy and literature. Rather than evoking the standard series of French philosophers summoned to explicate literature, Jackson frames her readings through the work of philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Emmanuel Eze. This allows her to shift the focus of her readings of literature from questions of language and close reading to underanalyzed topics in philosophy and literature, especially about how African literature enacts philosophical questions. She discusses topics ranging from the nature of the self and the meaning of rationality to a meta-interrogation on the purpose of philosophizing itself (pp. 16–17). That purpose... (shrink)

Abstract:Claims are often made that, in the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century, artists attempted to take over certain functions from religion, particularly the function of redeeming the world. But what exactly it might mean for art to redeem the world is rarely treated with any precision. In this essay, I show that Wordsworth's idea of a poetic theodicy offers an unusually clear and appealing form of the redemptive view of art, which, when properly understood, is less vulnerable to (...) standard criticisms than is commonly thought. (shrink)

Abstract:Focusing on Socrates and Oedipus, this article explores the role of imagery of legs and leg-associated activities in philosophical and dramatic representations of philosophers. Socrates's philosophizing begins with wandering, culminates in immobile standing, and tragically ends with his sitting with his legs planted in the ground. Oedipus's philosophizing involves tragic ignorance of his own legs: he has succeeded in solving the philosophical riddle about the legs of Man in general, yet fails to see his own feet and thereby to solve (...) the riddle of his own identity. (shrink)

