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Learning from Tolstoy: Forgetfulness and Recognition in Literary Edification

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Abstract

Philosophers have often applied a distinctively epistemic framework to the question of how moral knowledge can be derived from fictional literature, by considering how true propositions, or their argumentative support, can be the cognitive fruits of reading works of fiction. I offer an alternative approach. I focus not on whether readers fail to assent to the truth of a proposition or fail to provide it rational support. Instead, I focus on how readers fail to accord a truth (which they already accept) adequate importance in their web of beliefs about living a good human life. This is a form of ignorance, but in the form of neglect, or failure to pay proper regard – which is one sense of the term ‘forgetfulness’. I argue that works of fictional literature may, at times, stimulate audience members to overcome their own particular forms of forgetfulness in this respect. And I use Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a case in point.

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Notes

  1. Eric Lax, “The Chernobyl Doctor,” New York Times Magazine, 13 July 1986, 22.

  2. Plato Republic 598d–601b

  3. Lax, p. 22.

  4. Actually, a persuasive position could be developed supporting the view that for all his lack of conventionally recognized (that is, scientific) expertise in the psychology of dying, Tolstoy had a good deal of knowledge of the subject, particularly given the range of experiences he had undergone – from fear to despair to indifference – in encountering the deaths of his children and in confronting his own obsessions with death and the meaning of life. See Ronald Blythe’s suggestive introduction to the Bantam Books edition of The Death of Ivan Ilyich (New York, 1981). This is one more reason to question the Republic’s view that the artist lacks genuine knowledge about the subject matter depicted or described through his representation.

  5. We can discern two subgroups to forgetting 2 . First, I may incorrectly assess the proposition’s importance in relation to other true propositions. Second, I may correctly assess the proposition’s relative importance, but express this assessment only in thought or assertion; in practice I simply fail to act in ways that are consistent with my avowed evaluations – a form of not practicing what I preach. (In a more vernacular idiom, I talk the talk but do not walk the walk.) Whichever kind of forgetting 2 it is, it is not an epistemic failure to assert a true proposition, but a moral and psychological failure either to assess the proposition’s relative worth or to put these assessments into action.

  6. Cf. Santayana’s famous statement when interpreted with this form of forgetting 2 in mind: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (The Life of Reason 1.12 [1905–06]). That is to say: Those who forget 2 the past (through paying the known facts inadequate regard) are condemned to repeat the past.

  7. See Nelson Goodman’s claim that truth is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for understanding; a grasp of which truths are important, which truths “effect some telling analysis or synthesis” is just as crucial (Languages of Art, 2nd ed. [Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1976], pp. 262–65; quote is on p. 263).

  8. There is something similar here to the failure (some might call it a character defect) of procrastination, where instead of steeling oneself to do the undesired deed (such as writing a boring report), one finds oneself drifting from one project to another, all the while recognizing the importance of the deed still undone, and never wavering in one’s resolve to complete the deed at some suitable time in the future.

  9. On the other side of the coin, some of these people may be rating this truth too highly, if other worthwhile values are not given their proper due.

  10. To show the particularity of the audience member’s response: I and others might not zero in on this truth as the one we are forgetting 2 as much as some of the other truths the novella exposes, such as the one that recommends our critically thinking about how to live (or lead) a good human life, rather than just aimlessly drifting on the winds of social conformity, as Ivan seems to have done.

  11. For some propositional accounts of what audiences supposedly learn from fictional literature, see John Hospers, “Implied Truths in Literature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 19 (1960), reprinted in Francis J. Coleman, ed., Contemporary Studies in Aesthetics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 233–47; Morris Weitz, ‘Truth in Literature’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie IX (1955): 116–29, reprinted in John Hospers, ed., Introductory Readings in Aesthetics (New York: The Free Press, 1969), pp. 213–24.

  12. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 191–200. Quote is on p. 200.

