Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature 9780228015222

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U t t e r in g t h e Unutterable

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Uttering the Unutterable Aristotle, Religion, and Literature

L o u i s G roa r k e

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISB N 978-0-2280-1423-2 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-2280-1522-2 (eP DF ) ISB N 978-0-2280-1523-9 (eP UB) Legal deposit first quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Uttering the unutterable: Aristotle, religion, and literature / Louis Groarke. Names: Groarke, Louis, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220414327 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220414351 | ISB N 9780228014232 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228015222 (eP D F ) | I SB N 9780228015239 (ePUB) Subjects: LC S H: Literature—Philosophy. | L CS H: Reading—Philosophy. | L C SH : Religion and literature. | L CS H: Criticism. | L CS H: Aristotle. Classification: L CC P N45 .G76 2023 | DDC 801—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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With grateful thanks to the Department of Philosophy at St Francis Xavier University, old and new, and to our wise and able chair, William Sweet

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix 1  Wondering about Transcendence  3 2  Metaphysical Realism and Antirealism  35 3  Wisdom Epistemology  72 4 Anti-definitionalism  136 5  Definition by Four Causes  178 6  Morality and Literature  242 Notes 269 Bibliography 289 Index 309

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to recognize the assistance of others who contributed to this effort. He would like to thank, in particular: McGill-Queen’s University Press and its staff for their help and for this publishing opportunity, Khadija Coxon for her patience throughout the vicissitudes of manuscript preparation, two anonymous ­referees for their supportive and insightful comments, Susan Glickman and especially Matthew Kudelka for their reliable and enthusiastic editing, the Philosophy Department and the Plato Centre at Trinity College, Dublin, for hospitality while in Ireland, St Francis Xavier University for its continued academic support, and fellow members of my department – William Sweet, Christopher Byrne, Steven Baldner, Doug Al-Maini, Ed Carty, and Michael Szlachta – for their frequent help and friendship, as well as Jude Dougherty (†), Paolo Biondi, Joseph Novak, Peter Haskett, and Suzanne Stewart. Also, my brother Leo Groarke and my wife Marie-Andrée. I owe a debt of gratitude to many others who have selflessly encouraged me throughout my ­academic career.

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U t t e r in g t h e Unutterable

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1 Wondering about Transcendence

I. 1 T h r e e - T ie r ed Value This book is an exercise in applied Aristotelianism. It offers a readable, wide-ranging, moderate interpretation of literature currently unavailable to scholars, students, and experts in literary theory. Contemporary philosophers often champion Aristotle as a sober scientific voice opposed to an otherworldly Platonism. Literary critics lean, not exclusively, but often, in a Continental direction. Many dismiss Aristotelian “essentialism” as a crude, dogmatic way of ­thinking ill-suited to the elusive nature of literature. I believe, however, that most professors and students of literature are, without knowing it, working Aristotelians. In their criticism, they take for granted the same principles that Aristotle systematically elaborates and finely tunes in his wide-ranging philosophy. The present project extends the Neo-Aristotelianism of the Chicago School and the genre criticism it championed in a more transcendental direction. It is an exercise not in literary criticism but in meta-criticism. As I intend to demonstrate, Aristotelian philosophy provides the vocabulary and the conceptual toolbox we need to adequately deal with the epistemological, the cognitive, the emotional, the moral, and even the transcendental and the religious aspects of literature. Literature is, I will argue, something of perennial value that aspires to and struggles toward some experience of ineffable transcendence. By means of conspicuous, even violent expression, literature lifts ­readers up to an intensity of lived experience so momentous we can scarcely account for it. The best literature pushes readers to the cusp of a realization, bearing witness to something larger that can only be

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alluded to, hinted at, encrypted in symbols, encoded in metaphor, camouflaged by irony, or narrated in make-believe plots and allegorical characters. Literature utters the unutterable. Although we can go some way to describing and analyzing our experience of literature, we eventually come up short. There is always more to say; something meaningful is always left out. Zhuangzi (Master Zhuang, c. 369–c. 286 b c ), the ancient Daoist thinker, talks about language as a trap for catching meaning: “A trap is for fish: when you’ve got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: once you’ve got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you’ve got the meaning, you can forget the words.”1 I want to suggest that, in the case of literature, it is quite the other way around. We often lose the meaning (or much of the meaning), but the trap – the words the author used – are unforgettable. The eloquence of the expression will not let go. The mind is caught and cannot escape. Even when the meaning escapes us, great literature holds us in its grip; we revisit the words of great authors and continually find new meanings in them. Such is the power of language used by great minds to communicate some essence of meaningful existence. We could say, more simply, that literature uses words eloquently. I want to argue, however, that verbal embellishment is intrinsically valuable. Distinguish, then, in a very preliminary sort of way, between three broad philosophical theories that have different definitions of what is intrinsically valuable. (1) Hedonists (such as Epicurus, Bentham, and Mill) maintain that pleasure (whatever counts as agreeable sensation) is intrinsically valuable. (2) Aristotle, in his ethics, maintains that happiness, understood as individual self-realization or excellence, is intrinsically valuable. And (3) theologians (even Aristotle) maintain that a further orientation to the Divine is intrinsically (and supremely) valuable. We might explain the intrinsic value of literature in three corresponding ways. (1) Following the hedonists, we might argue that reading literature is inherently valuable, not simply as a means to pleasure, but as a particular kind of elevated pleasure. (What Mill had in mind when he referred to higher-quality pleasures.) We might call this a positiveexperience account of literature. (2) Rank-and-file Aristotelians might argue that literature is intrinsically valuable because it supplies an occasion for the optimal development of all our intellectual and affective capacities. In reading, we improve ourselves. We could call this a

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virtue account of literature. And (3) religious thinkers might argue that reading literature is valuable because it pushes us toward the divine. We could call this a transcendent account of literature. Expressing things in this rough-and-ready way, I champion all three accounts in this book. I believe, along with hedonists, that literature is to be enjoyed; I maintain, along with virtue ethicists, that literature is an occasion for intellectual and even moral edification (properly understood); and, along with the religiously inclined, I contend that literature exerts a pull toward the transcendental (however we wish to construe it). On the theory I propose, the hedonist, virtuous, and religious explanations of literature are compatible with one another. The last, “religious” element of this three-tier account does not defeat the other two; it merely means that any complete account of literature requires us to push our analysis further, past any elevated hedonism, past any virtue ethics, into something higher, into transcendental and even religious territory. I intend to show, perhaps surprisingly, that this is in line with Aristotle’s own position. The late American poet and critic Yvor Winters made a three-wise distinction between “the didactic, the hedonistic, and the Romantic” understandings of literature.2 He rejected all three in favour of what he called the “moralistic” approach. Although a follower of Winters might identify the transcendental approach I am arguing for here with the romantic option (which Winters denigrated), my methodology is, in fact, closer to his preferred “moralistic” theory. As I discuss later in the book, Winters was reacting against what he saw as Romantic exaggerations that disparaged the philosophical, religious, or moral content of literature, turning it into emotional mush. His description of poetry as “the last refinement of contemplation” fits nicely into the theoretical stance defended here.3 Winters, who steadfastly maintained that poetry must possess serious intellectual content, emphasized “the non-paraphrasable content” of literature. One cannot replace a poem with a simple prose paraphrase. He wrote, “I am not endeavoring … to establish poetry as a substitute for philosophy or for religion. Religion is highly desirable if it is really available to the individual; the study of philosophy is always available and is of incalculable value as a preliminary and as a check to activities as a poet and as a critic (that is, as an intelligent reader).”4 This is intelligently put. Literature is not philosophy, is not religion. Literature may deal with philosophical or religious subjectmatter, but it can never be reduced to its subject-matter.

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Like Winters, I leave plenty of room for the philosophical and, in particular, the religious content of literature. At the same time, this book is not intended, in any specialized sense, as an exercise in catechetics, in apologetics, in partisan theology, or in denominational wrangling. I do not affirm any precise position on the content, shape, or logical nature of the ultimate transcendent – an intriguing question in its own right. If, however, literature often chronicles or evokes human encounters with the transcendental, such themes, in Dennis Taylor’s words, “cry out for a sophisticated critical treatment.”5 Taylor calls for a turn toward a literary criticism – a major shift – that is more friendly to religion. “We live,” he tells us, “in an age of critical discourses that are expert in discussing the dimensions of class, gender, textuality and historical context,” while the transcendental aspects of the literary texts we read go “untouched.”6 Our “great critical need,” he thinks, is the elaboration of a “way of discussing religious or spiritual dimensions in works of literature.”7 “Brother Leo,” an anonymous monk, worries that mainstream approaches leave a “great vacuum” or a “scholarly void” that cannot be bridged by anything other than a renewed focus on the spiritual or transcendental aspects of human existence.8 I am sympathetic to such concerns, even if religious commentary can be narrow, divisive, and ideological in its own way. One wants to avoid both a rigid secularism about literature and a hardline religious extremism. I want to argue that literature itself is inherently religious; even the most secular literature pushes us to some more intense engagement with whatever is ultimate. Although I am not going to present a specific denominational interpretation of literature, I should point out, in passing, that mainstream religions have developed deep resources for dealing with the transcendent. The event of the Transfiguration is a key motif in the Christian story. As Matthew describes the event: “He was transfigured before them. His face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow.”9 Or, in Luke’s version: “the shape of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became white and glittering. And … there were Moses and Elias appearing in majesty  … And his waking ­companions saw his glory.”10 The Koine Greek uses the term “μετεμορφώθη” – literally, he metamorphosed before them. Surely, then, a Christian critic could seize on this turn of phrase as a way of understanding what literature does. Literature takes the seemingly mundane, the boring, the trivial, and the mediocre and metamorphoses them into something that pushes readers (or listeners) toward an

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epiphany of something that borders on something otherworldly and glorious. Literature transfigures human experience. No doubt, critics from other traditions – Buddhist, Islamic, or Hindu – could adapt their own religious stories and theology to such critical purposes, but any specialized venture into this sort of denominational criticism is beyond anything I endeavour here. Suffice it to say that I want to prepare the ground for a philosophical understanding of literature that makes room for this sort of religious criticism.

I. 2 A n A r is to t e l ian Approach In this book I aim to present a contemporary account of literature in an Aristotelian vein. Unfortunately, what has come down to us as the Aristotelian corpus presents serious textual difficulties. The primary sources are, by and large, composed of rough, scattered, elliptical notes brought together by mostly anonymous later editors whose precise bibliographical methods have been shrouded in the mists of time. There are problematic passages and philological ambiguities that often spark scholarly wars among specialists. Yet in spite of this, a general picture emerges that makes great philosophical sense. This synoptic philosophical perspective, expressed in a contemporary idiom, applied to the problems literary critics face, is what I am after here. In the Poetics, his well-known criticism of Greek tragedy, Aristotle offers a method of genre analysis, a sometimes misunderstood theory of art as mimesis (imitation), and an explanation of aesthetic response as κάθαρσις or catharsis (purgation of emotion). But these specialist literary themes must somehow be folded into a broader understanding of Aristotle’s general approach to philosophy. Aristotle provides a larger metaphysics, an epistemology, a philosophy of language, a logic, a moral philosophy, and even a theology that can serve as a groundwork for literary criticism. He believes that we can have objective knowledge of the world and that conscientious readers can evaluate individual texts according to objective norms. One may, of course, disagree, but he responds to all the usual criticisms. His wide-ranging arguments are not naive, implausible, or easily refuted. I do not mean to suggest that Aristotle escapes all the prejudices and errors of his age. Nonetheless, popular criticism of him often relies on a caricature of the primary sources. Aristotle was a staunch Greek loyalist who thought that Greek culture and even Greek Pagan religion were the epitome of civilization. What was Greek was better, he

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contended, than what was barbarian. Disappointingly, he was a slaveholder who rationalized “natural” slavery; but in his writings he never recommended ill-treatment of slaves, and in his will he freed his own slaves. His arguments clearly reject the pervasive ancient view that one can enslave any captives whatsoever. On Aristotle’s account, we cannot equate moral merit with social class. One can be a slave and possess a noble soul. Aristotle complained that barbarians (i.e., non-Greeks) treated their women like slaves.11 When it came to biology, he did not know about the ovum, and he described females as seedless, weaker males (which raised, for him, several scientific problems he later discussed). At the same time, he could not have believed that the soul or mind has gender (because it escapes physical embodiment).12 Although he distinguished between male and female social roles in accordance with ancient mores in the Economia, he (or one of his students) insisted on cordial and harmonious relations between spouses. He wrote, for example, that a husband “should approach his wife in an honourable way, full of selfrestraint and awe, and in his conversations with her, should use only the words of a right-minded man … treating her with much self-restrain and trust … [and] in a courteous and modest manner.”13 We cannot always approve of Aristotle’s period attitudes, but recent specialists have deconstructed simplified accusations of abject misogynism.14 Ancient biographies generally portray Aristotle in a positive moral light. If he sometimes seems to recommend trickery and flatly deceptive rhetorical techniques (in the Topics, for example), we must situate these strategies in a context of formalized debating contests. Although Aristotle was a philosopher and a scientist and was not given to naive religious beliefs, he seems to have been, in the eyes of his time, a respectably pious Greek. When it comes to his scientific accomplishments, there are, obviously, odds and ends of antiquated scientific mistakes scattered throughout his wide-ranging work: he believed in spontaneous generation (for very low levels of life); he had no understanding of evolution; he made evident errors about the mathematical physics of mechanical movement; and he accepted an ancient astronomy that seems, by today’s standards, farfetched. Yet listening to Aristotle is well worth the effort. Whatever his ­historical shortcomings, he comes across as a cautious, neutral, middle-of-the-road thinker who strived to articulate an objective, evidence-based approach to an enormously wide range of issues. Aristotle may have been a scientific essentialist, but his essentialism

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was not the rigid, Procrustean endeavour that contemporary critics fiercely oppose. Even Aristotle’s political opinions, while set within the framework of ancient discussion, are based on an astute and moderate understanding of humankind as politikon zōon. It may surprise some non-specialist readers, but the primary sources, carefully read and rigorously analyzed, present arguments and observations that are as relevant today as they ever were. Within the field of modern literary criticism, the Aristotelian approach is usually associated with that group of American critics who have come to be known as the Chicago School. During the first half of the twentieth century, intellectual figures such as Richard McKeon, Elder Olson, Ronald Salmon Crane, Bernard Weinberg, and Norman Maclean practised and championed a type of genre criticism at the University of Chicago. These critics argued for an Aristotelian approach that viewed the literary text as an organic whole ordered to a specific end (télos) by an author with specific formal intentions. They broadened the basic principles that underlie Aristotle’s account of tragedy to include a wide range of historical literary genres. They rebelled against what they saw as the narrowness of the New Critics, their main rivals, and, it must be admitted, they eventually lost the academic wars to opposing literary movements, fading somewhat from sight. Bernard Suits, who was Olson’s student and a Chicago alumnus, was my teacher. His insistence on the importance and relevance of careful Aristotelian definition motivated, to a great extent, the present book. The Chicago School is thoroughly Aristotelian, but the critical method I advance here differs somewhat from their orientation. Although McKeon was an influential philosopher in his own right (and the teacher of Richard Rorty), most members of the school were practising critics with a literary interest in Aristotle’s Poetics. My orientation is more philosophical. I want to examine the wider implications of Aristotle’s philosophy for the study of literature. This approach requires a more comprehensive exegesis of Aristotle. We have to situate literature within the proper metaphysical, epistemological, and moral framework. Once we get the larger philosophical framework right, we can move on to more specialized sorts of literary criticism. I am going to expand, then, the perspective of the Chicago School so as to argue that Aristotle ought to be credited with a transcendental account of literature that is closely tied to religion. This may strike some readers as anomalous. Specialists sometimes depict Aristotle as

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a minimally religious man. On this familiar account, Aristotle rebelled against the spiritually minded Plato to focus on material cause and biological science. He was, mostly, a scientifically minded individual who might have accepted the existence of God in a grudging, conventional sort of a way but who never felt any sense of personal commitment to God or engaged in any personal show of piety. Arthur Melzer goes so far as to argue that Aristotle was a secret atheist.15 I think such views are largely mistaken and side, instead, with scholars such as Richard Bodéüs (2000) and John McClymont (2010), who present a much richer account of the pagan-believing Aristotle.16 As Lloyd Gerson (2005) argues, I would also maintain that Aristotle was more of a Neoplatonist than is generally recognized today.17 But I will largely avoid this specialized debate here.18 The goal of this book is to develop a practical tool for literary criticism. I aim to construct a larger understanding that critics and theorists can adapt and employ in their study of the literary artifact. If I maintain that the defining feature of literature is its preoccupation with the transcendental, I will ground this overarching principle in Aristotle’s systematic world view. I hope, in this way, to provide a modest alternative to approaches based – mistakenly, I believe – on a metaphysical antirealism that caricatures and misconstrues the mainstream philosophical tradition. Needless to say, a genuinely Aristotelian approach to literary theory will clash with some key assumptions in contemporary mainstream criticism. Many commentators would insist that the typical Aristotelian focus on the definition of something such as “literature” borders on quack criticism. Most professional critics today believe that literature cannot be defined. They often dismiss attempts to isolate and identify essential or necessary traits of literature as part and parcel of a misguided and antiquated “essentialism” that has long outlived its usefulness – a bit like searching for the Holy Grail. Theorists tend to eschew, then, Aristotelian essentialism and invoke, instead, some Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblance, or make do, alternatively, with historical, sociological, or pragmatic distinctions. Yet clear communication only results when we define our terms. Every undergraduate instructor tells his or her students that we need to know what we are talking about. There is nothing bizarre, outlandish, or incoherent in this pursuit of conceptual clarity. The Aristotelian method can be understood as an extension of this basic requirement for sound communication.

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Again, I will argue that, seen from an Aristotelian perspective, literature is not just a religious endeavour but a moral one. Yet the idea that morality is the central preoccupation of literature will strike some contemporary critics as absurd. Isn’t the best literature about transgression, rebellion, even excess? What about literature that takes risks, that eloquently lingers over the nasty truths of human nature with flair and originality? What about literature that explores the morbid, the macabre, the horrible, the perverse? How could morality be an essential part of the mix? Is artistic genius not next to madness? What has morality to do with all that? To make matters worse, contemporary classicists may insist that moralistic interpretations of Aristotle’s account of Greek tragedy get it all wrong. If Aristotle points to a fatal flaw (ἁμαρτία, hamartia) as the identifying feature of tragedy, this has nothing to do, they claim, with morality.19 Aristotelian tragedy is not about punishment for sins; it is about the cruelty of blind fate, which rewards the wicked and murders the innocent without any moral compunction whatsoever. Greek tragedy is, according to this interpretation, an exercise in existential angst rather than an exercise in moral instruction. I do not have space to undertake a specialist treatment here. If, however, specialists tell us, over and over again, that moralist interpretations of Aristotle were a Victorian mistake, a misleading inheritance of more prudish and simple-minded times when art and literature were thought of in overly didactic terms, it goes without saying that Aristotle is a giant in the ethical tradition with a momentous interest in moral philosophy. His moral preoccupations bleed across boundaries into his consideration of many other matters. If contemporary critics place literature and religion into distinctly separate categories, this is because they unwittingly embrace an overly pinched view of morality that has little to do with Aristotle’s wide-ranging virtue ethics. I will argue that Aristotle’s more generous account of human aspiration dovetails with what literature is about. Later in the book, I will explore many other instances where the Aristotelian paradigm differs from more familiar present-day ways of looking at the world and with modern literary theory.

I. 3 W is d o m L i terature In this book, then, I want to elucidate, in present-day terms, an Aristotelian account of literature. Some theorists may view my

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approach as an outdated attempt to resurrect key ideas from the Chicago School. Having been taught by one of Olson’s students, and sharing the group’s enthusiasm for Aristotle, I would be pleased with any connection readers might draw between my own work and the Chicago School. If, however, I will defend these earlier NeoAristotelians, they were formalists whereas I am going to argue for an Aristotelian transcendentalism that adds other pieces of explanation to the larger picture. I want to bind together disparate elements in Aristotle’s philosophy to produce a coherent, state-of-the-art account of literature. The exegesis of Aristotle I present has been buttressed by a thorough reading of primary sources. (I do emend Aristotle’s Greek for readability and English grammar while making note of contentious or problematic passages.) I engage with the specialized secondary literature on occasion. When a point seems essential, I cite a representative book or article, but I cannot comment on all the arcane disputes that fill the philosophy journals. That kind of treatment would require an encyclopedia. The main goal here is critical insight into contemporary issues that arise in academic and public discussions about literature. When it comes to commentary on Aristotle, there is a larger problem worth mentioning, what I will call “snip-ism.” One cannot arrive at a proper understanding of Aristotle’s system by looking at isolated snippets of text. The best way to access Aristotle’s mindset is through a prolonged and thorough reading of everything in his far-flung corpus – including even fragments, apocrypha, and the texts of related ancient philosophers. We need big-picture knowledge of his corpus. This is not an easy task. But why should we care? Surely, Aristotle is not important because some scholar somewhere took an antiquarian interest in an ancient figure. And literature is not important because we need something to talk about to continue our academic careers. Aristotle is important because he provides, I believe, the most useful and insightful way to  understand literature. And literature is important because it expresses the transcendental. It utters the unutterable. This is the key idea in the book. When we read literature, words catch fire. Verbal eloquence drives, pushes, impels readers toward that which perplexes, confounds, and overwhelms. Readers are pushed to the verge of something they cannot quite explain. Even literary works that are intensely secular or antireligious only succeed qua literature to the extent that they push us in

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some superlative direction. What precisely literature is pointing toward is, of course, hard to explain. That end point is beyond tidy, straightforward, logical, scientific categories. All our philosophical attempts at explanation ultimately fail. They are useful but hopelessly inadequate. This is why we need literature. Different religions, different theologies describe the ultimate in a variety of ways. Use whatever name you want: the Divine, God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Brahman, Allah, Haneullim, Amun, Ātman, Ahura Mazda, Amenominakanushi, the Great Spirit, the Dao, the One, the Holy, The Creator, Abba, the Trinity, Christ, Zeus, Being, Non-Being, the Nameless, and so on. (There are also non-religious names for the ultimate.) But this is not a book that focuses on theological differences. Literature is not religious because it serves as propaganda for any particular institutional or political cause. Obviously, literature may be hostile to whatever a particular culture or time period views or accepts as established religion. When I say that literature is “religious,” I am commenting on the structure, the nature, the essence of literature, not on its specific content. Literature is “religious” insomuch as it moves beyond the here-and-now, beyond the readily understood, beyond the merely practical, to chronicle, grasp, intuit, and evoke the transcendental. I will argue that, on Aristotle’s larger account, literature points toward a transcendental point of meaning where wisdom and goodness come together in a nexus that is beyond description or explanation. Of course, Aristotle’s own beliefs are conditioned by his pagan, ancient Greek culture. That is not my focus here. Leave off consideration of precisely how Aristotle dealt with the ultimate for another book, for another time and place. Put into a rough-and-ready formula, literature is, paradoxically, language that utters the unutterable. It is the way authors push readers to a momentous peak experience that makes something literature. Literature happens when words are used in a way – however grandiose or humble, however comic or sublime, however earnest or satirical – that widens or intensifies the human experience, thus producing epiphanies that transcend ordinary epistemological categories. We care about literature because it keeps pushing us further and further into some realm of the universal, the incalculable, the incommensurable, the ineffable. Contemporary criticism is sometimes hostile to religion. One regularly encounters a secularism that assumes that any religious practice or belief is narrow-minded, reactionary, or authoritarian. Whatever

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is true of institutionalized religion, I want to argue that religion is an inevitable part of human aspiration and striving. Literature is “religious” because it is literature. It is religious in its method, its subjectmatter, and its effect, at least if we understand the word “religion” not in terms of any institutional structure or dogmatic foundation of belief, but as a determined striving to wrestle with a transcendent reality that is ultimately meaningful but also elusive. Along with this religious dimension, literature has an inalienable moral dimension as well. There has always been a place for didactic literature, but this is not, primarily, what links literature to morality. How an author describes something, the perspective taken, the style, the details he or she omits or includes: all this carries inevitable traces of moral evaluation. An event presented in a certain way elicits admiration and rapt, respectful attention; the very same event presented in a different way may elicit disgust, sorrow, anger, indignation. Moral beliefs alter, influence, and orient how authors write about their chosen subject-matter and how readers, in turn, understand what they have written. We cannot rinse literature clean of morality. Literature is about what we value and, hence, about morality. To argue that literature has an indissociable moral aspect is not to restrict literature to serious, weighty, puritanical discourse. Comedy is an important literary form, but there is nothing immoral in merriment. Giving readers a good laugh is a morally commendable endeavour. We should value mirth, wit, cheerfulness, jokes, and good humour as an essential part of the good life. It would be a strange philosophy of human nature that discounted such things. Aristotle views morality as a means to human flourishing. Literature that makes us laugh is not morally deficient, as a certain straw-man puritanism would have it. It is, indeed, something to be cherished. As I discuss in a later chapter, we moderns have narrowed morality down to some onerous conception of rule-obeying behaviour. This is not the Aristotelian way. It is a serious mistake to identify moral aspiration with ponderous, dour, and even morose behaviour. Leaving a healthy place for good-natured fun, I will argue that all literature is wisdom literature and that the best literary commentary is done from a wisdom perspective. Literature is about wisdom because – to use an old-fashioned turn of phrase – literature edifies. It lifts ­readers up to some higher possibility or understanding. Aristotelian ­scholars may wonder what all this has to do with Aristotle’s philosophy, but I intend to show that it is at the centre of Aristotle’s moral

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and epistemological aspirations. If morality is wisdom in action, ­literature is wisdom reified, turned into an aesthetic object for our wide-eyed contemplation. If literature encloses a straining toward transcendence, I acknowledge that there is a “bad” mysticism that loses itself in self-absorption, narcissism, obscurantism, superstition, and extremism. There is no need to be naive. If, however, one needs to account for such worrisome exaggerations, I will contend that any extremism that seriously detracts from human flourishing undermines the literary merit, the intellectual worth, and the emotional appeal of a text. Indulging in morbid titillation or celebrating evil for evil’s sake is, mostly, a source of inferiority and distraction. Literature, in the best sense, has more important preoccupations. Vociferous complaints that Western literature is a storehouse of patriarchal, heterosexual, imperialist, white prejudices largely miss the point. Literature is not literature because it bears the traces of older prejudices but in spite of such contamination. Some older texts may be deeply flawed, morally or otherwise, but this is not what makes them literature. When we call them literature, we are asserting that, despite serious shortcomings, they enclose something that is supremely valuable. This is what we value, not the sometimes depressing remnants of human gullibility, tribal loyalty, and turpitude that surface in historical and even contemporary texts in spite of genius and artistry. Reputable authorities have defended all the views I have just outlined. One may wonder, then, why they are sometimes so unwelcome in contemporary debate. I will argue that the problem is mostly philosophical. Our present-day understanding of literature is based on a serious misunderstanding of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Aristotelian philosophy can best illuminate the pertinent background issues and set the framework for discussion on a more judicious basis.

I .4 W h at t h e W o r d “ T r a nscendence” Means As an introductory matter, I need to define here two terms central to my analysis. If I identify “literature” with the transcendent, my use of terms such as “transcendence,” “transcendental,” and “transcendent” may seem at odds with present-day philosophical convention. The term “religion” also requires some careful unpacking if we are to move beyond partisan caricatures. In the next two sections, I define

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“transcendence” for present purposes and investigate the human phenomenon represented by the term “religion.” The English word “transcendence” derives from the Latin verb transcendere. The prefix trans means “to go across, over, or beyond”; the root scandere means “to climb towards the top of [anything steep], ascend, mount, scale.” To transcend is, then, as the Oxford Latin Dictionary has it, “to climb, step across or over (something lying in one’s path); to cross over (a river, channel, etc.) … to surpass, exceed, go beyond (in degree, attainment, etc.).” Those who “transcend” surmount some very high or wide obstacle that separates them from some extraordinary achievement. In the case of literature, obstacles are not hard to find. They involve the usual human limitations: to arrive at the ultimate we have to overcome some combination of ­stupidity, dullness, perverseness, pedantry, coarseness, boredom, wickedness, prejudice, or conformism. To say that literature pushes us to an experience of the “transcendent” is to say that readers are impelled and carried over such obstacles to something incontestably better. The journey moves from darkness into light, from the inert to the alive, from the mundane to the extraordinary, from ignorance to what surpasses the finite limits of understanding. However one wants to describe the content of peak human experience, theologically, mystically, morally, emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise, this is what literature is about. Although I will focus on Aristotle and the Western tradition, I would claim that transcendence is a worldwide and pan-historical concept. Not everyone agrees. Nahum Brown, for example, in discussing the work of the influential Orientalist Roger Ames, emphasizes his firm rejection of “the notion that Western scholars can import conceptions of transcendence into Eastern thought without grossly misappropriating what is otherwise an immanent vision of cosmology in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist texts.”20 Ames (along with others) maintains “that the basic division of this-worldly versus otherworldly,” which they identify with any theory of transcendence, “does not appear explicitly in the Eastern tradition.”21 One can always argue about details, but I would maintain that a preoccupation with transcendence, as I have defined it, is not merely present in the Western tradition but at the very centre of all philosophical thought and practice, including Eastern variants. The first aphorism in the Tao Te Ching runs (in Legge’s classic translation): “The Tao [or Way] that can be trodden is not the enduring and

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unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name … Having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth … Having a name, it is the Mother of all things.”22 This  poetic introduction to one of the great religious texts is a ­deliberate exercise in contradiction. We have a path that cannot be trodden – how then can it be a path? We have a name that cannot be named – how then can it be a name? We have the word “Tao” that is the ­enduring, unchanging name for that which does not have an enduring and unchanging name. We are told that the Origin of everything has no name, but the Mother of everything has a name, even though the Origin and the Mother seem to be the same “thing.” At least, this is how the passage reads at the first level of analysis. I will leave any in-depth interpretation to specialist scholars. But this opening text in Taoist scripture certainly seems to be referring to what I mean by “transcendence” here. The message is a warning that what is true, genuine, eternal, real, unchanging, and absolutely fundamental is beyond description or explanation. It is beyond logic, beyond words: an ineffable mystery we can never entirely elucidate. Ames has a specialist agenda – not necessarily a bad thing – which is to demonstrate “the irrelevance of strict transcendence and its ontological baggage for a processual Chinese cosmology.”23 But Taoism seems to begin with a commitment to what I am talking about here: to something at the very centre of everything that is over and beyond all theories and generalizations. This is how I use the term “transcendence” throughout this book.

I. 5 C h a r l e s T ay l o r : A Secular Age Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, makes much of the transcendent/ immanent distinction, something he views as a modern Western ­invention.24 His bulky book has spawned a sprawling debate I cannot investigate here. But a few brief points are in order. Taylor is, mostly, investigating what modern societies think about transcendence; we must keep in mind that his history-of-ideas approach is largely influenced by his Continental, Hegelian orientation. Coming from an Aristotelian direction, I want to look at transcendence from the viewpoint of metaphysical realism. In a review of Taylor’s book, Peter Gordon claims that Taylor is a closet realist in that he fixates on the idea of an eternal, otherworldly, Christian God as the only true reservoir of the transcendent. Gordon

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writes, “The basic distinction – between transcendence and immanence – is freighted with a great number of metaphysical prejudices that may obstruct us from recognizing other ways to experience the sacred in the modern world.”25 This kind of vague trope – that metaphysics is bad and simply gets in the way of understanding the human condition – is as familiar as it is tendentious. Metaphysics, properly construed, is not a hindrance but a guide to understanding ourselves and the world. Gordon suggests that “transcendence itself” may be “but one phase in the social history of the sacred.”26 But whatever exactly Gordon means, it has little to do with the way the word “transcendence” is being used in this book. The “social history of the sacred” is not the transcendent; it is a chronicle of human attempts to grapple with the transcendent, but it is not the thing-itself. I am arguing here that there is ontological transcendence, something metaphysical and real that is “stuck there” or “hangs there” in the middle of human existence, something immovable and very difficult to contend with that is somehow behind things (or in front of things, or above, or below, whatever). I am not going to take a denominational position on how we should best understand transcendence because that would mire us in endless other debates. Ruth Abby mentions “Taylor’s account in Modern Social Imaginaries of how three major arenas of modern life – the market economy, the public sphere and popular sovereignty – have come to be understood as self-constituting and self-regulating, as not relying on any conception of God, religion or transcendence for their legitimacy or smooth functioning.”27 But these imaginary social spaces are not reality; we may think about reality in ways that eliminate transcendence, but that does not mean that transcendence is not there. Surely, the critic of modern secularism could argue that things like fairness in the market­ place, inalienable human rights, and tolerance for personal autonomy require a morality that presupposes some sort of transcendental basis. I am not going to argue the point here. If Taylor argues that the ­modern secular mindset isolates human agency within an immanent framework that exists independently from transcendence, I would argue (much like Taylor) that this is another sort of reductionism that makes reality less than it is. To be clear: what I am calling transcendence is not immanence pushed to some higher degree; I am not ­arguing for gradualism, for a quantitative increase in something we fully know and understand. The transcendence, as I use the term, is

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something that is in principle mysterious, something that cannot be adequately explained in terms of what went before. One does not have to be a card-carrying religious believer to be open to the transcendent. Gordon complains – rightly, I think – that Taylor is not open enough to aesthetic encounters with transcendence like “a concertgoer’s experience of a Beethoven symphony.”28 If Taylor writes that “religion … can be defined in terms of transcendence,” or that “religion is belief in the transcendent,” this sounds about right, at least on the expanded account of religion I formulate below.29 But before turning to religion, consider, first, the historical provenance of philosophical uses of the term “transcendence.”

I. 6 T r a n s c e ndence: T h e M e d ie va l s and Kant In Western philosophy, medieval thinkers used the term “transcendental” in two different ways. As Wouter Goris and Jan Aertsen explain, the Latin noun “‘transcendens’ (i.e. ‘that which surpasses [something]’, pl. ‘transcendentia’)” was originally used to indicate “the nobility of being which is free from matter.”30 Immaterial things like God, angels, Platonic ideas, logical truths, and perfect geometrical figures were considered transcendental objects because they transcend the material realm of change and corruption. In later scholasticism, logicians began to apply the term “transcendental” to those pre-eminent predicates (transcendentalia) that “cross over” or “go beyond” Aristotle’s canonical list of ten categories. These “transcategorical” properties included “thing” (res), “being” (ens), “something” (aliquid), “unity” (unum), “truth” (verum), “goodness” (bonum), and sometimes “beauty” (pulchrum). In later scholasticism, these universal properties were sometimes contrasted with “supertranscendental” predicates, such as “opinabile” or “intelligibile,” which applied to real and fictitious beings alike. Throughout these technical discussions, logicians preserved the root meaning of “transcendental” as something that is all-encompassing, ultimate, or surpassing. This is, more or less, in line with my usage here. Authors in the theological tradition (long before Charles Taylor) sometimes contrast “immanence” with “transcendence,” using “immanence” to refer to God’s ubiquitous presence inside the universe and “transcendence” to refer to God’s immaterial existence outside the universe. Put a little too simply, pantheists (like the Stoics, or Spinoza,

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perhaps) believe in the immanence of God but deny His transcendence. A more orthodox theism accepts immanence and transcendence, not as competing but as complementary properties of God. But whatever the nuances of this or that theological position, most theists will accept that we can never hope to capture or describe the plenitude of God’s nature, whether immanent or transcendent, in merely human categories. It will follow that God must be, in the sense used in this book, transcendent. Philosophers and theologians such as Proclus, the pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, and Meister Eckhart try to cope with transcendence by implementing negative theologies that refer to a divine that is even beyond existence and non-existence. This method of via negativa can legitimately lend itself, as a methodological tool, to an analysis of literature. (As I explain below, this is one source of inspiration for Derrida’s account of différance.) It is important, from the outset, however, to avoid a possible confusion. Modern philosophers, following Kant, began to use the concept of transcendence in a more specialized, metaphysical way. Contemporary authors generally distinguish between a “transcendent” metaphysics that naively tries to describe the world as it really is and a “transcendental” metaphysics that restricts itself, more modestly, to a study of the structure of human consciousness. I want to resist this new distinction. Aristotelianism does not accept the Kantian separation of the unknowable noumena from phenomena. As I discuss in a later chapter, this bifurcated approach to metaphysics is an (intentional) departure from traditional Aristotelian realism. Throughout the book, I use the terms “transcendent” and “transcendental” interchangeably, according to grammatical or stylistic needs, to refer, more simply, to whatever surpasses human boundaries or limits. In contemporary literary theory, many critics take for granted an antirealism that derives broadly from Kant. This antirealism turns the very ground of being – what is technically termed the noumenon – into an epistemologically inaccessible object for philosophical (or literary) investigation. This transcendentalization of the whole of reality is an interesting possibility, but it is not the Aristotelian way of going about things. The Aristotelian will insist that we can, in a perfectly reasonable and fallible sense, claim to know the nature of the world that surrounds us. But this commitment to metaphysical realism need not entail any denial of aspects of experience or reality that are transcendent or, in an old-fashioned sense, divine. It is a modern positivism, not Aristotelianism, that is the enemy of the transcendent.

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Transcendence is the exceptional quality of being opaque to full disclosure. Obviously, there are many things that are very hard to understand: quantum mechanics, the proof for Fermat’s last theorem, Duns Scotus’s metaphysics, and PhD dissertations in literary theory among them. But that is not enough to produce genuine transcendence. When we arrive at transcendence, we get to a point of irreducible mysteriousness that overwhelms the very best that intelligence has to offer. The most cognitively efficient subject placed in the most advantageous epistemological context cannot fully understand it no matter how hard they try. They can partly understand, of course, but there will be some essential element that will always escape description or comprehension. We must not equate, however, our own limited experience of the transcendental aspects of existence with mere ignorance. Descartes states (in a letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630) that the divine is like a mountain: “we can touch a mountain with our hands but cannot put our arms around it.”31 Our thoughts, according to Descartes, can somehow reach out and touch the nature of God, but they cannot comprehend all that divine nature represents. They cannot encompass the fullness of the Godhead. This is, roughly, what transcendence is like. Partial understanding is not the same as nescience. We can understand to a degree, but our understanding is inevitably inadequate or incomplete. What I am calling transcendence is not like the “square-circles” or “mountains without valleys” that logicians and theologians like to talk about.32 Square-circles and mountains without valleys are logically self-defeating. We cannot make any sense of them because, objectively, they make no sense at all. We cannot encounter them because they cannot exist. On the view I elaborate, this is not what transcendence is like. The transcendental is not the impossible; it is not the absence of reality but a reality too large to handle. What is above reason is not the same as that which is merely a figment of our imagination because it is irrational. In this book, I present the transcendent as a real property or real object in the world, even if it exists beyond complete explanation or description. Religious mysticism and literature are parallel aspirations in that they both aim at an encounter with something that is so ultimate it overwhelms us. If, however, the content of mystical experience “defies expression,” if “no adequate report of its contents can be given in words,” it does not follow that mysticism must lack all epistemological

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content.33 Mystics, at least, claim just the opposite. William James writes, “Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth … illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain.”34 Whatever one believes about mysticism, I want to say something similar about literature. Literature strives to capture, in eloquent language, something so powerful, it exceeds, so to speak, the carrying capacity of language. Except that literature succeeds, somehow, in communicating the incommunicable. It may do this indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, through a deliberate suspension of disbelief, through empathy and a careful choice of words, through eloquence rather than logic. But the fact that it somehow succeeds is what makes it literature. James describes the typical mystical experience as that which cannot be shared. It “must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”35 “No one can make clear to another who has never had [that] certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it ­consists.”36 But the unsharable nature of mysticism distinguishes it from literature. The point of literature is, precisely, the sharing of something with others. Even authors who write a diary, in putting down thoughts in words, are opening themselves to other readers. Literature depends on an illumination or awakening that can be effectively communicated to good purposes. To say that literature pushes readers toward transcendence is to elevate literature over more ordinary forms of human communication that are, mostly, mundane, formulaic, obtuse, and obvious. But that is not enough. On the Aristotelian theory I propose, transcendence is not a subjective illusion. It is something we bump into whether we like it or not. It is a genuine property of how we experience things in the world. It corresponds to something out there. I am going to argue against any non-cognitive account of literature. Literature has a knowledge component. To borrow James’s word, literature has a noetic quality. It is about discovering, in its own way, what the world is like. It has, of course, an affective or connatural aspect. It evokes emotion, but the story does not end there. We are like the blind men in the Oriental story about the elephant, knowing a part of reality – the trunk, the tail, an ear, the point of a tusk, a foot – and thinking we know the whole thing. The purpose of art – literature, theatre, music, dance, painting, sculpture, even great architecture – is to restore our sight so that we somehow see each part

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connected to everything else; we see the whole elephant, so to speak. I will not focus on Aristotle’s theory of tragedy here, but I would argue that it revolves around a sense of moral wonder (to thaumaston), as Joe Sachs suggests, where wonder is to be understood as a proper appreciation of a cosmic reality much larger than oneself.37 On the Aristotelian model, the audience, when confronted with the sublime, experiences catharsis. Comedy – good comedy – does something similar, but in a reverse direction. Laughter is a catharsis. An outpouring of positive or negative emotion happens when something memorable overwhelms readers in an outburst that transcends ordinary humdrum human experience. Traditional candidates for transcendence include religious conceptions of God, but also philosophical conceptions of the absolute such as Geist, the One, the World-Soul, the Form of the Good, Logos, Apeiron, Dao, Mind, Reason, Spirit, Will, the Dionysian, the Ground of Being, Being with a capital B, and so on. One may attempt to identify the highest level of reality with truth, goodness, selfless love, the cosmos, physical principles, the progress of history through time, and, of course, whatever mystery one conceives of as following death. One may, perhaps, embrace some form of nihilism and associate it with nothingness, extinction, the void, “this deep blankness.”38 The latter is not the present author’s view of transcendence, but I will not try to settle such questions here. That would take a different kind of book. I want to argue, more simply, that the transcendence is out there and that literature attempts to get us into contact with it. Any lingering reductionist hope of turning the world into one vast machine with a neat and tidy mechanical explanation of everything is sadly misplaced. One cannot get rid of the mysterious bits of reality; they are immovable – an inalienable aspect of what we experience as the world. Literature is about exploring these shadowy corners, venturing into them, commenting on them, coming to grips with what they represent and mean. Seen from this perspective, any world view that attempts to expunge deep mystery from the world is not only nonsensical but anti-literature. Contrary to popular misconception, placing limits on explanation – admitting that we eventually encounter something greater than ourselves that we cannot adequately put into words  – this is only traditional philosophy. Philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, the ancient skeptics, Pascal, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) have pointed out that one cannot have a complete proof of anything because that

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leads to an infinite regress.39 One eventually arrives at principles and terms that cannot be demonstrated or defined in terms of anything farther down the line: these first principles are given; they must be accepted through an intelligent kind of faith; they cannot be deductively proved or grounded in a deeper theory. One might argue that all human experience is like this. Experience is rooted in something transcendent, in something that is logically beyond our ken, in something that begins in pure belief. The goal of literature is, then, to get to that ground of everything in a different way, not through logic or argument, but through eloquence of some sort or another. Literature can help us see that all life is drenched in transcendence, a momentous realization that is a step closer to a genuine appreciation of things. Some readers may well wonder what all this has to do with Aristotelianism. If the familiar stereotype pits an earthly, scientific Aristotle (making a decidedly horizontal hand gesture in Raphael’s famous painting) against the mystical and otherworldly Plato (pointing to the sky in the same painting), John Dillon from the Plato Centre at Trinity College (Dublin) has convinced me that Aristotle is, in his own way, a working Platonist. Plato may use a different terminology, but what I am calling transcendence is what the Platonic knower meets at the top of the Divided Line when encountering the Form of the Good. At this point, discursive reasoning (διάνοια, dianoia) gives way to intuition (νόησις, noēsis).40 One meets with truth, no longer through language or arguments but through some sort of immediate apprehension. The most explicit account of this mysteriously direct knowledge is in the Seventh Letter, where Plato (or a follower) discusses the highest, most complete form of knowledge. The author of the letter reports: “There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any Platonic treatise dealing with it. For it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but … it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself.”41 The writer points to this fifth level of knowledge as something that forsakes mere images for the essence of reality itself. The lower levels of knowledge are impure, “on account of the weakness of language,” whereas this fifth level involves pure knowledge by itself. “For this reason,” it seems, “no man of intelligence will venture to express his philosophical views in language.”42 We can find these themes referenced elsewhere in Plato, but what is more important, for present purposes, is how Aristotle takes up similar themes in some much misunderstood passages. It is only a

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contemporary focus on deductive reason that has obscured the intuitive aspects of Aristotelian thinking. Aristotle’s account of the highest summit of knowledge – what he calls theôria (θεωρία) – is very close, if not identical, to what Plato describes as happening at the top of the Divided Line. As we shall see, Aristotelian wisdom is – as Aristotle explicitly states – an imitation of God. For Aristotle, knowledge turns, at some point, into a kind of contemplation that is beyond words. I will argue that poetry provides a second way of arriving at that highest state of direct Aristotelian contemplation, most appropriately accompanied by wonder. Aristotle holds that knowledge is possible. But he also maintains that human knowledge has limits. It begins with first principles, with starting points or axioms (ἀρχαὶ) that are prior to logical demonstration. It ends in science and, ultimately, in wisdom. Aristotle believes strongly in a sort of science that provides a good model for systematic literary criticism. But he also acknowledges a kind of contemplative knowledge that arrives at something that exceeds linguistic expression. As a philosophy, Aristotelianism provides room, then, for both transcendence and knowledge. Seen from this perspective, to say that there is transcendence in the world is not the same as saying there is no knowledge. One could not devise a cogent literary theory if knowledge was impossible.