Abstract:Taking its cue from a resonant passage in Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, this essay reflects on the necessity of the figure of the child for Cavell's philosophy and for his understanding of the differences between Austinian and Wittgensteinian criteria. It develops the difference between instruction and initiation by meditating on how we learn the words for love. Finally, I examine briefly the figure of the boy Mamillius, son of the skeptic Leontes, in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, whom (...) Cavell first noticed as central to the play's energies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nostromo and Negative LongingDaniel BrudneyWhat, as the upshot of this exhibition of human motive and attitude, do we feel Conrad himself to endorse? What are his positives? It is easier to say what he rejects or criticizes.—F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition1IWriters, playwrights, filmmakers have often seen their work as political. In this essay I discuss one way in which a narrative might be political. My proof text will (...) be Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo.2Let's start by noting several ways in which a narrative might criticize the present.(1). It highlights a shortcoming, say, an injustice, of the present.(2). It shows the possibility of a different and better society, usually inhabited by people with a different and better psychology.(3). It shows nothing positive, and yet it elicits a desire for a radically different and radically better future, that is, for something very different from the present.The first option divides into:(1a) The narrative shows a particular injustice, the sort of thing that concrete institutional change might eliminate or ameliorate. There are plenty of examples of (1a): Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle, the movie Dirty Pretty Things. We could debate how far particular instances are propaganda, journalism, or "literature," and what difference these categories might make. Here, I merely note that narrative is capable of pointing to, making palpable, evoking outrage at, this or that particular injustice. Narrative will rarely tell us the best way to fix the injustice ("There ought to be a law" merely begins that conversation), but it can convince us that a particular injustice exists and needs to be addressed. [End Page 369](1b) The narrative shows what is wrong with something more general: a pervasive social institution, such as the market, imperialism (of one or another kind), some general pattern of social feeling and conduct. Many classic works do this, such as Middlemarch and Madame Bovary. Of course, precisely because such works criticize large and pervasive phenomena, they usually do not point to any specific solution. They say, "This (something fairly general) is bad."When we move to narratives that try to present better worlds, things get more complicated. We can see the issue by noting a distinction in (2) and between (2) and (3). With (2a), we are in the realm of what John Rawls calls a "realistic utopia."3 This is supposed to be (i) sufficiently specifiable, in terms of, say, principles of distribution, a conception of the person, and a conception of justification; that is, in terms of several central organizing ideas. It is also supposed to be (ii) sufficiently realistic in terms of the moral psychology needed for its instantiation. Rawls often talks of full compliance in his well-ordered society, but for that society to be sufficiently realistic, the psychology of its citizens must merely be a sufficiently real possibility in the sufficiently near future to generate sufficient compliance to make for sufficient stability.Call a realistic utopia realizably realistic if (I) the better angels of our nature upon which it calls are sufficiently like our actual nature to be plausible in the relatively near term, and (II) it does not require too often the instantiation of those better angels. The contrast is to (2b), a realistic utopia that is unrealizably realistic because although it satisfies (I) it does not satisfy (II): it is too dependent on the more or less constant instantiation of those better angels. It assumes that "can implies will" even though in real life the inference often fails.4 Still, such a society remains "realistic" since it is possible for us always to instantiate those better angels.With (3), condition (i) is not satisfied. The issue is not that we cannot or that we believe human beings will not realize something specifiable in terms of institutions and citizen psychology. It is that we have only a vague and primarily negative understanding of what we want. It is substantially (perhaps entirely) a political via negativa. And so (ii) cannot be known to be satisfied.The distinction between (2a) (and maybe also [2b]) on the one hand, and (3) on the other, tracks two ways... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction by Mark PayneAihua ChenFlowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction, by Mark Payne; 192 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction contributes significantly to the nascent scholarship on the ever-increasing corpus of postapocalyptic fiction by reading this genre philosophically and interrogating how it imagines new forms of life beyond the confines of a particular kind of world (...) and outside the polis walls. Payne's claim is that postapocalyptic fiction is "political theory in fiction form" and "shows what it would be like to live that life" (p. 2). Moreover, he posits that postapocalyptic fiction "imagines forms of human freedom, sociality, and capability outside the discourse of normative theory" (pp. 2–3). This monograph, framed by the great thinkers such as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and many others, provides a cogent and incisive analysis of the themes of occupation, ontology, and the anthropological horizon in postapocalyptic fiction. It offers a comprehensive study of the genre, ranging in the context of philosophical and political ideas from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. The readings include a well-developed introduction, three analytical chapters, and a conclusion.In his extensive introduction, Payne provides a rich background for his study of postapocalyptic fiction and perspicuously outlines his theoretical framework and research scope. Payne first traces the literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction to the biblical tale of Noah, and Hesiod's Works and Days. He offers a helpful delineation of the salient differences between apocalyptic fiction and postapocalyptic fiction, and thus narrows his research scope to postapocalyptic fictions that commit themselves to "staging human beings living on after the catastrophe, and to showing why catastrophe is necessary for the new forms of human sociality they envision" (p. 18), which accounts for his omission of some famous postapocalyptic novels, such as Will Self's The Book of Dave and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.After acknowledging his indebtedness to earlier research, Payne argues that although some critical readings of postapocalyptic fiction "have rightly identified its commitment to starting over, they have generally mischaracterized it by beginning at the macrosocial level, with the social contract and other large-scale forms of social organization, rather than the single human being and their body." He further suggests that "postapocalyptic fiction advances a strand of political thought that is as ancient as Aristotle's student Dicaearchus, who argued, against his teacher, that the polis is not the best form of life for the realization of human potential" (p. 21).Therefore, his research addresses this gap by focusing on individualism, small-scale sociality, and forms of freedom and regeneration outside the polis wall. Payne points out that "the form of freedom staged in postapocalyptic fiction is [End Page 499] marronage" (p. 26). Especially noteworthy is that Payne gives a detailed explication of the theory of marronage, the relationship between occupation and mentation to which he frequently refers in subsequent chapters to expound how survivors after the apocalyptic event can adapt themselves to the altered world and have new forms of mental life through their new occupations.The first chapter, "The Apocalyptic Cosmos," examines how cosmic forces transform human beings' physical existence and forms of life in the works of Hesiod, Shelley, and Olaf Stapledon, and how these writers engage with the immediacy of relationship between occupation and mentation. Payne first engages in illuminating exploration of how Shelley draws on Works and Days for her vision of postapocalyptic fiction. He argues that The Last Man looks to Works and Days "for its vision of human victimization at the hands of a whimsical cosmos" (p. 37). For Shelley, primitive agriculture is the ideal form of life, in which "the relationship between occupation and mentation is the most satisfying to human beings because it affords them the idea that personal, small-scale, local divinities care about human beings in the same way that human beings care for them" (p. 44). In the latter part of the chapter, Payne illustrates how Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker reveal... (shrink)

Abstract:Romeo and Juliet is one of the first works to emphasize the important place that romantic love holds in the lives of two individuals. Less frequently acknowledged is the role of romantic love in the play's criticism of feudal society. Using the notion of an unlikely couple, I explore the play's critique of feudal society for allowing the antagonism between the two lovers' noble households to undermine the possibility of their finding true love. The play argues for the importance of (...) a strong, centralized state in securing the welfare of its citizens. (shrink)