  13. Aristotle Poetics 13. There are two points worth noting. First, the fear is a self-regarding fear: although the intentional object of the audience’s fear is the character in the fictional work, since he or she is described as “like ourselves” (in terms of our similar moral experiences and understanding), “we are in effect also fearing our own related possibilities” (M.C. Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992], p. 275). Second, the fear (and pity) have a strong cognitive dimension. For an audience member to recognize a likeness between himself and the character requires judgment, not just a “purely spontaneous or unreflective” affective response; that is, there must be an understanding of the similarities in how events came to be, whether the origins derived from external forces or psychological internal motives (Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary [Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1987], pp. 125–26).

  14. A standard for Aristotelian tragedy is the eliciting of pity from the audience. But tragic pity requires a relatively good character who, although participating causally in his own downfall through an act exhibiting hamartia (or a mistake in judgment), fails to reach a level of culpability that leads us to say the downfall was a just retribution for the error’s commission. In Aristotle’s view pity can only be elicited if the audience recognizes the character did not entirely deserve the bad end he suffers (Poetics 13). But in Ivan Ilyich’s case that may be exactly what is in question, for Ivan’s own indifference toward the psychological needs of others is clearly paralleled by their indifference to his: in the emotionally cold society Ivan inhabits, that is just how people treat one another. So in the last analysis, Ivan, who had distributed insensitivity to others so freely throughout his life, is getting exactly what he deserves. With one exception, that is: toward the end of his struggle with dying, Ivan is treated to the comfort offered by Gerasim, the pantry boy. But this violates Aristotle’s tragic schema even more perversely, since Ivan, who had exhibited no act of compassion toward anyone (and least of all to Gerasim), is shown a) on the receiving end of a benefit, in contrast to catastrophic suffering, and b) receiving it in an entirely undeserved manner. Aristotelian tragic pity cannot be elicited from the audience when it witnesses undeserved acts of goodness.

  15. In contrast to “tragic fear” perhaps this sort of fear can be called “integrity fear.” Although the Poetics limits the audience’s fear response to the tragic variety, where tragic works of literature show the audience, according to Martha Nussbaum, that our vulnerability to forces beyond our control renders these forces worthy of serious fear (The Fragility of Goodness [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], pp. 385–86), Aristotle has other conceptions of what may constitute appropriate objects of fear. One is a “bad reputation,” with respect to which, “fear...is actually right and fine, and lack of fear is shameful” (Nicomachean Ethics 1115a12–13). Suppose we extend the concept of a bad reputation to a person’s internal assessment of his own behavior. Here the person recognizes the disconnection between his own beliefs and practices as an erosion of personal integrity, and therefore as an instance of bad reputation of sorts: only this time the bad reputation manifests itself to the person himself and the content involves his own behavior. Following Aristotle’s paradigm on fearing a bad reputation, then – as well as with some modifications – this undermining of personal integrity can also be thought to serve as an appropriate object of fear.

  16. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 72. Goodman also offers an extensive analysis of metaphor as the transfer of labels or categories (pp. 71–85).

  17. See Ted Cohen, “Identifying with Metaphor: Metaphors of Personal Identification,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 399–409. The distinction between predication and identity forms of metaphor is on p. 407.

  18. The distinction between flat and round characters is found in E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (San Diego: Harcourt, Harvest Book, 1955), pp. 67–78.

  19. There are suggestions of this account of metaphor as an open-ended form of visualizing, in Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 29–45.

  20. For the contrast between identifying with, and repudiating, certain desires and actions in my life – based on the way these desires and actions fit “my picture of the sort of person I want to be,” see Jonathan Glover, I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity (London: Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 150–51.

  21. We might recall here Plato’s example of Leontius, where one of the tripartite soul’s faculties – spirit – denounces the pleasure enjoyed by the indecent and difficult-to-resist desire to witness some dead bodies (Republic 439e–440a). According to Julia Annas (An Introduction to Plato’s Republic [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], pp. 127–28]), “Leontius felt shame at giving in to a desire which... did not fit his self-image; he did not want to be the kind of person capable of doing such a thing” (p. 128).

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Newman, I. Learning from Tolstoy: Forgetfulness and Recognition in Literary Edification. Philosophia 36, 43–54 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9093-5

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