I. 7 W h at Is Reli gi on? There is a second term that needs to be defined. If, as I argue, literature and religion are overlapping aspirations, like parallel lines converging at a point at infinity, we need to consider, more carefully, the meaning of the term “religion.” We can trace disputes over the etymology of the word “religion” back to ancient times. Cicero famously argued that the term “religion” (in Latin, religio) is derived from the Latin “relegere,” meaning to reread (re, again + legere, read). In an argument about “the purest, the holiest and the most pious way of worshipping the gods,” he insists that the genuinely religious person “rereads” religious texts – that is, he or she conscientiously rethinks uncritical superstitions and folk beliefs about the supernatural so as to arrive at a more intellectually respectable devotion to the divine. As Cicero explains, “Religion has been distinguished from superstition … Persons who spent whole days in prayer and sacrifice to ensure that their [own] children should out-live them were

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termed ‘superstitious’ (from supersies, a survivor), and the word later acquired a wider application. Those … who carefully reviewed and so to speak retraced all the lore of ritual were called ‘religious’’ from relegere (to retrace or re-read).”43 This sounds like some “creative etymology” on Cicero’s part (something Aristotle also indulged in), but let us turn to alternative accounts of the term’s origins.44 Ancient lexicographers, including Servius, Lactantius, Augustine, and probably Lucretius, traced the etymology of the word “religion” to the Latin root “religare,” meaning to restrain, or, more literally, to rejoin or tie-together-once-more (from re, again + ligare, tie). On this account, the word “religion” is intended to describe the way a corporate identity such as a church binds individuals together in an association with the Divine. Hence our modern use of the term “religion” to refer to separate faiths: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Protestantism, or Roman Catholicism, for example. This second explanation concurs with modern usage. Witness Victorian politician W.E. Gladstone’s negative comment on “Revived Paganism” or “secularism glorified,” which he refused to acknowledge as a genuine religion because it had “no relegating, no binding power” to join “the educated man” to “anything beyond the framework of the visible world on the other.”45 Here Gladstone is criticizing the pseudo-religion of secularism, not merely because it tends toward “selfishness and degeneracy,” but also because it lacks the ability to bind together the human and the Divine – because it leaves humankind untethered, so to speak, from genuine spirituality. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a letter to Joseph Cottle, relied on the same etymology in dismissing Unitarianism as a false religion because it failed, in his view, to have a powerful enough message to bind believers into one. Coleridge wrote, “Reason itself, or rather mere human nature, in any dispassionate moment, feels the necessity of religion, because if this be not true, there is no religion, no relegation, or binding over again  … and therefore Socinianism (misnamed Unitarianism) is not only not Christianity, it is not even religion, it does not relegate; does not bind anew.”46 The capacity of joining individual humans to one another and to God was, for Coleridge, what made something a “religion.” Contemporary scholar Sarah Hoyt identifies a third thread of meaning.47 Relegate is the Latin equivalent, she notes, to the earlier Greek verb ἀλέγω (alegō), which the Liddell & Scott defines as “to trouble oneself, have a care, mind, heed, respect.” (The Latin religiens is the

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opposite of negligens, negligence.) The German-English word “reck,” the immediate ancestor of the English term “religion,” denotes having “a care for” something. To be religious is, on this account, to care about, to heed, mind, respect, or trouble ourselves with the supernatural. (When there is religious exaggeration, then, we end up with fanaticism.) We still use the word “religion” this way in purely secular contexts. If, for example, I say, “she is so wonderfully fit because she exercises religiously,” I mean that she diligently respects her exercise routine. We can tie together – that is, “relegate” or “bind anew” – these different meanings of the word “religion” into a coherent bundle to produce a step-by-step account of religion. Religion begins, it seems, in a receptivity to something beyond the merely perceptual or the brute physical. Chinese ancestor worship, the animism of Kalahari bushmen, Thales’s statement that “all things are full of gods,” the Greek preoccupation with fate, Wordsworth’s description “of something far more deeply interfused,” Jungian interpretations of dreams, even the reading of Tarot cards or investigations of the paranormal, are, in this preliminary sense, religious.48 A vast array of human behaviours involve the human mind turning, inchoately and foolishly perhaps, toward whatever is conceived as transcending the natural order. Chronologically or logically, then, religion may begin in a mix of speculation, puzzlement, storytelling, moral intuition, and even superstition. As Cicero suggests, however, at a higher level of understanding, religion rethinks, reflects, and reasons about such things. It re-evaluates beliefs, striving to separate the irrational from the reasonable through a conscientious examination of practice and dogma. But religion is not only about thought and belief. Any genuine turning toward the transcendent has a conative aspect; it requires effort, willpower, and deliberate behaviour. The religious trouble themselves, care about, mind, heed the supernatural by conscientious rituals of some specific sort. If you are Jewish, perhaps you keep kosher, celebrate a Bar/Bat Mitzvah when you can, and recite the Kaddish when you must. If you are Muslim, you fast for Ramadan and make a ­pilgrimage to Mecca. Some Buddhists practise vegetarianism and meditation; Hindus burn incense, visit temples barefooted, and do not eat meat on Festival days. Zoroastrians lay out their dead on the Tower of Silence. Roman Catholics get baptized, go to mass, and confess their sins. Ascetics and saints of all religions engage in sometimes fearsome displays of self-denial and self-mortification. All religions place some moral restrictions on practical endeavour.

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Diligent respect for the supernatural is a matter of piety, but there is no need for sentimentality. Piety can be a fierce and even loathsome thing. Think of Phlegyas, in Virgil’s Aeneid, punished by the gods for burning down the Temple of Apollo.49 He is banished to Tartarus (sent to Hell). Virgil serves him up a fitting punishment: until the end of time, he must shout out a warning to anyone within hearing: Discite iustitiam, moniti, et non temnere divos! (Be warned, learn justice and do not despise the gods!).50 If, however, Phlegyas made a show of his impiety, he had a good reason to be impious: Apollo had raped his daughter and then arranged for her murder. Phlegyas was trying to punish the gods for their wickedness toward human beings. But it did not matter. He was impious and had to be punished forever. Besides requiring some display of piety, religion involves inclusion in a wider group of worshippers. Religious believers view themselves as members of a church, a chosen people, a covenant, a congregation, a denomination. Religion, in this sense, has to do with a collective identity based on a shared creed and rituals. This is perhaps the most familiar use of the term today; thus, we distinguish between Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists, Anglicans and Baptists, Buddhists and Hindus. Paul Tillich, somewhat famously, thought that communism, secular humanism, and liberalism were religions, in part because they bound believers together (like a church) under some broad umbrella. This book is mostly about literature, not religion. Nonetheless, I believe that Aristotle was religious in all four senses of the word. First, he was at least open to the possibility of a variety of supernatural phenomena. Second, he reasoned carefully about the nature of the Divine in his metaphysics and moral philosophy. Third, he adhered to ancient Greek ideas about the importance of pagan worship and public displays of piety. Fourth, as a Greek pagan and a student of Plato, he thought of himself, along with most mainstream Greek philosophers, as a pious theist. This is not a book about Aristotle’s private religious beliefs, which are, admittedly, rather obscure and open to competing interpretations. The present project is about developing a literary theory in the spirit of Aristotle while avoiding many of the caricatures that abound in the public square. To get a theory of literature off the ground, it is enough that Aristotle had a metaphysics, an epistemology, a philosophical anthropology, an ethics, and an aesthetics that acknowledged transcendental aspects of knowledge and existence.

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I. 8 T h e R a z o r a n d the Glue-S ti ck Terry Eagleton complains that modern critics “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap,” that “Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about some vital questions – death, suffering, love, selfdispossession, and the like,” and that literary theory “has, for the most part, maintained an embarrassed silence” on important religious issues.51 He complains about a secular triumphalism “rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion’s own.”52 According to one familiar trope, religion has a deleterious influence on intellectual endeavour; it sets narrow boundaries, promotes authoritarianism, opposes scientific explanation, demonizes the body, and generally gets in the way of intellectual progress. But any doctrinaire rejection of religion impedes our understanding of literature. When we get rid of religion, we exclude from our methodology one very important way of dealing with the transcendent. We make the scope of our investigation smaller rather than bigger. (Note that this secular narrowness is not quite atheism. Atheism is a more complicated matter; at the very least, it recognizes the importance of the religious question.) The enemies of religion borrow a refrain from Auguste Comte, arguing that because religion adds an extra level of supernatural explanation to things, it violates Occam’s razor.53 But Occam’s Razor is a methodological principle, not a guarantee of truth. Not every simpler explanation is true. Even a true explanation is not true because it is simpler. It is true because, well, because it corresponds to the way things are. And there is a second, rarely discussed methodological principle that must be taken into account. Already, in Occam’s time, Franciscan Walter Chatton had proposed, in opposition to the razor, an explanatory “glue-stick.” In response to Occam’s formulation: “A plurality is not to be posited without necessity,”54 Chatton replied, “My rule is that if three things are not enough to verify an affirmative proposition about things, a fourth must be added, and so on.”55 The Chatton-Occam debate was part of a longer episode that pitted metaphysical realists and nominalists against each other, but we will not delve into that here. Chatton’s glue-stick is, however, a useful reminder of the importance of explanatory sufficiency.56 If parsimony is a methodological value, it can be overemphasized. Narrowing down critical perspectives to exclude religion (in the broad sense intended

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here) results in an impoverished account of literature. This is what Eagleton is protesting against. I will argue, in effect, that we must use a glue-stick to add this “religious-something” to other ways of looking at literature, be they scientific, biological, psychological, linguistic, theoretical, genderist, or political. What matters here is adding, not subtracting. We need to expand the scope of present theories to make room for the transcendent as an aspect of the human condition and the knowable world. As I hope to demonstrate, Aristotelianism provides a very broad theory that can apply to all aspects of literature, including the ethical and the religious. A century ago, T.S. Eliot lamented that “modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, [in] that it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life.”57 Eliot dismissed anti-religious enthusiasms such as positivism, naturalism, materialism, behaviourism, utilitarianism, and Marxism, because they could not capture or express “the whole of what we are” as human beings.58 One may disagree with Eliot’s denominational commitments, but his plea for a larger account of literature that includes the whole person is still pertinent today. The modern love affair with science has swept aside untidy bits of evidence, traditional beliefs, metaphysics, immateriality, intuition, mystery, objective morality. Literature, like religion, stands firmly opposed to this trend. It is of the nature of literature to stymie and frustrate reductionism. My aim, in these pages, is to widen criticism by acknowledging the transcendent, the broadest category of all. There is no need to invent a new theory. As I will demonstrate, Aristotle has already provided the conceptual foundation we need. Modern science is a wonderful accomplishment. Still, there are many things science cannot explain: metaphysics, morality, free will, fate, conscious mental experience, the paranormal, the trajectory of history, genius, intuition, the first principles of mathematics, infinity, dreams, why there is something rather than nothing, the forward (not backward) movement of time, Buddhist koans, the Canterbury Tales, ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the perfection of Baroque music. Science cannot explain why I am typing on this computer putting down a “z” instead of a “y” while postponing other activities with a great deal of impatience so that I can finish before my children come home from basketball practice because I feel it is my duty as a father to make them a healthy three-course meal with fish, olives, and extra tomato sauce

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for supper. There are too many details here. Aristotle believes that science cannot decide between two alternatives that are both physically possible. He relegates such contingent events to the domain of “τύχη” or happenstance, which is beyond scientific purview and a central theme of religious literature.59 It goes without saying that a healthy approach to literary criticism will wield both Occam’s razor and Chatton’s glue-stick. One needs to  aim at a healthy mean between explanations that are overly ­parsimonious or overly rich; we need interpretations that are neither impoverished nor extravagant. There are times when one needs to narrow one’s focus. But the bigger danger today is underexplanation, not overexplanation. In the midst of ideological skirmishes, we omit the transcendental, what is ultimately momentous, enduring, and good beyond measure. The general point bears repeating: one can accommodate transcendence without rejecting science. I will argue that the scientific Aristotle leaves a place for literature, not as subservient to science, but as an equal partner in intellectual aspiration. We can apply the scientific method to literature. Just as scientists can probe and discover the nature of volcanoes, viruses, and elementary particles, experienced scholars and talented readers can determine and appreciate the ­objective nature of literary texts. In Aristotle’s system, we can probe a ­literary work to discover the teleology inherent in its structure. As the Chicago School insisted, unearthing this teleology – understood as a matter of aesthetic form, not biography – is the first task of critical evaluation. But more on this later. What matters most in the present context is that Aristotelianism provides a method for a scientific analysis of literary texts without eliminating the ineffable, the mysterious, or the transcendent. As Aristotle long ago understood, there is no proof of everything. The point is not to prove everything – which is impossible – the point is to believe what is reasonable on the basis of strong evidence. Aristotle digs deep. He unearths many of the hidden metaphysical and normative judgments taken for granted in ordinary discourse, proposing a carefully qualified justification for the epistemological claims most of us endorse outside an academic context. If, however, Aristotle’s philosophy is grounded in a robust realism, I am arguing here that it also ends in the transcendental, in the philosopher who engages in a contemplative life in imitation of God.

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I. 9 C h a p t e r- b y- C h a p ter Summary Taken together, the following chapters amount to an Aristotelian theory of literature. In chapter 2, I trace contemporary opposition to Aristotle to a prevailing antirealist epistemology that grounds influential discussion. Theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida largely take this antirealism for granted. I advance a brief Aristotelian critique of this epistemological stance and introduce Aristotelian metaphysical realism as a better alternative. My argument is not that prominent themes and tropes in the critical literature are without value but that postmodern notions such as the indeterminacy of meaning and the ineffability of literature can be readily accommodated within a wider Aristotelian picture, at least in more moderate formulations, and that modern antirealist views rely on a naive straw-man account of Aristotelian principles. Among other issues in chapter 2, I consider the semiotics of signs and signifiers, Baudrillard’s account of simulacra, and post-­ structuralist themes such as indeterminacy, logocentrism, and deconstruction. I take a brief critical look at the historical origins of the  anti-­representational epistemology that has led the “death of ­metaphysics” and evaluate representative selections from Saussure, Baudrillard, and Derrida. Historical authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas developed sophisticated theories that are not so easily discounted even today. After briefly critiquing metaphysical antirealism and its Kantian framework, I introduce readers to Aristotelian realism. In chapter 3, I elaborate a wisdom epistemology along Aristotelian lines. I discuss, then, Aristotle’s holistic view of wisdom (σοφία, sophia) and situate it in relation to literature. I go on to compare Aristotelian intuitions (derived from νοῦς) to what modern phenomenologists Louis Arnauld Reid and Henri Bergson call “epistemological feelings,” draw a parallel between Aristotle’s epistemological method and what contemporary sociologists Tom Pocklington and Allan Tupper call “reflective inquiry,” and trace a picture of literature and religion as convergent parallels that aim at a similar contemplative ideal. I argue that literature has a cognitive and a conative aspect, leading to epiphany-like experiences that mirror the experience of divine transcendence that Aristotle posits as the goal of theory (θεωρία). I also distinguish between good and bad examples of peak

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emotional experiences, referencing such diverse authors as Foucault, Evola, Schmitt, Barthes, Babbitt, and Winters. In chapters 4 and 5, I propose a definition of literature. It is a staple of mainstream criticism that the search for philosophical definitions is a vestige of an outdated, doctrinaire essentialism. I respond to this anti-definitionalism in chapter 4, relying largely on arguments from my teacher Bernard Suits. Like Suits, I understand definition as a matter of excavating tacit knowledge about paradigm cases. I expose a straw-man essentialism and navigate through standard criticisms (as formulated by Jonathan Culler). I also reply to challenges articulated by proponents of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” theory of meaning. Succinctly put, literature is verbal expression (genus) of superlative merit (differentia). Literature is not a “natural kind,” but an honorific name used to designate a meritorious product of human activity. In chapter 5, I use Aristotle’s theory of four causes to devise four different definitions of literature. I argue that these formal, material, efficient, and final definitions overlap. We can identify literature with the superlative use of literary form, with the superlative use of ­language and subject-matter, with inspiration and genius, or with ­successful audience impact. Ideally, literature satisfies all four criteria of excellence. I investigate here the genre criticism advanced by the Chicago School, discuss the role of literary properties such as “literariness” and “fictionality,” rebut overly narrowly criticisms of Aristotelian mimesis, and argue against Monroe’s and Beardsley’s formulations of the intentional fallacy. I revisit Barthes’s grandiose proclamation of the “death of the author” and pass under review Stanley Fish’s reader-response criticism. An influential trope that “theory has come to an end” severely overstates the case. In chapter 6, I explore the link between literature and morality. A long English tradition views literature as a normative endeavour, and in this regard I review short selections from Philip Sydney, William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and John Gardner. If morality sometimes seems a stifling aspiration that has little to do with literary merit, I argue that the widespread rejection of a moral criterion for literature is an understandable response to an impoverished understanding of morality. Aristotle advances a much broader account of ethical aspiration that secures a connection between human happiness, morality, and literature. I finish the book by briefly considering Paul de Man as

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a disturbing example of where “amoral” criticism leads and borrow from Kierkegaard’s perceptive account of modern despair to show how Aristotelian literary criticism can dovetail with remarkably ­different orientations in philosophy.

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2 Metaphysical Realism and Antirealism

II. 1 P a n o r a m ic Analysi s Everything begins in metaphysics. At least this is what Aristotle and Aristotelians seem to believe. If such heartfelt convictions may baffle contemporary readers who have been repeatedly told that metaphysics is long since dead, I will argue that Aristotelian metaphysics is not dead; it is only forgotten, misremembered, ignored, or caricatured. Metaphysics lives on as the unacknowledged foundation of everyday, common sense belief, in the hidden assumptions that frame inter­ disciplinary discussion, and in the moral and even spiritual aspirations expressed and embodied in religion, art, and literature. We cannot embark on an Aristotelian journey into literary theory without supplying a grounding in metaphysics. Aristotle’s philosophy is about synthesis – deep synthesis. He examines first principles, champions a perspective on logic and science, articulates a distinctive approach to politics and morality, and even (I will argue) introduces a unique way of approaching the transcendent. Before examining literature, then, we have to begin with a proper understanding of Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology. Traditional Aristotelianism is not friendly to any exaggerated skepticism. If the real world were beyond our grasp, if we could not know what knowledge entails, then we could never know anything about literature. The background theory I adopt here takes aim at metaphysical, epistemological, and moral positions often taken for granted in ­contemporary mainstream discussion. I will call my method “panoramic analysis,” a deliberate oxymoron intended to suggest a focused analysis that, paradoxically, pays attention to the bigger picture. In

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“analysis” (from Greek, ἀνάλυσις, to untie), we divide an object into ever smaller parts – as if dissecting it – to arrive at the most basic building blocks of reality. The term “panoramic” posits an opposite inclination: in one continuous sweep of the horizon, we take everything in. I intend, then, to combine these methods of division and synthesis to expose what I see as the questionable metaphysical and philosophical assumptions on which much contemporary theory is based. To some readers, devising a transcendental account of literature based on Aristotle’s scientific naturalism will seem surpassingly strange. Except that the narrowly scientistic picture of Aristotle we encounter in some of the secondary literature is misleading. Aristotle’s naturalism does not exclude belief in the human soul, in eternity, in religious piety, in objective morality, or in the Divine. I will insist, in a later chapter, that his theological views support a transcendental view of literature. Aristotle is, undoubtedly, not a Christian. A very old and probably apocryphal story in a work by Flavius Josephus records Aristotle confusing the Jewish religious tradition with that of the Hindu mystics.1 A pretty big mistake. One way or the other, Aristotle would have had precious little doctrinal knowledge of the Judaic religious traditions that gave rise to mainstream Christianity. There is, then, a big gap between the religious traditions we are familiar with and Aristotle’s metaphysical beliefs. Although there is some evidence for religious piety in the corpus, it is enough to say here that Aristotle’s philosophy brings together a naturalistic respect for science with a quasi-religious reverence for God conceived of as the final cause of the cosmos. Contrary to a popular stereotype, he conceived of metaphysics as the coming together of the worldly and the otherworldly, not as the exclusion of one for the sake of the other. This becomes particularly clear in the account of literature I elaborate here. Canvassing all the issues Aristotle addresses would require a very big book, even a series of big books, so I will focus, more modestly, on relevant aspects of his world view. I want to use his philosophy to understand literature, which means understanding Aristotle as a means to something else. We still have to get our interpretation of Aristotle right, but that is not the end goal of our inquiry. Call my method applied Aristotelianism, or Aristotelianism engagé, or the new Aristotelianism, or even Aristotelian transcendentalism. The term “Neo-Aristotelianism” might suffice (stripped of some pejorative connotations), but the labels do not matter so much; it is the spirit and

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precise purpose of the undertaking that needs to be understood. The main point of this book is not historical exegesis but truthful discovery. It is not what Aristotle personally believed that matters most; it is the way his systematic philosophy uncovers deep truths about literature. This book is not based on appeals to authority. I never maintain that this or that principle is true because Aristotle (or one of his followers) claims it is true. Even if we could eliminate all exegetical disputes arising from Aristotle’s rough prose, there is no reason to presuppose that Aristotle is always correct, always clear-minded, always consistent. And there is wisdom elsewhere in the tradition. I will turn to philosophical sources outside Aristotle insomuch as they seem helpful. With all that said, let us embark on the first stage of our journey, the elaboration of an adequate metaphysical basis for a successful theory of literary criticism.

II. 2 P o s t- E n l ig h t e nment Doubt Literary theorists tend to be highly suspicious of traditional epistemology. Witness English professor Philip Smallwood’s description of what he sees as a prevalent view: “Since no judgment is not open to challenge, no judgment can be right. There is no right. All readings are misreadings.”2 If, however, Smallwood summarizes a prevalent attitude, I will argue that this “hermeneutics of suspicion” (to use Ricoeur’s phrase) can be historically traced back to exaggerated Enlightenment demands for epistemological justification and a strawman critique of whatever went before. If skepticism of one sort or another has played an important role throughout philosophical history, this is unsurprising. Skepticism provides a useful service in that it puts our complacent world views to the test. It is the “refiner’s fire” that purifies belief. We can include under the skeptical banner such widely divergent figures as the ancient skeptics Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, the later leaders of Plato’s academy Arcesilaus and Carneades, the Muslim theologian al-Ghazālī, the medieval Catholic canon Nicholas of Autrecourt, the Renaissance Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, the self-proclaimed fideist Pierre Bayle, and, of course, the great spokesman of the Scottish Enlightenment David Hume. The ancient skeptics pointed to Socrates, who said that the only thing he knew was that he did not know, as the inspiration for their movement. I will argue, however, that we need to differentiate between skepticism as a

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useful philosophical tool and the more radical skepticism that permeates current theory. This latter sort of skepticism leads to a self-­ defeating dead end, putting insurmountable obstacles in the way of knowledge and curtailing any legitimate study of literature. Henry May identifies two core Enlightenment beliefs: “first, the present age is more enlightened than the past; and second, that we understand nature and man best through the use of our natural faculties.”3 Through the use of our natural faculties means by the medium of science. Enlightenment thinkers were committed, in short, to a belief in epistemological progress and natural science. They thought previous generations were gullible and superstitious and made a point of demanding proof. That is, they insisted on facts logically arranged to fully support conclusions. One can identify, then, a basic Enlightenment trope: “I will only believe if I have enough evidence.” A useful rule of thumb, although many Enlightenment thinkers privilege very partisan ways of determining what counts as evidence. The emphasis is on what is material, observable, measurable, quantifiable, empirical. Even today, one hears the same refrain in popular and specialized contexts. Popular author Philip Pullman, for one, explains why he doesn’t believe in God: “The main reason I don’t believe in God is the missing evidence … I can only go by the fact that, so far, I’ve discovered no evidence that he does [exist]: I have had no personal experience of being spoken to by God and I see nothing in the world around me, wherever I look in history or science or art or anywhere else, to persuade me that it was the work of God rather than of nature.”4 The theist could well complain that Pullman deliberately overlooks the evidence, but what matters, in the present context, is that this heartfelt response to religious questions is one more variation on a larger Enlightenment refrain: Show me the empirical, verifiable, measurable, material, ­scientific evidence. Otherwise, it is hard to believe. The first of Descartes’s “rules of method” nicely captures the mindset of the Enlightenment I want to highlight here. He explains: “The first [rule] was never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is to carefully avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it.”5 The final phrase bears repeating: “to include nothing more in my judgments than what … I had no occasion to doubt.” But this is a very

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demanding criterion of belief. The general problem with later Enlightenment thinking is that it sets the standard for epistemological justification so unwittingly high that it can never be met – which opens the door to rampant skepticism. Andrew Bailey presents a familiar account of Descartes’s original project: Descartes lived at a time when the accumulated beliefs of ­centuries … were being gradually but remorselessly stripped away by exciting new discoveries … Descartes’ central intellectual goal was to develop … a reliable scientific method and then to construct a coherent theory of the world and of humankind’s place within it. This theory, he hoped, would replace scholasticism, the deeply-flawed medieval system of thought based on the ­science of Aristotle and Christian theology. A key feature of Descartes’ system is that all knowledge should be based on utterly reliable foundations, discovered through the systematic rejection of any assumptions that can be called into doubt. Then, as in mathematics, complex conclusions could be reliably derived from these foundations by chains of valid reasoning – of simple and certain inferences.6 Bailey provides a fair assessment of Descartes’s intentions while ­skimming over some serious epistemological problems and the almost universally negative response of later philosophers to the Cartesian project. It seems ironic that Descartes, the man who set out to defeat skepticism, should be a key figure in legitimizing the skeptical attitudes that extend into the present era.7 The Descartes of the Meditations wanted to supply an epistemological remedy for uncertainty once and for all, to cure the world of skepticism, yet his arguments had just the opposite effect. It was like opening Pandora’s box. Over the course of the modern age, wave after wave of competing thinkers have dismissed his arguments while persevering in the same method of radical doubt. The title of the last chapter of Richard Popkin’s original treatment of Pyrrhonist debates in the Early Modern era is aptly titled “Descartes: Sceptique Malgré Lui.”8 Precisely. Once we start asking questions the way Descartes does, there is just no way to stop skepticism from spreading until it undermines all belief. I have commented on this elsewhere.

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It was not Descartes’s answer to skepticism, but his insistence on the right to question anything and everything that won the day. His methodological skepticism was the epistemological gift of doubt that never stops giving. Descartes anchored secure belief in the natural light of reason and, ultimately, in the truthfulness of God, but later thinkers readily questioned both sources of epistemological authority. Once one begins to question even the nature of reason, even the truthfulness of God, further questions follow interminably. All this led, not to a useful skepticism that makes us strain for good reasons for belief, but to a totalizing skepticism that destroys everything in its path. The Enlightenment began with great optimism. Science was going to explain the world and find remedies for human problems, while sociology (which Comte introduced as a science) was going to resolve any lingering social, political, and ethical problems. Except that the single-minded Enlightenment focus on “evidence” ended in an unanswerable skepticism. We can identify, then, two steps in the Enlightenment search for knowledge: (1) an initial burst of self-­ congratulatory confidence in science and modern progress, followed by (2) the fatal realization that exaggerated demands for epistemological justification can never be met. The sad fate of Descartes’s own project is a case in point. His methodological skepticism was so extreme that no philosopher who came after him could ever satisfy the relentless demands for more proof, more proof, more proof. As Sextus understood, we can never amass enough evidence to prove everything; there are always new ways of raising doubts. Unless we begin with a firm belief in something we already know, we cannot prove that one claim is more correct or true or sound than another. We can identify, then, as a recurrent Enlightenment motif, a two-step modus operandi. In whatever field or subdiscipline, we often notice (1) a burst of enthusiasm for some new epistemological development, followed by (2) disillusionment and, alas, a more specific skepticism directed against the new principles of the new (now old) theory. This inevitable slide from self-confidence into doubt must be traced, in part, to human fallibility (which can never be overcome), but it also owes its origins to overstated demands for proof that can never be met. The specific reasons marshalled by thinkers involved in any particular episode are largely immaterial. The human mind can devise all sorts of reasons for disbelief. Note simply the standard sequence that moves from epistemological optimism to pessimism.

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What I am describing as a slide from epistemological faith to epistemological skepticism corresponds roughly to how many literary theorists view the slip from modernity to postmodernity. Modernists, as the stereotype has it, are impatient, faithful crusaders for the cause of scientific knowledge; postmodernists, au contraire, dismiss such attitudes as passé, absolutist, naive, unsophisticated. Consider, as a case in point, the debate in literary theory that pitted structuralists against post-structuralists. The structuralist followers of Fernand de Saussure shared a robust Enlightenment world view. They had already brandished their own version of skepticism, as I discuss below. Nonetheless, their telltale enthusiasm for what they saw as the new science of “theory” represented in fact the first, celebratory stage in the Enlightenment pursuit of knowledge. Mostly, they were optimistic. Raman Selden explains: Structuralism has attracted some literary critics because it ­promised to introduce a certain rigor and objectivity into the ­delicate realm of literature … The structuralist neglects the ­specificity of actual texts, and treats them like they were like the pattern of iron filings produced by an invisible [magnetic] force. Not only the text but also the author is cancelled as the structuralist brackets the actual work and the person who wrote it, in order to isolate the true object of enquiry – the system … At the heart of structuralism is a scientific ambition to discover the codes, the rules, the systems, which underlie human social and cultural practices. The disciplines of archaeology and ­geology are frequently invoked as the models of structuralist enterprise. What we see on the surface are the traces of a deeper history; only by excavating beneath the structure will we ­discover the geological strata or the ground plans which provide the true explanations of what we see above. One can argue that all science is structuralist in this respect.9 Literary critics who aligned themselves with structuralism had, then, a scientific purpose: to discover the laws of interpretation for all literary texts. They believed they could contrive a hard-nosed discipline that would rival the rigour of the physical sciences by providing a complete, objective, law-like understanding of language. Jonathan Culler, who has been credited with bringing French structuralism to

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America, explains that “the real work of poetics is not the work itself but its intelligibility. One must attempt to explain how it is that works can be understood; the implicit knowledge, the conventions that enable readers to make sense of them, must be formulated.”10 Structuralists aimed to formulate the universal principles of linguistic expression. They were confident they could use the scientific method to discover and formalize some fixed, underlying, timeless, logical architecture that would elucidate all textuality. But what happened? If structuralism is a quintessentially modernist movement, post-structuralism represents the standard skeptical rebellion against an established prior world view. Post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva were all motivated by dissatisfaction with their structuralist mentors. As a group, they maintained that language is inevitably inconclusive, ambiguous, equivocal, contradictory, fraught with irony, and subject to misunderstanding. Any attempt to set up an objective science of literary meaning was bound to fail. If the original structuralists were impatient, faithful, modernist crusaders for the cause of scientific knowledge and naturalistic explanation, post-structuralists, in contrast, dismissed such attitudes as naive, unrealistic, or patriarchal, even imperialist. Robert Young explains: “Whereas [structuralists] sought to elevate their work to the condition of a science, post-structuralist thinkers … have questioned the status of science itself, and the possibility of the objectivity of any language of description or analysis, as well as the assumptions implicit in the Saussurian model or the linguistics on which Structuralism may be said to be properly based.”11 As structuralists saw things, literary criticism needed to be more scientific. As post-structuralists saw things, the scientific project of structuralism was ridiculously, even laughably out of touch. Selden explains, “It is evident that poststructuralism tries to deflate the scientific pretensions of structuralism. If structuralism was heroic in its desire to master the world of man-made signs, poststructuralism is comic and anti-heroic in its refusal to take such claims seriously … The poststructuralist mockery of structuralism is almost a self-­ mockery: poststructuralists are structuralists who suddenly see the error of their ways.”12 Post-structuralists concluded that structuralism was epistemologically naive and turned their energies in the opposite

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direction, doing everything they could to defeat the project. In their minds, any hope of elaborating a scientific understanding of literature was as good as dead. That structuralism should give way to post-structuralism was only one localized manifestation of a standard Enlightenment trope: optimism leads to pessimism, a brave new way forward collapses into a skepticism that questions the earlier faith. Of course, there is no reason to stop at post-structuralism. If structuralism can be questioned, so too can post-structuralism, whatever post-post-structuralism would entail. As the ancient skeptics understood, skepticism is an eternally unfinished project. It jumps from questioning to more questioning with no end in sight. Cartesian methodological skepticism, which morphed into secondstep skepticism against whatever prior system of belief, is an untameable beast. Demanding evidence in exchange for belief is a reasonable epistemological strategy within sensible parameters. But the person playing the role of the radical Enlightenment skeptic does not really want to purchase belief. It is like buying milk at the grocery store. The cashier tells you: “Give me the money, and I will give you the milk.” But radical skeptics are crafty. If you have two dollars worth of evidence in your pocket, they will say that the milk costs three dollars. If you have three dollars worth, they will say that the milk costs four dollars. If you have four dollars worth, they want five. And so on. They deliberately set the epistemological price of justification so high that no knowledge gets bought; it is left behind on the shelf as something no one can afford. It is a game, really. In the course of daily life, post-structuralists believe, like the rest of us, in ordinary things. But when they enter into academic debate, they shed those beliefs for radical doubt. This is not without its advantages. One can use skepticism to deftly deflate any opponent’s beliefs. Except that consistent skepticism undermines all belief-systems across the board; it plays no favourites. If you can use it to undermine your opponents’ beliefs, your opponents can use it to undermine your beliefs as well. (Yes, we can use skepticism to undermine skepticism.) If we can assume that past generations were disastrously wrong, then future generations can, in turn, assume that we are disastrously wrong. Radical skeptical methods – consistently used – turn around and bite the hand that feeds them. Only a little time goes by and some new skeptical exercise will require the disposal of present-day beliefs.

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I I .3 M e ta p h ys ic a l S k e p ti ci sm: Saussure A widespread skepticism about traditional metaphysics has been rolling down the philosophical pipeline since Hume and Kant. Everyone knows the story by now. Aristotelian metaphysics aimed to discover the true nature of things in the world, which turned out to be dreadfully naive. Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” thankfully, turned ­attention away from speculation about the unknowable nature of the world toward a more cautious examination of the structure of human cognition. The general consensus today is that human knowledge is restricted to what Kant calls “phenomena.” We cannot access the underlying noumenon, things as they objectively exist in-and-bythemselves beyond human consciousness. Because we access the world through the organizing structures of the mind, our knowledge is inevitably limited to the way the human mind cognitively processes the world; we can never access things-in-themselves. The old Aristotelian metaphysics is subsequently dismissed as a “naive realism,” a relic from a more gullible age.13 Consider, then, the dramatic imprint that Kantian notions have left on the discipline of literary theory. Obviously, there are competing schools and voices, too many to survey here. I believe that many contemporary critics – particularly those who focus on individual texts, authors, or time periods – often operate in an Aristotelian mode. This book is intended as an aid to such endeavours. Here, however, we want to focus on the opposition. Let us briefly consult, then, Saussure, Baudrillard, and Derrida, three seminal figures who in many ways set the agenda for modern theory. I discussed structuralism earlier; now I turn to consider more closely the reasoning behind structuralism, also known as semiotic literary criticism. If post-structuralists were skeptical about structuralism, structuralism itself was a skeptical response to traditional Aristotelian realism. Saussure sets out to recalibrate the meaning of language in the light of post-Kantian objections to metaphysics. He argues that language does not refer to real natures in the world (which are part of the noumenon and, therefore, inaccessible). Words are not names for natures in the world; they are names for ideas in our heads. (A little like “internalism” in analytic philosophy of mind.) When we speak of dogs and cats, for example, we are talking about our idea of what dogs and cats are because we cannot know the true nature of dogs or cats as they exist in the world. Dogs-in-themselves, cats-in-themselves

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are beyond our ken. All we can know is how dogs and cats appear to us; nothing more. For all we know, noumenal cats and noumenal dogs are entirely different from our conceptions. We can refer to our own ideas of dogs and cats, but that is about it. Language becomes a matter, then, of consulting the ideas in our own heads. Saussure follows this new antirealist wisdom to its logical conclusion until he ends up with language understood as a self-contained system of ideas cut off from the real world. I will argue that this is at odds, not just with Aristotle, but with the spirit of literature. Saussure writes, “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.”14 Take the word “turtle,” for example. Saussure respects the Kantian turn and avoids any metaphysical commitment to believing something about the real nature of turtles out in the world. The word “turtle” does not unite the phonetic-image with the true nature of turtles; it unites the phonetic-image with the idea (or concept) we have of a turtle. By making words refer to ideas instead of things, Saussure avoids any old-fashioned Aristotelian commitment to metaphysical realism. He argues that the word “turtle” gets its meaning from a comparison with other ideas represented by other words. Our idea of a “sunset,” for example, is very different from our idea of a “turtle.” Again, our idea of “spaghetti” is very different from our idea of a “turtle.” This is how meaning originates. Language is not about pointing to real things out in the world but about differentiating between our own concepts. This is why Saussure’s system is called “structuralism”: because the place a word occupies in the overall structure of language is what determines what any individual word means. What is most important here is to emphasize how the Saussurean model gets rid of the outside world. A recent textbook explains: Saussure’s theory of the sign is not concerned with a sign’s ­ultimate referent. For Saussure, [a word] only has two essential parts, the signifier [sound or letter group] and the signified [the idea]. By dispensing with the necessity of a third term (a referent or object), Saussure’s theory affords itself a remarkable degree of autonomy … The meaning of any particular signifier is assured by its place in the language as a whole. This is Saussure’s major structuralist insight. Language is a system of differences that generates meaning through its own internal mechanisms. The signifier “dog” signifies simply because we know how to

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place it within the English language as a whole; a signifier such as “zog” has no place in the system.15 Saussure’s system of metaphysically autonomous language is based on a séparation infranchissable between the meanings of words and things in the world as they exist outside our heads. Words get their meaning by their place within a totalizing system of ideas. We are left with language, every bit of which refers to ideas inside our heads. But is this a good thing? Compare Saussurean semiotics to the everyday folk-understanding of language. The plain man or woman – I will insist throughout this book – is an Aristotelian realist. When Plain Jane pronounces the word “turtle,” she thinks she is referring to those things we call turtles in the outside world. She believes, for example, that the words “turtle” and “spaghetti” have radically different meanings because they point to radically different things with radically different natures. She believes that turtles really do have a different nature than spaghetti does. The radical difference between the nature of a turtle and the nature of spaghetti is why we need two different words to refer to them. But Saussure believes that Plain Jane is being naive; she has made a grave metaphysical mistake. On a Saussurean account, the terms “turtle” and “spaghetti” do not refer to knowable natures out in the world. They refer to our own ideas of what those things are. They always point inwards, toward something inside the apparatus of our mind, not outwards toward real natures in the world. Which is a subtle stance, surely, but I will argue that something gets lost in the transaction. The Saussurean account of language dispenses with referents out in the real world. It is the way one word-puzzle-piece fits into surrounding word-puzzle-pieces that produces meaning. Words only have meaning within an architecture of signs that regulates our way of thinking. It is the internal relationship of ideas to ideas that matters. This antirealist stance (a radical type of epistemological coherentism) is presented as an advance in metaphysical thought for there is no embarrassing Aristotelian reference to the nature of things outside our heads. We can disregard such metaphysical realism completely. I examine, from an Aristotelian perspective, the nature of metaphysical antirealism later on, but it is important to point out, from the start, that there is an obvious problem with all this theorizing. To begin with, Saussure provides a seriously deficient description of how we actually use words. When plain men and women and when literary types wax

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poetical about diamonds, tea roses, snowstorms, barn swallows, and Rocky Mountain sunsets, they are not referring to ideas inside our heads. Whatever metaphysical primitivism they are guilty of, they think they are referring to the nature of objects out in the world. Even if they are wrong to do that – even if they lack philosophical sophistication – this is what they really do mean: that there are things called diamonds, tea roses, snowstorms, barn swallows, and Rocky Mountain sunsets in the world and that the words we use refer to the radically different natures that differentiate them from one another. A descriptive account of language should be about what people mean by the words they use, not about what a particular school of antirealist metaphysicians would prefer them to mean. The referents of ordinary language use are there whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. When Plain Jane talks to her neighbour about her horses, she does not believe that the words she is using point merely to an idea inside her head; she believes, however mistakenly, that these words refer to things in the world that possess a horsenature that differs, substantially not just perceptually, from the nature of sheepdogs, daisies, motorbikes, and the planet Jupiter. Once antirealists leave the lecture hall and take up life as ordinary human beings, even they succumb to such convictions. They believe, just like the rest of us, in something more than ideas that only refer to other ideas. They take language, as all of us do, to be something composed of names that point to different natures out in the world. And they believe that with or without language, these natures have an independent objective existence. Horses would be horses with a horse-nature even if no word was ever invented to refer to them. Even if Saussure’s semiotics are metaphysically correct, this way of looking at things inevitably weakens the power of language. Makebelieve only rises to the level of literature when it is accompanied by a “suspension of disbelief” that allows us to approach the unreal as if it were real. We are disturbed when we are informed about the death of a protagonist in a novel because we think that “death” is something real. We think human beings are real and that they really do come to an end. This is why death frightens us. It is more than a mere idea inside our minds. To disentangle language from any robust connection to extra-linguistic reality is to dilute its impact. Literature would not be very interesting (except perhaps for semioticians) without that crucial connection to the “reality” we all believe exists beyond our own minds. The structuralist understanding of literature serves a

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philosophical purpose, but we are not moved by literature because it serves a philosophical purpose. The celebrated structuralist insight that “the bond between signifier and signified is arbitrary” is beside the point. No metaphysical realist believes that we have to use the exact English word “dog” to refer to dogs. The French word chien will do; or the Greek word, “κύων” (kuōn), or the Latin word canis. What metaphysical realism tells us is that dogs are different from turtles and quartz crystals. It is a good idea, then, to contrive different names that refer to these different natures. It is up to us to decide what sound or sequence of letters to choose. This is a matter of collective cultural artifact and human purpose. I will argue that literature pushes us to a transcendental effect by connecting us with something real and objective outside ourselves. Language half-succeeds, half-fails, but it points to something more than the ideas inside our heads. Something much larger than ourselves and beyond our control. Something that dwarfs human possibility. One can, of course, side with reductionists and deny the existence of an accessible transcendent, but to do so would be, in effect, to eliminate the possibility of literature.