Abstract:Describing the metamorphosis of a beloved wife into a vixen, David Garnett's novella Lady into Fox does not depict a possible world that is remote from our actual one. This metamorphosis is a metaphor, a speech act embedded in a literary description of actual reality, in which marriage, dissociated from natural, free untrammeled love, turns into a hunt—terminating in the horrible death of the wife as a hunted vixen. The unity of the literary realism and fantasy, as a metaphor, is (...) what makes Lady into Fox such a moving novella. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Renaissance ExerciseRoy GlassbergDescribing the influence of Aristotle's Poetics on education in Renaissance Italy, Lane Cooper writes, "Before 15431 it was a regular academic exercise to compare a Greek tragedy with a Senecan, with the demands of the Poetics as a standard."2An interesting prompt for an article, one that I shall here pursue. In what follows, I compare Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus with Seneca's Trojan Women in terms of their (...) adherence to a set of three criteria culled from the Poetics, dramatic elements that were regarded by Aristotle as conducive to a well-constructed tragedy. For example, Aristotle writes in chapter 6 that "the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy [are] Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes."3 And that these are most effective when they occur concurrently (A, p. 41). Thus, I will inquire of each play whether it includes a scene of reversal and recognition and whether these happen simultaneously.Criterion one: Aristotle states in chapter 13 that "a well-constructed plot should … be single in its issue rather than double as some maintain" (A, p. 47). The plot of Trojan Women is double, one line of action leading to the death of Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromache, and the other to the death of Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba and Priam. The plot of Oedipus Tyrannus, on the other hand, is single, with its action focused on Oedipus from its beginning through its middle to its end. [End Page 490]Criterion two: Aristotle tells us in chapter 13 that "a perfect tragedy should … imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation" (A, p. 47). He further remarks that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune and fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves" (p. 45). Thus, we pity Andromache and Hecuba for the loss of their children and fear the loss of our own. Similarly, we pity Oedipus for his unmerited misfortune, his situation being the result of a curse brought down upon Laius, his father. And we fear being subject, ourselves, to unmerited divine hostility.Criterion three: As noted above, reversal and recognition are regarded by Aristotle as providing "the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy" (A, p. 27).In Oedipus Tyrannus, reversal and recognition transpire simultaneously when the messenger comes bearing good news that turns out to be bad news: that the king and queen of Corinth are not Oedipus's real parents.4 We find no scenes of reversal and recognition in Trojan Women.Thus, in comparing Oedipus Tyrannus with Trojan Woman in terms of the three criteria presented above, the game goes to Sophocles.Roy GlassbergPortland, OregonFootnotes1. 1543 was the date of Cinthio's translation of Aristotle's Poetics into Italian, thus making the students' efforts at their own translations moot.2. Lane Cooper, The "Poetics" of Aristotle: Its Meaning and Influence (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), p. 201.3. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1951), p. 27; hereafter abbreviated A.4. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 54–55.Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Abstract:Historicist criticism makes more sense as an aesthetic stance than as a discipline for producing knowledge. I examine Galen Strawson's essay "Against Narrativity" and Ian McEwan's novel Saturday to account for historicism's distinct aesthetic. Strawson distinguishes between Diachronic and Episodic orientations toward time, and both writers work to validate the Episodic perspective against the claim that Diachronicity is psychologically and ethically normative. Because historicist criticism privileges singular epiphanic encounters with the past that would transcend or preclude narrativization, historicists appear as (...) unhappy Diachronics, seeking an Episodic fulfillment that their prior commitment to totalizing narratives of power renders elusive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram EilenbergerDavid HermanTime of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, by Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. Shaun Whiteside; 432 pp. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.Is it possible to write a deeply researched and technically precise contribution to the history of philosophy that reads like a gripping novel? Time of (...) the Magicians, originally published in German in 2018 as Zeit der Zauberer, convincingly demonstrates that this feat can indeed be accomplished. However, it may be achievable only by the rare expert who, like Wolfram Eilenberger, combines a thoroughgoing knowledge of the field, an unstinting commitment to recreating a public forum for philosophy, and a gift for the exposition—and dramatization—of philosophical debates, the broader circumstances in which they took place, and the motivations and aims of those who participated in them.The book, stylishly translated by Shaun Whiteside, begins by plunging us into the middle of things. Eilenberger provides snapshots of what his four focal thinkers were up to in 1929, before backtracking, in subsequent chapters, to cover key events in the decade that brought them to this point. Then, in the epilogue, he briefly sketches their post-1929 lives and careers. The book's readability is further enhanced by the way the text is broken up into short sections with eye-catching titles ("A Hut of One's Own," "Existential Health Check," "Self-Fashioning through Openness").The opening pages center on June 1929, when Ludwig Wittgenstein, having previously renounced his portion of his family's fortune and taught for several years at primary schools in rural Austria, undertook an oral defense of his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge at age forty. Wittgenstein's "thesis" just so happened to be Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the influential, sometimes gnomic book he had published in 1921; and at the conclusion of the defense, the candidate is rumored to have said to his examiners, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it."In fact, as Eilenberger discusses in a later chapter, by 1929 Wittgenstein's own thinking was no longer where it had been when he wrote the Tractatus. The [End Page 492] philosopher's primary concern had shifted away from identifying the logical structure of meaningful propositions; instead, he had become interested in how meaning emerges from the way language is used in particular, concrete contexts. Apropos the evolving nature of Wittgenstein's ideas, one of the funniest parts of the book describes the philosopher's meetings with members of the Vienna Circle, a group that, in seeking to reorient philosophy around the natural sciences, had come to see the Tractatus as a touchstone for their work. During his first meeting with the group, in 1927, Wittgenstein, instead of talking shop, recited poems by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, standing with his back turned to the audience. Later discussions did involve philosophy, but eventually, as Eilenberger puts it, although the "Vienna Circle had hoped for something that coincided with their ideal of objective research," they "were instead left to grapple with an extremely idiosyncratic style of thinking that, in both execution and results, seemed directly contrary to it" (p. 274).Meanwhile, a few months prior to Wittgenstein's defense of a thesis that no longer reflected his real tendencies of mind, two of Eilenberger's other focal thinkers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, engaged in a much-anticipated public debate at the Grand Hôtel Belvédère in Davos, Switzerland. When he first mentions it, Eilenberger furnishes just enough detail to whet readers' curiosity about this epochal contest between the eminent neo-Kantian Cassirer, whose reputation for encyclopedic erudition had just been sealed by the publication of the final volume of his masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and the considerably younger Heidegger, a one-time student of Edmund Husserl who had made a radical departure from Husserlian phenomenology in Being and Time.By the time readers return to the debate, some three hundred pages later, Eilenberger has provided a decade's worth of historical context, which casts a... (shrink)