II. 4 M e ta p h ys ic a l S kepti ci sm: B au d r il l ard Saussure is, of course, not alone. Much of literary theory takes for granted the Kantian antirealist narrative. Consider, next, Jean Baudrillard’s theory of “simulacra” and, in the following section, Jacques Derrida’s method of deconstruction. Both Baudrillard and Derrida embrace antirealist positions, rejecting the bedrock Aristotelian realism that once motivated, not just the Chicago School, but traditional criticism more generally. I will consider other schools of criticism (the New Criticism, reader-response theory, Neo-Marxism) elsewhere in the book. But on to Baudrillard, who, for all his post-structuralist credentials, does not elaborate a metaphysical theory that differs much from that of the structuralists. Baudrillard is only a post-structuralist to the extent that he rejects a previous theory. He plays the skeptic when it comes to structuralist linguistics, but, like his structuralist mentors, he is a dogmatist when it comes to his opposition to metaphysical realism. He sets out his position in dense prose that reads like apocalyptic poetry but hits on familiar antirealist themes. Like many

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theorists, he does not construct philosophical arguments in support of his antirealism, yet they are there in the background, supporting everything else. Baudrillard elaborates a sort of reverse Hegelianism, charting out a chronology of epistemological failure that has produced a metaphysical crisis in the contemporary world. We have now entered, he thinks, “an age of simulacra and simulation.” In other words, we are living in an era of fakery that surrounds us with nothing but artificial signs and images. Baudrillard identifies four successive stages in the history of art and literature: • • •

•

the image “as the reflection of a basic reality”; the image as something that “masks and perverts a basic reality”; the image as something that “marks the absence of a basic reality”; the image as something that “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”16

So we progress, step by step, from an initial representationalism to an antirealist climax where images no longer point to any reality outside themselves. In this epistemological dystopia, there is no longer any room for any kind of metaphysical correspondence between language and the nature of reality. Symbols and signs have lost all contact with the things in the outside world they were formerly intended to emulate. Like Saussure, but using eschatological images, Baudrillard accepts that words do not refer to true natures in the world. He comments, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It [has become] a question of substituting signs for the real itself.”17 The Saussurean optimism about linguistics – that it could supply a complete science of signs – is again replaced with a postmodern despair: words are images that represent nothing at all. What they pretend to represent is no longer there; reality is irrecuperable. The original link between words and what they are supposed to ­represent has been erased. Error, illusion, phoniness is the only epistemological possibility left. Baudrillard believes, in short, that the modern world is so fake, the distance between words and their referents is so great – an unbreachable abyss – that no contact between what we say and the real is even possible. We are surrounded by simulacra, what Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal,” which substitutes total illusion for what exists. The

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images and models we confront represent nothing but our own projections, wishes, imaginations. Human communication tells us nothing about reality, which is buried inside the inaccessible, unknowable, Kantian noumenon. Language no longer maps, mirrors, points to, or signifies “a territory, a referential being, or a substance.”18 It points to nothing outside itself. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.”19 All that is left is “a generation by models [of images] … without origin or reality.” The map substitutes itself for reality. The only venue open for investigation is an artificial hyperreal composed of images that have no true reality. Baudrillard assumes that the naive notion of a correspondence between language and things in the outside world is ludicrously outof-date. He is violently hostile to metaphysics. There is no place in his schema for Aristotelian realism understood as the epistemological endeavour of mapping out the true natures of things in the world. He explains: “This [old tradition of] representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers’ mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation – whose operation is nuclear [destructively explosive] and genetic [self-generating], and no longer specular [through lookingglasses] and discursive [operating through language]. With it goes all metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity.”20 If Nietzsche proclaims the death of God, Baudrillard proclaims the death of metaphysics. There is nothing left but fakery; we are condemned to live in a world without meaning understood as something that attaches us to the truth about natures in the world. When we engage in conversations, we are forced to use pseudo-signs that symbolize nothing; we devise models of reality that model nothing. We interact with levels of virtual reality that we can never escape. This, then, is where Baudrillard’s post-modernism leads, to a hyperreal that “is no longer measured against some ideal,” that “is no longer real at all.”21 What replaces knowledge understood as correspondence to nature is the mass production of empty images, symbols, and texts, “reproduced an indefinite number of times.”22 We have somehow gone off the rails and left behind the real world that earlier thinkers like Aristotle believed in. Insomuch as the philosophical conversation drones on, it is epistemologically empty, the endless operation of repetition after repetition, fakery after fakery. Literature itself represents nothing real or true. A calamity perhaps, but that is just the way it is.

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There are many philosophical problems here. Baudrillard tries to solve a metaphysical debate through an inversion of the usual Hegelian/ Marxist account of history – instead of steady progress toward a universal self-understanding or a classless utopia, things keep getting worse rather than better. It is a neat trick, perhaps, but the question of whether realism or antirealism is metaphysically correct is an ahistorical question. Baudrillard maintains that antirealism has been forced upon us by the course of history. But, surely, the mere passing of time does not change what we are as human beings, the physical nature of the cosmos, or the deep structure of human intelligence. Although Baudrillard is an effective communicator, he does not deal in arguments. His negative burst of enthusiasm can be construed, perhaps, as an ethical epistle. This is Holden Caulfield’s complaint in Salinger’s period piece Catcher in the Rye. The modern world is inhabited with fakes and phonies. Except, if nothing is real, this makes Baudrillard’s own theory as unreal as everything else. His own words must be empty signs, maps of non-existent locations, representations of blankness, simulacra that simulate nothing. If humanity has reached the nadir he describes, he too is an active participant in the present calamity. As Socrates says of Protagoras, it is hard to see why we should give his pronouncements any objective degree of truth or meaning. One has to admire Baudrillard’s verve, but his general strategy is not atypical. He embraces a flamboyant antirealism as a useful strategy for creating a startling doomsday effect. He spins another chapter in an anti-metaphysical apocalypse that now reaches a sensational conclusion: words now replace reality rather than representing it. Metaphysics is entirely eradicated. Or is it? Baudrillard’s philosophy is best understood as alarmist social critique, not as serious metaphysical analysis. His criticism of a “fake society” may contribute to an enlightening criticism of the modern condition, but the key to his analysis – the notion of a symbol, image, mirror, or map that is entirely non-representational – is logically incoherent. Things that do not represent anything outside of themselves are not symbols, images, mirrors, or maps. Images must represent, at the very least, the intentions of their creators. The idea that the word “bird,” for example, no longer has a connection with birds in the world is simply an exaggeration. History has not changed the fact that there are birds, and the words we use to represent those wonderful feathered flying creatures are no less effective at communication than they ever were. Anyone who has read Parmenides knows that any claim that we could represent “nothing” (or create something

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out of nothing) is deeply problematic. There is no serious engagement with the metaphysical tradition here. If Baudrillard means to suggest that many modern symbols are dishonest or fraudulent, that might be a truthful conclusion, at least some of the time, but that is not what he says. He claims that there are no symbols (in the original sense) at all, which – even if it were true – would rid the world of language, philosophy, knowledge, and literature. Taken as anything other than a poetic gloss, his account of modern culture is literally untrue. People continue to make images to represent the nature of things in the world. As Aristotle would have said, imitation (mimesis) is a fundamentally human activity. One cannot eliminate symbols through some sort of post-modern wizardry. Baudrillard rejects old-fashioned realism out of hand, without any hint of argument, as if radical skepticism were, for the present era, the only conceivable possibility. But this is all assumption, not argument. His extremist presentation may be a poetic or prophetic gloss on the dangerous times we live in, but it is not philosophically compelling. Human agents will continue to use symbols, and symbols will continue to represent things outside themselves in accordance with practical, moral, scientific, and logical criteria, whatever the fashions of esoteric literary theory.

I I . 5 M e ta p h ys ic a l S k e p ti ci s m: Derri da Consider, finally, Derrida, who styles himself as a philosopher with a wider grasp of the historical philosophical tradition but comes to similar conclusions. I will briefly examine three key concepts Derrida (and his many followers) rely on: logocentricism, deconstruction, and différance. Derrida uses the term “logocentrism” to refer pejoratively to the traditional realist view that we can use words to describe the nature of the world. Valentine Cunningham describes the all-out Derridian attack on “logocentrism”: [Logocentrism] denotes the position that words, writings, ideas, systems of thought are fixed and sustained by some authority or centre external to them whose meaning, validation, and truth they convey … This validation “from the outside” may consist of something as simple as mere objects “out there” in the “real” world beyond language, apparently referred to by words. The

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everyday, normative, logocentric assumption is that language refers [to something outside itself] and so does language organized into text; that signs have referends or signata, that words make present to the reader or hearer ascertainable, decipherable meanings, that is, they contain and convey some “presence” or presences from outside or beyond themselves … Reference is in this view transcendent.23 The term “transcendent” here is pejorative. This is Kant’s derogatory term for naive realism. To believe in reference, in fixed meanings that link words to real natures in the outside world, is to make an elementary philosophical mistake. It is to fall prey to realism. Derrida, then, in line with other antirealists, believes we cannot access or speak about the metaphysical world outside our ideas. As he puts it, “there is nothing outside the text”: “Il n’y a pas de horstexte,” which means, literally, “there is no outside-text.”24 Language only refers, as Saussure insisted, to ideas in the mind. There is nothing outside textuality. Whatever words refer to, they cannot refer to something outside language, for, as the Kantian legend would have it, it is epistemological naivety to assume that we can use reason to access the true nature of things. Logocentric metaphysics no longer being a viable alternative, Derrida introduces deconstruction as a rival methodology. If logocentrism is the enemy, then deconstruction is the stick of dynamite for exploding logocentrism to smithereens. Cunningham continues: “This logocentric assumption about how words and thinking operate has, according to Derrida, been the foundation of the whole history of Western thought and linguistics from Plato until the present. Deconstruction is thus a mode of analysis that sets out to help us see through, to historicize and so to undermine this conceptual mindset which has been the glue binding all Western thinking and writing.”25 Derrida believes that the glue binding everything together is Western metaphysics, that is, Aristotelian metaphysics. Deconstruction is useful because, as Joseph Adamson explains, it “expose[s] the problematic nature of … concepts such as truth … [and] overturn[s] metaphysics.”26 Derrida himself is decidedly coy when it comes to defining deconstruction. To cite from his own work: •

“What is deconstruction not? Everything, of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course.”27

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“Deconstruction doesn’t consist in a set of theorems, axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods … There is no deconstruction, deconstruction has no specific object.”28 “Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one … It must also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an operation.”29 “Deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible.”30

Such light-hearted diversionary banter is unhelpful. One may find it witty or exasperating, but Derrida endlessly introspects – chatters in philosophical-sounding language – it is his modus operandi: he affirms something and he takes it back; he says that X must mean Y and that Y can never mean X; he puns, he equivocates; he deconstructs joyfully, slyly, in whatever way he can; he holds himself aloof from intended meaning while allowing the readers to puzzle and strain; he says it all with a straight face but with his tongue in his cheek. Or does he? He plots these carefree flashes of wit so carefully. But is this only obfuscation? Or is there a deeper meaning here? The deconstructionist strives to displace, decentre, topple over, pull the rug out from underneath that wobbly old edifice of metaphysical realism presupposed by naive interpreters like those Aristotileans. Gary Rolfe captures the mindset well: “The bottom line, the degree zero, of deconstruction, lies in this: ‘deconstruction is the active antithesis of everything that criticism ought to be if one accepts its traditional values and concepts’ (Norris) … Deconstruction consists in putting this authority ‘out of joint’ (Derrida). Deconstruction is the enemy of the authorized/authoritarian text, the text that tries to tell it like it is, including this one.”31 This is all a bit of fun, but taken seriously, how is one to endorse such a decisive rejection of authority when, for rankand-file Derridians, the master’s hallowed missives are themselves an “authorized/authoritarian text,” a text that tells it like it is? As soon as we legitimize deconstruction, we have invested it with authority. It becomes an authoritative guide to what we as critics are supposed to do. Deconstruction is the enemy of fixed meaning, but a fixed methodology is as limiting as fixed meaning. Should we deconstruct deconstruction? All the irony in the world will not eliminate the underlying inconsistency. Deconstructionists render the meanings of texts problematic by focusing on peripheral details and linguistic ambiguities, by mixing

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up historical contexts, by conceptual oppositions and the artful use of rival interpretations. Using whatever tactic works best, the conscientious deconstructionist beavers away, destroying the dam instead of constructing it. But the fact that a clever critic can intentionally misinterpret a text – turn it on its head, with panache or wit – does not demonstrate that meaning is irretrievable or that realist metaphysics is impossible. One can do all sorts of strange and wonderful tricks with language – like the liar’s paradox – leading readers down however many rabbit holes with Alice. But all this seems to show is that creativity can be turned to obfuscatory ends. It does not show that meaning is unavailable or that the world is a metaphysical conundrum. Perhaps it shows that we can turn the world into a conundrum by an artful dislocation of language. But that is hardly news. The Sophists realized this a long time ago. Consider, finally, Derrida’s concept of différance. Some explanation is in order. Derrida’s neologism différance and the ordinary French term différence sound the same. They cannot be distinguished aloud; even the difference in spelling is very slight: an “a” replaces the “é” (but the acute accent turns the “é” into a similar “a” sound). Derrida aims to demonstrate here that language is readily prey to misunderstandings. But consider the issue more closely. Différance comes from the somewhat antiquated French verb différer, which has two meanings: to defer until later (remettre à plus tard), and to be different from (ne pas être semblable). Derrida’s subversive suggestion is that we are to use the term différance with an “a” to refer to the way meaning is deferred when words need to be explained by further words that need to be explained by further words, and so on, ad infinitum; we are to use the word différence with an “é” to refer to differences between things. The exact same signifier, the same word-sound, can be used, then, to pick out two distinct meanings, which illustrates (allegedly) how language can be subverted by a fatal indeterminacy of meaning. Derrida thinks that this is a very important lesson – and to some extent it is – but surely he gets carried away when he breathlessly suggests that such confusion definitively scuttles any possibility of effective communication. To begin with, it is odd that Derrida, who pays such particular attention to language, should overlook an important feature of the French verb différer. It is true that the verb différer can be used in two different senses, but the use of différer to mean “deferral or postponement” is transitive (with a direct object): différer un rendez-vous =

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“to postpone an appointment.” The use of différer to mean “differentiate or distinguish between” is intransitive (with an indirect object): Les deux questions différant par leur nature et leur urgence, nous les traiterons séparément = “As they differ in their nature and urgency, the two questions will be treated separately.”32 This grammatical rule makes the two different uses of the verb conspicuously distinguishable. There is no ambiguity here. If we have a direct object, we mean différer in the first sense; if we have an indirect object, we mean différer in the second sense. Grappling with the meanings of words is a tricky business. Language exhibits insufficiencies and deficiencies that require careful consideration. Foreign-language translation is particularly problematic (as Derrida points out). One might argue that we can never precisely capture the tone, the connotations, the tacit humour in a foreignlanguage expression. Still, it is an exaggeration to conclude that these difficulties pose an impenetrable barrier to communication. Consider an actual case – not a contrived example – from French slang. Informally, in Quebec, one sometimes comes across the following jocular expression: au moins, on n’est pas arrivé à Saint Clin-Clin-des Creux (pronounced sane-klehn-klehn day-kreuhhh). This rustic turn of phrase might be translated as something like, “Well, at least we didn’t end up in the remote countryside.” But this does not do justice to the cheeky phrase. As Derridians might complain, there is a richness and resonance to the Québécois patois that is very difficult to capture in English. Does it follow that the meaning of the phrase is somehow irretrievable? Of course not. We can tease out the nuances with some patient, careful explaining. In old Quebec, villages were named after their parish saint: St-Célestin, St-François-de-L’île-d’Orléans, St-André-du-Lac-SaintJean. “Saint Clin-Clin-des Creux” operates, then, as a made-up name for a village that so remote it bears the silly name “Saint “Clin-Clin” of the Creux. The word creux (“hollow”) suggests that which is physically deep (like a valley), which is very far (the remotest part), and which is empty-headed or backward (as goes the prejudice against rural people – hicks, hosers, hillbillies). So saying that we did not end up in Saint Clin-Clin of the Hollows means something like, “at least we didn’t wander so far out in the countryside that we ended up among the hillbillies at the end of the world somewhere.” But there is even more. The nonsense name Clin-Clin is reminiscent of the sound of a cowbell. It is onomatopoeia; it sounds – clink!

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clink! – like the clanging of a cowbell. So, Saint “Clin-Clin” sounds like Saint Clang-Clang or, in effect, Saint Cow-Bells. (An alternative version of the phrase runs: Saint glin-glin des meu-meu. But meu-meu is the sound a cow makes: i.e., moo-moo.) In its rapid-fire pronunciation, the expression clin-clin also recalls un clin d’oeil, a knowing “wink.” So the original expression communicates something like: “At least we didn’t end up – wink! wink! – in the Parish of the Cow Bells among the Hillbillies at the end of the world somewhere.” Even when we translate such a far-fetched phrase into English, the meaning is not, as Derrida would have it, irretrievable. It just takes some patient, careful unpacking. So-called différance – the presence of subtle, hard-to-discern shades of meanings – is not a definitive obstacle to communication. Language is a rich repository of subtle, sometimes obscure nuances. But deconstructionists want to leap from that fact to the conclusion that meaning is utterly indeterminate. This is hyperbole. Indeed, Derrida articulates such a bleak view of the power of language that it is hard to see how any meaningful theory would still be possible. His system of interpretation (or misinterpretation) disparages what literature is mostly about – effective communication. It places obstacles in the way of communication. But we can understand what literature means – at least to some large extent – which is why we treasure it. Derrida, and Derridians, are not given to understatement. They believe that the possibility of différance not only confuses us but also subverts the whole edifice of Western metaphysics. Derrida wades knee-deep into philosophy, going so far as to hypostasize différance and identify it with an inexorable elusiveness at the very heart of things. Borrowing from the theological notion of a via negativa, he spins out an anti-metaphysics (an anti-essentialism) based on a generalized possibility of error. It is the possibility of error, not knowledge, that he champions. For Derrida, everything is a text: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” But the language we access must be permeated by différance, a cosmic Heideggerian hiddenness that lurks (or not?) inside the deepest things. Derrida directly addresses the issue of metaphysics. He reports: “[The] metaphysical text must retain a mark of what is lost or put in reserve, set aside [i.e., différance] … [This] is a trace, and a trace of the effacement of a trace. In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it … proposes both the monument and the mirage of the trace, the trace as simultaneously traced and effaced, simultaneously alive and dead, alive as always to simulate even life in its preserved inscription; it is a

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pyramid.”33 In more straightforward terms, Derrida discerns at the centre of existence something erased, lost, or set aside; something weighty and substantial (like a monument) that is only a superficial appearance (like a mirage); something that makes a mark but that erases any mark it makes; something that is dead and alive; something that merely copies (simulates) the meaning of life; something that is a pyramid. A pyramid is a monument built to house the dead, except, of course, the dead are no longer there, for, like most Egyptian tombs, the grave of metaphysics has been robbed and stands empty. Metaphysics is like a copy of an inscription in hieroglyphics preserved on a tombstone worn away by age. Something erased is still there. Or is it? Derrida waxes poetical. Différance is and is not. It is “something other than presence and absence.” It leaves a fugitive “trace,” but “the trace has … no place, for effacement belongs to the very nature of the trace.” It must be “a trace and a trace of the effacement of a trace.” A trace that must “disappear in its appearing.”34 Derrida opposes any notion of Aristotelian substance: “Effacement must always be able to take over the trace [of effacement]; otherwise it would not be a trace but an indestructible and monumental substance.”35 Yet Derrida seems to make différance an essential feature of reality. Even if différance is natureless, this naturelessness is a fixed, unwavering, necessary property of it, which would make the metaphysics that describes it unambiguously true. (An embarrassing conundrum.) So Derrida tries to say that différance neither has a nature nor is it natureless. It must be something beyond being and non-being, like the God of Plotinus and Proclus and the Neoplatonists. Given this mystical-sounding language, one might think that Derrida is on the brink of identifying différance with God. He goes so far as to borrow Eckhart’s term for God, the nomen innominabile (the “unnameable name”), but he cannot bring himself to assert the positive existence of a deity: “what is unnameable here [i.e., différance] is not some ineffable being that cannot be approached by a name: like God, for example.”36 Derrida’s différance is more like Locke’s pre-noumenal concept of substance, except that the metaphysical je ne sais quoi Locke situates beneath the appearances of things is supposed to glue things together, whereas différance does the opposite: it unglues the world, fracturing and separating things rather than joining them together.37 This is not positive methodology. It is like analysis by epistemological acid bath. Différance eats away at the joints and ligaments in existence, cutting things apart, surrounding them with a void of misunderstanding, and

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leaving us with an inexpressible paradox that risks betraying the antirealist impetus that motivates the project. Derrida’s différance is as empty as the conceptual space that separates two people who inevitably misunderstand each other. The “trace” of effacement that penetrates and surrounds everything is nothing more than a reification of a grammatical slip, a linguistic error that isolates people, making effective communication impossible. Genuine mysticism aims at enlightenment, at transcendence, at union with everything. Différance ends in separation and misunderstanding. It is a missed mysticism, a mysticism of the gap, of the fissure, of the unintelligible. Derrida seems intent on turning literary criticism into literature, or perhaps philosophy. But Derrida’s metaphysics-with-an-asterisk is a metaphysics* of cognitive failure. He may borrow his philosophical terminology from the Neoplatonic tradition of via negativa, but, in Christianity at least, that tradition ends in a perfect, loving Other that is intelligible, good, and beautiful. Even Aristotle’s earlier non-­ Christian god (the prime mover) is the exemplar of all cognitive ­perfection. Derrida’s postmodern via negativa leads in the opposite direction. His goal is to dispense with the naive philosophical project of understanding the world, and he goes about it by erecting obstacles to knowledge and lucid communication. In doing so, he reifies the possibility of error, leaving us with a destructive, not merely a “deconstructive” approach to language and literature. Derrida’s rhetoric (like Baudrillard’s) is eschatological; he heralds the “glad tidings” that metaphysics has come to an end. Not everyone agrees, of course. In a fiercely combative piece, Rainer Friedrich denounces “the apocalyptic tone” of Derrida’s criticism. He writes: “[Derrida participates] in the interminable death-sentencing [by postmodernism] … in his declarations of the end of all that constitutes Western civilization … [He excels in] the general postmodern tendency of ‘going-one-better in eschatological eloquence’ in proclaiming the end of almost anything. In the notorious ludic manner [he] has found so congenial, his [thought] comes down to the standard paradoxes in which poststructuralism so delights and of which it never tires of tiring us: ‘an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without message and destination, without revelation,’ culminating in ‘a closure without end, an end without end.’”38 Clearly, battle lines have been drawn. The culture wars are about such things. But, philosophically, what are we to make of all this? I will argue that the metaphysical antirealism Derrida takes for granted

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impoverishes rather than enriches criticism. As far as I can see, in Derrida’s eloquent tirades there is nothing that provides a devastating rebuttal to Aristotle’s metaphysics. The notion that metaphysics is unable to discover the true nature of things presupposes a partisan account of Kantian principles. We may find Derrida’s style mesmerizing (along with that of like-minded theorists such as de Man, Žižek, and Fish), but this is not a matter of rigorous philosophy. Derrida has embraced the second skeptical phase of Enlightenment knowledge formation: in his mind, structuralism has been found wanting, leaving only skepticism in its wake. There is no new constructive metaphysics in sight. (He himself elaborates a metaphysics-with-an-asterisk, but he does not want us to consider that as a metaphysics.) In his criticism of Derrida, Friedrich refers to a passage from David Lodge’s Small World in which the protagonist (modelled after American critic Stanley Fish) describes “deconstruction as ‘the last intellectual thrill left – like sawing through the branch which you’re sitting on.’”39 If a critic like Culler sees this as a metaphor for poststructuralism’s sophistication and a felicitous “instance of Nietzsche’s injunction in The Gay Science to ‘live dangerously,’” Friedrich points out the obvious. If some edgy theorist claims that “if they fall there is no ‘ground’ to hit,” this does not mean there is no ground to hit.40 As traditional metaphysics insists, the world forces itself upon us in ways we did not devise and cannot correct. When we fall down on something hard, it hurts whether we like it or not. The point of philosophy is not to deny the sometimes painful consequences the world imposes upon us but to construct a coherent world view based on the data we have. The critical method of decentring literary texts is a way of shifting the focus from the text to the literary aspirations of the critic. Decentring X is really a disguised way of centring Y: X is the text; Y is the mind of the critic. Derrida turned critical attention away from the literary text to his own quasi-philosophical concerns. We need to find a better philosophy, one that prioritizes the text and retreats into the background. I argue that Aristotelian realism is the best alternative to the skeptical attitudes sometimes taken for granted in theoretical discussion.

I I .6 R e h a b il itat in g S o c rates, Boethi us , A q u in as , a n d t h e Tradi ti on I insist here that the skeptical approach that theorists such as Saussure, Baudrillard, and Derrida embrace is philosophically naive. When all is said and done, traditional Aristotelian realism is a more sophisticated

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way of doing metaphysics. There is a reason why so many mainstream philosophers, down through the ages, have pushed realism. It is not because they are arrogant or gullible, but because realism makes philosophical sense. Beliefs about the objective reality of the things we perceive in the world around us are inextricably embedded in language. We cannot use language to meaningfully evaluate literature without bringing back, as a default position, a common sense Aristotelian realism about the world. The radical metaphysical skepticism I have been discussing is known  under many labels: antirealism, anti-essentialism, anti-­ representationalism, anti-foundationalism, deconstruction, postmodernism. It has gained a considerable following in contemporary literary theory. It is largely based, nonetheless, on a caricature of earlier ­epistemological attitudes. Mainstream philosophers never believed that it was their job to provide an absolute proof for knowledge. What Derrida calls différance, understood as the possibility of error or the inevitable incompleteness of human understanding, was always a part of Western metaphysics, long before Derrida coined the word. Philosophers down through the ages were well aware of skeptical ­challenges to knowledge. Anyone who suggests that earlier philosophers (including religious philosophers) posited some sort of absolute knowledge (in the modern sense) has not diligently read primary sources. Socrates’s adamant insistence that the only thing he knew was that he did not know comes to mind. Or consider Plato’s Timaeus, his dialogue on cosmology. Timaeus begins the exercise with a pious warning to Socrates: If we are not quite crazy … we must pray to all the gods and goddesses that what we say will be pleasing to them … Don’t therefore be surprised then Socrates, if on many matters ­concerning the gods and the whole world of change we are unable to in every respect and on every occasion to render a ­consistent and accurate account. You must be satisfied if our account is as likely as any, remembering both that I and you who are sitting in judgment on it are merely human, and should not look for anything more than is probable in such matters.41 It is an irresponsible exaggeration to portray ancient thinkers like Timaeus, Socrates, and Plato as uncritical, knee-jerk dogmatists who ignored the limitations of human fallibility, blithely assuming that they

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had certain truth. I will say more about Aristotle later, but the same spirit of careful reservation permeates the Hellenistic period. And what about the religiously dogmatic Middle Ages? Thomas Aquinas defined truth as an “adequation” of intellect to the object: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus.42 Truth happens when the mind contrives an adequate idea of things in the world. Thomas never believed that a human being could perfectly know anything. That would require omniscience. Only God perfectly knows the world. The metaphysics of epistemological overreach that Derrida and colleagues attack is, mostly, an exaggeration. Thomas aims at reasonableness, at an adequate idea of the world, not at “Capital T Truth” (whatever exactly that pejorative phrase is supposed to mean). Gudrun Schulz (1993) goes so far as to argue that Thomas’s fallibilistic account of truth is, more or less, the same as the Kantian view.43 This is overly enthusiastic. If, however, Schulz means to claim that the scholastics were not responsible for the “logocentrism” of Western metaphysics that Derrida and colleagues deride, he makes a valid point. It is the modern positivists, not the scholastics, who champion logocentrism by their excessive epistemological demands. From very early on, the key Kantian insight – that the mind plays a role in organizing and structuring what we perceive and know – is already part of the metaphysical tradition. Thomas understands that the nature of the mind structures how we perceive and know. So do other medieval philosophers. In the Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy tells Boethius: Every subject, that is known, is comprehended … according to the nature of those who know it. [So] the roundness of a body may be known in one way by sight, in another way by touch … [And] man himself is differently comprehended by the senses, by imagination, by reason, and by intelligence … In the knowledge of all things, then, the subject uses its own standard of capability, and not those of the objects known … Every judgment … is an act of the person who judges, and therefore each man must of necessity perform his own action from his own capability and not the capability of any other.44 Here, then, is an early medieval text that acknowledges that the capacities and limitations of the human mind predetermine and c­ ontrol knowledge-formation. Boethius describes a staircase of four different

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stages of knowing (from lower to higher): sense perception (sensus), imagination (imaginatio), reasoning (ratio), and intelligence (intellegentia). Someone who only has sense perception cannot know the world the way someone who has imagination can know the world; someone who only has imagination cannot know the world the way someone who has reasoning can know the world; and so on, for all four levels. Insomuch as the knower lacks ability, their knowledge will be correspondingly restricted. Boethius goes on to claim that humans cannot know the world the way God knows the world because they lack epistemological capacity. Although I will not trace back the history of metaphysics here, one can find these ideas even earlier in the tradition (in the Pre-Socratics, for example). Suffice it to say that the metaphysics of epistemological overreach that Derrida and colleagues attack is a straw man. Most great thinkers in the tradition are epistemological moderates. They had sophisticated, thought-out positions about the limits of knowledge and the nature of human cognition. They were not naively optimistic. They left room for the mysterious, for the fragmented and incomplete, for the elusive character of existence. Yet they believed that knowledge of  the true nature of things outside ourselves is possible. I will argue, with a specific focus on Aristotle, that they were, in the main, correct.

I I. 7 W h at ’ s W ro n g w i th Anti reali sm? B r ie f ly I aim to show, in the following section, that Kant has not won his argument with Aristotelian metaphysics. This may come as news to non-specialists immersed in contemporary literary theory. I do not dispute Kant’s important position in the Western canon. It is the fashionable antirealism that takes its inspiration from Kant’s metaphysics that I am discussing here. I fully admit there are more sophisticated ways of interpreting Kant, but a knee-jerk antirealism has won the day, and I aim to investigate this poor man’s Kantianism here. Kant devises an ingenious narrative so as to undermine any ordinary, realist interpretation of human experience. We all believe, for example, that every event must have a cause. This is a metaphysical belief. If, however, most of us assume that cause-and-effect is part of the true nature of things, antirealists are more cautious. They (correctly) point out that “it is the human mind that attaches a cause to every event.” They conclude, more or less, that it is the mind – not the world – that

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imposes causality on things. It is a mistake to naively project a mere aspect of our conscious experience – the relationship of cause and effect – onto the outside nature of the world as if we could know there really is causality “out there” in the world. Consider the Kantian notion of space. Georges Dicker explains: “[Kantian space is] a permanent, built-in feature of the human knower as opposed to something that exists independently of the knower.”45 Dicker goes on to propose a thought-experiment: Suppose that a man has a pair of blue-tinted glasses permanently and irremovably affixed to his head … It is obvious that he can never see anything except as blue … The way he sees things (i.e., as blue) is determined by the glasses rather than by the object seen … Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of space is that just as the man in the analogy has a permanently fixed pair of blue glasses that makes everything he sees appear blue, so humans are equipped with a cognitive faculty, which Kant calls “sensibility,” that makes everything we see spatial.46 Seeing space in the world is like looking through those blue sunglasses: the glasses, not the world, turn everything blue. Just so, the mind endows the world with spatial aspects by imposing spatiality on it. Space comes from the mind, not the world. What the world is really like – whether space exists “out there” – we can never know. For we can never take off the “blue sunglasses” or the “spatial goggles” of the mind to see the true nature of the world as it objectively exists on its own. Whenever we try to access the world, the mind gets in the way, imposing its own unique reading of things. A textbook makes the same point in more general terms: “All of us experience the world as consisting of external objects. Not only that, we see the objects as existing in space and time and as related to one another causally. Why? Because, Kant theorized, our minds impose these forms on our sensations. Our sense-data are processed by the mind in such a way that we have the sort of experience we do … Kant’s revolutionary theory … explains how we can be sure of many of the things we are sure of.”47 Kant argues, in effect, that metaphysical properties like space, time, causality, self, identity, and so on come from us, not from the nature of the world. The mind imposes these distinct categories on our experience. To assume that the world is as we apprehend it to be is to fall into naive realism. It is to overlook the

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role the mind plays in perception and thought. This is what earlier philosophers were guilty of. Antirealists assume that this beginner’s Kantianism is more sophisticated than any plain-person understanding of the world, but there are many problems here. To begin with, the blue-sunglass example misfires. If, as most people believe, blue already exists in the world, then the sunglasses only filter the man’s experience so as to restrict it to one aspect of what is already there. To make the example fit, one would have to show that any blueness in the world comes only from the man’s sunglasses and that blue could not exist without the sunglasses. That is out of sorts with what most of us believe. Word this in a different way. Ignore the question about whether or not blue objectively exists in the world. If, wherever we turn our gaze, all we see is blue, wouldn’t we come to the conclusion that we must have blue sunglasses affixed to our heads? And if we know that we have blue sunglasses affixed to our heads, then we would know something about the true nature of things in the world. Which would mean that realism is correct. Antirealism disputes this. Antirealists believe that true natures are forever outside our grasp, but obviously, if we know that we are walking around with blue sunglasses affixed to our heads, then we know something true about natures in the world. We can push this even further. What happens when the blue consciousness of the mind looks inward at itself? The mind will experience blue introspection. It will see that it is blue when it looks at itself. How could it not? If, however, the mind is capable of true selfknowledge, it will know the true nature of something in the world (for the mind is something in the world). Yet Kant seems to be saying this is impossible. Again, say all this in another way. If, as Kant argues, we know that the mind imposes space, time, causality, and other categories on conscious experience, then we already know something true about the nature of the mind. That is enough to get a foothold for realism. If the mind is space-imposing, time-imposing, and so on, then asserting that mind has these powers must count – for Kantian reasons – as a true metaphysical claim. But antirealists tell us that metaphysics is dead, that we cannot do metaphysics because we cannot know anything true about the natures in the world. Any such account defeats itself. Perhaps the antirealist could insist that we only see the appearance of the mind, not what the mind is. But on the Kantian view, the mind is the author of those appearances; it creates what we see. So, we know

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already something about the mind; it has the requisite powers to produce these appearances, and, knowing this, we know something about what something in the world is. Someone who claims we can know nothing about the nature of the mind because the mind makes us see the world in a certain way has already contradicted themselves. Is this a logical, a reasonable philosophical position? Antirealism is, at the very least, a very odd theory. It is important to see just how odd it is. Compare the human mind to an ordinary camera. A camera takes a picture at whatever it is pointed at. The mechanism of the camera and whatever is in front of the lens cooperate to produce the picture. But a Kantian camera is not like that. In the case of a Kantian camera, the camera – all by itself – has to make the picture. Suppose, then, you were to take a picture of the “bright blue sea” with a Kantian camera. Seeing that it is a Kantian camera, the blueness in the photograph tells you nothing about the nature of the sea in front of the lens; for all you know there is no sea in front of the lens. For it is the camera that is doing all the work. Indeed, the Kantian has to maintain that every case of cause and effect, every case of spatial extension, every case of temporal chronology, and so on is produced by the camera. It does not matter how many pictures we take, we can have no true knowledge of the outside world. But is this not extreme? How could it be that whatever is in front of the camera lens does not alter what appears in the photograph, at least to some degree? And if it does alter what is included in the final picture, why wouldn’t the resulting picture tell us something about the true nature of the world? Kant “saves” metaphysics by positing a human mind that is the same for every human being. On his account, the principles of mathematics, geometry, logic, science, metaphysics, and even morality (via the synthetic a priori) are universal because all human minds are the same. But this seems to be a metaphysics that gets epistemology wrong by confusing “truth” with “consensus.” To say that we all accept a proposition is not the same as saying that that proposition is true. We should not conflate claims about truth, about what is the case, with claims about what everyone thinks is the case. If we all agree with one another because we all have the same type of mind, this is not enough to make our beliefs true. True belief tells us what the world is like; consensus is about what we all agree on. Consensus may be true or false depending on the circumstance. Certainly, the fact that a consensus is a ­consensus does not make it true.

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Antirealism is unfalsifiable because it ends in a radical skepticism. As the ancient skeptics demonstrated, one cannot disprove skepticism. What is needed to make knowledge possible is not more logical argument. What is needed is a reasonable faith in the origins of human intelligence. We need to replace a despairing suspicion about human reason with a moderate belief in human reason. If human beings are fallible, it need not follow that they are entirely in the wrong. Human experience provides us with hard evidence. There is no evidence that the metaphysical principle “every effect has a cause” is wrong. All the evidence is in the other direction. Are we supposed to be suspicious of this principle? On what basis? If the mind can minimally grasp the reality of things, it makes sense to say that every effect presupposes a cause. (But more on this below.) Antirealism disqualifies the only evidence we have by making up a completely unverifiable story. The Kantian never proves – rather, he or she assumes that all our experience may be radically out of touch with the nature of the world. With what evidence? The old skeptical trick points to obvious mistakes: the bent oar, optical illusions, hallucinations, past scientific mistakes. But none of these show that the mind has no knowledge of the world. They only show that the human mind sometimes makes mistakes. Everything we know must be processed through the mind. If we take the position that the mind is untrustworthy, this contaminates all evidence that is humanly available. It is this totalizing move that is unhelpful and unsupported by the evidence. To make the Kantian narrative work, we have to have faith in it. In a secular age that is less than gentle toward religious faith, how oddly inconsistent that we are asked to have faith in an anti-metaphysics that subverts the evidence of human experience, which is the only evidence we have. We can accept human fallibility without a totalizing skepticism. The Aristotelian realist, contrary to a well-worn caricature, need not believe we have an “absolute” proof of anything. What he or she believes is that we have to move from fixed starting points to as reasonable a picture of the world as possible. Knowledge is a combination of the hard reality of the external world interacting with an inner thoughtfulness. When the camera of the mind takes a picture, what is in front of the lens determines the content. Not exclusively, but to a large extent. Literary theory largely takes antirealism for granted. Commentators such as Saussure, Baudrillard, Derrida, Barthes, de Man, Žižek, Culler, and Fish write eloquently  – indeed, more eloquently than most

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philosophers. But they rely on an argument from authority. They assume that antirealism is true because that is what they have been taught, because this is what their academic peers, their mentors, and their colleagues believe, because this is, now, in Kuhn’s terminology, the paradigm of “normal criticism,” the initial theoretical standpoint within which theorists and critics have learned to operate.48 Any suggestion that the antirealist paradigm is fundamentally misguided may seem inconceivable to them. If, however, antirealism has won the day, stubbornly Aristotelian metaphysicians have plenty of philosophical reasons they can brandish in support of their more moderate point of view. I have tried to show, then, that the present antirealist rejection of metaphysics is not immune to philosophical criticism. We need not be intimidated by eloquent prophets announcing the death of metaphysics. Antirealism reduces to a skepticism that, consistently followed, makes knowledge impossible. It is not a large step to a value relativism that undermines the very notion of literature. If we cannot know the true nature of things in the world, then how can we know the true nature of particular texts? And if we cannot know the true nature of particular texts, then how can we distinguish between those that are literature and those that are not? The resulting classification seems arbitrary, at best, a matter of personal prejudice and taste. Hence the newfound focus on mere “texts” as opposed to “literature” in university English departments. There is a worrisome epistemological issue here, as I discuss below. But the main problem is that contemporary theory is rooted in the wrong metaphysics.

I I .8 A r is to t e l ia n R e a l ism: Very Bri efly But enough with the opposition. Although I do not have time to provide a full accounting of Aristotelian metaphysics here, I will quickly set out what Aristotelian metaphysical realism fundamentally entails. Once we get our metaphysics right, it will be easier to evaluate literature. Aristotle and his ancient and his medieval colleagues are committed from the start to the idea that intelligence is trustworthy and knowledge is possible. Intellectual first principles have to be accepted as they are. We can then extend our understanding and discover and discern truths we did not know before. Inquiry is not a waste of time, a sin, a mere game, a mental illness. Some arguments are better than others; wilful ignorance is contemptible; wisdom is an admirable aspiration.

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We have to continually choose between laziness and insight, selfinterest and objectivity, rigorous truth and mere distraction. Unlike the Cartesian, the Aristotelian does not start inquiry in radical skepticism. We must accept that we are fallible – befuddled, finite, imperfect, distracted, utterly human. But we know that we are fallible; that is already knowledge. To keep insisting that we might be wrong is not very helpful. In some very general sense, our own fallibility is undeniable, but we need some truth, however tenuous, to begin with. The mainstream position in the history of Western philosophy has never been that knowledge begins with an “absolute” proof for anything. Knowledge is about moving from what we already know toward explanations that will push us still further. Of course, we sometimes realize, in hindsight, that we have been mistaken and that we have to return to our first principles and correct them. Still, through the diligent exercise of observation and reason, we can make progress. Older philosophers accepted a weaker sort of epistemological justification to start with and, thus, avoided the Enlightenment collapse into skepticism. Mostly, they steered clear of unwinnable epistemological battles with radical skeptics and championed rigorous, evidence-based reasoning, both inductive and deductive, from accepted first principles. Our experience of the world is always particular, but there has to be a reliable way of moving from the particular to the universal. This is the power of reason; we have to believe in reason if we are to get anywhere in the journey toward knowledge. Some of these authors – not Aristotle – were undoubtedly suspicious of literature. Aristotle believed that we can know something about the nature of things in the world. We can understand what an eclipse is, why deciduous trees lose their leaves in the fall, why keeping promises is more honourable than breaking them, why giving a military guard to a tyrant is politically dangerous, but also why some poems are better than other poems. We can identify different natures in the world and construct accurate definitions of things. We can learn the general principles of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, science, art, and morality. But this also means, by extension, that we can appreciate and understand literature. We can study texts and discern their nature just as we can figure out the nature of other things in the world. We can define what a genre of literature is and develop reasonable strategies for exegesis and interpretation. There is no need for absolute proofs or symbolic logic; what we need is sensitive, evidence-based worldly

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reasoning. This book is intended as an introduction to this philosophical approach to literature. Winters makes a telling comment. He writes, “I am acquainted … with the arguments which prove that the wall is not there, but if I try to step through the wall, I find that the wall is there notwithstanding the arguments.”49 This common sense response to Descartes’s methodological skepticism recalls the incident where Jonathan Swift tried to refute Berkeley’s alleged skepticism by kicking a rock. Such realworld “arguments” will not convince the up-to-date philosopher or the Heideggerian literary critic.50 Aristotelian philosophy presents, however, as a highly developed philosophical alternative, a metaphysical realism that, once we get past the caricatures, provides an articulate response to all sorts of philosophical questions (more than I can discuss here). The metaphysical realism that came to the fore in the Aristotelianism tradition takes the objective reality of the external world seriously. In our daily interactions, we constantly meet up with something outside of ourselves, something that impresses itself upon us, whether we like it or not. When we lean against a brick wall, it pushes back, refusing to budge. The bricks have a hard-edged texture even if we would prefer a soft cushion. This is the world. We are forced to confront a world that does not conform to our own whims and fancies. We are forced to trust sense perception (mostly), to add and subtract correctly, to reason through problems, to make correct distinctions, to identify patterns and types, to pay attention to the hard evidence. We are forced to make moral and political decisions. The world exterior to our wants, whims, and wills has an independent nature that imposes itself on us. This world has an inalienable moral and religious dimension. Acceptance of this basic fact of human existence is where knowledge starts. This is all we need for metaphysical realism. We should not simplify things. Metaphysical realism is not the view that the human mind plays no role in knowledge-formation. The mind is an objective part of the world, with an objective nature that filters, shapes, and evaluates incoming data. Metaphysical realism does not deny any of this. Nor does it entail any rejection of the transcendent. As we shall see, literature is one way of accessing objective reality; religion is another. Despite his robust commitment to logic and science, Aristotle leaves plenty of room for the Divine, for morality, and for literature. On an Aristotelian account, literature provides a truthful account of things. It helps us make sense of the scattered evidence. This book

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is part of the evidence. The last words of your dying grandmother are evidence. The fact that we dream is another kind of evidence. If people believe in immaterial souls and angels, that is part of the evidence. Morality is part of the evidence; so is mysticism; and so, unfortunately, is evil. I will argue, in the next chapter, that reading literature is a path to wisdom and that literature too must count as part of the evidence. But enough for the moment. Having dealt with metaphysics, we must now turn to epistemology, that is, to a consideration of what we can know. Once we settle on a more reasonable epistemology, we can venture into an in-depth discussion of how Aristotle can help us understand what literature is.

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3 Wisdom Epistemology

III. 1 L it e r at ure and E p is t e m o l o g y Di vorced I want to propose, here, a general concept of wisdom as an ideal that the best literature promotes and encourages. Who produces the best literature? The wise person. Who best understands the best literature? The wise person. Who is the best reader of literature? The wise person. There are many complications, but this is the basic stance I defend here. Some recent work in literary criticism derides wisdom as a possible vantage point from which to understand or evaluate literature. I move in the opposite direction. According to a misleading stereotype, contemporary philosophy can be divided into analytic (Anglo-American) and Continental schools. If Continental philosophy lionized Kant, analytic philosophy lionized David Hume and often sees itself as an extension of Hume’s skeptical epistemology. Although analytic philosophy has had considerably less influence on literary theory, it is widely viewed as the authoritative voice in contemporary logic and epistemology. It prides itself on rigorous, scientific, technical treatments of knowledge. Richard Rorty described the history of analytic philosophy as one of total, unmitigated defeat: “The notion of logical analysis turned on itself and committed slow suicide.”1 Suffice it to say, here, that the initial burst of optimism that spurred analytic philosophy fell away as the movement, under duress, moved in extremely diverse, even eclectic directions. There is a pluralism today that resists easy classification, but a logical thread that runs through much of analytic

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epistemology has not served literary criticism well, for reasons I will briefly sort through here. In the corpus, Aristotle transitions easily between metaphysics, morality, philosophy of human nature, epistemology, and poetics. There are technical bits, of course, but Aristotle shifts between these different subject-matters holding, more or less, to the same epistemological point of view. That is much more difficult in the modern dispensation. I will argue that literature is chiefly concerned with the communication of meaning through the use of natural language that refers, in a metaphysically realist sense, to natures in the world. But this is not what modern analytic epistemology is chiefly about. In contemporary philosophy, we have a specialization of the knowledge project that is very far removed from literary preoccupations. Literature is often fiction. It proceeds by analogy, allusions, figures of speech, exaggeration and understatement, irony, genre. It rarely makes arguments. Mostly, it assumes a position of authority and transmits truth directly, without trying to prove what is the case. I will argue that when a novelist creates a truthful portrait of something, this is knowledge. We intuit the truth of what is being communicated. But this is very different from the view of knowledge that took pride of place in epistemologically oriented analytic philosophy. If knowledge is true justified belief, as the old formula has it, then modern interpretations of knowledge seriously detract from our appreciation of literature. Here, in a simplified schema, is how modern epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic part ways with literature. (A) Knowledge as Proof Ian Hacking traces modern epistemological attitudes all the way back to the seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who “thought that truth is constituted by proof.”2 Leibniz had interesting metaphysical reasons for this, which I will not develop here. What is crucial is the new focus on the need for logical justification: “A proof gives the reason why something is true, and indeed is the cause of the truth.”3 Hence the emphasis, in modern analytic circles, on arguments understood as a proper “arrangement of sentences” organized so as to produce a valid conclusion.4 Suppose I see an apple on the table. There it is in front of me. I see it! Usually, that puts an end to any further questions. I saw the apple

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with my own eyes; it was there! If, however, we were asked to prove it was there, philosophers can raise endless objections to any naive reliance on sense perception. It was an optical illusion; perhaps you are a brain in a vat; false memory syndrome happens! But the modern epistemological project of proving everything or of believing only what we can prove pushes us away from ordinary life and literature. Literature accepts that the apple you see on the table really is there and that you and everyone else knows that it is there. One could write a story, of course, about the illusion of an apple on the table, but the demanding project of a complete scientific or logical justification of things is cast aside for more important issues. Identifying knowledge with proof takes us away from literature. Philosophers generally identify knowledge as true justified belief. If, however, truth requires proof and literature has little to do with proof, it will follow that literature has little to do with knowledge. Surely, a disastrous conclusion! Except that this unfriendly epistemological disparagement of literature seems to derive from a confusion. We need to make an important distinction. I can make two very different claims. I can say (1) that X is true or (2) that I can prove that X is true. Statement (2) presupposes (1), but (1) does not presuppose (2). Literature is preoccupied with (1), whereas analytic epistemology is preoccupied with (2). These are different (albeit compatible) aspirations. We can get to the truth of things without the apparatus of formal logic, without proofs from set theory, without scientific investigation. I may know, for example, that I am thinking about X right now, but there is no way I can prove to you that this is true. Literature, which is often fictitious, copies human experience with such verisimilitude that we come to know that what it says is true. How this happens is very different from the elaborate mathematical formalisms favoured by analytic philosophy. (B) Meaning as a Truth-Value If, in a skeptical age, modern epistemologists have identified truth with proof, they have also tended to identify meaning (in the simplest case) with a designation of true or false. What does the sentence “there is an apple on the table” mean? In ordinary language and in literature, the sentence refers to a specific state of affairs in the world: there is an object with a certain nature called an “apple” located on a piece of furniture with a flat top that serves as a platform called a “table.”

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But given the needs of formal logic, analytic philosophers, most importantly Frege, reduced the meaning of a sentence to a simple truth-value of true or false.5 Dummett reports, “Frege held that truth and falsity are the reference of sentences … The relation between a proposition and its truth-value is … rather like [the relation] between the sense of a definite de­scription and the actual object for which it stands.”6 This is not as complicated as it sounds. Frege maintained that every sentence points to its “truthvalue,” defined as either true or false in the same way that the definite description “this red, square table” points to the red, square table on which I am presently writing. If, however, this Fregean strategy may make sense from a logical point of view, we cannot use it to make much sense of real-world discourse or literature. All sorts of problems aside, this is a simplified account of meaning. Clearly, all the true statements in the world do not mean the same thing. Even if the statement “this table is red” and “George has bushy eyebrows” are both true, I cannot communicate what I believe about the colour of the table by insisting that, yes, indeed, Georg has the thickest eyebrows I have ever seen. Pace Frege, these sentences do not refer to the same thing. This analytic methodology confuses judgments about truth with what statements mean, but these are two very different things. One can understand what a statement means without ever knowing whether it is true. But I will not linger over logical details here. What matters most of all, here, is that logical epistemology and literature move – it seems – in very different directions. According to the old truth-value account of meaning that is “the established view” and “holds historical pride of place” in analytic philosophy, all true statements mean the very same thing.7 A marvellous simplification that pulls the meanings of endless claims into one tidy pile. But there are two important consequences. First, this way of doing things separates the practice of logic from any substantial sort of metaphysical commitment. What I mean is that it separates the study of logic from what we believe about reality. In the Aristotelian dispensation, we might reason differently about red tables and George’s bushy eyebrows because these things have different natures in the world. They are really different. In the Fregean dispensation, we don’t reason about natures in the world; all substantive meaning is reduced to true or false: logic bypasses these issues for a focus on connections between deliberately ambiguous sentences.

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The second consequence is that this logic moves in the opposite direction from literature. What philosophers in this symbolic-logic tradition do is generalize meaning. In effect, they get rid of meaning (in any specific sense) to focus on general logical form. But literature moves in the opposite direction. It is about getting details exactly right so as to effectively communicate meaning; it uses grammatical form to communicate meaning but it does not push particular meaning aside to focus uniquely on form. It follows that a truth-value theory of meaning is largely useless for any careful analysis of literature. It is too coarse-grained to deal with the necessary subtlety. The novelist who writes “the table is red” means something very different when he writes: “I noticed George’s bushy eyebrows.” Great writers in the canon particularize language. They are concerned with nuance, with substantive details far beyond the scope of any logical formalism. The interest in (one could even say the mania for) formal logic in hard-core epistemology misses the point. This can be shown in another way. Frege wanted a “concept writing” (the Begriffsschrift) where every step in each arithmetical proof was to be dutifully recorded, in accordance with clearly identified rules of syntax, without any reliance on knowledge that might derive from general experience, sense perception, intuition, inspiration, morality, metaphysics, or empirical science.8 Frege wanted a purist logic that was only logic. But in excising all these other aspects of reality from logic, he (and successive waves of colleagues) produced an apparatus that was largely irrelevant when it came to something like the study of literature. A “logical proposition” is, on the modern account, “a proposition that has complete generality and is true in virtue of its form rather than its content.”9 But literature is about content. Even fiction aims at true content. Of course, the structure behind what it says is a necessary means to efficient communication, but literature is not inwardly focused on its structure in the way that modern logic is. Here is a simple statement from first-order logic: “∀x(¬(P1(x)∧P2(x)) ↔ (¬ P1(x)∨¬ P2(x))).” And here is a statement taken from set theory: “A ⋃ B implies x ∊ A ⋃ B if x ∈ A or x ∈ B (or both).” The reader who is not conversant with the symbols need not worry; the specific logical functions described are not so important. What matters is that the subject-matter of such statements, what x, A, P, or B specifically represent, is deliberately ambiguous. They can stand for almost anything, for the point of the exercise is to study abstract logical relations in a universal way without paying attention to the specifics of whatever it

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is we happen to be talking about. But this is not what literature is like. Literature is about the substantive content of language; it is about particular meaning; this level of abstraction seems largely useless in a literary context. Not everyone agrees, of course. William Empson’s painfully scrupulous book The Structure of Complex Words provides a conspicuous example of one literary critic bent on turning literary criticism into something like formal logic. Empson sought to give precise expression to the secret rules that govern “an inner grammar of complex words.”10 But despite some obligatory praise by sympathetic critics, Empson’s fiendishly complicated book with its obscure symbols, charts, and equations is mostly unused and forgotten. Campbell Crockett, in a contemporaneous review, explains: The task that Empson sets for himself is the construction of a ­linguistic theory that will be adequate to support responsible and illuminating criticism. He differentiates four entities in the habitual use of a word: Senses, Implications, Emotions, and Moods; and a symbolism is developed to assist in the ­differentiation and integration of these entities. The development of these “little bits of machinery” is monstrously complicated … The “Implications” of a word are its “connotations,” i.e., those ideas which are associated with the Sense of the word now in view. ‘A/1’ stands for the first Implication of the Sense of a word. ‘(A)’ is used for “a Sense of the word ‘when at the back of the mind’; normally it will appear in this way beside another Sense which acts as the chief one, so that the full symbol would be ‘A(B).’” ‘-A’ symbolizes a Sense of a word which is deliberately excluded; ‘A +’ and ‘A-’ symbolize the process that makes the meaning of a word warmer and fuller or cooler and more ­vacuous … A complex word is a “solid entity” which “carries a doctrine.” The most important way in which a complex word can carry a doctrine is through an equation. An equation brings two meanings of a word together and implies that they belong together, and is expressed by ‘A is B’ … The order of terms in an equation is quite important, e.g., reverse the above equation and note the difference in meaning. Accordingly four types of equations are differentiated: I-Chief Sense implies Head Sense; II-the Chief Sense and Head Sense coincide and call out part of the connotation; III-Head Sense implies Chief Sense; IV-order

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of the Senses is indifferent. Empson’s conception of an equation is clarified through his distinction between an equation and a metaphor.11 One could go on, but the reader gets the picture. Essentially, I want to argue, here, that this is not the best way to do literary criticism. This formalism is largely a distraction, motivated perhaps by the prestige accorded mathematical logic in the mid-twentieth century by those who hoped to turn everything into a provable scientific calculation. Empson is not doing logic – perhaps linguistics is a better term – but he is focused on the elaboration of an abstract, generalized structure as if that provides a better vehicle for understanding the meaning of language. Tellingly, Empson himself gave up on his technical system and returned to ordinary language discussion as his analytical tool of choice in his later criticism. (C) Meaning as Logical Syntax This is not the place for an undergraduate course in the history of logic. If, however, the truth preservation logic of Frege and various other parallel systems was ill-suited to the study of literature, things got worse. Logic – the paradigm of reason – turned ever more inward on itself, brushing aside any direct reference to truth (or correspondence to reality) for a preoccupation with logical syntax studied for its own sake. Frege expert Michael Dummett complains that Frege’s old-fashioned focus on truth “had highly deleterious effects both in logic and philosophy.”12 The problem is that Frege devised a logic “concerned with truth rather than with logical consequence.”13 Dummett, along with colleagues, champions a logic that operates “solely by specifications of rules of inference, without any outright postulation of logical truths.”14 We are left with logic that understands everything in terms of syntax; the study of argument becomes the study of how one semantically empty string of symbols logically entails another semantically empty string of symbols. “The recognition of statements as logically true does not occupy a central place” in this new logic.15 This new technical focus on syntax rather than truth-preservation may make sense from the viewpoint of specialist logic, but seen from an epistemological perspective, it smacks of desperation. If all truthclaims are deeply problematic, one might think that we need to retreat

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from a logic that deals in truth and restrict ourselves to the only thing we can be certain about: what logically follows from what. (As if skepticism would reverence that!) The problem is that this produces a philosophical activity that is even further removed from literature. Literature, like all thinking, presupposes logical inference, but literature has content. Even fiction tells truths. Maybe the most important truths. But literature is written in natural language. It is not merely that the syntax and the symbolization of new logic is often at odds with the structure of natural language we all use. It is that the system is deliberately designed to be substantively empty, that is, to extend syntax consistently while retreating from claims about what is true about the world. Much like art for art’s sake, this new logic is logic for logic’s sake. But this has little to do with literature. Insomuch as literature yearns to say something real, true, and beautiful, the intellectual aspiration at the heart of the literary enterprise is fundamentally different. As I discuss below, there are logics we can use to evaluate reasoning about what we substantively believe about the world, but one will not find this in the new symbolic logic. (D) Semantics as Proof If one hopes to find something closer to literary preoccupations in analytic philosophy of language (which is different than specialist logic), one is bound to be disappointed once again. We might briefly mention two overlapping developments: formal semantics and truthconditional semantics. First, there is formal semantics, broadly construed. Michael Wolf turns to Alfred Tarski rather than Frege. He reports: “Tarski made a great leap forward [in the 1930s and 1940s] for the rigorous analysis of meaning, showing that semantics could be treated just as systematically as syntax could … Tarski sought an analysis of the concept of truth [and meaning] that would contain no explicit or implicit appeals to inherently semantic notions, and offered a definition of it in terms of syntax and set theory.”16 Pay close attention to what Wolf reports: Tarski (and colleagues) were able to transform the study of meaning into the study of logical syntax and set theory. But this turns linguistics into another exercise in mathematical formalism. We are left with more investigation of abstract mathematical structures, without any consideration of what language means in ordinary conversation and, by extension, in literature. (Robert Stoll and Herbert Enderton write

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that “set theory … is less valuable in direct application to ordinary experience than as a basis for … the definition of complex and sophisticated mathematical concepts.”17 But literature is not about complex mathematics. It is about that “direct application” of language to ordinary life, which is ill-suited to the application of set theory.) Second, there is the standard truth-conditional semantics advanced by Donald Davidson and many others. As Max Kölbel explains, the basic idea behind truth-conditional semantics is that “the meaning of a sentence” must “be specified by giving the condition under which it would be true.”18 This suggestion is already problematic, but more importantly, it is cover for the same endeavour to turn language into some sort of formal logic. Kölbel continues: Behind the truth-conditional slogan is a very complex view which has little, if anything, to do with the profound metaphysical significance the slogan suggests. Truth-conditional semantics is a view concerning the form a theory of meaning (semantic theory) for a particular natural language should take, namely the view that [we need] an axiomatic theory whose recursive axioms ­generate theorems … Its primary motivation is not the idea that a theory of meaning for a language ought to tell us something about how that language’s expressions relate to extra-linguistic reality. Rather, it is motivated by the need to describe in a precise way, how the meanings of complex expressions depend on the meanings of their parts.19 Put technically, truth-conditional semantics is about “compositionality,” about how the parts of a system relate to one another; in short, it is about syntax. So, we arrive at one further strand of academic philosophy that reduces the study of language to a study of syntax. Even if meaning could be reduced to truth-conditions, this is a distraction when discussing literature. In literature, words acquire meanings by pointing to some “extra-linguistic reality.” In a short story, the terms “dachshund,” “paper clip,” and “musical note” mean different things, quite simply, because they point to different natures in the world. Literature is not about how we go about proving that a dachshund is a dachshund; it is more like: this thing I am describing is a dachshund; now what follows from that? How we reason about dachshund is not the way we reason about musical notes.

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But, mostly, we do not need any excursion into recondite logical formalisms for this. One can’t help thinking of the emphasis on logical or scientific proof as a holdover from the old Humean challenge: if a book is filled with anything other than logical truths or empirically provable propositions: “Commit it then to the flames!”20 The intense modern need to prove absolutely, to the utmost degree, what is the case is why analytic philosophers – Quine, Russell, Hempel, the Vienna Circle, Ayer, Popper, the Churchlands, Dennett, et al. – are so influenced by positivism. And why something as dubious as the verifiability principle held sway (briefly) in the early twentieth century. The project failed for a variety of reasons, but the important thing here is that literature is not in the business of proving things, scientifically, logically, or otherwise. Any epistemology that directs its attention chiefly to that will, inevitably, bypass literature. (E) Meaning as Use Speech-act theories of language associated with thinkers such as J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein provide another way of looking at meaning. I will say much more about this in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that, insomuch as these theories leave room for meaning understood as reference to external objects, they can be a useful addition to semantics. But they cannot replace the ordinary language understanding, which I discuss next. (F) Realist Meaning So, what do words mean? I will argue that the traditional theory – caricatured, neglected, lambasted, or ignored – in all this sophisticated treatment of language and logic is, by and large, correct. Words get their meaning by pointing to “real things” in the world. This is the “naive” Aristotelian understanding. The word “turtle” points to “turtles” out in the world. This is what it means: that kind of thing. Truth about turtles means getting the natures of turtles right. Knowledge happens when we are justified in coming to the conclusion that “this is the true nature of turtles” because we have enough of the right kind of evidence. Aristotle’s realist metaphysics provides a sophisticated basis for this understanding of language.

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On the Aristotelian model, words do not refer merely to ideas in our heads. We can invent words like “unicorn” and “mermaid” – Aristotle talks about such cases – but, mostly, Aristotelian logic specializes in inferences about what something is.21 Aristotelian logic is, as Henry Veatch used to say, a what-logic that concerns itself with the natures of things, not a mathematical logic that restricts itself to abstract relations of inference or inclusion. It does have a mathematical side (the formal syllogistic) but it is designed to operate in ordinary language, with broad rhetorical considerations, and it does not shy away from metaphysical, moral, political, aesthetic, or religious commitments. Aristotelian metaphysical realism recommends a via media between the extremes of radical skepticism and naive realism. Once we accept that reality is there and its nature can be known, we can invent words to communicate what we believe about those natures. We can do that truthfully in a way that corresponds to what we know is “out there” in the world. When someone has enough evidence to justify belief, they have enough for knowledge. Knowledge of the most important, most fundamental, most overarching things is wisdom. Unlike so much of modern epistemology, this (simplified) Aristotelian picture can be used to make sense of literature. I am going to argue that literature is valuable because it tells us the truth about reality. If, however, literature tells us what reality is, antirealist metaphysical philosophies that insist that we cannot know anything about reality have – according to their own lights – little relevance to literature. Likewise, abstract theories of logic and language that focus on the structure of bare inference devoid of substantive content have little to tell us about literature. The Herculean attempts of modern academic philosophers to steer clear of any robust commitment to a metaphysics make much of what they say irrelevant to literature. Literature is about metaphysics in a wider sense, about what we know is real and true is in the deepest, most important sense. What we need in order to better understand literature is a revival of metaphysics, not systems that deliberately push it to the sides of academic endeavour. Antirealism makes reality inaccessible. Modern developments in logic and semantics that focus on proof, on truth-values, on syntax, on logic for its own sake, on mathematics, or on science avert their eyes. As if metaphysics is akin to bad manners. (In fact, they advance a hidden metaphysics, but that is a story for a different time.) All

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this is disastrous for anyone wanting an epistemology that makes sense of literature. This is a book on literature, not epistemology. I am not going to elaborate an extensive theory here as that is a matter for specialists. Of course, there are myriad complications. We can know the meaning of something without knowing how to formulate a definition. Metaphors are literally incorrect but truthfully felicitous. Fiction tells the truth by telling lies. The transcendent is ineffable. There are aspects of the world that do not lend themselves to mathematical calculation or scientific exploration: facts that are unverifiable, historical truths that disappear in time, moral truths that are beyond empirical verification; mental realities that are subjective, private, invisible to others. We can be justified in believing that something is true for all sorts of reasons: human experience, moral inclination, aesthetic judgment, arguments from authority, eyewitness accounts, mathematical calculations, intuition, induction, deduction, argument to the best explanation, and so on. But there are no obstacles here that a careful Aristotelian theory of language or logic cannot navigate. The important point is that literary critics do not have to feel ashamed when they use words the way we ordinarily use words, to refer to things in the world. On the wisdom approach to literary criticism I advance here, everything from nonsense poems to gothic novels to fairy tales to Greek tragedies has an element of truth when understood correctly. This, then, is why we need Aristotelianism. Not because literary critics need an extravagant skeptical epistemology or an abstruse formal logic. Mostly, they can bypass these modern preoccupations so that they can go on with the very important business of discussing, and evaluating, literature. Aristotelian philosophy provides a sophisticated alternative that, paradoxically, allows philosophy to retreat into the background and literary criticism come to the fore. Aristotelian logic uses a wide mix of technical and non-technical approaches. It lends itself to natural language (like modern informal logic); it can be used to evaluate contingent and merely plausible claims; it understands the world in qualitative, not merely quantitative terms; it provides for technical discussion of fallacies, figures of speech, topoi, tropes, first principles, grammar, dialectic, oratory, and so on. But, mostly, Aristotelianism takes the epistemological perspective of ordinary people and ordinary language seriously.

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Plain language is more sophisticated than we sometimes imagine. We make epistemological distinctions in everyday speech, not just between dogs and cats, but between a real dog, a dog in a dream, a dog in a novel, and “a dog in a manger.” Literature does the same thing. Edward Lear muses: “The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea / In a beautiful pea-green boat.” We all know this is silly; delightfully so. But we know this because we understand the specific meaning of these words. The whimsy would be inaccessible if we did not know, specifically, what an owl is, what a pussy-cat is, what a boat is, what the colour “pea-green” is. Once we know what these words refer to, we can add them together to produce an utterly fanciful conceit that pleases us the way the author intended, but more on that later. Literature is not science, nor is it philosophy. It is not about proving what is the case, and it is not about arguments. If literature is like anything, it is more like Scripture. The New Testament does not argue; it is inspired utterance; it speaks with authority; it takes seriously the supernatural and moral aspects of the world. Theological methodologies like hermeneutics are a useful literary tool because they take texts seriously, without the epistemic reservations of so much modern philosophy. Literature uses language to show us what is the case. Love poems show us what love is like; tragedies show us what failure is like; soliloquies show us what introspection is like. There is a non-cognitivism that would separate emotive responses from what is truthfully the case. But in Aristotle, the nature of reality makes certain affective responses humanly appropriate or inappropriate, legitimate or illegitimate, moral or immoral. When we believe that certain things are true, this should make us feel a certain way. The fact that we appreciate literature for its emotional content need not detract from the knowledge component of literature. Think of comedy; it operates something like: “Hey. This is funny! Look at this. This is worth a good laugh! Laugh!” Comedy is not about explaining laughter or proving that laughter exists. It is about making us laugh, for reasons I discuss later. I will argue that even comedy has metaphysical content: the funny, the droll, the hilarious is a genuine aspect of reality. Literature recognizes this as an integral part of a voyage of intelligent discovery. I will argue that literature is, ultimately, about wisdom. But wisdom is about synthesis, about seeing things in terms of “the big picture.” This is another reason for a plain language approach. Formal techniques tend to focus on the solving of specialized problems like a

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microscope. We cannot use a microscope to survey the far horizon. Wisdom surveys the far horizon; it situates individual things in a much larger picture. It requires sweeping judgment as well as accurate details. Natural language is the biggest language system we have. It is the most general, the most understandable, the most adaptable way we have of putting things: we can use it to buy a car, to explain a political position, to say a prayer, to make a promise, to write a poem, to teach chemistry, to report facts, to distinguish between cases, to make moral claims, to tell jokes. Natural language is what most of humanity spends most of their time using; it is what we begin with, and it is what literature is made of; it taps into a vast repertoire of human testimony and experience. It is sensitive to what human beings actually believe, does not shy away from intuitions and first principles, and can be adapted to all sorts of moral, psychological, aesthetic, political, and religious considerations. As most authors in the tradition accepted, it is a fitting vehicle for literary criticism. In comparison to technical formalisms, natural language is closer to human experience, less liable to obfuscation, more useful for crossdisciplinary dialogue, and highly adaptable to moral, political, and religious investigation. Professional criticism requires a specialized vocabulary – ordinary people do not discuss enjambment, catachresis, anagnorisis, epithalamiums – but there is no need to disparage the usefulness of plain speech, which is pre-theoretical in an epistemologically useful way.

III. 2 L it e r at u r e a nd I ntui ti on If literature has an epistemological as well as an aesthetic side, knowledge has to begin somewhere. On an Aristotelian account, knowledge begins in intuition, in immediate knowledge, in knowledge that happens without argument. Although literature is rarely about arguments, it is often a place where intuition rises to the surface and informs us about the way things are. Louis Arnauld Reid, in a 1980s paper, criticizes the idée fixe that only arguments count as “true knowledge.”22 In philosophy, we all too readily yield to the Leibnizian trope and identify knowledge exclusively with logical proof. On the ancient view, which Aristotle endorses, logical arguments are merely a symptom, not the cause of wisdom. Wise people make, of course, good arguments, but wisdom is an intelligence, developed over time, that puts itself on display in a

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variety of ways: through shrewd decision-making, through moral behaviour, through scientific observation, through witty sayings, and through sound arguments. Diogenes Laertius tells an apocryphal story about Plato, the archetypical wise man, who, falling out of the good graces of the tyrant Dionysius, was supposedly sold into slavery, charged with a capital offence, and brought before the court. As Diogenes describes the incident: “Plato was brought before the assembly and, being kept under close scrutiny, maintained an absolute silence.”23 It does not matter, for our purposes, that the story is false. Diogenes is pointing to Plato as a paradigm example of a wise man who, at the risk of his life, remains completely silent. Plato here does not say anything. He does recite truthful propositions. He does not make sound arguments. He is like Jesus before Pilate. So, sometimes, the wise choose to remain silent out of a better understanding of their situation. Arnauld identifies a first level of conscious experience that he calls “feelings,” which “includes bodily sensations, actions of various kinds, thinking, imagining, willing, having moral and aesthetic experiences, perhaps religious ones, loving, hating, coming to know and coming to terms with the external world, ourselves and other people.”24 (Note that Suzanne Langer adopts a similar perspective although I do not have space to explore her ideas here.25 As Alexander Durig reports, “Langer suggests that we can think with feelings, and that we can know things in a meaningful way without engaging in talk.26) What I mean by “intuition” corresponds, then, more or less, to the early stirrings of knowledge in these first “feelings,” that is, in a primordial, non-discursive mix of belief, self-awareness, discernment, and affective attitudes. Reid (like Langer) was influenced by Henri Bergson’s description of inner conscious experience as a self-constituting, self-conscious durée. He believes that language can never fully capture or adequately express the content of this rudimentary level of epistemological “feeling.” Aristotle thought of truth as a relation of faithful correspondence between a statement and the nature of the world.27 This is the common view. Reid formulates an “adverbial” account of truth as a property of something we do. He explains: “Physically, when we stretch out to grasp something, we may get a firm hold of it, or we may fumble and slip … When the mind [is] working efficiently, [this] cognitive prehension [is] ‘true,’ and when working inefficiently, in various degrees, false. [The terms} truth and falsity … [refer to] the living self-transcending cognitive activity of mind apprehending its object.”28 In Reid’s system,

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the truthful mind has a firm intellectual grip on the world. This happens, at the most basic level of intellectual functioning, long before the mind articulates beliefs and attitudes in sentences or arguments. Reid comments: “Verbal – or other symbolic – statements of propositions are but the expression of something more basic, more fundamental … The mind’s transcendent power … of being able to cognize, to know … of which statements are one kind of necessary articulation, deposited publicly, as it were, in an already shared public language.”29 Knowledge begins, then, not in calculation, not in formal logic, not in scientific proof, not even in language, but in intuition understood in terms of an adept intellectual orientation that reaches out and firmly grasps the world. Sentences and arguments participate in truth insomuch as they faithfully represent successful mental events at a prior level of intellection. Wisdom is, first and foremost, something that is to be found inside the mind of the sage rather than in any subsequent series of sentences or arguments. If, then, we want to take a wisdom approach to literature, Reid’s account provides an apt starting point. Even without argument, great authors in the literary tradition can use natural language to delve into the very first operations of intelligence where knowledge and wisdom are first formulated. Ordinary language is closest to this intuitive level of discernment that precedes any logical or scientific formalism. What literature is about is, in effect, a “knowing how” that tries to bring to the surface some aspect of the cognitive “feelings” that Reid identifies as an ultimate source of knowledge. As Anthony Pilkington helpfully notes, French author Marcel Proust describes literature in precisely these phenomenological terms, comparing writing to a magnifying glass – “mon livre n’étant qu’une sorte de ces verres grossissants” – that readers can use to examine the interior reaches of mental life.30 Proust believes that literature has a subtractive function: it eliminates all the different “factors which conceal from us what at any time we really do feel and think.”31 In Proust’s own words (from Le Temps retrouvé): The greatness of genuine art … is to rediscover, to grasp again, to make us acknowledge this distant inner reality that we push away to the degree that we substitute a stereotypical social understanding for it … We seriously risk never having known this inner reality before we die, this reality that is quite simply our true life, the life finally discovered and illuminated, and

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which is, therefore, the only life really lived. This is what literature is; grasping this life that … lives every instant inside every human being as well as inside the artist. But others do not see it because they do not strive to throw any light on it.32 Proust believes that the purpose of literature is the illumination of a transcendental or ineffable source of conscious awareness located deep inside each one of us. This intuitive level of mental life can never be definitively captured in words. But literature comes as close as humanly possible, translating aspects of this inner reality into poetry, fiction, metaphor, symbol, allusion, and allegory. Surely, this is one insightful way of understanding literature. Pilkington compares Proust and Henri Bergson. According to Bergson, literature pushes aside “useful practical symbols, conventional and socially acceptable generalizations and, indeed, everything that masks this reality, to put us face to face” with the mystery of our inner self.33 Literary authors, then, dip down into this pre-theoretical self, where the flow of intuition constitutes durée. Literature brings what is happening there to light. Such self-examination must be, according to Bergson, an integral part of any thorough investigation of the human condition. Proust’s and Bergson’s account of literature as thought turning inward on itself bears some resemblance to Aristotle’s account of the intellectual life of the wise philosopher engaged in theôria. Aristotle thinks that his wise philosopher is imitating the introspecting God, which he describes as thought-thinking-thought. I explore this idea later in this chapter. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that the modern, phenomenological approach to consciousness adopted by Bergson, Reid, and even Proust is not as un-Aristotelian as some might think. Ancient philosophers, including Aristotle, had a heroic vision of the successful philosopher as a sage, as someone who lived out the ideal of wisdom. They thought of philosophers not primarily as knowledgemanufacturers, as “makers of arguments,” but rather as repositories of wisdom. Literature, then, seen from this angle, is another way to unearth, describe, and define a fund of attitudes and true beliefs that, at its very origins, motivates the wise individual. As we shall see below, Aristotle’s account of wisdom is much more friendly to intuitive approaches than the deductivist approaches of modern academic philosophy would have us believe.

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III. 3 P O C K L IN G T O N AND TUPPER The conservative critic Irving Babbitt used to complain about modern educators who viewed knowledge as akin to collecting facts, an approach Enlightenment thinkers such as the French Encyclopedists seemed to favour. Babbitt’s plaidoyer for a return to older ideas associated with the traditional humanities disciplines had, at best, mitigated success. Contemporary sociologists Tom Pocklington and Allan Tupper have recently taken up the battle. Pocklington and Tupper are not philosophers – they do not discuss the philosophical antecedents to their discussion – but their fierce criticism of what counts as knowledge in the present-day academy is instructive. It can serve as a segue into a more philosophical account of such things. Pocklington and Tupper argue that there is a serious problem with modern university education. They distinguish between two types of academic activity: what they call “frontier research” and “reflective inquiry.” In frontier research, “the idea is that each ‘knowledge producer’ explores a fragment of the intellectual universe.”34 Piece by piece, the knowledge-manufacturers gather the new information they obtain into bigger and bigger piles. “Each scholar produces” some “tiny brick of information,” putting brick on top of brick until “the larger skyscraper of human understanding” reaches up to the skies.35 The more data, the better. The largest pile wins, so speak. Pocklington and Tupper equate frontier research with the German model of patient philology. Scholarship is divided into specialist silos. Academic researchers inside each narrow field diligently record the technical details of esoteric subject-matter in a heroically meticulous manner. They dismiss criticism of their endeavours coming from the outside as lacking in technical rigour. They do not question first principles; they preserve reputations and careers by an arduous loyalty to the task at hand. Higher education is something like an automobile assembly plant: “The modern professor, far from being a person of extraordinary intellect and broad insight, is a highly specialized trade person in the knowledge factory.”36 Pocklington and Tupper champion a humanist ideal they call “reflective inquiry” as a better alternative to frontier research. Reflective inquirers adopt an overarching approach to knowledge. They constantly reassess their “own strengths and weaknesses”; they reformulate “underlying assumptions” and ask “key questions”; they consider

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“scholarship beyond [their] own specialization and discipline”; they present present-day discoveries “in context with past ones”; they engage in “careful thought about the human condition” and assess the limits of what we “claim to know.” 37 A reflective inquiry approach only reaches fruition over a lifetime of teaching, thinking, and scholarly research. It ends in synoptic knowledge that somehow accounts for the way everything is related to everything else. One may dispute details about Pocklington’s and Tupper’s diagnosis. But the reflective inquiry ideal they are proposing is very close to the ancient philosophical ideal of an intellectual life devoted to wisdom. On a wisdom account of literature, reading the canon is supposed to be part of this larger project. Both authors and readers are in it together. They move in the same direction. I will insist, to borrow this terminology, that the same generalist mindset applies to the best literary criticism, which needs to err on the side of reflective inquiry over frontier research. Specialized knowledge is useful – but literary critics, like authors and readers, need to approach literature as providing a way into larger issues about meaning and transcendence. This means accepting that literature is important, not because it adds more facts to the pile, but because it glues everything together as a source of abiding value and meaning. Even today there are academic celebrities, public intellectuals, pundits and editorialists, who are revered as heroic sages by loyal bands of readers. For better or worse, the list goes on and on: Jürgen Habermas, John Kenneth Galbraith, Camille Paglia, Jacques Derrida, Lionel Trilling, Ayn Rand, G.K. Chesterton, Milton Friedman, Richard Dawkins. Some former specialist frontier researchers have turned themselves into public intellectuals with varying results. So, for better or worse, the wisdom aspiration lives on. What Pocklington and Tupper call reflective inquiry is an essential component, I will argue, of literature and of our understanding of literature.

I II. 4 W H A T E V E R H A P P E NED TO WI S DOM? Pocklington and Tupper trace the focus on frontier research over reflective inquiry to an academic professionalism that rewards frontier research endeavours and ignores or even punishes those who stray into non-specialist matters. But there are also deeper, philosophical reasons behind this disenchantment with the age-old wisdom ideal. A generalized metaphysical skepticism makes it hard to see how wisdom

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could ever be a realistic intellectual goal. If metaphysics is dead, if objective truth is inaccessible, if natural language is fatally ambiguous, if only hard science counts as knowledge, if human nature is a social construct, if morality is subjective, if politics is only a matter of selfinterest, if Western civilization is an accumulation of patriarchy, ­sexism, racism, colonialism (etc.), where does that leave us? One might think that skepticism could lead to a Socratic stance: “the only thing I know is that I don’t know.” If, however, the ancient skeptics did find inspiration in Plato’s aporetic dialogues, Socrates also lambasts misology, the hatred of logos or reasoning, which derides the pursuit of knowledge as useless or a waste of time.38 We have to begin with the idea that we can have knowledge of the true natures of things. To whatever minimal extent. Otherwise, what is left to work with? Our biases, our class consciousness, our historically inflicted confusions, our Darwinian need to subjugate others, our libido, our religious superstitions? Arguments and academic disputes that pit bias against bias, self-interest against self-interest, social construct against social construct, received dogma against received dogma, one type of skepticism against another type of skepticism, have no genuine winners. Those who “win” such academic battles are no better than the losers; that is all. Any totalizing skepticism, of course, counts equally against all our own opinions. If every viewpoint is equally questionable, totalizing skepticism must be equally questionable as well. And if genuine knowledge is out of reach, where is there any place for wisdom? If all views have the same epistemological status, so-called wisdom is nothing more than a disguise for some hegemonic intellectual imperialism. Calling someone “wise” only means elevating someone who shares our own opinions above others. There is only one way out of this quagmire that traps everyone, even the canny and the clever, in quicksand. We need to believe in the possibility of knowledge; not arrogantly, but with modest insistence. How can we recommend one literary text over another literary text unless we can know something – about texts, about authors, about psychology, about morality, about beauty, about history, about sin and redemption? If we take the cultivation of wisdom seriously as an epistemological ideal, we need to find a way out of the present imbroglio. I have already argued that the way out is Aristotelian realism, the position of choice in mainstream metaphysics through the ages. Philosophically,

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Aristotle offers a complete picture of the world that has been refined and adjusted down through intellectual history. He accepts that knowledge, truth, and wisdom are possible. Not easy, but possible. Reasoning is not mere wishing, self-projection, self-interested manipulation, social conformism, authoritarian manipulation; it involves observation, evidence, and argument; it yields answers that transcend mere whims or desires; it does not curry favour; it strains toward objectivity. Aristotle also thinks that ethics is a form of reasoning that adapts itself to the complicated circumstances of human experience. There is good and evil and all the shades in between. In the case of art and literature, we can use similar values to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the momentous from the trivial, the eloquent from the awkward, the meaningless from the momentous. If Aristotle’s metaphysics is science-friendly, I will show how we can use the details of this scientific world view to investigate and evaluate the nature of art and literature. But what is perhaps more surprising is that Aristotelian essentialism also harbours a deeply spiritual, transcendental account of being. It hints at the Divine, at that transcendent nexus of what is beyond all telling. This is almost entirely overlooked in the popular literature.