Abstract:While many readers know Aldous Huxley as the author of Brave New World, few know him as a philosopher. Even fewer readers are aware of his extensive knowledge of Eastern philosophy and the ways in which he perceives epistemological and ethical parallels between Eastern thought and Western philosophy. This essay freshly unveils this unexpected part of Huxley by investigating his dialogue with a classical Chinese philosophy called Taoism and the ways in which Taoism contributes to the formation of his most (...) important philosophical treatise The Perennial Philosophy (1946), written as a book of global philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract:The Inferno's central conflict is between us readers and God. When fictional characters captivate us, we are normally free to enjoy their charms. Not so Dante's sinners. If we feel bad for these characters, it cannot be because they are sympathetic—after all, God put them in Hell—but because we are naive. But is this sympathy really naive? This article reconsiders the Ugolino episode as a paradigm for the Inferno's ethical contradictions. In a poem that reminds us that crimes often create (...) the circumstances for victimization, perhaps sympathizing with the damned is the most ethical reading of all. (shrink)

Abstract:The paradox of fiction deals with the following question: how is it possible to react emotionally to a fictive image? After a discussion of two important solutions to the paradox, I present an outline of my solution. The "real/fictional information-processing" theory proposes that all kinds of stimuli (real or fictive) are undergoing information processing by the cognitive system. Each stimulus consists of bundle of particular stimuli (for example, a cat) and certain indicators that specify whether it is real or fictitious. (...) Based on the result of this processing, one's emotional response is done adequately—it fits reality. (shrink)

Abstract:Curiously, Marxist literary and art criticism often historicizes everything but the artist's labor. This essay articulates "techne-Marxism" as a critical standpoint that locates the ontological core of the artwork in conceptual and technical labor. It posits techne as the materialist substrate of art forms often explained away as part of an ideology of bourgeois taste rather than the proper bedrock of a Marxism that avoids alienating labor in a symptomology of historical structure. Ultimately, the value of techne-Marxism is its ability (...) to synthesize socially objective knowledge about art and the critic's ability to build labor-oriented evaluative judgments out of that knowledge. (shrink)

Abstract:How might reading fiction allow a victim of the deadly sin of pride to escape? Your fictive imagination uses the transworld exemplification of performance props playing the somaesthetic role of your avatar, a character whom you are not simply acting or identifying with but "being." You avoid the epistemic glitch of a point of view from nowhere. You play the fictive role of your avatar either in the make-believe world of sport and art without time past or in the rhetorical (...) activity of communication learning about history in that fictional world complete with moral judgment and the judgment of taste. (shrink)