I I I. 5 A r is to t l e ’ s A c c o unt of Wi sdom Aristotle believes that wise people possess a discerning intelligence, an ability they have developed over time, that cannot be easily summarized or communicated to anyone else. He does not view wisdom as an easily summarized position, an algorithm, a recipe, or a secret code. We have to try and imitate the sage, but there is no way to write down in a sentence or two, or in a book or two, what wisdom entails. No secret mechanism or formula can be discovered that will make us wise. Philosophy can be of some help, but wisdom is a matter of self-­realization; mere book-learning cannot replace experience and intelligence. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between five successful kinds of intelligence: 1 nous (νοῦς), insight or intuition: pure intelligence that yields immediate knowledge without argument; 2 technē (τέχνη), art or craft: expertise in making; 3 epistēmē (ἐπιστήμη), that yields universal and necessary knowledge that can be scientifically demonstrated; 4 phronēsis (φρόνησις), moral or practical wisdom put on display in good decision-making; and

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5 sophia (σοφία), wisdom (i.e., “philosophical” or “theoretical” wisdom): a big-picture understanding that answers the biggest, deepest questions; usually a characteristic of older people.39 Aristotle believes that wisdom – sophia – reigns supreme. It is the highest form of intelligence and incorporates the lower forms. Even ethical wisdom can be understood as a means to philosophical wisdom. (Aristotle also uses Greek words such as gnōmē [γνώμη] and sunesis [σύνεσις] to refer to a generalized, wisdom-like understanding, often in an ethical context, but I will not enter into exegetical details here.) Modern-day researchers often focus, for example, on individual arguments in Plato.40 In the eyes of the ancients, however, what is impressive about Plato is not necessarily the individual arguments but his comprehensive world view. Perhaps an analogy may help. Imagine a Louis Cyr type strongman who lifts a car, a concrete pillar, fourteen sacks of grain, a tractor wheel. What is most impressive is not any individual feat but the physical strength that makes all of them ­possible. Likewise, with the wise philosopher, it is not individual arguments that matter most but the underlying intellectual strength and insight that makes such arguments possible. The ancients valued the intellectual condition of “smartness” that expresses itself in good arguments more than the arguments themselves. Hence Plato’s insistence that the highest knowledge is ineffable and incapable of verbal expression. (A conviction explicitly expressed or at least hinted at in various places in his corpus: for example, in the Symposium, in the Seventh Letter, in his analogy of the cave, in the Divided Line, and elsewhere.) Simply put, seen from this ancient perspective, the wise person is an individual who can peer through the darkness and see. As Socrates says in the Republic, even the best teacher is not in the business of “inserting vision into blind eyes.”41 The best we can do is turn someone with good eyesight in the right direction so that they can see the truth for themselves. Aristotle, following in Plato’s footsteps, makes fun of the sophists (literally, the “wise men”) because they made their students learn things by heart. In a strange-sounding passage that compares rhetoric and shoemaking, he reports: The training given by the paid professors of contentious arguments [i.e., the sophists] was like the practice of Gorgias. For he used to hand out rhetorical speeches to be learned by heart, and [the other sophists] also handed out speeches in the form of question

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and answer, which they supposed would cover most of the ­arguments on either side. The teaching they gave their pupils was rapid but unsystematic. For they supposed that they trained people, not by imparting them the art [of making arguments], but by supplying its products, as if one … were not to teach a man the art of shoe-making … but were to present him with ­several shoes of all sorts.42 Aristotle complains that sophists do not teach their students the art or skill (technē) that one needs to make convincing arguments but rather make them memorize the finished product as if the end result is more important than the ability that produces the product. But this has things backwards. Someone who wants to become a good cobbler must master the skill of shoemaking; looking at shoes is not enough. Likewise, if one wants to become a good reasoner, memorizing the finished arguments that clever people make is not enough. What we need to do is master the prior skill we call rhetoric. Instead of making students memorize shrewd thinking, one must turn them into shrewd thinkers. Wisdom is like this. Aristotle thinks that the sophists confuse the effect with the cause. The shoe is the effect and cobbling is the cause; just so, good arguments about the most important issues are the effect, and wisdom is the cause. Protagoras claimed to be teaching wisdom to his students. If, however, teachers can help sharpen students’ thinking skills so that they see the truth on their own, they cannot insert “wisdom” readymade into students’ minds. The receptive student, through industrious and sustained effort over a long period of time, may attain wisdom. They may come to understand the world in big-picture terms. Wisdom remains, however, an arduous, remarkable feat. Aristotle attributes twelve overlapping characteristics to wisdom. (1) Wisdom is general knowledge: the wise “are wise in general, not knowledgeable in some particular field or in any other limited respect.”43 (2) Wisdom develops over time: it is knowledge “which has received as it were its proper completion,” knowledge that “has been worked through until it is the most precise.”44 (3) Wisdom is something that characterizes elders; the young cannot acquire it: “a boy may be a mathematician but cannot be a wise person [σοφὸς].”45 (4) Wisdom is very difficult to attain: it is “rare, marvelous, difficult, and even superhuman.”46 (5) Wisdom is knowledge of the best subjectmatter: it is “knowledge of the highest objects,” or “as regards things of the most exalted nature.”47 (6) Wisdom is about eternal things,

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which includes “belief about things that are universal and necessary” (what Aristotle calls episteme) and is associated with activities such as the contemplation of immutable and eternal “celestial systems” (ancient astronomy and theology).48 (7) There is only one wisdom; there cannot be many competing wisdoms.49 (8) We develop wisdom through insight and argument: it is an intellectual hexis or habit developed through the use of “scientific knowledge [proof and argument] and intuition.”50 (9) Wisdom is not possible without morality: “moral wisdom [including temperance and the other virtues] provides for wisdom coming into being.”51 (10) Wisdom is a pleasurable state: “the activity of philosophical wisdom is the pleasantest of virtuous activities … offering pleasures marvelous for their purity and their enduringness.”52 (11) Wisdom is intrinsically valuable: it “alone would seem to be loved for its own sake.”53 (12) Wisdom would seem to be self-sufficient, for “even when by himself the wise man can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is.”54 That is quite the list of praiseworthy attributes. Wise people busy themselves about the most profound things. Wisdom becomes a part of who they are and how they see the world. It permeates their attitudes, words, and gestures. In the modern world, we tend to associate wisdom with book-learning, but that is not the ancient attitude. Remember the dictum attributed to Callimachus, μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν (mega biblion, mega kakon, “a big book is a big evil”). The ancient sage who exemplifies wisdom might write and read books, but that is not a requirement for sagehood. Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers is filled with tall tales of sages who may have written books but who were famous for the way they lived their lives. I want to insist that there is no room in Aristotle for a wicked wise man. There may be wicked experts, wicked specialists, wicked artists, wicked authors, wicked politicians who gain power and notoriety, but none of this is enough for wisdom. In an Aristotelian scheme, moral and philosophical wisdom overlap and reinforce each other. (Aristotelian commentators like to sharply distinguish moral from intellectual virtue, but the present author thinks this is too extreme.) In Aristotle, all forms of intelligence, ideally, converge at a point. The wise person (σοφὸς) possesses intuition (nous), science (epistēmē), morality (phronēsis), and philosophical wisdom (sophia). Wise people may not engage in art (technē) in any physical sense, but they surely engage in the mental techne (skill) of making wise pronouncements and arguments.

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In his ethics, Aristotle mentions the old sage who has many different wisdoms that meet together at a single point. He observes: “Different intellectual habits converge, as might be expected, to the same point; for when we speak of thought and judgment [γνώμη] and generalized understanding [σύνεσις] and moral wisdom [φρόνησις] and intuition [νοῦς], we say that the same people that are old enough to show judgment and discernment are morally wise and understand things generally.”55 The same old people are morally wise, thoughtful, good judges, and even intuitive. Think of wisdom, then, like a pyramid, where different types of knowledge represent different sides that join together at the apex. The sage is located somewhere near the apex. For the ancients, sages were something like the gods up on Mount Olympus. They could take in the whole wide sweep of the horizon in a glance. The whole world was laid out before them; they had a vision of everything. Indeed, they saw so far into the distance that they beheld transcendence lurking on the horizon. But more on that below. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, viewed learning as movement up Socrates’s Divided Line: we climb upwards until we meet with the Form of the Good (ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα), where we leave behind argument (διάνοια, dianoia) for intuition (νόησῐς, noesis).56 This is where, in the terms of this book, we meet with the transcendent. The individual who reaches the top of the Divided Line is like the person, escaped from the cave, staring directly at the sun. They have a complete understanding of everything. (The same applies to the person on the top rung of the ladder of beauty described in the Symposium.) Aristotle’s account of the wisdom of God does not stray very far from this Platonic ideal. Even for Aristotle, propositions, arguments, calculations, and theories are mere steppingstones to a contemplative end that surpasses all particular knowledge in a transcendental grasp of what is ultimately good and real. As we shall see, Aristotelian wisdom is, in the best sense, an imitation (a mimesis, we could say) of God’s intellectual activity. But before we investigate the link between wisdom and transcendence, let us turn to consider the connection between wisdom and literature.

III. 6 L it e r at u r e , M o rali ty, Wi sdom I want to suggest that the perspective of great literature is a wisdom perspective. Literature can promote and enhance the very wide understanding that Aristotle and other ancients identified with wisdom.

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Literature does this through an infectious, intelligent, and supremely eloquent disclosure of what is important. Mostly, we read literature because we enjoy reading. We read a good story because it is a good story. But this is not at odds with the wisdom aspiration. Wisdom is not boring; eloquence stirs the emotions; plot engages our attention; complexity surprises us; humour can extend our understanding of the world; even frivolousness can be a serious art form; fantasy can be as truthful as journalism. Aristotle, and ancient philosophers generally, identified wisdom with old age. Why are the elderly wise? Because they have experience; they have lived a long time. Another way of extending our experience of life is by reading literature. One can sit in a chair with a book and grow “older” by turning the pages: by reading, and more reading. There is something paradoxical here. The more I use a knife, the duller it gets; the more I use my mind in reading literature, the sharper it gets. Like muscles getting stronger through repeated exercise. I am using the term “literature” in an honorific sense: the best writing is literature. Literature is like investigating the human condition with a very knowledgeable guide – like when Dante passes through the underworld escorted by the Roman poet Virgil. We philosophers are keen about arguments, but Aristotle insists that “the ‘unargued for’ [ἀναποδείκτοις] assertions … of experienced and elderly people … are as much deserving of attention as those which supported by argument; for experience has given them an eye for things, and so they see correctly.”57 Literature is like this. Authors, through some genius or inspiration, have an eye and see correctly. Through eloquent assertions, they add to our experience not in any argumentative or proof-driven way, but through an enhanced observation that pushes us toward a larger understanding. Literature is a mix of what we observe, what we understand, and what we feel. But whatever the Stoic stereotypes, the Aristotelian sage is not supposed to be a zombie. The wise appreciate things in felicitous ways. Strong emotion is not foolishness: the proper amount of emotion in the proper circumstances is wisdom in action. As Aristotle puts it in his Ethics, to feel the proper emotions “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both inter­ mediate and best and characteristic of virtue.”58 As the literary ­fascination with the sublime suggests, we can even cherish the vicarious experience of negative emotions (something Aristotle’s own theory of Greek tragedy presupposes).

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Some might argue that any human experience “eloquently” described is literature. If one wallows in despair as long as one does this eloquently, this is literature. But this is not the Aristotelian view, for the Aristotelian perspective on things always includes a moral component. If despair is the greatest sin – leave aside theological niceties – there can be no such thing as eloquent despair. There may be eloquent sorrow, eloquent lamentation, eloquent loneliness, perhaps even eloquent misery. But despair – if it really is a black hole excluding everything that has value – must be, on an Aristotelian account, the opposite of eloquence. Abject wickedness defeats beautiful speech just as efficiently as it puts an end to human goodness. I will propose a moral account of literature, admittedly an unusual stance today. Still, an occasional critic takes up the cause. American novelist John Gardner, writing in the 1970s, criticized the moral nihilism of Samuel Beckett. He observed: Samuel Beckett – surely one of the great writers of our time … is loved by critics, but … the tendency of all he says is wrong. He says it powerfully, with comic-tragic brilliance, and he believes it, but what he says is not quite sound. Every night Samuel Beckett goes home to his wife … puts his arms around her, and says, “No meaning again today …” Critics can say … Well, it doesn’t matter what he says, it’s how well he says it. But I think in the long run Beckett is in for it. Because great writers tell the truth exactly – and get it right. A man can be a brilliant writer who writes wonderful lines, and still say what is just not so; like Sartre [and] Beckett.59 I agree with Gardner’s general point, except that, as an Aristotelian, I would go further. Eloquence is more than sequences of words cleverly put together. Either Beckett captures something true and meaningful about the world, or he fails at eloquence. If “all he says is wrong,” then his “eloquence” is sheer appearances, not reality. As Gardner comments, literature is not, as the formalists have it, some value-neutral adventure in language. It concerns what we care about and what we care about inevitably has an ethical dimension. A story about people eating razor blades might serve as a meaningful portrayal of mental illness. But any story that portrayed this behaviour in a genuinely positive light would not be literature. It might be

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written in a gripping, suspenseful way, but it would also be morally obtuse and insensitive. This is what Gardner is getting at. But more about the connection between morality and literature in the last chapter. Literature includes a moral perspective, but it is about many other things as well. On a wisdom account, literature is an extension of what wise people do. What do wise individuals do? They do all sorts of things: tell the truth, appreciate the beautiful, keep their promises, resist evil, engage in politics, write poetry, participate in meaningful conversation, record history, pray to the gods, get excited about art. If literature is about wisdom, then wisdom has something to say about all these matters. Wise people may do philosophy; they may investigate the universal principles of metaphysics, science, morality, or even theology. But they also tell stories, make up riddles, sing songs, go to the theatre, write essays, make speeches. Literature is not philosophy; it is oblique, embellished discourse. Most of the time, literature communicates something about a particular: a particular person, a particular place, a particular event, a particular way of doing something or thinking about something. But it does this in a way that enhances and enlarges our point of view and, as such, encloses a wisdom aspiration. I have argued for Aristotelian realism as the ultimate ground of knowledge. Literature is not usually about literal truth. It exaggerates, understates, tells falsehoods, hides its meaning in secret symbols, and so on. But this can be an aid rather than an obstacle to wisdom. To be wise is to appreciate and understand the nature of the world. If one could write a text without any epistemological implications, the final product, whatever it was, would not be literature. Literature, we could go so far as to say, is important because it brings us into more immediate contact with reality. Aristotle’s metaphysics accepts that the things we see around us and their properties are real. Other human beings are real. Tables are real. The colour yellow is real. Loneliness is also real. Heroism is real. We can make some sense of all this with Aristotle’s broad-ranging philosophy. Once we eliminate obvious exceptions – optical illusions, drug-fuelled hallucinations, mental illness, dreams, religious superstitions – we are left with something that needs to be accounted for. We could call it “being” or even “becoming.” Literature then opens a door to all being and all becoming.

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I II. 7 L it e r at u r e a n d Transcendence If literature communicates to readers what is real, what are we to make of transcendence? Some would dismiss “the transcendental” as something we mostly make up, as something soft, tenuous, impressionistic, and merely emotional. That is not the view espoused here. I am an Aristotelian realist: what I am calling the “transcendent” is, I believe, an objective facet of reality. Metaphysics gets to the transcendence one way; literature gets there another way; religion gets there another way. These are, nonetheless, parallel aspirations. If we think long and hard enough, we will eventually arrive at some objective reality that is much larger than our partisan interpretations and favourite theories. When we are not blinded by clichés and stereotypes, by dullness and fatigue, by our own stupidity or by bad ideas, we will find something hard and ultimate at the far end of the world. Aristotelians like to propose definitions, but in the case of transcendence, this is immediately problematic. We cannot offer a rigorous definition of transcendence, for indefinability is its distinguishing trait. This is what it means to be transcendent. Obviously, we cannot define in words what is ultimately ineffable. Because literature operates indirectly, it circumvents any need for a definition of transcendence, providing access to an experience of transcendence itself. It speaks obliquely, ambiguously, metaphorically, symbolically, vicariously, but this is the only way to express any contact with the very far margins of human experience. To borrow, then, from the title of this book, literature utters the unutterable, expresses the inexpressible, says in words what cannot be said in words. Meaning permeates literature; there is almost too much meaning; more meaning than we can get a handle on. As the psalm has it: “my cup overflows.” Literature deals with what surpasses the limits of ordinary discourse; this is its vocation. Literature may be filled with facts, but it is not literature because it is filled with facts, but because it presents those particular facts in a way that inspires something greater. Consider fiction. Fiction is not literally true, but it may be metaphysically, morally, psychologically, politically, and theologically true. Literature is about appreciation. Perhaps we know that human life is meaningful, tragic, glorious, petty, funny, lonely, beautiful. Appreciating that state of affairs is the difficulty. But literature not simply an exclamation mark added at the end of a sentence – the way Ayer described

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morality. Literature has, as I have argued, cognitive and conative depth; it is knowledge and emotion all wrapped up together. I do not mean to suggest that literature is only valuable as a means to the transcendent, as if it would be a good idea to jettison the words and focus on the transcendence all by itself. This is, in effect, what mystics do. If, however, mystics don’t need literature, most of us are not mystics. Reading literature opens up a pathway to the transcendent for the rest of us. Literature opens up a window so we can see through to the other side. At least to some extent. According to our capacities. Here is another way of thinking about it. In logic, induction is inference from the particular to the general. We end up with a conclusion that is larger than the data we started with. (Hence, the so-called problem of induction.) We could think of literature, then, as a form of induction. The term “induction” (from the Latin indūcere: to lead or conduct someone somewhere) is Cicero’s translation of Aristotle’s logical term, “ἐπαγωγή” (epagōgē), which means to lead, drive, impel, seduce, draw onwards, bring, cause, or instigate (Liddell and Scott). In induction, “agents are urged on, driven, impelled, pushed, pulled, encouraged, seduced” to a realization that transcends what they started with.60 There is “a gaining of mental momentum … which impels knowers, driving them forward to a greater understanding.”61 But isn’t this rather like what happens with literature? Great literature leads readers, drives them, impels them, even seduces them, bringing them to the verge of an epiphany that leaps to the broadest conclusion possible – the transcendent. Through the eloquent use of language, literature opens out into the ineffable and inexplicable. As Aristotle explains induction, a mental seeing penetrates appearances to behold the essence of the thing. But literature facilitates – indeed, compels – a leap of insight that reveals something essential about the world. The task of literature is to inflict inspiration on others. Emerson, the American “transcendentalist,” writes, “There is some[thing] in all life, untranslatable into language. He who keeps his eye on that will write better than others.”62 This strikes me as a thoroughly Aristotelian thought. As I will try to show, Aristotle acknowledges the importance of literature and the reality of the ineffable. We shouldn’t be overly serious; literature can be funny, light-hearted, nonsensical, and entertaining. Why should we assume that any meeting with the transcendent must be grim and humourless? Comedy opens up essential elements of reality; wit cuts straight to the heart of things; joy is a perfection; laughing, a liberation. Huizinga famously described

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humans as Homo ludens, the “playful ape.” But there is no reason to assume that playfulness is incompatible with the transcendent. Bernard Suits, whom I discuss below, once argued that the mental life of Aristotle’s God is, in the very best sense, “play” in that it is an autotelic (intrinsically valuable) activity pursued at the expense of practical labour.63 Although Aristotle seems to disparage comedy as “a representation of inferior people” involving “some blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster,” we cannot be certain about his original stance, having lost his work on comedy.64 If Matthew Kieran argues that comedy may be equal to tragedy in literary merit, this more or less aligns with the interpretation presented here.65 Comedy, I argue, can be viewed as yet another window on the transcendent. But what is the transcendent? One could posit, paradoxically, that indefinability is the defining feature of the transcendental. Definition is the process of specifying what something is, whereas the transcendent is beyond all specification. Mystics from all traditions and historical eras insist on this. Is the transcendent God? Perhaps it would be better to say that “God” is one incisive way of describing the transcendent. But I will leave it to readers to make up their own minds about how to best describe the absolute. The important point here is that I am “defining” the transcendent as an objective feature of the world. We “bump” into it as an inalienable part of reality. How we try to explain or describe it is a different question. We may arrive at false feelings of transcendence on the basis of misguided, immoral, or uncritical judgments. Not every expansive experience is genuine. Self-deception, confusion, and sheer stupidity are ever-present possibilities. If I say that I have been carried up to the seventh heaven and experienced God, that is not enough to establish the case. If someone says they had a mystical experience, maybe they were drunk; maybe it was indigestion; maybe they had a mental breakdown; maybe they are trying to impress listeners. On the metaphysical account offered here, we don’t make transcendence up; it is a real property of things. We can’t quite grasp “it,” but it is “out there” just the same. And we sometimes make mistakes when we think we have come into contact with it. History is littered with idols that, with the passing of time, turn out to be distractions or, even worse, harmful errors of judgment. If we can genuinely look at the world from different perspectives, it does not follow that we can see anything anywhere. And because people make mistakes about what is truly momentous, they also make mistakes about literature.

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How do we distinguish, then, between true and false, accurate and inaccurate, good and bad accounts of transcendence? There is no easy answer. Suffice it to say that human beings are evaluators. We distinguish between good and bad wine, correct and incorrect grammar, moral and immoral behaviour. It is something we all do, and something good readers and good literary critics have to do when it comes to evaluating literature. The fact that I believe something is not enough. Our ideas about transcendence may be as misguided, shallow, contradictory, partisan, self-indulgent as our ideas about anything else. Human beings seek out transcendence, but the pursuit of transcendence can head off in some very strange directions. Turn, then, and consider transcendence gone wrong.

III. 8 F o u c au lt : S E XUAL RELI GI ON Even a fleeting glance at human behaviour reveals a preoccupation with peak experiences that seem momentous and meaningful. We all crave emotional intensity. But a hit of heroin produces a euphoric experience. Indeed, some people are ready to give up everything for it. Do users experience “transcendence” when they shoot up? But one does not have to turn to drug use as an example. Consider the new religion of sexuality that Michel Foucault celebrates in his well-read book The History of Sexuality. Foucault pushes sex – not loving sex, but the sheer physical act of sex – as something worth ­living and dying for. He tells readers: It is through sex … that that each [modern] individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility … We have arrived at the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from … the plenitude of our body … from what was [once] ­perceived as an obscure and nameless urge. Hence the importance we ascribe to [sex], the reverential fear with which we ­surround it, the care we take to know it … Over the centuries it has become more important than our soul, more important almost than our life; and so it is that all the world’s enigmas appear frivolous to us compared to [sex]. The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for … When a long while ago the West discovered

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love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this equivalence, the highest of all.66 Foucault is not celebrating the connection between sex and companionship, romantic love, measured enjoyment, family, a stable life, health, longevity. Nehamas piously suggests that “sadomasochism was a kind of blessing in Foucault’s life [in that] it provided the occasion to experience relations of power as a source of delight.”67 But this is diplomatic understatement. It is like saying that Nietzsche politely disagreed with Christianity. It does not capture the intensity that became the focus of Foucault’s personal sexual life later in his career. Foucault was not distracted by some dilettante Epicurean hedonism; he became focused on extreme forms of sexuality as a modern means to transcendence. Details can be found elsewhere, but there is nothing here of a genteel Sidgwickean utilitarianism that situates value in “agreeable feelings.” Foucault is on a par with the morbidly mystical Georges Bataille: the new transcendence of sex replaces the old transcendence of love. Sadomasochism, which involves illicit pleasures, pleasures that transgress the consensual, is proposed as the route to transcendence. If Epicurus insisted that hedonism was only to be valued a way of avoiding pain, the new hedonism Foucault follows is, perversely, a matter of seeking out pain.68 That is how the pleasure gets in: pain becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes pain. This is outrageous – but that is the point! Sadomasochism transgresses moral boundaries and, thus, provokes an epiphany of sensation. The pleasure principle contradicts itself to produce a paradoxical via negativa of transgression. Seen from a certain angle, surpassing limits is what transcendence is, fundamentally, about. Sadomasochism surpasses limits, the limits imposed on us by morality, by common sense, by health, by liberalism, by etiquette, by law, by religion. Foucault’s new religion of sex demands the ultimate sacrifice: one must be ready to be a martyr for the cause. Kierkegaard argues that the despairing man seeks to annihilate himself.69 Perhaps this is the modern condition. But whatever is going on here, I would argue, on Aristotelian grounds, that there is a cognitive mistake at the heart of this misguided extremism. Foucault toyed with the idea of suicideorgies, where every participant dies in throes of sexual excess. But confusing the self-destructive pursuit of extreme bodily pleasure

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with authentic transcendence is an epistemological, a moral, and even an aesthetic error. At least on Aristotelian grounds, this is a disastrous mistake. This is transcendence gone horribly wrong: this is despair, not salvation; nihilism, not meaningfulness; self-destruction, not self-affirmation; slavery to irrational appetite, not freedom. It is like bored, alienated teenagers cutting themselves because they are in need of stimulation. Cutting oneself for no reason at all is a self-destructive, foolish thing to do. It is like taking heroin. It replaces cognitive, moral, even aesthetic striving with an empty rush of feelings. Literature, I will argue, is about successful engagement with a real transcendent.

III. 9 P o l it ic a l Reli gi on: E vo l a a n d Schmi tt The pursuit of “bad” transcendence is not limited to libertine excess. If human aspiration naturally orients itself toward the transcendent, we should not be surprised to see many misguided attempts at ­transcendence. It would be naive to think that every attempt at transcendence is good, wholesome, positive, life-enhancing, or moral. Consider Julius Evola, who turned politics into a higher religion, arguing for terrorism, for antisemitism, and for misogyny. Evola recommended political violence as the route to a shared, collective transcendence. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke explains: “he identified self-transcendence with the higher, timeless spirituality of a lost world, which could only be reborn through catastrophic change.”70 It was only through complete warfare with industrial, mechanistic modernity that one could regain contact with theosophic transcendence, which Evola saw shining through the material world. Hence his support for violent insurrection and terrorism. Why did Evola support antisemitism? As Goodrick-Clarke reports, he (following Weininger) interpreted “the Jewish contribution to science as an urge to deny all transcendence through a mechanisticmaterialist worldview.”71 This led, he thought, to a Marxism that prioritized the material economic over the immanent spiritual. Briefly put, Jews are bad because the Jews are against transcendence! (One finds echoes of similar antisemitic tropes in other period authors, including Nietzsche and Marx.) Again, why is Evola a misogynist? Goodrick-Clarke explains:

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Evola’s dualism of male-spirituality [was borrowed from] the young Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903), whose famous book Geschlecht und Charakter [Sex and Character] (1903) expounded a metaphysical view of the principles of male and female sexuality. Weininger had glorified higher reason, Platonic truth and Kantian imperatives while negating the fallen, mundane sphere of matter and nature. Only man aspires to the eternal life of the spirit, while woman embraces the lower life of earth and the senses … Woman … is part of the material world. Void of any higher spirit, she knows nothing of logic and morality … Ontologically … her existence simply guarantees the continued reproduction of the material sensate world.72 Evola disparages women precisely because he sees them as an obstacle to transcendence. Men have an eternal, Platonic, Kantian soul; women are merely mundane material vessels for biological reproduction. (Evola’s misogyny is based on a gendered conception of the transcendent, which seems strange: because the transcendent is the undifferentiated, it must exist, surely, beyond the specifications of gender.) Evola was far from being the only transcendentally minded Nazi ­sympathizer. Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi film classic Triumph of the Will is filled with “transcendent” imagery. Everything is ponderous, epic, Shakespearean, overly serious, grandiose, stark, mysterious. Riefenstahl dresses up the organic nationalism of German thinkers such as von Herder and Fichte. One finds a similar mingling of politics and transcendence in Carl Schmitt’s account of political loyalty in which the state becomes, in a way (to borrow Hobbes’s phrase), “the mortal God” at whose altar we all must worship.73 Thus the state is what gives all meaning to life. The problem, here, is that the concept of transcendence has been reified and politicized in a disastrously circumscribed way. Just as Foucault narrows transcendence down to physical sexuality, and Evola narrows it down to the masculine, these authors narrow it down to some sort of tribal mythology where Germany becomes the absolute. I cannot examine the rights and wrongs of political ideology here. The important point is that such nationalisms have a transcendental scope; they reach toward some ultimate that gives meaning to everything else. But something has gone terribly wrong. Every pursuit of the transcendent is not good, right, honest, beautiful, or true. We need to avoid a Polyannaish infatuation with anything that claims to be mystical.

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I will argue that literature pushes us to the proper transcendental understood as the widest possible appreciation of the world, but this means, among other things, transcending libertine excess, misogyny, or chauvinistic political religion. There are complicated issues here I cannot sort through. Suffice it to say that, on an Aristotelian model, genuine transcendence has an inalienable moral aspect; it must be, in principle, good. We have to be careful not to confuse transcendence with something less than the good, the beautiful, the real, and the true. This holds for human aspiration in general, but it also holds for literature.

III. 1 0 B a rthes: T h e D e at h o f the Author Foucault’s religion of sex, Evola’s religion of anthroposophy, Schmitt’s religion of German nationalism; these worrisome alternatives all revolve around problematic notions of the transcendence. I cannot attempt a taxonomy of transcendence gone wrong here; readers can judge these issues for themselves. If, however, the human yearning for the ultimate is so pressing, it should not be surprising when modern literary criticism sometimes partakes of similar mistakes and exaggerations. (This happens in philosophy as well.) Consider one very brief example of a sort of literary analysis that, in my opinion, ends in misplaced transcendence. In 1967 the French critic Roland Barthes rather flamboyantly announced “the death of the author.” This gave rise to a prominent trope in present-day criticism that revolves around worries about the transparency of authorial intention. Why does Barthes reject authorial intention? Because it imposes limits on interpretation. He writes, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”74 Barthes does not want to “close the writing” but to open it up to the largest meaning possible. He goes so far as to suggest that the inventive reader can find any meaning in a text. (Stanley Fish complicates this reader-response theory somewhat; I will discuss his “improvements” to the theory later.) Barthes thinks of the death of the author as a liberation. He argues against the “essentialist” idea that texts have fixed meanings, for that would impose a restraint on transcendence understood as an over­ coming of all limits. How, according to Barthes, should we read ­literature? “The space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced”; “there is nothing beneath” the text; “everything is to be disentangled,

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nothing deciphered”; we are to accept that the “writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.”75 This exemption from meaning is supposed to free us from the finite limitations imposed on us by a particular author; we are to transcend what the author intended for the complete freedom of absolute, undifferentiated autonomy. In effect, Barthes turns authorial intention into a literary version of Kant’s inaccessible noumenon: the author’s intentions have become a mystery no reader can penetrate. When it comes to literary exegesis, we – literally – can make it up as we go along. Once we kill off the author – he or she does not die, Barthes is more interested in murdering the author – we can turn the text into whatever we want it to mean. But isn’t this an exercise in dangerous self-absorption? When we exclude the ideas of the original author, we have to replace his or her ideas with our own ideas. Isn’t this a case of cutting ourselves off from something outside ourselves? Doesn’t this relentless focus on what we want to think make any encounter with the genuine transcendent as an Objective Other impossible? Barthes declares: “To refuse to fix meaning … [is] to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.”76 But Barthes assumes that the claims of religion, of “reason, science, and law” are external constraints that get in the way of human self-realization. This is not how the Aristotelian sees things. Reason, science, and law are inside us. Even religion is inside us. All these things are an integral part of human nature. We cannot cast them off as if they were a pile of clothes left behind when we are undressing. In conforming to these higher aspirations, we are responding to something located inside ourselves. Barthes is impressed by the intentional fallacy (which I discuss later). But he also has the wrong idea of transcendence. The transmission of literary meaning is, doubtless, a complicated affair (filled with purposeful ambiguity, as Empson suggests). At the same time, language use must, of necessity, restrict possibility; that is how language operates. When an author chooses to use a particular word over others, he or she closes off the meaning represented by those other words. By choosing a specific vocabulary, authors build a fence around meaning to avoid possible misinterpretation (as Locke says about the function of law). Barthes wants to shake off all limits. Fair enough. But if words could mean anything, they would not be words and communication would be impossible. The restriction of meaning is precisely what makes something a word, for a word is a symbol with a specific

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meaning. It is the restriction of meaning that makes the choice of a particular word so powerful. Barthes wants to open up meaning. Yes, that may be a worthwhile aspiration, but it is more complicated than that. Literature is only possible through the closure or containment of meaning. Mystics, those rare people who meet the unlimited directly, without the intermediary of language, have no need of literature. But the rest of us are not so fortunate. Literature is the humbler path. It operates, paradoxically, through a containment of meaning that opens up meaning. We enter through the narrow gate. We have to limit meaning to produce an experience of the transcendent. Barthes’s theory is too simple; at best, he only captures half the equation. Barthes conflates transcendence and subjectivity, meaning and arbitrary will, nihilism and freedom. For an actual experience of the transcendent, we have to confront “the Other” as anything that is different and bigger than ourselves. If reading is inserting our own pet ideas into a text, we will never meet with something beyond ourselves. Our own understanding is inevitably limited, inadequate, in need of improvement. The self-absorbed exercise of pouring our own meaning into a text is a narrowing down, not a widening of experience. This strategy seems, at the very least, limiting. This is to restrict access to transcendence, not to enhance it. Barthes vituperates religion as the ultimate source of dogmatic authority. It is a tired trope. But Barthes does not get rid of God. That is not how these things work. Rather, he invents a new god. In this nouvelle théologie, the reader becomes god. The reader reigns supreme over the meaning of the text. The reader gets to decide what the text means; what the reader decides is the new truth. What about the old religious worries about idolatry? And isn’t there an epistemological, not to say an aesthetic complication here? What is literature if one can read, plausibly, any meaning whatsoever into a text? Barthes’s declarations about “the death of the author” seem like a simplified liberalism played softly to a literary theme. It is like Mill’s “no harm principle.” We make a bargain: I will not interfere with your reading; you will not interfere with mine. Your beliefs are your beliefs; my beliefs are my beliefs, and no one is allowed to impose meaning on anyone else. With this arrangement, we are left free to interpret any text as we will. If, however, leaving individuals to determine what a text means according to their own subjective proclivities might make for some sort of peaceful coexistence among academics – in fact, it

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doesn’t – then this strategy leaves any serious pursuit of the transcendent far behind. Transcendence, on an Aristotelian view, is an objective aspect of reality; it requires a great deal of self-discipline, smarts, and hard work to approach or emulate the ultimate with any degree of success. Transcendence distances itself from the self-indulgent. When Barthes blocks off access to authorial intentions, it makes the world smaller, not larger, as he had perhaps hoped.

III. 1 1 B e yo n d Babbi tt: C r it ic iz in g B a d T r ans cendence I have argued that if literature is a source of pinnacle experiences, epiphanies, and a sense of expanding or intensifying consciousness, one has to frame knowledgeable discussion of the transcendent within objective criteria. How then are we to differentiate between bad and good ways of pursuing transcendence? One obvious way is through morality. This is, in effect, what conservative American critic Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), the mentor of T.S. Eliot, spent his career trying to do. Babbitt set himself up as the champion of neoclassicist values such as decorum, proportion, symmetry, harmony, poise, and moral sensibility. He also saw himself as the enemy of a permissive, eccentric, narcissistic Romanticism. Babbitt argues for the pivotal importance of conscience in literature, where conscience is understood as a higher exercise of will that provides an “inner check” against a dissolute modern obsession with the transcendent understood in terms of unbridled emotions, self-­ indulgent sensuality, and undisciplined imaginations. Babbitt traces the “romantic corruption” of morality to authors such as Rousseau and Shaftesbury, who insidiously transform conscience “from an inner check into expansive emotion.” Babbitt explains: [Shaftesbury] set up an aesthetic substitute not merely for ­traditional religion but for traditional humanism. He undermines insidiously decorum, the central doctrine of the classicist, at the very time that he seems to be defending it. For decorum also implies a control upon the expansive instincts of human nature, [whereas] Shaftesbury is actually engaged in rehabilitating “nature,” and insinuating that it does not need any control. He attains this expansiveness by putting [the] aesthetic in the place of spiritual perception, and so merging more or less completely

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the good and the true with the beautiful. He thus points the way very directly to Rousseau’s rejection of both inner and outer ­control in the name of man’s natural goodness. Once [one accepts] Shaftesbury’s transformation of conscience, one is led almost inevitably to look on everything that is expansive as natural or vital and on everything that restricts expansion as conventional or artificial.77 Babbitt’s opposition to a facile Romanticism is, fundamentally, an attack on false notions of transcendence. What exercises his ire, mostly, is the way Romanticism opens up the individual to unqualified epiphanies of meaning that have no anchor except in the self-absorbed fantasies and desires of the individual. Glenn Davis reports: “Babbitt believed that a wandering, unrestrained imagination would prove to be socially and morally destructive … [The] radical individualism fostered by Rousseau and his followers would produce at best eternal childhood and, at worst, freaks and monsters operating under the guise of individual genius.”78 Babbitt proposes an art and a literature that would bring moral order and a healthy discipline to inspirational chaos. He insists that literature requires an “ethical” rather than a “Rousseauistic” imagination. Any valuable sense of literary inspiration must be framed within larger moral values. To pursue unravelling desire over balanced self-restraint is, he thinks, anti-humanist; it leads not to human fulfillment but to nihilism and self-destruction. Historically, Babbitt was swimming against the intellectual tide, and his project lost its influence on the wider community. As an Aristotelian, I want to suggest that Babbitt’s solution to such self-indulgent Romantic exaggerations may have proposed a welcome Kantian check to unrestrained emotion, but his response to this modern malaise is only second-best. First, Babbitt focuses too much on style. The contrast Babbitt draws between neoclassicism and Romanticism is too stark. We need to deal with these issues at a deeper level. We cannot answer fundamental questions about literature by recommending one literary style over the other. Each style has advantages and disadvantages. Neoclassicism has to find a way of evoking the transcendent as a beautiful, harmonious ideal. (Lovely Baroque music, for example, is orderly and transcendental at the same time.) And Romanticism, for all its emotional intensity, has to preserve formal structure to be intelligible. Second, although Babbitt was legitimately worried about a loosening of moral boundaries, one has to be careful lest we end up with the

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opposite problem: we don’t want to confuse literature with some pedantic, rigid formalism devoid of transcendence. (This is what Oscar Wilde, to Babbitt’s chagrin, railed against.) Extreme Romanticism may turn thought into narcissistic, amorphous mush. But extreme neoclassicism harbours its own risks. We may end up with the formulaic, the rigid, the merely didactic, the uninspired. But the main problem with Babbitt’s sermonizing is, third, that he unwittingly falls prey to some of the modernist faults he is criticizing. Babbitt’s insistence on the primacy of a muscular will as the final safeguard against moral dissolution is more reminiscent of Kant (with whom he was not enamoured) than Aristotle. Babbitt overemphasizes muscular self-exertion, turning morality into something like a Calvinist war against corrupt human nature. There is something to Edmund Wilson’s bitter complaint that Babbitt believed “that virtue should consist mainly of the exercise of the will to refrain.”79 In someone like Nietzsche, whom Babbitt severely critiqued, there is plenty of room for the exercise of will. It is not more will that is needed but wisdom. Mill remarks that human achievement involves something more than Calvinist self-restraint. As he puts it, “There is a different type of excellence than the Calvinistic; a conception of humanity as having its nature bestowed on it for other purposes than merely to be abnegated. Pagan self-assertion is one of the elements of human worth, as well as Christian self-denial.”80 Although Mill misunderstands somewhat the ancient (and perhaps the Christian) tradition, there is truth in what he is saying.

III. 1 2 F ro m B a b b it t to Wi nters: P o e t ry as M o r a l Expressi on Although Babbitt did not win the critical wars, he was not entirely alone. Poet and critic Yvor Winters took his distance from Babbitt’s “New England voluntarism” but mounted a similar attack on what he saw as an undisciplined and self-indulgent Romanticism.81 Unlike members of the Chicago School, Winters was no Aristotelian scholar. In a discussion of tragic catharsis, he humbly writes, “I myself am incompetent to discuss what Aristotle really meant.”82 Yet, compared to Babbitt, Winter comes much closer – it seems to me – to enunciating an Aristotelian doctrine. Winters views poetry (in a matter analogous to the view defended here) as a combination of understanding and emotion. In In Defense

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of Reason, his magnum opus, he writes: “The theory of literature which I defend … is absolutist. I believe that the work of literature, in so far as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of objective truth … The poem is good in so far as it makes a defensible rational statement about a given human experience … and at the same time communicates the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of that experience.”83 Winters is a formalist worried about the disintegration of proper poetic form in the face of unleashed, undisciplined emotion. He is mercilessly critical of the “pseudo-mysticism” and vague theosophy of much twentieth-century poetry. He rails, for example, against a colleague’s work because it “continually lays claim to extreme feeling, which has no support whether of structure or of detail and which is therefore simply un-mastered and self-inflicted hysteria.”84 He takes aim at a pretend-transcendence, a disguised luxuriating in nebulous but intense feelings of spiritual superiority and emotional release, targeting notably Hart Crane because his oeuvre “often suggests a … theoretic rejection of all human endeavor in favour of some vaguely apprehended but ecstatically asserted existence of a superior sort.”85 Dismissing “the conception of the poem as a safety valve … by which the writer escapes from an attitude by pouring it into his work and leaving it behind him,” he advances, instead, “a conception of poetry as a technique of contemplation, of comprehension, a technique which  does not eliminate the need of philosophy or of religion, but which, rather, completes and enriches them.”86 Winters offers a “moralistic” conception of poetry because morality – understood very generally as some rectitude of feeling – pus limits on misdirected attempts at transcendence. Understand morality here, very broadly, as intelligence in action (as I discuss in the last chapter). Winters thinks that the Romantics, in aiming at the supreme gratification of exalted feeling, leave behind morality and lose themselves in epiphanies of disordered feelings and attitudes. Poetry means putting form to something, not abandoning form for some nebulous and irrational Absolute. Winters offers interesting advice to authors who aim at transcendental effects. “In so far as one endeavors to deal with the Absolute, not as a means of ordering one’s moral perception but as the subject itself of perception, one will tend to say nothing, despite the multi­ plication of words.”87 But this is too strong. Any facile attempt to “utter the unutterable” through the mere expansion of grandiose

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rhetorical effects must fail. Still, it is not as if morality is opposed to transcendence and transcendence is opposed to morality. It is not as if we must leave behind one category to embrace the other. If the prevalence of pseudo-mysticism does not count against the perhaps much rarer occurrence of authentic mysticism, a literary preoccupation with false transcendental effects (which reveal themselves as false under the scrutiny of good criticism) need not obscure the transcendental nature of true literary accomplishment.

III. 1 3 A r is totle: P u t t in g T h in g s in Context Turn back, then, to Aristotle. How do we go about dealing with the problem of false or bad transcendence from an authentically Aristotelian perspective? Aristotle does not rely on this kind of vocabulary, although he (like Plato) does mention the specific possibility of inspiration, which involves some sort of human experience immersed in transcendence. (He distinguishes, for example, between true and false cases of inspiration, but I do not have time to enter into any detailed exegesis here.88) Still, the general Aristotelian position is not hard to formulate. We need to situate transcendental experiences within life more generally, which means framing them within the standards supplied by morality, reason, science, religion, and social custom. It is not the apparent intensity of feeling or the subjective opinions of the agent, but (as Winters suggests) some larger web of rational and moral evaluation that provides the criteria for legitimate transcendence. Critics like Babbitt and Winters insist that moral considerations are an important part of literature. But Aristotle has an internalist, not an externalist account of morality. On Aristotle’s account, moral standards do not need to be imported from the outside and applied through sheer strength of will to human experience and aspiration. Insomuch as literature is an extension and expression of human nature, it already encloses within itself moral understandings, moral nuances, moral imperatives, and moral judgments. For Aristotle, ethics resides inside us, and therefore inside literature, which is humanity’s selfexpression. Literary criticism is a matter of bringing to light human values already embedded in the text to discern the difference between legitimate and counterfeit aspiration. On a genuinely Aristotelian account, we cannot eliminate ethics from our discussions about literature because we cannot eliminate

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ethics from human life. We can try to hide our value-judgments somewhere in the background, but wherever there is human aspiration, there is a moral orientation that presupposes specific values. This orientation surfaces in art and literature. As Babbitt argues, literature is more than subjective emotivism. It makes a great deal of difference whether we pursue exaltation through heroin addiction, or through white supremacist rallies, or through reading Milton’s poetry. Isolated from moral and humanistic standards, a mere feeling of so-called transcendence is not enough. A parallel might be instructive. Suppose someone thinks they are in love. They are infatuated. They enjoy wonderful feelings. But how do we determine whether those feelings are warranted? The mere intensity of emotion does not differentiate true love from passing infatuation. However cold that sounds, it is the evidence, the context, the reality that establishes, hopefully, that this is true love. The pursuit of transcendence is not so different. In a mystical context, it is not the intensity of the paranormal experience but an evaluation of the life and virtues of the individual that differentiates true from false mystics. This is standard mystical teaching: by their fruits you shall know them. When it comes to discerning the transcendent at work in literature, no magic trick covers all cases. There are general principles no doubt, but what we need is a sort of literary casuistry that applies broad ideas to unique cases. The best thing we can rely on is careful reasoning by wise critics. They can help determine whether a text operates as an authentic path to something objectively much greater. We can find a wide foundation for this sort of case-by-case reasoning in the details of Aristotle’s rhetoric and ethics. There is no reason why we cannot adapt this Aristotelian understanding to contemporary literary criticism. Aristotle believes that we can determine the nature of objects in the world and evaluate their merit according to objective standards inherent in their natures. Just as we can understand birds, volcanoes, or galaxies, we can understand novels, plays, hymns, and epigrams. Such things have an objective nature that can be accessed and evaluated according to reasonably precise criteria. We can do this in a way that incorporates normative judgments, devising sound arguments that explain and expand on our present understanding. There is no need to be overly simplistic about such things. If a text is purposefully ambiguous, that ambiguity is part of its essential nature. It must be acknowledged and described. As we have seen, Barthes eliminates any access to the true nature of the text, turning it

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into something like a tabula rasa, a blank surface on which readers can record their own thoughts. I discuss these issues further below. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that Aristotelian literary criticism is not like this. It is a science-like endeavour that attempts to explain or comment on what a text is like, both up close and as it emerges from a wider literary tradition and from human history. Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, neatly quipped: “You cannot lift cream cheese by a hook.”89 You need to wrap round a lump of cream cheese with a snug piece of cheesecloth. A hook will not work; the whole thing breaks apart. This fits neatly into the Aristotelian picture of a scientific criticism in that adapts itself to the nature of whatever is under consideration. I have already argued for a natural language approach to criticism; natural language reasoning is so versatile that it can be fashioned into cheesecloth or a hook: it can serve both purposes admirably. As I discuss below, versatility is one of the hallmarks of an Aristotelian criticism. One might assume that Aristotle’s scientific realism is somehow at odds with the transcendent. Why would this have to be the case? Realism operates on the principle that we must make judgments based on the evidence we have. But, as many great thinkers insist, there is plenty of evidence that points to the transcendent. All the substitute reductionist explanations – Freudian, evolutionary, Marxist, behaviourist, materialist, positivist, and so on – can be criticized because they do not seem to take the full extent of human experience seriously. The transcendent seems to be “out there.” Religion is one way of dealing with it; literature is another. Although I will not dwell on the point in this book, Aristotle himself seems to believe that his metaphysics presents a parallel avenue of access.

III. 1 4 S e c u l a r T r a nscendence: T h e O ly m p ic Games One finds transcendence in the strangest places. Ivo Jirásek, in a paper on “physical education and recreational sport,” has recently argued that coaches, trainers, athletes, and teachers need to get in the habit of “perceiving life not as a mechanical and explainable aggregate of facts but as a certain mystery and gift that potentially offers individuals a chance to experience certain moments of … transcendence.”90 Jirásek aims to recuperate a “non-religious spirituality” as an integral element of organized sport. He argues that modern Olympic Games founder

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Pierre de Coubertin’s religio athletae (religion of sport) must be understood in terms of a striving toward secular transcendence.91 Coubertin’s Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) is about overcoming, surpassing, transcending. It does not posit an end to athletic accomplishment, but rather an ever striving further and beyond. Insomuch as sport shares in this aspiration to accomplish something that comes as breathtakingly close as possible to the ultimate, the superlative, the ineffable, it has a quasi-religious dimension. One can understand why some modern thinkers might prefer non-religious notions of transcendence, but Jirásek misunderstands somewhat the religious spirit of the original Olympic Games. Obviously, the Greek Olympic Games were never about proving that gods exist. Or forcing religious beliefs on converts. Still, they were closely intertwined with the temple culture of Greek pagan society, and they provided an opportunity for heroism on a grand scale. Greek heroes, who were also revered in temples (as Aristotle says), were close to the gods. Indeed, they were about as close to the gods as humans could ever hope to be. For the ancient Greeks, what was immortal was divine. But the Olympians were aiming at immortality. They pursued a glory that would never fade; they wanted to be remembered forever. Aristotle tells us that to “partake in the eternal and divine” is “the goal towards which all things strive and for the sake of which they do whatever their natures render possible.”92 He views the longing for immortality as a natural aspect of the world (as in reproduction, for example). We yearn for the Divine. Unable to have personal immortality, we come as close as possible, be it through progeny, Olympic exploits, military prowess, or intellectual or artistic achievements. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Aristotle compares philosophy to the experience of watching the Olympic Games. In his Protrepticus, he contends that philosophy is worthwhile because it allows us to be spectators of the highest truths, which, he says, is like going to the Olympic Games or attending a religious festival. As the most recent reconstruction of the text has it: We [philosophers] don’t claim that [philosophy] is [instrumentally] beneficial but that it is in itself good, and it is appropriate to choose it for itself, not for the sake of some other thing. For just as we travel abroad to Olympia for the sake of the spectacle itself, even if there is going to be nothing more to get from it

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(for the observing itself is superior to material wealth), and just as we observe the Dionysia [religious rituals] not in order to acquire anything from the actors … and as there are many other spectacles we would choose instead of money, so too the observation of the universe [through philosophy] should be ­honoured above everything that is thought to be useful. For surely one should not travel with great effort for the sake of beholding people imitating girls and slaves [as in Greek theatre], or of beholding fighting and running [in the Olympics], and think one should not [in philosophy] behold the nature of ­existing things, i.e. the truth, for free.93 So, Aristotle, who composed a (revised) list of Olympic champions, compares doing philosophy to watching Olympic competitions. Why? Because both activities involve the first-hand witnessing of some momentous spectacle. In one case, supreme athletic performance; in the other, the highest truths. If Olympic athletes strive toward transcendence, it should not be surprising that echoes of that ripple through spectators witnessing first-hand such glorious performances. But the more important issue, for present purposes, is that Aristotle calls the activity of beholding truth (the way a spectator observes the Olympic Games) theōria, or “theory.” And what Aristotle means by theory is, then, fundamentally different from modern conceptions. 94 Let us turn next to Aristotle’s conception of the theoretical life.

III. 1 5 A r is to t e l ian “Theory” We moderns talk about atomic theory, Darwin’s theory of evolutionary, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and so on. Literary critics call themselves “theorists.” What, then, is a theory? Merriam-Webster offers the following definition: “a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena.” According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it is “a formal statement of the rules … or of ideas that are suggested to explain a fact or event.” The Dictionary of Philosophy defines a theory as “a unified system of laws or hypotheses with explanatory force.”95 The Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as “the set of propositions deducible from a set of axioms … a deductive closure of axioms.”96 On a modern account, then, a theory is, more or less, a system of claims and rules that explains something.

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One might ask, if this is what theory is, what has theory to do with literature? We do not read a novel or a poem because we are searching for “a unified system of laws or hypotheses with explanatory force.” That is the point of a chemistry textbook or even a textbook in philosophy or literary criticism. But literature itself, when seen from this perspective, seems a decidedly untheoretical affair. Aristotle and the ancients, however, had a very different idea about theory (theōria). As Andrea Nightingale reports, the original Greek term derives from the ancient practice of pilgrimage in which a θεωρός, a “seer,” left home to travel to a religious ceremony or momentous event (like the Olympic Games) and returned with an eyewitness report of what transpired. The Greek word for theory, θεωρία, “means, in its most literal sense, ‘witnessing a spectacle.’”97 To do theory, then, in the original Greek sense, is akin to witnessing something momentous first-hand. One might conceive of philosophers, then, as the first theorists, as pilgrims on a voyage, following the sacred path of philosophy to the epistemological arena and taking a front-row seat from which they can gaze upon the spectacle of universal truth. Hence Aristotle’s comparison of philosophy to watching the Olympic Games. Francis Cornford maintains that it was the Pythagoreans who first “intellectualized” the word theōria, turning something associated with Orphic religious pilgrimages into something more strictly epistemological. Cornford explains: Pythagoras gave a new meaning to theōria; he reinterpreted it as the passionless contemplation of rational unchanging truth, and converted the [philosophical] way of life into a “pursuit of wisdom” (philosophia). [This new] way of life … means death to the emotions and lusts of the vile body, and a release of the intellect to soar into the untroubled empyrean of theory. This is now the only avenue by which the soul can “follow God” (ἔπεσθαι θεῷ) who has ascended beyond the stars. Orgiastic [­religious] ritual … must go; only certain prescriptions of the Orphic askesis [asceticism] are retained, to symbolize a turning away from lower desires that might enthrall the reason.98 On the Pythagorean account, “theory” requires a mystical contemplation of divine truths based on pure reason. One must ascend above the world of physical appearances and appetites to behold the universal ideas that determine what reality is. Aristotle, as we shall see,

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borrows from some of these basic Pythagorean themes, which prevailed in the Academy. Aristotle tells us, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that God is doing theōria. But the theoretical life of God is not the life of accumulating logical, mathematical, or scientific arguments that we associate with modern philosophy. Aristotle’s God is not devising a system of logical explanatory principles in the modern sense.99 Aristotle’s God does not compose deductively valid syllogisms, answer questions, collect evidence, infer conclusions, or analyze data. He knows every conclusion to every argument beforehand. He does not need to ask questions: he already knows all the answers. Theōria, here, is better translated by the English word “contemplation.” What Aristotle’s God is doing, then, when He does “theory,” is “contemplating” truth; He is gazing upon the greatest truths. Aristotle’s God sees, in an intuition, why and how everything in the cosmos holds together just the way it does. He knows everything effortlessly, by immediate insight, without bothering with argument or explanation. He engages in a non-discursive act of understanding, in pure intuition, involving a complete saturation of discernment, in the most superior sense. This is why doing theory is like going to the Olympic Games. Someone who visits the Olympics games does not spend their time arguing or calculating; they spend their time looking, seeing, beholding what is happening. And this is what Aristotle’s God is doing: seeing the truth, directly, immediately, instantaneously. And, to a lesser extent, this is what the wise philosopher is doing. Aristotle’s God is complete intellectual accomplishment. Unlike the philosopher who is pursuing wisdom, God Himself is not the pilgrim on the way to the temple; He has already arrived. He is not an accountant God, a logician God, a writer-of-books God, a researcher God, a God-scientist, a God-historian, a divine detective, an omnipotent rhetorician trying to persuade us of something. Why would God waste his time solving problems? Again, he already knows all the answers. Solving problems means moving from a state of not-knowing to a state of knowing; but any state of non-knowing is impossible for God. God’s knowledge is entirely adequate, all the time. Some analytical commentators are notably uncomfortable with any non-discursive account of theōria.100 Richard Sorabji argues that, for Aristotle’s God, “thinking must be propositional,” for every definition God thinks about must entail a belief in the proposition “that suchand-such an essence belongs to such-and-such a subject.”101 Except

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that this misses the point. Aristotle’s God does not have to formulate this statement in language to know this.102 Aristotle’s God is above language. He can see that an essence and a subject go together without having to formulate a separate proposition about it. God knows every truth immediately, without having to spin out, in language, any statement, definition, or argument. Sorabji trivializes any notion of a non-propositional definition, arguing that definitions in this non-propositional sense “involve simply referring to the same things twice.”103 As if saying that “a human being is a rational animal” were the same thing as saying that “a human being is a human being.” But turning definitions into empty tautologies has little to do with Aristotle. Aristotle believes that we can intellectually see into the substantive nature of things. Definitions do not involve mere repetition but the beholding of a nature. And the full beholding of natures is what theōria is about. But this is beside the point, anyway. Aristotle himself suggests that knowledge of definitions does not involve propositional thinking, as I have discussed elsewhere. Sorabji wants to replace Aristotle’s reliance on insight or direct intelligence (nous, noēsis) with a reliance on propositional logic as the paradigm of theoretical knowledge. In ancient philosophy, however, propositional logic is mostly a ladder that can be thrown away once the truth-seeker, like a pilgrim, a theoros, arrives at the destination of truth. Aristotle has no problem accepting that we know definitions and necessary first principles via a species of immediate intuition. This is a common trope in ancient thought and philosophy. As classicist Kurt von Fritz points out, the ancient Greeks thought of thinking “as a kind of mental perception.”104 Originally, and in Homer, νοῡϛ (mind, thought) never meant “reason,” and νοῑεν (thinking) never meant “to reason,” whether deductively or inductively. The Greek word for “thinking” (νοῑεν) primarily meant seeing what is the case. As Jacob Ziguras reports, in the ancient mind, the knowledge that “thinking” arrived at was “not the result of any discursive process.”105 Archaic Greek terms such as νοῡϛ (the mind or intellect), νόησιϛ (understanding or intuition), and νοῑεν (to think or see) all point to intuition, not logic, as being at the very root of human intellectual abilities. Neoplatonic authors such as Plotinus and Proclus are not so far from Aristotle when they situate divine reason in non-discursive intuition, what they call nous. The medieval schoolmen also had a good grasp of this aspect of Aristotle. We tend to view science as the epitome

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of knowledge, but Aristotle’s God is beyond science understood as the pursuit of truth. God does not pursue truth logically or empirically. He already has the truth; He is not involved in data-collection (what Aristotle calls historia, from the Greek verb ἱστορέω, which means to inquire), in scientific induction (epagōgē), or in demonstration (apodeixis).106 Aristotle’s God has a simultaneous habit of mind that directly mirrors the truth in all aspects. He is transcendent in the highest sense possible. Wise philosophers who imitate or aim at this sort of theoretical stance are aiming at something we can only very imperfectly approach and never fully attain. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies what is traditionally translated as the “contemplative life” but is, more literally translated, the theoretical life (bios theōrētikos) with “perfect happiness.” He remarks, “The activity of reason, which is theory [theōria], seems both to be superior in serious worth and to aim at no end beyond this activity and to have its own pleasure proper to itself … As the supremely happy man is characterized by self-sufficiency, leisureliness, and unweariedness (so far as this is possible for man), these and all his other attributes are evidently those connected with the practice of theory [theōria], this theoretical life will be the complete happiness [εὐδαιμονία] of man.”107 Aristotle further observes that the part of the mind capable of doing theory is either “actually divine or the divinest part of us,” and that the theoretical life must be “higher than human so that a man will achieve it not in virtue of his humanity but in virtue of something in him that is divine.”108 Aristotle’s view of “theory” is, then, far removed from modern notions. To arrive at truth, we humans need argument, logic, calculation, and the laborious accumulation of evidence. But God does not need any of this. He just sees the way things are. God must be the smartest, thinking of everything without any strain or labour. It is successful cognition that counts as “theory” for Aristotle. God enjoys this perfectly; the wise person enjoys such moments of knowing fleetingly. Aristotle famously defines God as “thought-thinking-thought” (ἡ νόησιϛ νοήσεω νόησιϛ).109 This is an odd idea, but we can make logical sense of it. “Thinking” here does not mean problem-solving. When Aristotle’s God “thinks,” he has a mental apprehension of what is true; there is no labour or effort involved. If, however, Aristotle’s God, being God, has to “think” of the very best things, He must be – in some meaningful sense – thinking of Himself, for God’s nature is the

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very best. The idea of a self-absorbed, introspecting God may seem narcissistic (as Aristotle himself recognizes), but we should not think of God’s self-contemplation as exclusionary but rather as inclusionary.110 In contemplating himself, God contemplates universal principles embodied everywhere in the cosmos. Aristotle writes: “Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be theōria; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be closest to the nature of happiness.”111 Imagine, then, the wise philosopher or the wise literary critic doing “theory.” We moderns think that this means the making of arguments (hopefully, in a logical, not an eristic sense). If, however, it is true that arguments can be thought of as a tool that may bring us into a confrontation with truth, the ultimate confrontation with truth that Aristotle prizes transcends the mere making of arguments. Aristotle’s theoretician must imitate God. Aristotle’s God, however, gathers all wisdom and self-understanding together in a single stroke. Imagine, then, all knowledge collapsed into one almighty, omniscient thought. This is what inhabits Aristotle’s God. God’s contemplation of this thought must be done altogether all-at-once, in a non-discursive manner. Now, this is what Aristotle means by theory. Insomuch as literary theorists imitate God by doing theoría, they must participate in this kind of intellectual vision. They must succeed at intuition, at the non-discursive beholding of truth.112 They can make arguments, but that is not as important. Arguments are only a means to an end. Because human beings are incapable of any sustained engagement in theōria, Aristotle advises that we need many other things as well, such as relaxation, friends, and family life, for example.

III. 1 6 D iv in it y a n d Li terature from a n A r is to t e l ia n Perspecti ve We moderns tend to divorce the act of theorizing from the act of reading literature because we associate theory with expository systems of deductive arguments. Because literature does not argue, it has been dismissed as producing something less than knowledge. We assume that those who argue for their opinions are the “theoretical” ones. Aristotle, by contrast, is more interested in knowing than in arguing. These are not the same. Aristotle is not trying to defeat the soft skepticism that plagues the modern world. He is a realist. He believes that we already have enough knowledge to know. Insomuch as literature

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operates by putting something truthful and momentous on display, it already operates, on Aristotle’s account, as “theory.” Aristotle’s account of “theory” is much more literature-friendly than modern alternatives. If the term theōria derives from the Greek practice of pilgrimage, it cannot be disconnected from the sense of awe the holy pilgrim experiences when witnessing first-hand the sacred festival. But this is, in effect, what literature does. It re-creates something as if we were actually there to witness it first-hand. When we read a story, we gaze upon the event being narrated. We see what happens from a front-row seat. Literature operates through effective description and storytelling, as if we, the readers, were really there. This is like pilgrimage. We journey to some distant sacred place to witness something meaningful that moves the soul and enlarges the mind. This is how literature is a path towards wisdom: by allowing us to behold the truth directly in a way that adds greater intensity of meaning and understanding to ordinary lives. Literature operates by “seeing,” not by arguing. But this is no obstacle to knowledge. Indeed, seeing is the essence of Aristotelian theōria. It does not matter how the mental vision comes about – through argument, literature, or divine inspiration – in seeing the truth, we have arrived at knowledge; we are already doing theory. In a philosophical or a scientific context, knowledge requires justification. We demand a test, a calculation, a measurement, a proof, a deductive demonstration. This is what we need for knowledge. But literature is not like that. Literature is not in the business of epistemological justification. Literature puts things on display so that we can see them clearly, perhaps for the first time. It directs the readers’ attention to characters and scenes, so that readers can “see” them, with understanding, with “the eyes of imagination.” Literature provides close-ups of reality that open readers up to some larger truthful vision that we recognize as truthful once we see it. Insomuch as literature puts on display what is generally true, this is enough, in Aristotelian terms, to make it a “theoretical” occupation. Aristotle suggests that philosophers imitate God’s contemplation; I am arguing that those who read literature imitate God’s contemplation. Aristotle maintains that literature is more philosophical than history.113 History tells us what literally happened; literature, in contrast, has a philosophical bent in that it communicates some grasp of what is the case generally. Stories are about particular incidents, but these incidents are held up as an embodiment or exemplar of something

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greater and more pervasive. Literature expresses some aspect of reality so eloquently that we understand it with a sense of freshness and intensity that makes us appreciate things for what they are. In the modern dispensation, we tend to rank logic first and intuition second. Aristotle goes about this the other way around. He maintains that intuition (what he calls νοῦς) is more certain than scientific deduction (epistēmē).114 Intuition comes first, supplying first principles; discursive reasoning comes second, supplying us with logic, argument, and science. In addition to this intuition-friendly framework in epistemology, Aristotle repeatedly refers, in more marginal discussions, to various types of wit and cleverness that involve instantaneous sorts of mental recognition. He uses Greek terms such as ἀναγνώρισις (mental discovery), ἀγχίνοια (quick wit, acumen), εὐστοχία (sure-sightedness, sagacity), and δεινότης (cleverness) to indicate how knowers can instantaneously hit on the right answer with rapid-fire intellectual vision.115 Such words refer to something like “wit”: that sharpness or agitation of intellect that suddenly hits on the right word or phrase felicitously and eloquently. Intelligence, here, does not operate through logical argument, but it puts the truth on display, sometimes felicitously. Consider Aristotle’s account of anagnōrisis (ἀναγνώρισις) in Greek tragedy.116 This is the moment of “discovery” or “recognition” where the protagonist suddenly grasps a pivotal truth that changes the direction of the plot. In a flash, by a revelatory set of circumstances, an epistemological correction is forced on an individual. Aristotle refers to Iphageneia’s discovery that the person she is about to sacrifice on the altar is her own brother and to Eurycleia’s abrupt realization, from the sight of a scar on his leg, that the person she is bathing is her old master Odysseus.117 Anagnorisis involves a sudden disclosure of knowledge that is genuinely epistemological. The characters immediately understand, on the grounds of whatever new evidence, a surprising truth about a situation in which they find themselves. The audience shares in the epistemological event and the resulting emotional effect. Ziguras discusses the anagnorisis-episode in the Iliad where Queen Helen suddenly realizes that the old woman she is talking to is actually the goddess Aphrodite (who has just saved Paris).118 This scenario follows a set pattern. After meeting the old woman, Helen sees that she has made a mistake and immediately recategorizes the experience. There is a moment of transfiguration. Helen grasps what is the case: “This is the goddess!” But this makes for a sudden increase in knowledge. Helen now knows the true nature of something she previously

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did not know. When she realizes her mistake and corrects herself, she makes an epistemological gain, not through logical argument or by scientific calculation, but by seeing what is the case. This is knowledge through direct revelation: the goddess unveils her identity and reveals who she is. It is the goddess who is doing the epistemological work here by planting the insight in Helen’s mind. Aphrodite lets Helen know through a mental illumination that she is speaking to a goddess. This is what intuition is like; this is what it means to see the truth the way Aristotle’s God sees the truth. In much of Aristotle’s epistemology, knowledge means seeing past surface appearances and penetrating to the very essence of things. Hence, the pejorative “essentialist” epithet used so often to disparage Aristotle. When it comes to this incident from the Iliad, we are not discussing any sort of scientific knowledge. We are discussing particular knowledge in a literary context. Nonetheless, this seeing past surface appearances and penetrating to the very essence of things is precisely what happens. Helen sees past the appearances of an old woman and penetrates to her divine essence – lo and behold! It is the goddess! There are many discussions of anagnorisis as a literary technique, but I want to propose it as a model for how literature operates more generally. Literature is inductive, not deductive. There is a cognitive moment of insight in induction that propels a leap to a new and better understanding. Does this not happen in literature? Literature operates through a kind of direct display that brings about some new and greater appreciation of something. We do not actually see what happens in a novel (although we do in a film). Still, in reading or listening to words, we see through the power of imagination and come to witness something essential. This happens, in the old-fashioned phrase, through some exercise of “agitation of wit.” This Aristotelian interpretation of literature as a source of knowledge and wisdom sees literature as a wake-up call. The stereotypes and clichés we uncritically rely on: this is what literature unexpectedly disrupts. It provides the occasion for a correcting vision – a discovery, an anagnorisis – of something we didn’t understand or appreciate. As Socrates might have said, we are insufficiently reflective. We tend to sleepwalk through life; to be jaded, insensitive, formulaic beings who misunderstand and underappreciate what is going on around us. Great literature changes that. The gifted author makes us see something that went unnoticed. The scales fall from the eyes; we

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penetrate misleading appearances and see. In irony, we see that success is failure and failure success. In pastoral poetry, we peer into a simple flower with rapt attention. In comedy, a happy incongruity springs to attention. In tragedy, the vicissitudes of fate shake us to the core. These all involve knowledge; and these forms of literature are all ways of making us wise. Nietzsche, of course, announced that God is dead. Derrida thinks that metaphysics is dead. Barthes has pronounced the author dead. All this is the logical end of a certain line of thinking. On this sort of account, the death of the author, the death of God, the death of metaphysics can be a force for liberation in the world. It can be an escape from authoritarian captivity. But this is not the Aristotelian picture. Aristotle does not think that God is dead. We should not kill off God; we should imitate Him. This is precisely what literature is about. The reader of literature imitates God, for literature is cleverly designed to trigger and facilitate the exercise of contemplation; literature provides an excellent opportunity for theōria in the original sense. (So does philosophy, of course, but in a different way.) Aristotle’s God is the paradigm of goodness, knowledge, and wisdom. In his metaphysics, he repeatedly says that all things in the universe try to imitate the goodness of God within the limits of their capacities. This is a familiar ancient trope. (Plato’s Timeaus says that God desires “that all things should be as like himself as possible.”119) Literature, however, provides an extraordinary means of imitation; the minds of ordinary readers are able to rise up, however imperfectly, to the level of God. Great authors produce insightful texts that bear witness to truths the reader contemplates. Communication here is not oppression but the height of accomplishment. Readers imitate God as closely as possible. But divine imitation is, in Aristotle, the most valuable thing of all.

I I I .1 7 P h il o s o p h y, L it e r ature, and Wonder We moderns tend to separate feelings from theory. Good theory is what logically follows when cold reason is unimpaired by emotion. This is almost the opposite of Aristotle. The idea that knowledge has to be divorced from appreciation – as if knowing and emotion are incompatible – has little to do with Aristotle’s notion of theory. Aristotle is hardly aloof when he discusses theory. Aristotle’s God delights in theory just as we delight in literature. Seeing what is true

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has an aesthetic effect on the knowing mind. This is why Aristotle maintains that theōria is the greatest and surest source of human happiness. God enjoys thinking – not deductive thinking, which operates piecemeal, bit by bit – but thinking as intelligent appreciation of direct truth – which is why we enjoy thinking, because imitating God as closely as possible is the most pleasurable alternative possible. Granted, Aristotle privileges philosophy as a path to wisdom, but I am arguing that a similar line of reasoning applies to literature. It is not the activity of making arguments, but the ability to directly see the truth that is most pleasurable of all.120 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle suggests that philosophy begins in wonder (θαῦμα, thauma), in the act of being amazed or astonished (θαυμάζω, thaumazō). He is expanding, here, on Socrates’s earlier comment in the Theatetus that “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”121 Aristotle maintains: “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters … And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant … therefore they philosophized order to escape from ignorance.”122 Aristotle goes on to suggest that philosophy solves the problem of wonder by explaining the causes of things.123 Read in a certain way, this might make it sound as if the goal of philosophy is to drain the world of wonder. A little like the know-it-all in the audience who tells everyone how the magic trick was performed so that the amazement evaporates. Heidegger takes it upon himself to “correct” Aristotle. He lectures us: “[Wonder] is not left out in the process [of doing philosophy] … but the beginning rather becomes … that which governs. The pathos of astonishment thus does not simply stand at the beginning of philosophy as, for example, the washing of his hand precedes the surgeon’s operation. Astonishment carries and pervades philosophy.”124 Except that Heidegger’s “correction” misunderstands Aristotle. On Aristotle’s account, philosophy does not eliminate wonder. Rather, it produces a learned amazement, which is better than an amazement based on sheer ignorance. We have to take Aristotle seriously when he associates knowledge with the best sort of human flourishing. Aristotle identifies theory as “a pleasure peculiar to itself” that “aims at no end beyond itself,” that is “leisurely,” “relaxing,” and “self-sufficient,” and that has “all the other attributes of blessedness.”125 But this is a description of aesthetic

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experience. As we have seen, the way the Aristotelian philosopher contemplates knowledge is akin to the way a sports fan beholds the finals of the 100 metre sprint at the Olympic Games. This is a fun thing to do! In the specific case of literature, eloquently worded texts are designed to incite, guide, induce, and goad the reader into that mental state of panoramic or deepening astonishment that parallels the mental state of God and the sage. The sage appreciates knowledge the way an art connoisseur delights in a painting by Rembrandt. Aristotle writes, “the enjoyment of knowledge is a still pleasanter occupation than the pursuit of it.”126 For Aristotle, knowledge ends in the aesthetic. That is why literature is so pleasurable. What the ­all-knowing God experiences is the best and most pleasurable state of all. What the sage experiences comes as close as possible to what God experiences, so it must be, for humans, the most pleasurable state of all. It follows that literature, as an eloquent parallel to its argumentative sister philosophy, lifts the reader up toward the Divine in a way that is deeply, thoroughly enjoyable. But there is more to say. I have argued that literature reaches for the transcendental. This is also in keeping with the wisdom perspective. Obviously, we can never arrive at the plenitude of knowledge contained in Aristotle’s God. The content of God’s thinking is beyond human expression. It is ineffable. I have defined literature, then, in a more modest sense, as the expression of the ineffable; as the utterance of that which is beyond utterance. Literature, so to speak, carries us to the edge of the transcendent where words begin to fail. To the cusp of something bigger than our words, theories, systems, ideologies. Aristotle suggests as much in his treatment of tragedy when he speaks of catharsis. I cannot examine Aristotle’s somewhat contradictory theology in any detail here. Suffice it to say that Aristotle’s God is not the Christian God. In Christianity, the highest goal is union with God. In Aristotle, the highest goal is imitation of God. These are not the same. In the former, one aims at loving union with the transcendent. In Aristotle, we participate in the transcendent by thinking in the way God thinks. There is a parallelism at work. What we are doing and what God is doing are, to the extent possible, the same. We may locate the transcendent wherever we want: it may be inside us, outside us, in the Heavens, in Platonic forms, in the World Soul, in the universal mind, in the physical world, in the Pythagorean forms of mathematics and formal logic, and so on. I will not debate these

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issues here. Readers can figure out how much difference this makes when it comes to literary criticism. Here, I am just interested in getting across the basic picture. We read literature because we enjoy it. But this enjoyment in the literary artifact cannot be separated from the knowledge aspiration. It is like people who travel to a skyscraper observation deck to enjoy the view. Someone says to someone else: “It’s breath-taking!” And one could say something similar about literature. Literature is not “frontier research.” It is the aesthetic equivalent of “reflective inquiry”; it brings things together into some sweeping, synthetic vision that makes sense of the world in ultimate terms. It is peering from the mountaintops! Leave the business of providing a systematic explanation for science, psychology, philosophy, or theology. Literature imparts knowledge through a leap of empathy and imagination, through some mental seeing, not through logical argument. The adept reader of literature participates in moments of cognition that are valuable in themselves. Literature pushes tired, bored, self-interested, uncritical readers to the edge of their seats. We awaken to an intimation of something much much larger. Aristotle defines human beings as “rational animals.” We could define humans as literary animals. Aristotle might hesitate because the word he uses for literature, “μῦθος” (myth, plot, story) has some worrisome epistemological and moral connotations. If, however, literature is a form of Aristotelian theōria, it shares, with philosophy, an important role in what it means to be a human. In the Politics, Aristotle writes that the city is logically prior to the individual.127 What he means is that a city is not an artificial invention but the realization of propensities and abilities inherent in human nature. It had to come about given what we are as human beings. But could we not say something similar about literature? Humans inevitably turn to literature for this is an integral part of what it means to be human. Literature has to happen, given human nature, time, and propitious circumstances.

I I I. 1 8 A r is to t e l ia n L it erary Cri ti ci s m Although I cannot address here every issue that pertains to Aristotelian literary criticism, some brief comments are in order. Throughout the corpus, Aristotle repeatedly insists that art is like nature. If scientists can investigate the true nature of things in the world, it should not surprise us that we can investigate the nature of a text. There is no great

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mystery here. How do we study literature? Through patient, meticulous, comprehensive, logical, evidence-based investigation. Contrary to some influential opinion, the Kantian idea that the true nature of things is inaccessible to human cognition changes little. Literature belongs to the realm of phenomena, and phenomena possess, in Kant’s system, universal features applicable to all human beings. Kant also believed in objective standards of taste. He himself would not have accepted the idea that the nature of literary texts is subjective, indeterminate, or impervious to evaluation. If literary criticism is to function as criticism, it must throw some light on the nature of the text being discussed. This is as true from a Kantian as well as an Aristotelian perspective. A postmodern critic like Derrida points to the ineffable element in literature and claims that this puts the lie to traditional realism. As I have shown, however, mainstream metaphysical realism does not necessitate any elimination of the religious, the mystical, the transcendental. Mainstream metaphysical realism is not modern positivism. It was the later Enlightenment thinkers, fiercely invested as they were in materialist science as something that could explain everything, who snuffed out the mystery of the transcendental. Aristotle is himself a scientist; he does not want religious or literary explanations interfering with his scientific work. But Aristotle joins this scientific naturalism to a transcendental metaphysics. Most mainstream philosophers in the Aristotelian realist tradition were theists of some sort or another, which required them, at the very least, to believe in a transcendent divinity. It is a false dichotomy to think that we must choose between science and transcendence, science and religion, science and literature. If modernists prioritize science over transcendence, a good number of postmoderns prioritize transcendence over science. But Aristotle embraces both poles. He embraces a scientific investigation of the world but does not deny the reality of the transcendental in metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, literature, and religion. There is no reason why literature, which lets us inside other people’s minds, cannot play a key role in the achievement of wisdom. Obviously, intelligent criticism can head off in many different directions. Aristotelian criticism will emphasize “appreciation,” a term that has fallen into disrepute. All the term means, in this context, is judging and evaluating a work, a style, a genre according to what it actually is. If literature is, epistemologically, about the appreciation of reality for what it is, we could say that literary criticism is about the

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appreciation of that appreciation. It means evaluating, understanding, and developing the proper emotional response to texts. It has a conative as well as a cognitive aspect. Aristotle is convinced that one can differentiate, on a rational basis, between things such as good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the noble and the base, the momentous and the inane, the artful and the artless. We can do this by correctly assessing the nature of human expression. It will follow that a conscientious literary critic can distinguish between good and bad poems, good and bad stories, good and bad theatre. This mental labour of measuring the worth of individual texts – good and bad, and all the degrees in-between – counts as reasoning. The best literary criticism is not a matter of mere emotion, wishful thinking, or self-promotion. It must rely on observation, evidence, analysis, good judgment, and argument. Literature may, of course, be legitimately evaluated from multiple perspectives by different readers from different cultures and from different personal points of view. If, however, there may be many legitimate perspectives on a particular text, it does not follow that any exegesis or any interpretation of that text is correct, true, or accurate. Aristotle believes that the literary critic needs to take into account the author’s original intention, the formal possibilities inherent in a literary type, and the substantive content of the work. (I discuss this in detail later.) Doubtless, good works of literature have deep resources of meaning and structure that can never be fully exhausted. Every text contains more than what the author consciously intended, for authors inevitably respond to cultural expectations and conventions in ways that are difficult to identify and trace. None of this invalidates the basic Aristotelian idea that a serious study of literature begins with a careful investigation of the text, the style, and the authorial intention. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle stresses the importance of habits for ethics: “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”128 Likewise, we learn how to read well by reading well. Add reading and rereading to native ability and we get the analytical skills needed for insightful criticism. Aristotle observes: “Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these things he is a good judge.”129 Surely this also holds true for literary criticism. Those who read a great deal stand a much better chance of becoming good judges of literature. What was formerly called “good taste” arrives through experience. It presupposes abilities, but there is no substitute for diligent reading. There is no theoretical

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system that, rigorously used, will magically turn the fledgling reader into a shrewd critic. No systematic template or formula can replace intelligent judgment – literary phronēsis – as the ultimate criterion of accurate evaluation. If, as we have seen, the exercise of reliable judgment requires wisdom, then wisdom is not mere data collection but a dynamic, knowing attitude toward things in the world that is built of a big-picture intelligence that understands and appreciates things. Aristotle believes that reasoning adjusts its methods to the subjectmatter. He argues, for example, that “precision is not to be sought to the same degree in all discussions … It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits. It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable or uncertain reasoning from a mathematician or to demand scientific [logically necessary] proofs from a rhetorician.”130 The distinction here is between rhetorical arguments (enthymemes) that are probabilistic and scientific or mathematical demonstrations that follow necessarily. Aristotle thinks that rhetoric is about approxi­ mation; science and mathematics require exact proof. It is not that rhetoric does not require reasoning but that it makes do with a more flexible and looser form of reasoning. In philosophical circles, the term “rhetoric” has lingering unsavoury connotations. If, however, Aristotle maintains that moral and political philosophy operate by rhetorical standards, he never suggests that moral (or political) judgments are subjective – only that they have to be supple enough to adapt to endlessly differing circumstances. Something similar happens with literary criticism. Because literature “admits of much variety and fluctuation of opinion,” “we must be content in speaking of such subjects and with such premises as to indicate the truth roughly and in outline,” using premises “which are only for the most part true and to reach conclusions that are no better.”131 Sound literary judgment is like ethics; it puts on display a robust but qualified use of reason that adapts itself, unceasingly, to an endless diversity of texts. It can make sense of the unpredictable and the “for the most part” nature of literature. This is an epistemological virtue, not a vice. The obscure peripatetic philosopher Demetrius, in an ancient treatise on “plain style,” discusses “vividness” as an important literary effect.132 The Greek here is ἐναργεῖς, from ἐναργής, meaning made visible, palpable, as when a god (like Aphrodite) appears and takes on bodily shape. Demetrius writes that authors who aim to achieve a

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vivid effect should provide “an exact narration overlooking no detail and cutting out nothing”; they should “mention the accompanying circumstances of any action” and make frequent use of repetition, cacophony, and onomatopoeia.133 If, however, this advice rings true, it must be selectively applied to literature texts according to what best succeeds in particular contexts. Not every vivid scene has to make use of repetition, cacophony, and onomatopoeia. And if Demetrius observes that vividness comes from “overlooking no detail and cutting out nothing,” it would be literally impossible to record every detail in, say, a battle scene as if the vivid writer should record the exact position of every stray hair on Achilles’s head. A wealth of details often produces a vivid, life-like effect, but, of course, an author can go too far and impede the flow of events by clogging up a plot with overly meticulous representations of details. Demetrius’s recommendations are to be taken in a looser, rhetorical spirit. This does not mean, however, that they are somehow arbitrary, unhelpful, or irrational. For a modern example, look to Barbara Leavy’s extended argument that survivors in “plague literature” typically focus on spiritual issues, turning their attention to “questions about what it is in addition to the body that is being preserved.”134 Through an examination of individual texts by Defoe, Boccaccio, Poe, Ibsen, and Camus (and many others), Leavy arrives at a general principle: survivors ask religious questions.135 Leavy does not argue that every individual who ever existed in a plague context has been driven to spirituality, but only that this usually or often happens. It is what, ceteris paribus, we should and can expect from characters in plague narratives. Leavy means this as a general insight: epidemics threaten an individual’s sense of selfidentity in a way that provokes questioning about what – if anything – lies beyond the death of the physical body. This general principle is a pattern or template Leavy observes operating inside a genre of literature. We cannot formulate any exceptionless rule about every character in every literary text that mentions a plague; that said, Leavy is reasoning carefully, sifting through the evidence and formulating conclusions on the basis of what she observes. Aristotle suggests that we begin research in any field with a respectful overview of endoxa, the prominent principles and opinions relevant to that field. Some may think this is too conservative, but the advice applies to both sides of the ideological spectrum. A refurbished library of endoxa might include ideas like phallocentrism, hegemony, praxis, intertextuality, false-consciousness, the death of the author, critical race theory, heteroglossia, and deconstruction. This seems legitimate

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as long as one respects Aristotle’s advice that we continually modify and correct whatever hallowed principles we begin with in the light of new data or an enlarged understanding.136 I will not attempt to work out any comprehensive system of Aristotelian literary criticism here. This book is about providing the background philosophy that makes traditional criticism a respectful academic endeavour again. Suffice it to say that when it comes to methodology, critics are rightfully opportunistic. They can and should seize on whatever system or explanation can open up and expand upon a text. If literature is about the transcendent, then there must be a sense in which criticism is a commentary on this, but then, the transcendent is the largest category of all. There must be room in good literary analysis for any methodology that opens a text up to an ever wider treatment.

III. 1 9 C o n v e r g e nt Parallels: L it e r at u r e a n d Reli gi on To summarize: I have argued that literature and religion are analogous aspirations aiming at the transcendent like parallel lines that converge at infinity. The precise nature of the transcendent is a matter of no small disagreement. I leave those disagreements for elsewhere. Suffice it to say that literature is like religion in that it aims at an encounter with something so superlative that it escapes any straightforward, reductionist explanation. Something so much higher than ourselves that it transcends all our logical terms and categories. Something – to use traditional terminology – that is Divine. The anti-religious animus of much contemporary criticism needs no further comment. According to the stereotype, religion breeds a dangerous fanaticism, producing pillar saints who crucify the body and jihadi terrorists whose only aim is to kill as many infidels as possible. Familiar caricatures depict religion as inherently limiting, judgmental, or oppressive. In denying the religious element in literature, however, we risk overlooking what makes something literature: that awe-inspiring push toward something much greater than ourselves that supersedes our own pet theories. Without some sort of impetus towards the transcendent, we are left with propaganda, potboilers, hack work, platitudes, editorials, witticisms, bromides. As we often view movement toward the transcendental in religious or mystical terms, it makes sense to argue that literature is, essentially, a religious endeavour.

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4 Anti-definitionalism

IV . 1 A n t i- a n t i- e s senti ali s m: S u it s   v e rs u s   W it tgenstei n I aim to offer a definition of literature here, following, more or less, in the footsteps of Bernard Suits, a personal mentor at undergraduate and graduate levels and the author of the whimsical classic The Grasshopper, in which he articulates an Aristotelian definition of a “game” in determined opposition to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous insistence that a concept like “game” cannot be defined. Professor Suits – “Bernie” – was a chain smoker who kept his door securely locked to hide from the smoking police. Entering his office was like walking into a curly blue fog. In the course of sharply chiselled conversations, he formulated, for my benefit, a theory about the right way to arrive at a definition. I am going to apply the method he taught me to literature. Thomas Hurka, who has had the good sense to see that Suits’s classic text The Grasshopper was republished, has argued that Suits embraces an instrumentalist (as opposed to an Aristotelian) view of things. Suits, however, was a graduate of the University of Chicago and a great enthusiast of the Chicago Neo-Aristotelianism. He avoided worrisome terms like “essentialism” and artfully identified himself, in person, as an “anti-anti-essentialist.” I want to employ his anti-antiessentialist method, with a twist or two, to elucidate what literature is. This means, among other things, mounting an argument against “anti-definitionalism,” the idea that philosophical definitions – as Aristotle understands them – are unattainable when it comes to something like literature.

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Suits had little patience for Wittgenstein, the Anglo-German philosopher who became the de facto figurehead of the anti-definitionalist movement. He jocularly warns his 1960s readers about his antiWittgenstein views: I am well aware that there are topics the very contemplation of which induces in some people definite – and sometimes violent – rejective reactions. There are those, for example, who display acute anxiety whenever they are obliged to understand something in abstract symbols. Others are overcome by a kind of profound melancholy when invited to consider a new proof for the ­existence of God. But some of the most extreme reactions come from those who are incurably opposed to the construction of ­definitions – persons I think of as terminal Wittgensteinians. For when a terminal Wittgensteinian realizes you are seriously trying to define something, he exhibits anxiety and melancholy, and then he calls you bad names. So I now pause for five seconds, as a public service, to permit those with a severe definition-­ phobia to make their escape.1 Suits, who had a keen sense of humour, was wary of Wittgensteinians (whom he caricatured as a “religious cult”). In his book The Grasshopper, he argues against the Wittgensteinian opposition to essentialist Aristotelian attempts at philosophical definition. Consider, then, the nub of disagreement. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein points to the concept of a “game” as a paradigmatic example of something that cannot be defined. He writes: Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’” – but look and see whether there is anything common to all. – For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that … Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass

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next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost … Compare chess with noughts and crosses [Xs and Os] … In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at … the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! … And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; [and] can see how similarities crop up and disappear.2 Wittgenstein concludes that the word “game” does not pick out a common nature but a group of behaviours that resemble one another in unpredictable and shifting ways. He suggests that we replace old essentialist attempts at definition with a “family-­resemblance” theory of meaning. As he puts it, “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities [between diverse games] than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.”3 There is much useful work in literary criticism inspired by the language games approach of the later Wittgenstein. Suits, however, was decidedly unimpressed with what he derided as Wittgenstein’s woolly new doctrines. In The Grasshopper, he sets out to disprove Wittgenstein (as he told me on many occasions), not by mounting a general attack against his theory of meaning, but by presenting a salient counterexample to this general thesis. Suits sets out, then, to do the impossible: to elaborate an Aristotelian definition of the term “game.” The Grasshopper is a playful but penetrating Socratic dialogue, intended as an indirect refutation of Wittgenstein’s anti-definitional stance. Borrowing terminology from Ryle, he describes Wittgenstein, in a later edition, as the “ghost haunting the text.”4 Suits defines a “game” as a “voluntary attempt to overcome artificially-created obstacles” valued for its own sake.5 But I am not going to investigate this specific definition here. I want, rather, to take what Suits taught me about Aristotelian definitions more generally and apply it to the case of literature. In the Preface to The Grasshopper, Suits quietly announces:

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I am, of course, aware of the fairly wide disenchantment with the search for definitions that currently prevails in the philosophical community, and indeed the intellectual community generally. And Wittgenstein, one of the most forceful spokesmen … for the anti-definitional attitude, is famous for having singled out the attempt to define games as illustrating par excellence the futility of trying to define anything whatever. “Don’t say,” Wittgenstein admonishes us, “there must be something in ­common or they would not be called ‘games’ – but look and see whether there is anything in common to all.” This is ­unexceptional advice. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein himself did not follow it. He looked, to be sure, but because he had decided before hand that games are indefinable, his look was fleeting, and he saw very little.6 Something similar has happened, I will argue, in literary theory. David Myers, in an elegant piece, airily tosses out what is almost a platitude in “literary studies.” He breezily explains: “Literature is not a thing like a chair, the essence of which can be wrapped up for all time in a tidy formula.”7 Myers dismisses three ways critics have tried to define literature: literature is not, he tells us, an “imitation of human action,” nor is it an “overflow of powerful feelings,” nor is it a moral “criticism of life.” If (as Alvin Kernanto suggests), literary studies “fails to meet the academic requirement that true knowledge defines the object it studies,” Meyers thinks that this is not a genuine failure but, somehow, a decisive blow against an essentialist (?) political establishment. The attitudes Myers chronicles have, if anything, shifted even further in the same direction in recent years. In a positive review of contemporary trends, Peggy Kamuf looks forward to the time when all the atavistic fuss about the concept of “literature” will give way to more meaningful scholarship. Kamuf, who is cautiously optimistic that her own views will be shared by upcoming generations, reports from the front lines: “In the last decade … it appears that the discipline of literary studies has begun to negotiate a transition or a displacement into the almost unlimited domain of cultural studies, media studies, communications, and so forth. This development may well indicate that a growing number of practitioners in the domain have renounced the project of taking literature seriously … In any case, it signals some displacement there that affects literature as the name of something to

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be taken seriously.”8 Kaufman, here, is welcoming the “displacement” of literature as the name of “something to be taken seriously.” In less cumbersome language, she is happy to think that future scholars will disparage “literature” as something less than worthy of serious consideration and turn to more egalitarian pursuits like communication studies. She hopes this will happen. Kamuf, who translates Derrida, is proud of her avant-garde stance. Literature, she claims, is an “object about which no essential knowledge is possible.”9 Which is only to say that literature is incapable of definition. She herself asks and explicitly answers the definitional question: “What is, e.g., the literary, literariness, literature? Literature is essentially nothing, essentially nothing but its name. The name of literature has always been peculiarly full of emptiness. This has something to do with why it will have been so easily displaced [in the near future]. Precisely because it is empty of substance, literature is also dependent and tied to its name. It exists in name only, we could say.”10 Kamuf is not inclined to engage in any rigorous exploration of the philosophical issues at stake. She replicates, even parrots, what she takes to be the scholarly consensus among the intelligentsia. I will argue, in sharp contrast, that we can define literature in a systematic and meaningful manner. But before elaborating a definition, let us begin (as Wittgenstein recommended) by taking a good look at what literature seems to be, at least from the perspective of an ordinary, everyday understanding.

IV . 2 S ta rt in g Wi th What W e A l r e a dy Know We already know, in some approximate but universally acknowledged sense, what literature is. Scholars may disagree, of course, about which texts belong in the canon. Still, it seems patently obvious that experts and non-experts alike believe that some texts are particularly valuable, momentous, original, insightful, or profound. We call these texts literature. It is really that simple. We use the term “literature” as an honorific classification to differentiate the very best texts from others of inferior quality. The fastidiousness that turns down its nose at the term “literature,” preferring the neutral and all-inclusive term “text,” only disguises a distinction everyone makes, explicitly or implicitly. In a 1980s treatise, W.W. Robson distinguishes between “honorific” and “descriptive” definitions of literature. After criticizing – carefully,

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moderately – descriptive definitions of literature that focus on the literary quality of the language or the fictional nature of the subject-matter, Robson throws out what may seem like a platitude: “what most people have in mind, when they talk about literature, is great and good works, of whatever genre.”11 If this seems to be a truism, it has the great advantage of being a truism that seems to be true. Robson does include “transcendence … as a central characteristic of literature,” along with “linguistic adequacy, propriety, and excellence.”12 He believes that literature continues to capture an audience’s admiration and affection over long periods of time. But, most importantly, he defines literature as the best writing possible. The cautious Gregory Castle, who explains earnestly why literature may be undefinable, unwittingly advances a definition of his own: “Literature, then, is the most fully human way of seeing and understanding the world.”13 This is unbearably vague, but its ringing endorsement of literature as something that is highly valuable gets to the key issue. The extent to which we value certain texts is why we bother to call them literature in the first place. If one were to call average, bad, dull, utterly miserable, or hateful novels “literature,” that would be unhelpful and uninteresting. We do not want a definition that includes everything. A good definition of literature must include some texts and exclude others. Mainstream traditional philosophy has always taught that the very best things are intrinsically valuable; we value them, not merely as a means to something else, but as ends in themselves. Literature (and art generally) were traditionally held to be intrinsically valuable. We read literature to read literature. There may be other reasons, of course, but the activity of reading literature is usually thought of as a reward in and of itself. This is part of what it means to say that some text is literature: that reading it is an intrinsically valuable experience. Ralph Rader defines literary works as “verbal compositions in which the act of understanding is … experienced as its own justification.”14 In other words, literature is composed of texts that provide readers with intrinsically valuable experiences. The activity of reading literature has many good side-effects – it may even make us better people – but the core idea, which I also defend here, is that it is good in and of itself. One could even argue that some philosophical, religious, or scientific texts qualify as literature inasmuch as we can read them for their own sakes. Doubtless, academics in literature departments study many texts that do not qualify as literature – dictionaries, obituaries,

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archives, and letters – but this is a means to an end; these non-literary texts can be useful aids in understanding and appreciating specific works of literature. In ordinary usage, we often use the term “literature” to denote something like “superlatively valuable verbal expression.” What makes certain texts “superlatively valuable” is variously described as “mastery with language,” or “making words come alive,” or “the best books,” or “inspired writing,” or “what is really worth reading.” What matters here is not one rigid formula to exclusion of all others, but the main message: literature is the best writing. This is, roughly speaking, how I will define literature here. It may seem surprising that a philosopher wants a definition of literature that concurs, more or less, with ordinary, “folk” usage. As Suits taught me, however, we do not engage in philosophical definition to disprove what we already know but only to make what we know more rigorous, more explicit, more precise. This is in line with Aristotle’s general methodology, which begins with a received understanding of things, through an investigation of endoxa that may require further correction.15 Definition is, in some real sense, an inquiry into the way we already use words. In the following sections, I introduce (very briefly) Aristotle’s original account of definition, consider anti-essentialist objections to the entire project of philosophical definition, and critique familiar accounts of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” and “language-game” theories of meaning. In the next chapter, I formulate a definition of literature as “superlative verbal expression” in line with Aristotle’s notion of four causes. This will involve some reordering of usual Aristotelian priorities. If rigourists care to dispute the Aristotelian spirit of my conclusions, I remain convinced that the general philosophical orientation Aristotle best embodies can guide us through the maze of complications and objections we need to confront here.

IV . 3 P ro l e g o m ena to a M e t h o d o f D e fi ni ti on Before devising a definition of literature, we need to say a few words about definitions generally. If a widespread antirealism is correct, then we can’t know the true natures of things in the world and the project of Aristotelian definition is therefore impossible. We can’t say what something is, at least not in any decisive philosophical sense.

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This would render language irremediably ambiguous. But the anti-­ definitionalist argument relies on an absolutist caricature of the Aristotelian project of philosophical definition, which it then rejects because of the limited nature of human cognition. Except that Aristotle never claimed that definition was a magical road to absolute knowledge. The primary sources – if we bother to read them – are teaming with careful qualifications. Shorn of its pejorative connotations, Aristotelian “essentialism” is not that complicated – at least, not initially. It starts with an obvious truth: the world is composed of different kinds of things. Rattlesnakes are not roses: a real distinction between different kinds that anyone who lives in Alberta or Texas would do well to remember when collecting wildflowers. The task of definition, then, does two things: (1) it inserts something into a particular class or category, and (2) it tells us something about the nature of the thing in question. Consider this simple propositional claim: “Gertrude is a rattlesnake.” This statement places Gertrude in the group rattlesnakes. But we know many things about rattlesnakes. If Gertrude is a rattlesnake, she is a living organism, a reptile; she has a rattle on her tail, a venomous bite, a good sense of smell, a taste for rodents, no legs, and scales. We can also conclude that she is cold-blooded, was hatched from an egg, and is not very talented in philosophy. The claim that “Gertrude is a rattlesnake” would be meaningless if the word “rattlesnake” had to function without some sort of definition. Because we know what the word means, we can communicate what Gertrude is to others. Words are signs – sounds, shapes, even textures (Braille) – to which we have attached a meaning. The letter sequence “lknfgfveohgfvk” is not a word. To say that Gertrude is a “lknfgfveohgfvk” is meaningless. Without definitions that attach meanings to words, language would be like this. Some may protest that we cannot define “literature” the way we define things like rattlesnakes and roses. Agreed, but I would argue that we still have to define “art” and “literature” to comment intelligently on them; at the very least, we need a rough idea, from the beginning, of what we are talking about. Merriam-Webster identifies literature as “writings in prose or verse … having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.” The OED defines literature as “[w]ritten works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.” Both dictionaries trace the etymology of the term, helpfully, to late Middle English (fourteenth century), where “literature”

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was understood as “knowledge of books.” Still further back, we can trace the term, via the French, to the Latin word litteratura, which denoted writing, grammar, and learning taken altogether. Still, we are looking for something more philosophical here. The lexicographer chronicles how people use words, but that is not enough for a philosophical definition. Ordinary usage does not have the final word. Suppose everyone were to mistakenly believe that whales are very big fish. A period dictionary might define a “whale” as “a very big fish,” which might be correct from a historical point of view – it might tell us how those people used the word – but it remains a blatant inaccuracy. Whales are mammals, not fish. We want a definition of literature, then, that corrects conventional usage if necessary. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle distinguishes between nominal and scientific definitions. A nominal definition reports on how people use language; it tells us “what the name … means.” A scientific definition is “a sort of a demonstration of what a thing is.”16 A scientific demonstration identifies – puts on display – the nature of the thing defined. It explains, for example, what a rattlesnake is. Granted, literature is not a biological or a natural kind but an artificial product of human skill. Still, I believe that we can “scientifically” investigate the underlying “nature” that makes literature literature. Although Aristotelian definitions usually focus on form, I will enlarge the scope of these investigations to include all four Aristotelian causes – material, efficient, final, and formal  – so as to better elucidate the distinguishing features of literature.

IV . 4 P ro b l e ms wi th F a m ily R e s e m b lances At first glance, we might imagine that the anti-Aristotelian opposition takes the middle position. Wittgenstein’s family resemblance approach, in setting approximate limits on what words mean through an emphasis on overlapping properties, may seem like a good compromise. It provides some way of mapping out what words mean while avoiding essentialist dogmatism. Except that, as Suits insists, the family resemblance theory of meaning is deeply problematic. Here is a colourful counter-example from one of Suits’s lectures. (He used to regularly indulge in this sort of routine when teaching his classes.) Suppose, then, that the local elementary school holds a Bring Your Dog to School Day. One precocious urchin walks in with a boa

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constrictor called Spot under his arm. The teacher objects: “Johnny, that is not a dog!” john ny: Why not? teac h e r : It doesn’t have any legs! john ny: But it has a tail. Betty’s dog has a tail. teac h e r : It doesn’t wag its tail! And, anyways, dogs lick you when they are happy. john ny: No, Miss, my Spot wiggles his tail. And he has a tongue, a thin little tongue, but I have seen him stick it out. teac h e r : Johnny, be sensible; dogs have fur. john ny: It is true Spot doesn’t have fur. But he has lots of spots. Tommy’s dog has lots of spots, and he brought it to school! teac h e r : Be realistic, Johnny; that is not a dog! [Thinking.] Dogs bark. I bet you have never heard your pet bark! john ny: Well, that may be true, Mrs., but my Spot bit the ­mailman, just like Suzie’s dog. And Spot has sharp teeth! I keep him in a doghouse I built myself. This absurd skit makes a serious point. So many similarities exist between sharply different kinds of things that, on a family resemblance theory of meaning, it is hard to figure out which is which. Wittgenstein proposes that there is no way to determine how many similarities we need to make something the same as something else. It is almost impossible to know where one concept begins and another ends. Imagine how our cheeky dialogue between Johnny and his teacher might end: teac h e r : Johnny, if you keep this up, I am going to have to send you to the Principal! john ny: Teacher, my dog isn’t exactly like the other dogs, but haven’t you heard of the family resemblance theory of meaning? My mother is a philosophy professor and she told me all about it. I bet you are a nasty old essentialist! That’s not allowed in schools anymore. The word “dog” doesn’t refer to things that share a common nature. If you look at all the different breeds of dogs, you don’t see something that is common to all, but mere similarities and a criss-crossing series of them. Jack’s dog has beady little eyes but my dog has beady little eyes too; Holly’s

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dog is three years old but my dog is three years old as well; Winn Wang’s dog lives on a farm and eats live rats and I feed my dog live rats; Carlos’ dog likes to sunbathe and my dog sunbathes all day; Marie’s dog has a nickname, and I have a special nickname for my dog. If you’re an essentialist, I will have to report yo u to the Principal! In The Grasshopper, Suits discusses the example of a police officer chasing a robber. According to the family resemblance theory of meaning, this could be seen as a sporting competition like the hundred yard dash, for in each case, “both people are running, and one is trying to overtake the other.”17 But, obviously, the two activities are essentially different. One is a game; the other is law enforcement. If, however, we are going to insist on the distinction between sport and law enforcement, we have to be able to explain why the differences between these two activities are more decisive than the many similarities. Which seems an impossible task within the parameters of the family resemblance model. One can spin out endless resemblances between outrageously anomalous objects. How is the Empire State Building like an orange? That’s absurd, you say: one is a building; the other is a fruit. But, if this is your objection, aren’t you implying an essentialism of buildings and fruit? Isn’t that like saying there is an essential species difference between the two? If you are recommending that we sort things into groups like buildings and fruits by focusing on their basic natures, this is just ordinary, layperson Aristotelianism. Of course, the Empire State Building is not an orange, but can the family resemblance enthusiast rigorously demonstrate this? One can point to endless similarities. Both are physical objects. All that comes with physicality – shape, size, location, an inside and an outside – these are features that an orange and the Empire State Building inherently share. Both are composed of chemicals and molecules and subatomic particles. People have touched the Empire State Building, but people have touched oranges, too. You can’t eat the Empire State Building, but if you broke it up into small enough pieces, you could swallow it in the same the way that circus freaks swallow cut-up Volkswagens one tiny piece of metal at a time. The Empire State Building is in New York, but New York has lots of oranges too. The Empire State Building is not a mushroom, but an orange is not a mushroom either. Of course, the Empire State Building is not the same colour as an orange, but we

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could, in principle, paint it orange. Would that make it something closer to an orange? Of course, this is crazy. With a little ingenuity, we can spin out countless resemblances between different kinds of things. How many resemblances does it take to make two things the same? Seven? Forty-six? One-thousand-thirty-three? The nebulous Wittgensteinean approach – in trying to avoid any kind of essentialism – ignores what the real issue is: the Empire State Building and an orange are essentially different. Counting up mere resemblances or differences will get us nowhere. It is hard to see, anyway, how Wittgenstein’s original metaphor undermines Aristotelian definition. “Family resemblances” – freckles, a prominent nose, curly hair, a heavy build – do not make people members of the same family. Your Suzy is not part of the same family. What makes people a member of the Smiths or the Hans or the Tremblays is the fact that these people were born from the same parents. That is the essential point. We might want to say, more scientifically, that it is in the genes; the focus on physical traits confuses the issue. Any physical resemblances are entirely after-the-fact. If a Martian came down from outer space that looked like one of the Tremblays, it would not be a member of the Smith family. It doesn’t matter if it had brown eyes like the other members of the Tremblay clan and wore the same shape of hat. If our Martian has different parents, that is the point at issue. Wittgenstein’s sweeping suggestion that Aristotelianism is decisively refuted because “accidental” physical characteristics vary from family member to family member misses the point. Accidental traits are not essential traits. Aristotelian metaphysics knows how to deal with accidental properties. (Family membership is, metaphysically speaking, an accidental human trait and Aristotelians do not claim that every term refers to the essence of something. Some words designate non-essential, accidental properties.)

IV . 5 S t r aw M a n “ Es senti ali s m” Of course, there is more to the story than Wittgenstein and family resemblances. John Wilkins traces back the meaning of the term “essentialism,” with its mishmash of pejorative connotations, to surprisingly recent roots. Wilkins reports, “To be accused of essentialism is to be, variously, an adherent of an outmoded and dangerous metaphysics, to be antiscientific, anti-Darwinian, anti-women, racist, nationalist, anti-l g b t, and very probably some kind of political

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regressive. Like many other terms of that kind, it is almost entirely defined by its opponents, and has little generic meaning beyond expressing the disapprobation of those opponents, and relegating those who are said to hold the ideas to the outer darkness.”18 Wilkins’s paper is devoted to technical scientific issues, including what he takes to be the false dichotomy between essentialism and Darwinism. Along the way, he impressively investigates the contemporary hostility to “essentialism,” exploring the origins of the concept in authors such as John Dewey, Karl Popper, W.V. Quine, and David Hull.19 In Wilkins’s opinion, Hull is the person who “set the tone, and clearly established the notion that Aristotle was the author of essentialist thinking, whereas Popper and before him Dewey … had suggested it was Plato.”20 Although Hull’s anti-essentialist approach to the “species problem” in biology was decisively influenced by Wittgenstein, larger forces are at work here. Wilkins cites from Popper’s Open Society (1945), which alarmingly identifies methodological essentialism as a precursor to a looming authoritarianism. In Popper’s own words: I use the name methodological essentialism to characterise the view, held by Plato and many of his followers, that it is the task of pure knowledge or science to discover and to describe the true nature of things, i.e. their hidden reality or essence … Many of the later methodological essentialists, for instance, Aristotle … agreed with him in determining the task of pure knowledge as the discovery of the hidden nature or Form or essence of things. All these methodological essentialists also agreed with Plato in maintaining that these essences may be discovered and discerned with the help of intellectual intuition; that every essence has a name proper to it, the name after which the sensible things are called; and that it may be described in words. And a description of the essence of a thing they all called a definition. According to methodological essentialism, there can be three ways of knowing a thing … we can know its unchanging reality or essence; [or] we can know the definition of the essence; [or] we can know its name. Accordingly, two questions may be formulated about any real thing … A person may give the name and ask for the definition; or he may give the definition and ask for the name.”21 According to Popper, to insist on essentialism is to insist that we can have true knowledge of Kant’s noumena, which Popper views as

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politically dangerous because it links up with Plato’s tendentious use of his invisible forms (which can only be seen by the ruling classes) as a tool of political oppression. Wilkins locates “the very first use” of the specific phrase “Aristotelian essentialism” in a 1950s passage from Quine that describes it as a belief in accidental and essential properties.22 But, mostly, he thinks (appealing to Wittgenstein) that “the word ‘essentialism,’ like its root word ‘essence,’ does not refer to a single [viewpoint], but a group of [viewpoints], which are not all closely related but which form a family of ideas that resemble each other somewhat.”23 In this case, at least, the family resemblance theory of meaning is put to good use but only because the term “essentialism” has no unified core of meaning but is a makeshift term of opprobrium used by different commentators for different (often political) purposes. Wilkins does draw some useful distinctions between different kinds of essentialism. His understanding of Aristotle’s working method in his biological works is largely accurate. Still, the modern take on “Aristotelian essentialism,” even as Wilkins explains it, is vitiated by a serious misunderstanding. Wilkins tells the reader: Popper’s attack in the Open Society (1945), and [Michael] Scriven’s [analogous treatment],24 are discussing what we might call the assumption that we can define terms in an essentialistic or analytic fashion, and thereby know something. Popper’s attack is centered on the idea, long held in philosophy, that one can gain knowledge by definition: I call this “science-by-­ definition” (sb d). Aristotle in his logical works did practice a form of sb d , and Plato clearly did, although the famous “carve nature at its joints” comment (Phaedrus 265d–266a) applied to justice and not any “natural” kind in the modern sense. But the knowledge Aristotle thought he gained from analytic characters [through an analysis of language] … was of a different kind to the knowledge gained by empirical observation and experiment [as in] science.25 Although Wilkins attempts to rehabilitate Aristotle’s reputation, he fundamentally misconstrues what Aristotle’s science is about. Perhaps we could trace the problem to a confusion that still reigns in modern analytical philosophy between analyticity (which applies to words) and metaphysical necessity (which applies to things). Aristotle’s working scientist is not like Rodin’s thinker, turned inward, dissecting

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definitions in his head. The Aristotelian scientist goes out into the world and observes. This reliance on observation is where knowledge starts. Wilkins gives his readers a little history lesson. He, quite rightly, points out: The term essence was not actually used by Aristotle, but by the late classical and medieval followers … It is a Latin word, and Aristotle expressed himself in Greek, and the words (not word) he used – to ti ên einai and variations – mean, in a literal ­translation “what it is to be [that thing]”. In this sense it is ­relatively harmless – even the most nominalistic of thinkers believes there are properties, causes or components that make something what it is, but Aristotle appeared to make more of this than a simple passing phrase. He introduced the notion of an “accident” (sumbebêkos), a property that a thing has which, if changed, would not make it something else. For example, a white bird remains a bird if it changes into another color, so whiteness is not “essential” to being a bird. Those properties that a thing has that if changed would make it not a bird, like feathers and a beak, are “essential.”26 What, then, is Aristotle’s so-called method of “science by definition” really about? And how can we apply it to literature? For Aristotle, a large part of science involves recognizing just what different kinds of things in the world are. We can distinguish between earthworms and emeralds and paper clips and livers and poems and nuclear power plants. When we ask, “What is that?” someone might say: “Oh, it’s a lock of hair.” Or, “It is a duck-billed platypus.” Or, even, “It’s a Petrarchan not a Shakespearean sonnet.” This is where Aristotle’s essentialism starts, in an intelligible distinction between kinds. There are complications that have to be ironed out. But none renders unintelligible the basic question: “What is it?” If someone thinks that we can answer this sort of question for things in the world, whether they know it or not, they are a working essentialist. Aristotle never suggests that devising nominal definitions inside our heads – what Wilkin’s calls sb d, “science by definition” – is proper scientific procedure. Aristotle does not believe that we begin science by opening the dictionary; we begin by observing the world. All knowledge begins in sense-perception. Nor does Aristotle argue that everything in the

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world has an essence, or that every name refers to an essence, or that language has no social, conventional character, or that there is no need of approximation. These are trumped up charges, hardly worthy of serious consideration. But there is a further complication. Aristotle believes that the universe is a collection of individual things, “substances” that have an internal source of unity. Featheriness, or wingedness, or beakedness is a symptom, a sign, that makes us realize, “Oh, here is another instance of a bird-substance!” The properties that make up what a bird is form a seamless unity. This is why we murder to dissect. Because the aspects of the bird fit so closely together, when we pull the “birdpieces” apart, we can’t get the living bird back. We can pull apart artificial kinds like cars, computers, and jigsaw puzzles and stick them back together and get them working again, but Aristotle draws a clear line between living things and artifacts. Living things provide the most conspicuous example of an essence. The artificial unity that characterizes artifacts is, at best, a quasi-essence compared to the true metaphysical unity that characterizes living organisms. Aristotelians use the term “essence,” then, to refer to and describe the characteristic type of unity that joins together a living organism. An individual bird is one thing. The essence of each bird is, according to the tried-andtrue formula, the “form” that holds them all together. (There are complications, but press on.) Contemporary philosophers of biology like Richard Boyd speak of individual organisms as “homeostatic clusters of properties” that manage to preserve and regulate themselves as a whole.27 This technical way of describing things is akin to the root notion of essence that Aristotle had in mind. The Aristotelian picture of substance is not like the Empiricist model (Locke et al.) of an invisible pincushion into which all the properties of the organism are stuck. Aristotelian substance is not some invisible thing hiding underneath the properties; the properties (taken together) are the essence. The bird is a substance and its essential nature is the holding together of all its properties, so to speak. Wilkins reminds us of Diogenes the Cynic’s challenge to Plato’s definition of humankind. As Diogenes Laertius tells the story: “Diogenes of Sinope challeng[ed] Plato’s definition of the essential characters of Man as a ‘featherless biped’ by bringing a plucked chicken to his next talk, whereupon Plato redefined Man as a featherless biped with broad nails.”28 This is doubtless intended as ribald,

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ancient philosophical humour, but both Greek Diogeneses – the Cynic and Laertius – seem to miss the point. The accidental fact that a plucked chicken is featherless is not an expression of its nature. Practical joker Diogenes “rearranged” the chicken. The chicken he held up was not a natural type but a contingent historical fact. To add the detail “nails” (instead of hands) to the definition of human being – surely, a joke – is to act as if we could arrive at a definition by making a list of observable properties. But that is not what Plato or Aristotle had in mind. The properties come from the essence; the essence does not come from the properties. If we pluck feathers off a bird to make it featherless or, conversely, stick feathers on a man to make him feathered, so what? These neat tricks have few metaphysical implications. Surface changes to the appearances of something do not change what Aristotle (or Plato) is referring to by an essence – the natural unity that derives from the basic nature that a thing is. A bird and a man are wholly different beings; they are incommensurable species – not gradations of each other. This is part of what it means to be an Aristotelian essentialist: taking differences seriously. For the Aristotelian, different species are qualitatively different; they are not different degrees of the same thing as if an increase or decrease in dogness could produce catness. Distinct natures do not softly fade into one another (as in the sorites paradox). The Aristotelian believes that the world is made of truly different things. Pluralism exists as an objective fact in the world. As I have already mentioned, Aristotle situates causality in the nature of things. If you are a dog, it is your dog nature that causes you to have a tail, four legs, strong teeth, a bark, and pack sociability. If you are a tulip, your tulip nature causes you to have leaves, stamen, petals, and bulbous roots that need water. We first discover these natures through observation, not by composing definitions inside our heads. If modern science strives toward the formulation of mathematical laws, Aristotelian science strives toward definition based on observation. We observe that dogs and tulips have different natures and can define them accordingly. Identifying such natures provides the best explanation of the world. In this way, we come to understand what the world is and how it operates. An Aristotelian scientist tries to answer a basic question: “What is it?” This is what scientists do when they are working in the field. They notice something and wonder what it is: “Could this be a new sub­ species of cutthroat trout?” This is the function of scientific definition.

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It identifies the essence or nature of something and marks it out for what it is. Of course, there are many details about the process that cannot detain us here. Wilkins suggests that this Aristotelian “science by definition” operates through linguistics. Or even through an investigation of Platonic forms (what he calls “rationalism”). Aristotle tells a very different story. Science operates through induction (ἐπᾰγωγή, epagōgē), when the great scientific genius discerns something in the data that no one ever saw before. Observation is penetrated by intelligence to produce a Eureka! or Aha! moment by an astute stroke of insight (νόησις, noēsis). “Oh, I see! That is what it is!” Verbal definitions put this knowledge on display. But the dictionary definition happens after the fact, after the first successful flash of intelligence (which is not unlike inspiration).

I V . 6 A D e f in it io n Is Li ke a Metaphor If literary critics are noticeably skittish when it comes to definition, Aristotle himself likens definitions and metaphors. Surely, literary critics believe in metaphors. Why not, then, believe in definitions? For Aristotle, the intellectual engine of the metaphor is basically the same as for the definition: an ability to discern resemblances between things. In both cases, we penetrate confusing distractions to capture an underlying similarity. A definition is more rigorous – the likeness is more narrowly construed – but the two are not fundamentally different. Aristotle has a high opinion of metaphor. He writes (to use Fyfe’s translation), “It is a great thing to make a proper use of each of the rhetorical elements mentioned … but by far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt from others; it is the token of genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.”29 Bywater translates the last sentence: “A good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilar.” More literally, the Greek reads, “To make metaphors well is to behold likenesses.”30 Or, to add in parentheses what seems to be clearly implied: “to employ metaphors well is to eye-witness the (momentous) likenesses (hidden from others).” Fyfe adds a helpful endnote. To have “an eye for resemblances” is to possess “the power of detecting ‘identity in difference,’” something that distinguishes “both the philosopher and the scientist.”31 The Greek term for resemblance is ὅμοιος (homoios), meaning “to be like,

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similar to.”32 This, then, is what both metaphor and definition are about: seeing that things that appear different are, in some important respect, the same. Aristotle notes that intelligent people are able to discern, not merely obvious and trivial resemblances, but surprising, hidden, and uncanny resemblances between things. In modern chemistry we can point to the periodic table as a scientific success that cleverly categories physical substances according to a series of under­ lying resemblances. But this happens in literature as well. For example, a medieval morality play that puts the seven deadly sins on display relies on a careful exercise in taxonomy: immoral acts are gathered into precise categories because they are (essentially) the same. Creative insight, in both science and literature, often involves a recognition that things that seem, at first glance, to be very different are in fact very much the same. In a textbook on contemporary hermeneutics, Andreas Köstenberger and Richard Patterson report on the received state of opinion when it comes to metaphor: Thinking is essentially analogical. The process of analogy is ­basically the way metaphor works. In metaphors – and by ­extension all figures of speech – two ideas are related in such a way that a new thought emerges. E.D. Hirch [writes that] … All thinking is “the process of metaphor” … This view is a long way from the purely rhetorical and affective view of metaphor in previous centuries. Far from dismissing figures of speech as mere language decorations or emotional stimuli, we must ­understand that figures of speech do indeed express cognitive content. Other writers put it differently, but they all agree … Leland Ryken remarks, “Metaphor and simile are not ‘poetic devices’; they are new ways of thinking and formulating reality.” Literary critic Northrop Frye states flatly, “We clearly have to consider the possibility that metaphor is, not an incidental ­ornament of Biblical language, but one of its controlling modes of thought” … [We should] understand that figures of speech in the Bible can convey cognitive concepts.33 Commentators do not seem to realize that this cognitive approach to metaphor has a clear precedent in Aristotle.34 Aristotle views metaphor as epistemological. In a technical explanation, he argues that resemblance “should be studied … the formula

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being ‘A:B :: C:D’ … ‘As A is in B, so is C in D.’”35 He supplies a rather trite example: “as old age is to life, so evening is to day.”36 This is very elementary, but we can see his point. Where A = old age, B = life, C = evening, and D = day; A:B :: C:D (or as A is to B, so C is to D). Aristotle means to say that there is a cognitive structure to the proceedings; it is not hit and miss; rather, it operates logically (even mathematically), that is, in terms of a ratio. The Greek word for “ratio” is logos, from which we get the word “logic.” To associate metaphor with logos is to give it a logical and therefore cognitive structure. Aristotle’s meaning is clear: the formulation of metaphors, like the formulation of definitions, involves knowledge. (Note that Aristotle points out that sense-perception is a ratio, as is justice; in other words, both have a logical structure open to analysis. He says this explicitly: “Sense is a ratio.”37 “The just, too, involves at least four terms, and the ratio between one pair is the same as that between the other pair.38 More could be said, of course.) If a talent for metaphor requires some insight that properly seizes on resemblance in the midst of difference, definition relies on a similar exercise. In Aristotle, every type of knowledge originates in the same ability to see that this thing is like or not like that thing.39 This is the Archimedean point around which knowledge revolves. Science, theory, craft, logic, rhetoric, dialectic, morality, metaphor, definition: all begin here. Unsurprisingly, then, Aristotle recommends the study of likenesses and of differences in the search for definitions. He writes, “The examination of likeness is useful … with a view to the rendering of definitions.”40 And again, “The study of differences helps us … in recognizing what any particular thing is.”41 A traditional Aristotelian definition identifies genus (larger group) and differentia (smaller group). Some simple examples may help. What is a mare? A horse (genus) that is female (differentia). What are cirrus clouds? Masses of water droplets (genus) that are thin, wispy, and at high altitude (differentia). What is a simile? A comparison of two or more things (genus) using prepositions such as “like” and “as” (differentia). We can use this sort of formula to identify the true nature of specific things. When we correctly sort through likenesses and differences, we will know what to include and what to exclude from the genus group and the differentia group.42 So the same mental ability that makes metaphor possible makes definition possible. Aristotle uses definitions to identify the natures of things in the world. If literature is to be a meaningful category, it must also have a

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nature. The pursuit of a philosophical definition of literature is nothing more than a stubborn attempt to acknowledge the implicit criteria that govern what we think literature is. Experts often smuggle in hidden definitions of literature that decisively shape their judgments as well as the curriculum they choose to teach and study. But literature professors pay little attention to certain types of texts. Almost no one studies the phone book, or proofs in pure mathematics, or the list of ingredients on tubs of yogurt, for example. Clearly, then, English professors must have criteria in mind when deciding what counts as literature. I am going to try and arrive at a definition that puts those criteria on display. A genuinely Aristotelian definition of literature will be an intensional definition – one that picks out the properties that cause something to be literature – not merely an extensional definition that points to a collection of great books and declares: this is literature! But a word of caution: Supposing we can successfully devise a satisfactory intensional definition, this will not end disagreement about which books specifically qualify as literature. Even if we can settle on the basic requirements for literature, disagreements about which books meet those requirements are interminable and inevitable.

IV . 7 R e j e c t in g Defi ni ti on: J o n at h a n C u l l er et al. Terry Eagleton, like so many others, dismisses the idea that anyone could come up with a definition of literature. He declares, “Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera.”43 Eagleton points to the endless variety of literary forms as an insurmountable obstacle to attempts at definition. In an implicit reference to Wittgenstein, he writes, “It would not be easy to isolate, from what has variously been called ‘literature,’ some inherent set of features. In fact, it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single, distinguishing feature that all games have in common. There is no ‘essence’ of literature whatsoever.”44 We do not need to be reminded that the term “literature” does not refer to a natural kind like an insect. Ants, bumblebees, and mosquitoes are natural kinds that reproduce themselves and exist quite well enough on their own without human help. Literature, on the other hand, could not exist without humanity. Literature is an artifact,

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something artificial, devised by human beings. As Aristotle says, its “existence is contingent; its origin is in the maker and not in the thing made.”45 No Aristotelian would place the “essence” of literature in the same metaphysical category as the essence of an insect. Along with the four elements and species of living organisms, Aristotle mentions many other natural kinds. A celestial sphere is a natural kind. “Deciduousness” is a natural kind.46 “Bilelessness” (lacking gall) is a natural kind.47 Right-angle triangles and triangles are something like natural kinds inasmuch as all these things have an essence that does not derive from human ingenuity. Literature, on the other hand, is an extension of human capacity. It is a product of human skill and intellectual ability. I will argue, nonetheless, that literature possesses a specific nature and that we can describe and define it using Aristotle’s helpful categories. Jonathan Culler, in an abbreviated introduction to literary theory, dismisses any hope of a definition. Following Wittgenstein’s lead, he maintains that literary texts do not share “essential” properties; there are, at best, overlapping similarities or family resemblances.48 But, mostly, Culler does not care very much. In his short treatise, he effectively shrugs his shoulders and turns to more pressing problems: What is literature? You’d think this would be a central question for literary theory, but in fact it has not seemed to matter very much. Why should this be? There appear to be two main reasons. First, since theory itself intermingles ideas from philosophy, ­linguistics, history, political theory, and psychoanalysis, why should theorists worry about whether the texts they’re reading are ­literary or not? … Second, the distinction has not seemed ­central because … [of] the “literariness” of non-literary ­phenomena. Qualities often thought to be literary turn out to be crucial to non-literary discourses and practices as well.49 Culler is making two suggestions here: (1) literary theorists have more pressing interdisciplinary concerns, and (2) no special features distinguish literature from non-literature. Neither seems conclusive. Although an openness to other disciplines surely aids and supports our understanding of literature, why should excursions into sociology, philosophy, or political science demonstrate that literature cannot be defined? Surely, literary criticism entails a purposeful focus on literature. Perhaps, then, Culler’s second point is more compelling.

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Culler maintains that we cannot establish any firm boundary between non-literature and literature because literature and non-­ literature share the same textual properties. Hence the failure of a movement like Russian formalism, a point Culler returns to repeatedly. I will argue, however, that Culler exaggerates. As we have seen, distinguishably different kinds of things often share the same properties. Dogs and cats both possess four legs, fur, teeth, eyes, ears, and so on. Still, dogs are not cats, and cats are not dogs. A bad poem may share many properties in common with a good poem; it does not follow that it is literature. I respond to this objection more fully below. Culler advances three further objections to definitions of literature. First, he argues that literary genres are impossibly diverse. According to Culler, we cannot reasonably hope to discover any “essential, distinguishing features that [all] literary works share.”50 So definition is impossible. As he puts it, “Works of literature come in all shapes and sizes and most of them seem to have more in common with works that aren’t usually called literature than they do with some other works recognized as literature. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, for instance, more closely resembles an autobiography than it does a sonnet, and a poem by Robert Burns – ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ – resembles a folk-song more than it does Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”51 Secondly, Culler argues against any pancultural, transhistorical understanding of literature. He insists that the concept of literature is a product of social forces; it is not fixed for all time and, indeed, has undergone changes throughout history. He points out, for example, that the modern use of the term “literature” derives from Romanticism: “The modern Western sense of literature as imaginative writing can be traced to the German Romantic theorists of the late eighteenth century and … to a book published in 1800 by a French Baroness, Madame de Staël’s On Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions. But even if we restrict ourselves to the last two centuries, the category of literature becomes slippery … And once we begin to think about non-European cultures, the question of what counts as literature becomes increasingly difficult.”52 Culler’s argument here is readily summarized. Because different societies have different views about what counts as “literature,” any universal understanding of what literature entails is out of the question. Each culture, each historical period has a different idea. So, any commonly agreed upon definition is impossible.

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Third, Culler argues that many people who ask the question “What is literature?” are not really looking for a definition: “Thus understood, [the question] ‘What is literature?’ asks not for a definition but for an analysis, even an argument about why one might concern oneself with literature at all.”53 Asking for a definition is really a rhetorical ploy on the part of critics asking larger questions about the nature and social value of literature. Culler’s desultory prose wanders around key issues, but mostly he seems to believe that people who speculate on the nature of literature “already have an idea what counts as literature and want to know something else.”54 Definitional issues arise “because critics and theorists hope, by saying what literature is, to promote what they take to be the most pertinent critical methods.”55 In other words, theorists already have a rough idea as to what literature is, which is all they really need or want. Trying to piece together a rigorous definition naively misconstrues the polemics surrounding criticism. Taken altogether, this is the case Culler makes against attempts to define literature. We can add Culler’s first two suggestions to his three objections to produce a list of reasons why definitionalism is bound to fail. Call his first objection the we don’t do that here objection; the second, the shared properties objection; the third, the formal diversity objection; the fourth, the historical semantic objection; and the fifth, the not what we are talking about objection. Culler’s first objection simply avoids the issue, as does his fifth objection. If influential critics are not really interested in defining ­literature and want to involve themselves in a different sort of investigation, that is all well and good, but it in nowise shows that a definition is logically impossible. We don’t need to dwell on these first two lines of argument here. Turn, instead, to Culler’s three substantive objections what I have called the shared properties objection, the formal diversity objection, and the historical semantic objection.

I V . 8 C u l l e r a n d H o n o ri fi c Defi ni ti on Literature is a word that usually signifies success; it denotes a positive judgment about how well a writer or speaker has performed. Although Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain was delighted to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, literature is a rarer phenomenon. The man writing commercial jingles for advertisements may cleverly use

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meter and rhyme, but even he would be surprised to learn that this counts as literature in the same way that Pope’s The Rape of the Lock counts as literature. To say that something is literature is, then, to evaluate and strongly approve of a text. One might say, “that was a good lecture,” or “that was a brilliant rendition of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto,” or, conversely, “the conductor made a mess of it.” We make evaluations all the time. In the best cases, we have good reasons for these value judgments, but this also applies to literature. Presumably, when we say that Crime and Punishment is a very good novel, we have a reason for saying this. Others might disagree, but such judgments are not arbitrary. Everyone believes that some texts are better or more important than others. We may argue – passionately – over which books should be published, reprinted, reviewed, and cited. Because we cannot devote equal attention to every text, we are forced to pick and choose. Those who expand the university curriculum to include comic books or soap operas do not eliminate the canon altogether; their intent is to introduce new material as literature (and, inevitably, to exclude old material). No one believes that all texts are equal. Culler agrees. He writes, “It’s not that all texts are equal: some texts are taken to be richer, more powerful, more exemplary, more contestatory, more central for one reason or another.”56 But Culler goes even farther, somewhat inconsistently arguing that literature is composed of those texts that society’s intellectual “arbiters” determine to be exemplary and, therefore, worthy of attention: “A literary work … presents itself as in some way exemplary (why else would you read it?).”57 But doesn’t this sound like a definition of literature? What is literature? “Texts (or verbal expression)” (the genus) that is “judged of exemplary merit” (differentia). So Culler, after insisting that literature cannot be defined, falls back on the usual rough-and-ready definition people rely on when discussing literature.

IV . 9 T h e S e m a n t ic Objecti on But leave this aside. Turn, rather, to Culler’s explicit objections to the philosophical activity of devising a definition for literature. Begin with what I will call the “historical semantic objection” or “the semantic objection.” According to this line of argument, we cannot define literature because different societies and eras view literature in markedly different ways. Because the definition of the word

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“literature” depends on the society, the time and place, no universal kind called “literature” can be said to exist. There is no right or wrong view of literature, only social opinion, which changes according to cultural and historical factors. Other societies may have had predominantly religious, nationalistic, or oral notions of literature, which are unacceptable or inapplicable today. Or, perhaps, they had no conception of “literature” at all. But does any of this matter when it comes to philosophy? We are looking for an Aristotelian definition that identifies the nature of something. We are not attempting to devise a lexicographer’s definition the way the Oxford English Dictionary records how people use particular words. As Culler himself indicates, we can begin with the simple idea that there are texts (or “speech acts”) that are particularly praiseworthy. And, indeed, we find out that most (if not all) societies have valued some texts, stories, or songs as much better or more worthwhile than others. This seems a fixed feature of human anthropology. Culler insists that the modern concept of “literature” is a recent innovation. He explains: “The modern sense of literature is scarcely two centuries old … Works that today are studied as literature in English or Latin classes in schools and universities were once treated not as a special kind of writing but as fine examples of the use of language and rhetoric. They were instances of a larger category of exemplary practices of writing and thinking, which included speeches, sermons, history, and philosophy.”58 If, however, earlier historical periods revered what they saw as “exemplary” or as “fine examples” of oral or written expression, that lends credence to the idea that literature, as we mean it here, has existed down through history. Those people could have called literature “oxxunglthsu,” for all that matters. We are interested in a particular category of human achievement, not in whether older societies used a particular word. All we need, to begin with, is a sense of better and worse authorship, which was already evident in earlier societies. Culler pushes the argument further. Following John Ellis, he compares the positive concept of “literature” to the negative concept of a “weed.”59 Both concepts must be understood, he thinks, as markers of social value. Weeds are undesirable; literature, on the other hand, is desirable. If the term “weed” designates widespread disapproval, the term “literature” designates widespread approval. This is why Culler thinks that neither term can be scientifically defined. What is a weed and what is literature can change as social evaluations change.

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There is no fixed nature to be had, and scientific definition becomes impossible. Culler’s weed-literature analogy is insightful but misleading. He explains: Take the question “What is a weed?” Is there an essence of “weedness” – a special something, a je ne sais quoi, that weeds share that distinguishes them from non-weeds? Anyone who has been enlisted to help weed a garden knows how hard it is to tell a weed from a non-weed and may wonder whether there is a secret. Well, the secret is that there isn’t a secret. Weeds are simply plants that gardeners don’t want to have growing in their gardens. If you were curious about weeds [and] seeking the nature of “weedness,” it would be a waste of time to try to ­investigate their botanical nature, to seek distinctive formal or physical qualities that make plants weeds. You would have to carry out instead historical, sociological, perhaps psychological enquiries about the sorts of plants that are judged undesirable by different groups in different places. Perhaps literature is like weed.60 Literature certainly is like a weed inasmuch as it is a carrier of social value. Still, our attitudes toward plants and texts are ultimately based on the nature of the object in question. It is not as if we can approve or disapprove anything at all. Value-laden concepts such as “weed” and “literature” span broad formal categories, but it does not follow that they have no nature that can be captured in a definition. Although the word “weed” does not designate a single botanical species, weeds are not “simply plants that gardeners don’t want to have growing in their gardens.” If Shirley’s husband mistakenly plants tulips where the potatoes were supposed to be, the tulips do not become weeds, even if Shirley and her husband both agree that they don’t want them growing there and go to the trouble to uproot them. The broccoli that you don’t want growing in your garden is not a weed even though you don’t want it growing there. Being a weed is something more than “growing in the wrong place.” It turns out, in fact, that two botanical schools have different ideas about what a weed is. Michael Pollan distinguishes between two possible definitions: (1) “A weed is any plant in the wrong place,” and (2) “a weed is an especially aggressive plant that competes successfully

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against cultivated plants.”61 Culler favours the first definition, which Pollan traces all the way back to a failed Romanticism. The second definition has a botanical basis that appeals to properties beyond our social prejudices. As Pollan puts it, “In the first, Emersonian definition, the weed is a human construct; in the second, weeds possess certain inherent traits we do not impose.” If, then, Culler relies on the Emersonian notion, Pollan’s second definition is more informative. To define a weed as an “especially aggressive wild-plant” is to identify a genus (wild-plant) and a differentia (especially aggressive) in line with traditional Aristotelianism. This Aristotelian definition does a better job of explaining the cause of the negative social evaluation. Weeds are bad – we realize – because they grow so fast and so invasively in any open space that they do not leave any space for the desirable, domesticated plants we want to cultivate. We don’t have to agree with Pollan’s second definition. There may be many other negative reasons why we declare a plant to be a weed: because it is inedible, poisonous, ugly, as well as difficult to get rid of. The important point is that social and historical consensuses often arise because of objective features of things in the world. There are, after all, objective reasons why gardeners consider some plants to be undesirable weeds. The designation is there for good reasons, not merely because gardeners like playing social language-games. Imagine if we had horticultural experts who, one day, declared that carrots and roses were weeds. We wouldn’t believe them. Carrots and roses are objectively desirable; we have good reasons not to think of them as weeds. Carrots are nutritious and roses are beautiful. If a gardening expert informed us that we should think of them as weeds, we would say to ourselves “Who is this so-called expert! He is just playing mind games! He wants notoriety!” Just as we may have objective reasons for designating something as a weed, we may have objective reasons for designating a text as a work as literature. Should we think that past opinions about meritorious texts were merely a matter of historical or social whim? Readers from ages past presumably had good reasons for thinking that some written texts were better than others. We might disagree with their choices, and their opinions may have been wrong, but our disagreement about what counts as literature only deserves respect if it can be backed up by good reasoning. Essentialism is not the impoverished system Culler imagines it is. Whatever wide swath of philosophical opinion the vague epithet

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“essentialism” refers to, there are resources in metaphysical realism for dealing with normative categories. The fact that the word “literature” denotes a praiseworthy value-judgment about a text is no obstacle to the traditional project of definition as long as we accept that such j­ udgments are based on the objective nature of the texts in question. As I have already mentioned, literature is, for Aristotle, an artistic or productive kind. We can trace back attitudes of social approval about artistic things, however, to something other than the mere fact of crowd-thinking. When Culler presents “literature” as a matter of cultural convention, he reduces the term “literature” to a word used in a Wittgensteinian language-game. I investigate further Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism below. But first, consider Culler’s two remaining objections.

I V. 1 0 T h e F o r m a l D iv e rs i ty Objecti on Consider what I have called “the formal diversity objection.” This is a very familiar trope. Culler believes that we cannot define literature because literature comes in many shapes and sizes. It does not make sense, he maintains, to assert that sonnets, aphorisms, one-act plays, novels, and the theatre of the absurd share the same nature in light of such obvious formal differences. Except that Culler misconstrues what the classification “literature” is supposed to do; it is supposed to pick out texts of an exemplary nature. Suppose, in writing a technical paper on the history of the Olympics, I were to define the phrase “sports champion” as “Olympic gold-medal winner.” One may like or dislike this stipulative definition, but it is clear. We know what it means. Yet the formal diversity of Olympic sports is an unquestionable fact. Tennis, triathlon, the marathon, kayaking, boxing, beach volleyball, swimming, shooting, speed-­ skating: these are all Olympic events. The athletes who participate in such events are incredibly diverse. A champion hammer thrower is not a champion 10,000 metre runner is not a champion judoka. Yet all of these people can be “sports champions” in the sense intended; they can all be Olympic gold medal winners. If, then, we can speak about the remarkable “formal diversity” of “sports champions,” this does not demonstrate that something is wrong with our definition. The members of this set – technically, the extension of the term – only need to share one essential property: having won an Olympic gold medal.

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Culler insists there is no natural kind we call “weedness,” but neither is there any natural kind called “sport champion.” It does not follow that neither concept admits definition or that no objective criteria exist for inclusion in each category. The “formal diversity” of gold medal winners – they come in all shapes and sizes – like the formal diversity of weeds – dandelions, quack grass, creeping thistle, goutweed – is no obstacle to definition. Meaningful concepts can span very different categories like “weed,” “Olympic gold medal winner,” or “literature.” No one denies the formal diversity of literature. It does not follow that a definition of literature is impossible. If a short story is not a novel is not a ballad is not an epigram, the term “literature” refers to any textual exercise of superior quality. Even more marginal forms of writing such as political tracts, prayers, hymns, diary entries, can in principle qualify as literature. If a written work is a superior text (that points toward the transcendent) – a gold medal text, so to speak – we can regard it as literature, whatever its genre or classification. I discuss the formal requirements for literature at greater length below.

I V . 1 1 T h e S h a r e d P ro p erti es Objecti on Consider, then, Culler’s final objection, what I have described as the “shared properties objection.” It simply is not possible, according to Culler, to isolate any formal textual strategies limited to literature. Any attempt to define literature will end up being too broad; it will identify as the defining trait of literature formal properties that are also included in non-literary texts. Culler criticizes those “formalists” who sometimes argue that the defining characteristic of literature is “self-reflexivity,” a literary selfconsciousness that focuses on technical aspects of writing and on seminal relationships among literary texts. He explains: [Consider] the self-reflexivity of literature. Novels are at some level about novels … So Madame Bovary can be read as an exploration of the relations between Emma Bovary’s “real life” and the way the romantic novels she reads and Flaubert’s own novel make sense of experience. One can always ask of a novel (or a poem) how what it implicitly says about making sense relates to the way it itself goes about making sense … [But] this is something we could say about other [textual] forms: bumper stickers, like poems, may depend for their meaning on prior

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bumper stickers: “Nuke a whale for Jesus!” makes no sense ­without “No Nukes,” “Save the Whales,” and “Jesus Saves,” and one could certainly say that “Nuke a Whale for Jesus” is really about bumper stickers. The … self-reflexivity of literature is not, finally, a defining feature [of literature].62 Culler mentions Madame Bovary, which is, in part, a book about the unwholesome influence of Romantic novels on readers. But make his example of the lowly bumper sticker even more obvious. Imagine a bumper sticker that says, “down w i t h bu m p e r s t i cke rs !” This humorous bumper sticker is probably not literature, despite its conspicuous display of ironic self-reflexivity. It seems, then, that we cannot limit formal literary properties that belong to literature to literature alone. Culler concludes that there is no essence of literature: no special defining property that excludes non-literary things from the group. But there are problems with his analysis. The first problem is that Culler proposes a surprisingly narrow description of literature. One wonders why the very best bumper stickers – epigrams on sticky paper – couldn’t be considered literature. Is it because literature is found only in books? What if one printed aphorisms from Pascal’s Pensées, biblical verses, or haikus by Basho on bumper stickers? Would this change in location disqualify them as literature? Surely, it is not where something is placed that makes it literature. A second problem is that the fact that literary and non-literary works share formal properties does not show that literature is not a distinct kind. Clearly, Olympic gold medal winners and non–gold medal winners in the same sport share very similar characteristics. The person who won the silver medal in the javelin is very similar in shape and size to the person who won the gold medal. But only the gold medal winner counts as a “sports champion” (given our stipulated definition of the term). The gold and silver medalists in the javelin resemble each other, but it does not follow that we cannot differentiate between them. Of course we can. One of them won gold; the other didn’t. This is enough to distinguish between them. Only one is a “sports champion,” as we have defined the term. As everyday usage would indicate, literature is composed of “gold medal–winning writing.” To be literature is to be conspicuously superior verbal expression. Granted, the criteria we use for evaluation are complex. Still, we do rely on objective criteria when evaluating

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better and worse instances of many kinds of writing. This is all we need. It is hardly surprising that exemplary novels, exemplary movies, and exemplary poems share many of the same properties found in second-rate novels, B movies, and sentimental doggerel. But none of this counts against the common sense idea that the very best texts are “literature.” Culler, who wants to emphasize the role interpretation plays in defining literature, takes a cue from Stanley Fish (discussed below) and turns the introductory sentence of Quine’s epistemological treatise From a Logical Point of View into a sort of pseudo-poem: A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity.63 This rearrangement of the spacing of the words into something that looks like free verse is supposed to show that non-literary works – a collection of essays in analytic epistemology – can be approached from a literary perspective and, indeed, operate in ways we associate with literature. Culler continues: “What can such thought-experiments tell us about literature? They suggest, first of all, that when language is removed from other contexts, detached from other purposes, it can be interpreted as literature.”64 This ever-present possibility, Culler is convinced, fatally blurs the distinction between literature and non-literature. But this “Quinian” objection is only a slightly reformulated version of the shared properties objection. The idea seems to be that the literary properties latent in Quine’s treatise only become evident once we rearrange them like a poem. As Culler comments, “When a text is framed as literature, we are disposed to attend to sound patterning or other sorts of linguistic organization we generally ignore.”65 When we look at Quine’s discourse qua epistemology, we focus on logical argument; when we look at it qua literature, we focus on diction and alliteration and lyrical possibilities latent in the text. So the same Quinean text can be approached as philosophy or as literature. But does this demonstrate the undefinability of literature? Culler overstates his case. Return to the Olympic gold-medal winner analogy. We could easily pretend that an athlete who is not an Olympic gold-medal winner is an Olympic gold-medal winner. The Canadian women’s senior

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champion in the hundred-metre dash who never went to the Olympics could convincingly impersonate the Olympic gold-medal winner in the woman’s hundred-metre dash. We could take a photograph of her with some sort of gold medal around her neck; we could videotape her running style and call it “striding out like an Olympic champion”; we could talk about how she is such a dedicated athlete (which she is); we could call her a world record holder (which she very well may be). But, still, she is not a “sports champion” on our definition, because, although she may be a remarkable athlete, she did not win gold at the Olympics. It simply does not follow that because we might easily mistake her for a “sports champion,” she is a sports champion. And the very same thing can be said about literature. We can mistake passages that have been conveniently clipped out of context and artfully rearranged for literature. It does not follow that there is no difference between literature and non-literature. Suppose I were to read Quine’s treatise all the way through and come to some understanding of its aims, its methods, and its contents. And suppose I were to still “mistake” it for literature. This seems almost impossible! But if this happened, what would knowledgeable experts conclude? Probably, that I am a seriously deficient reader and misunderstand what Quine is about. These issues notwithstanding, I do accept that some philosophy texts can be both philosophy and literature. (Hardly Quine.) It still does not follow that there is no definition of literature or that literature is any text whatsoever. The fact that we can sometimes mistake non-literature for literature does not indicate that no definition of literature exists. Culler, like Fish, exaggerates the problem. I say more on this below.

I V . 1 2 W it t g e n s t e in : L anguage-Games Wittgenstein, we might say, has won the day. An influential critic like Culler simply assumes that his family resemblance theory and the allied notion of a “language-game” are the last word on the issue. I have already argued that the family resemblance theory of meaning is fatally ambiguous and generally presupposes the common sense realism that permeates everyday discourse. But briefly examine, now, Wittgenstein’s influential language game account of meaning. His approach is valuable; only it does not invalidate Aristotelian attempts to formulate scientific or so-called essentialist definitions.

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Wittgenstein’s motivations are not entirely transparent; that said, he strongly suggests that he wants to replace more traditional methods of definition with a better account of the meanings of words. At first glance, his manoeuvring seems innocuous. He writes, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”66 This seems reminiscent of structuralism, but Wittgenstein is more of a pragmatist. He devotes much of his time to an examination of everyday examples, emphasizing the different ways words are inserted into “language-games,” tacit structures of meaning that facilitate the activities of ordinary life.67 Wittgenstein claims, then, that traditional philosophers – he specifically mentions Augustine – view language as the business of naming things. He comments: “[Augustine] give[s] us a particular picture of the essence of human language [:] the individual words in [a] language name objects – sentences are combinations of such names. – In this picture of language … Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands … If you describe the learning of language in this way you are … thinking primarily of nouns like ‘table,’ ‘chair,’ ‘bread,’ and of people’s names.”68 Wittgenstein suggests that we think instead of language as part of an activity focused on doing things successfully: Think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked “five red apples.” He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers – I assume that he knows them by heart – up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. – It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words. – “But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” – Well … explanations come to an end somewhere. – But what is the meaning of the word “five”? – No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used.69 Wittgenstein argues, then, that meaning is “how words are used” rather than “what [the words] are naming.” Wittgenstein thinks the old naming approach relies on ostensive definitions. As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains, “Ostensive

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definition specifies the meaning of an expression by pointing to ­examples … to which the expression applies.”70 A student asks: “What is a chair?” The teacher points to a chair: “Chair!” This is the method of ostensive definition. We can point to frogs, rainbows, roses, stars, and shoes as the meanings of the corresponding terms. Wittgenstein maintains, however, that the process of ostensive definition is deeply flawed. It cannot be applied to counting, for example. He gives this ostensive definition of the number two: “That is called ‘two’ – pointing to two nuts.” And immediately objects: “But how can ‘two’ be defined like that? The person one gives the definition to doesn’t know what one wants to call ‘two’; he will suppose that ‘two’ is the name given to this group of nuts!”71 Except that ostensive definition is not without resources. The way someone ostensively defines “two” is first to point to the two nuts, then to two oranges, then to two dogs, then to two marks on a piece of paper, until the onlooker finally realizes: “Oh! I see. It is the quantity two that he is referring to. That is what all these things have in common!” Traditional philosophers thought we could fix on the common properties of things (like the shared quantity “two”) through some kind of abstraction (a thorny issue I cannot delve into here). Indeed, Wittgenstein’s opposition to ostensive definition is hard to fathom. His example about the meaning of an expression like “five red apples” easily lends itself to ostensive definition. We can point to the colour red; we can point to an apple; we can point to collections of five objects. To add insult to injury, Wittgenstein himself does not hesitate to use ostensive definition when he tries to define the word “games.” In laying out his family resemblance theory of meaning, he points to various examples of games: board-games, card-games, ballgames, chess, tic-tac-toe, and ring-a-ring-a-roses. But this sounds like an ostensive definition. So, what is the problem? Wittgenstein makes it sound like we have to choose between “use” and “naming,” but I am not sure we can draw a hard-and-fast line between the two. Don’t we call things by names in order to use them? “Hand me that screwdriver over there, not the Robertson, the Phillips.” In our day-to-day activities, naming things is very useful methodology. It is precisely because we can use words to name things that share the same nature that naming is a useful way of getting things done. But Wittgenstein has a further explanation of meaning that is intended to circumvent any need for an Aristotelian definition that points to the true nature of something. On this antirealist account,

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language is a “language-game” played by a community. In the absence of genuine metaphysical knowledge, it is the opinions of the collectivity that determine what words mean. Meaning is, in effect, social convention. Hence Culler’s comments about literature as a changing historical and social construct.72 If, however, the meaning of the term “literature” is mere social consensus, any hope of achieving a stable definition that stays the same through time is simply naive. Suppose, then, we accept Wittgenstein’s suggestion that “the meaning of a word” is “how the word is used” in practical endeavour or how it is inserted into a local language-game. First, does this really make much of a difference? After we cut through the rhetoric, I am not sure one is left with a substantial argument against Aristotelian definitions. A screwdriver is a hand tool that turns screws. But can’t we express this information using a tradition genus/differentia definition? What is a screwdriver? A screwdriver is “a carpentry tool” (genus) with a specially designed head “to turn around screws” (­differentia). Suppose we think of carpentry as a language-game with certain tacit rules: one should not call a screwdriver a hammer; one should not call concrete, plywood; a carpenter uses different words for right-angle and circle. But this sounds like a very Aristotelian attempt to use words to distinguish between natures in the world. How does this show that the project of Aristotelian definition is untenable? The main problem here is the way in which Wittgenstein (or perhaps his interpreters) detach the notion of a language-game from “real meaning” in the world. As already discussed in the chapter on epistemology, language points to things in the world. (Whether one calls that “ostensive definition” is a technical issue we won’t explore here.) Suffice it to say that language – although it may have game-­ characteristics and family-resemblance characteristics – refers to shared natures in the world. Is language a game? We can choose not to play chess, soccer, or badminton, but human life is hemmed in by hard metaphysical necessities that do not leave us with much of a choice. If we had a language that described rocks as edible or referred to hemlock as herb tea, we would not last very long. Language cannot take any form whatsoever; it must – to use a much abused term – correspond to reality; otherwise, it would be useless, meaningless, even fatal. A language cannot make 2 + 2 = 6. It cannot eliminate death, make gravity disappear, produce an effect without a cause, kill the aids virus, or make genocide a moral act. Language has to conform to judgments and truths larger than itself.

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“Language-games” that have no anchor in the real world would be a distraction. I have already argued that literature gets its power from its direct connection to reality. Literature is not gripping because it corresponds to social conventions but because it penetrates beyond conventions to capture what things objectively are. Because it rubs up against reality, revealing the way things really are. When the process of evaluation operates successfully, a social consensus forms around the great books of earlier generations, but these books are not great because of social consensus; rather, the social consensus that these texts are literature forms because they are great. The consensus has to be a matter of objective merit, not mere intellectual fashion. At least on the Aristotelian view I am articulating, determining whether a particular text is literature is a matter of wise objective judgment, which may often run directly counter to social values. Part of the motivation behind Aristotelian definition is the pursuit of some deeper criterion that does not uncritically depend on current opinion. The language game approach views meaning as behaviour constrained by the rules of a particular game. It is something of a cliché to say that literature often means breaking the rules. You may play the game of hockey and break all the rules, but this does not mean you are a good hockey player. Likewise, it is not breaking the rules but being skillful in verbal expression that makes something literature. Within the space opened up by specific formal expectations, we can evaluate how much strategy, skill, and intelligent decision-making is taking place. To call something “literature” is not merely to say that someone played the “game” called literature, but to say they played it exceedingly well. In effect, they won a gold medal. Literature is about succeeding at something, about excellence. One aspect of game-playing that Wittgenstein seems to overlook is the way it posits an objective test of merit. Games have a structure. It is not as if you can do anything you want in the middle of a game of basketball and be a good player. It does not matter if you are handsome or ugly, rich or poor, charming or a boor – as long as you put the ball in the basket more times than your opponent, you win. The same holds true for literature. Precise criteria for excellence differ according to genre, but it is not as if an author can do anything at all and produce literature. The game of literature means getting something done, successfully or unsuccessfully. We reward the highly successful texts with the encomium “literature.”

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IV . 1 3 W h e r e D e f in iti ons Come From At first glance, coming up with a definition of anything at all may seem impossible. Suits points to the paradox Meno poses in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name. Meno identifies, there, an impossible sort of dilemma (from Greek: δίλημμα, meaning “double proposition”): Can virtue (ἀρετή) can be taught or learned?73 There seems to be two possibilities. Either we know what virtue is and can point to examples, in which case we cannot learn about virtue because we already know what it is. On the other hand, if we do not know what virtue is and so cannot recognize examples of it, how can we ever learn what it is? As it turns out, learning seems impossible: either we already know something, or we can never find out.74 Socrates suggests, in his response, that what happens in learning is not the creation of knowledge from nothing but a remembering of what we have forgotten. As Suits piquantly puts it, “Socrates did not remain in trouble for long. In proposing the doctrine of recollection as solution to the dilemma, he simply admitted that seekers of definitions do have the definitions they are seeking already tucked up their sleeves, and that the philosophic inquiry after definition is a kind of retrieval system for shaking them into view again.”75 Suits suggests that Socrates’s answer to the puzzle is more or less correct. Except that one does not have to rely on Platonic recollection. We are able to identify different kinds in the world long before we articulate these distinctions in rigorous or precise language. This basic level of knowledge is what Aristotle calls ἐμπειρία (empeiria), or “knowledge by experience” (which operates at a level roughly equivalent to those epistemological “feelings” discussed in the previous chapter). Definition formulation turns out to be a matter of actualizing knowledge already implicit in human judgment and behaviour, a process of expanding on the distinctions we already make inside our minds. It involves a move from tacit to explicit knowledge that leads to a refinement or correction of what we uncritically thought was the case. Suits responds to critics of his own definitional project, with perhaps a little too much heat: Refraining from attempting to define anything whatever on the ground that none of the distinctions available may have been drawn with sufficient accuracy is … to exhibit a nearly

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pathological degree of taxonomic insecurity. Most of us may be presumed to know, for example, our ass from our elbow, and a great [deal] more beside[s]. To take a rather more polite example, consider Aristotle’s distinction between … the kind of thing that has its principle of motion internal to it in contrast to the kind of thing that has its principle of motion external to it. I submit that without knowing (or at least without being conscious of knowing) anything as sophisticated as that distinction, we are perfectly capable of telling a hawk from a handsaw. Aside from the fact that I do not take special care to protect my chickens from a handsaw, nor try to saw a board with a hawk, it does not seem particularly fanciful to surmise that something like the difference between natural objects [organisms] and artefacts operates in this bit of minor knowledge.76 No one mistakes a hawk for a handsaw. But, as Suits suggests, there is already a lot of “essentialist” knowledge packaged inside in this distinction, including an Aristotelian distinction between self-moving organisms and tools. What definition does is bring this tacit knowledge to the surface. Distinctions we take for granted become the epistemological resources that, put under scrutiny, help us understand the nature of things in the world. Turn, now, to the specific case of literature. It is a philosopher’s fantasy that we can start from zero (as Descartes seems to have intended) and spin knowledge wholly out of ourselves, like Swift’s spider.77 We begin our intellectual lives not in splendid isolation like a wolf-child but in the rough-and-tumble world of social engagement, practical behaviour, and everyday language. We already use words to make sense of human experience. And we use words to define other words. As Suits writes, “We do not, every time we seek to define something, have to start from scratch, as though we were required to define everything else before we could define this. We do not begin at the beginning of time or at the beginning of knowledge but in media res – in the midst, that is, of a network or community of other definitions.”78 Suits argues, then, that we should begin our search for a definition with obvious examples of the thing in question – what he calls “paradigm cases.” We might insist – as some practising critics do – that we already know what literature is: it is the Bible, Beowulf, Boccaccio, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, and Eliot. Texts like those. These seem to be prototypical or archetypical cases. These are

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canonical works that everyone agrees are literature. We can start, then, by trying to identify what these works have in common and move on to evaluate more controversial or problematic examples. How, then, can anti-definitionalists assert so vociferously that we cannot obtain any knowledge of what of literature is? Suits traces the contemporary hostility to the project of philosophical definition to a wilful blindness that deliberately overlooks obvious resemblances so as to erect insurmountable obstacles to any sort of common sense essentialism. He insists: Not everyone is equally successful in the search for definitions even when they are to be found. Such lack of success … comes down in the end to a certain kind of insensitivity – insensitivity, that is, to the way in which human experience has classified the objects that arise in human discourse and inquiry. And such insensitivity, where it exists, is roughly one or the other of two kinds – natural or induced. By a natural insensitivity … I mean simply a constitutional inability to apprehend definitions. It is analogous in music to being tone deaf. By an induced insensitivity of this kind I mean that a bias is at work in the person which actively prevents him from apprehending definitions that he would apprehend in the absence of bias. What I am calling a bias is the kind of thing Francis Bacon called an idol, and one of the idols at issue here is the idol of family resemblance, which I would class as an Idol of the Academy … Wittgenstein’s appeal to ordinary language can be understood as an appeal to the ­verbal commerce carried on by the anthropos in the agora. But I submit that the man in the street is not a Wittgensteinian. He is a working essentialist.79 Suits mentions Bacon’s discussion of the Idols of the Academy (or the Theatre). Bacon, hardly a philosophical friend of Aristotle, points out that we tend to uncritically conform to artificial systems of thought that come in and out of fashion like “so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.”80 What garners our loyalty is not the evidence but the sense of academic authority they exude. We uncritically kowtow to ideas “received into the mind from the playbooks of philosophical systems” without being able to distance ourselves from presentday enthusiasms.81

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If working men and women do not balk at ordinary language definition, Suits maintains that those in the Modern Academy purposely subvert the project of philosophical definition by proposing exotic, marginal examples under the guise of our freedom to decide what our words mean. This strategy guarantees failure by turning the subjectmatter we are investigating into a category that is much too diverse to allow for definition. If the strangest things can be literature, then obviously, no definition will be possible. Literary critic Alex Good writes, “‘Literature’ is a subject that can be hard to pin down. Broadly, it might include any structure of words, including a grocery list.”82 But surely, it would have to be a very fine grocery list to qualify as literature? Imagine a grocery list equal in literary merit to Homer’s Iliad, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. These works – which everyone recognizes as literature – reach a pitch of eloquence that is, surely, beyond that of any grocery list. If, then, someone self-confidently asserts that a grocery list is a work of literature, we can probably assume that this is, in Suits’s terminology, a case of “wilful blindness.” If ideological critics want to mix up categories to disprove essentialism, that is unsurprising. Arthur Gibson muses, “If we have a concept of literature, it is not itself a capacity to recognize what literature is … We might have an idea, might use it, but do not necessarily understand the concept or how to recognize all instances of it. For example, might you say that a grocery list is or is not a piece of literature? What happens, however, if a grocery list is used in a piece of literature?”83 But this is not much of a conundrum. Suppose an abstract artist makes a collage by sticking together pages cut out from a newspaper and includes a grocery list. All this shows is that an artist can use raw materials that were not art and turn them into art. If I include a grocery list in a novel, it may become part of a novel. It does not follow that an ordinary grocery list is a work of literature. Including a grocery list in a novel adds a level of aesthetic intention that is entirely absent when we head out to the supermarket. Suits points to a certain “Humpty-Dumptyism” that gets in the way of informative discourse. He quotes from Lewis Carroll: “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’”84 As Suits points out, “rational discourse can tolerate a certain

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amount of Humpty-Dumptyism,” but only so much.85 Commentators can stipulate strange and even illogical examples to their heart’s content, but their egregious uses of the word “literature” in non-standard cases need not set the standard for the rest of us. It might be exciting to stipulate, say, that the letters floating in a bowl of alphabet soup are literature, but that has nothing to do with the Aristotelian project of determining what paradigm cases of literature hold in common. Suits writes, “If, obviously, some of the things called games are called games metaphorically or carelessly or arbitrarily or stupidly, then there will predictably be nothing importantly common to all of them.”86 The same holds true for literature. We should not waste our time trying to find a common nature in deliberately eccentric examples. This is why eccentric examples were chosen: to show that essentialist definition is impossible. If we have to choose between believing that a grocery list is literature and believing in the possibility of a definition, isn’t the latter alternative more credible? A definition “should include neither more nor less than the term being defined.”87 If a definition of literature excludes paradigm cases, it is too narrow; if it includes egregious counter-examples like phone books and train schedules, it is too broad.88 A good definition will map out the extension of the term by identifying genus and differentia, as well as acknowledging necessary and sufficient conditions. It will cast a conceptual net over things that share the same nature without omitting any of their number. Even if we formulate a plausible definition, disagreement will remain regarding which texts satisfy the listed criteria and count as literature. The point of the present book is not to settle all disagreement (reasonable or not) about which texts to include in the canon. I offer, instead, an Aristotelian way of understanding what paradigm examples of literature share. When it comes to disputed cases, we have to hope that disinterested, scholarly opinion among critics can, over time, develop into a reasonable consensus.

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5 Definition by Four Causes

V.1 A r is to t l e ’ s T h e o ry of Four Caus es I will now elaborate four separate but overlapping definitions of ­literature using Aristotle’s theory of four causes. Consider, first, how Aristotle uses his theory of four causes to explain the nature of the world. In an Aristotelian cosmos, properties are instantiated in individual substances, which can be explained in terms of (1) material cause: the physical substrate; (2) formal cause: the characteristic pattern or structure; (3) efficient or moving cause that causes the thing to exist, and (4) final cause: the purpose or goal (τέλος, telos).1 Simply put, we can describe things from the perspective of matter, form, change, and purpose. These causes are closely related, but Aristotle never tries to reduce them to one.2 He observes that formal, efficient, and final causes “often coincide,”3 but this is a comment on overlapping explanations, not a recommendation that we conflate these explanatory perspectives. (Note that the Greek words Aristotle uses for cause – “αἴτιον,” “αἰτία” [cause or reason] – could be translated as “explanation.” We could refer to “Aristotle’s four causes” or to “Aristotle’s four explanations” without any real difference in meaning.) Living things make up the most important Aristotelian class of substances. Organisms have a material and a formal cause, a body and a soul. They serve, mostly, as their own efficient cause (they reproduce themselves) and their own final cause (their purpose is the survival of the species). Artifacts, say machines, also have a material, formal, efficient, and final cause: in order, the physical stuff they are composed of, how they are designed, the craftspeople who make and

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repair them, and the purpose they serve. There is inevitable scholarly disagreement about details, some of which we discuss below. But this is the basic picture. Although Aristotle has a healthy respect for material and efficient cause, he is not a modern-day reductionist. In a passage that sounds almost Neoplatonic, he writes: “It is not likely that either fire or earth or any such element should be the reason why things manifest goodness and beauty both in their being and their coming to be … nor again could it be right to ascribe so great a matter as beauty and goodness to spontaneity and luck.”4 Aristotle maintains that we cannot account for goodness and beauty exclusively in terms of material cause (the elements) or random chance (the absence of final cause). Because he situates teleology – striving to achieve a goal – within biological and even inanimate natures, we can have “scientific” explanations that refer to goodness and beauty understood in terms of the fulfilment of a nature. There is no is/ought gap in Aristotle as in modern philosophy. This opens up room for thoroughly normative sorts of investigation. We can use the four causes to explain almost anything. Consider a rattlesnake. What is the material cause? The d n a, the carbon molecules, the tissues, the bones (etc.) of which it is composed. The formal cause? The species to which it belongs: rattlesnake (with all that entails). The efficient cause? Reproduction and a steady supply of food. The final cause? Reproduction, the survival of the species. To use a traditional example of an artifact that comes straight from Aristotle, consider a bronze statue of Apollo. The material cause is the bronze; the formal cause is the Apollo shape; the efficient cause is the sculptor; and the final cause is the adornment of the local temple. This is just standard doctrine. Each cause answers a specific question: together they explain why this thing possesses the nature it does. I aim, then, to apply each of these four causes to literature; each cause can explain something about what makes something literature. It is important to emphasize: if I propose four definitions, a work of literature is not four separate things added together but a single thing viewed, so to speak, from four different angles. Technically, the distinctions between definitional perspectives are made secundum rationem (according to the mind), not secundum rem (according to the thing itself). What seems true from one perspective will, of course, help determine what is true from another perspective. The final cause (purpose) of something will influence, for example, its formal cause.

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I will not enter into details here. Suffice it to say that the separate causal requirements set out by the four definitions, taken together, represent an ideal that the very best literature would satisfy. One may wonder whether the terminology I am using is correct or even truly Aristotelian. According to a standard interpretation, Aristotelian definition deals with formal cause. A definition identifies an essence that is the form the thing shares with individuals of the same species. Why not call the principles I enunciate the “four characteristics” of literature without calling them “definitions”? But this seems too weak. In each case I intend to devise a definition in the standard sense: to identify genus and differentia, necessary and sufficient conditions. Each cause will become, in its own way, a description of the “essential” nature – the necessary distinguishing features – of what literature is. It is important not to get sidetracked into perplexing metaphysical issues. We do not restrict the use of language to metaphysics, where the formal understanding of essential natures makes the most sense. If by “essence” we mean the properties that make something what it is, we can identify, in some cases, the “material essence,” the “efficient essence,” the “formal essence,” and the “final essence” of things. As we shall see, disagreements between competing schools of criticism arise, in large part, because critics tend to champion one causal perspective over all the others. I want, inasmuch as that is possible, to combine all of these perspectives into an overarching theory. Aristotle uses the Greek terms ὄρος (horos) and ορισμός (horismos) for definition. A ὄρος is a limit or boundary; ορισμός refers to the way we set out limits for a word’s meaning. We can do this by emphasizing something other than formal cause. Consider the sentence “Ecologists think that Styrofoam cups should be banned.” How do we define “Styrofoam cup”? The distinguishing trait (differentia) here is the material cause, the Styrofoam of which the cup is made. Or suppose a textbook informs the reader: “Electricity is the movement of electrons through a conductor.” This is a definition of electricity that identifies an efficient (or moving) cause as the essential characteristic of electricity. Or consider the phrase “successful chemotherapy,” as in a doctor’s comment: “I would consider this to be a case of successful chemotherapy.” Here, the larger group (genus) is “chemotherapy”; the smaller group (differentia) is “chemotherapy that is successful.” But the term “successful” is a comment on final cause, an intended goal (which has been reached).

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What matters when defining a term or an expression is picking out the identifying feature that makes something what it is. We can do this using any one of the four causes. Suppose I have, for example, a barn located on my property. I might describe the barn as red, large, old, rickety, made of wood with a concrete floor, and filled with dairy cows. This may add up to an adequate description of my barn, but this is not a definition. A definition must go further. It must set out requirements that must be met for something to be what it is. Merriam-Webster defines a barn as “a building on a farm that is used for storing grain and hay and for housing farm animals or equipment.” This lacklustre suggestion tells us at least what a barn is; in other words, it tells us what is required for a building to be a barn. In searching for a definition of literature, we are likewise looking for criteria that tell us what is required for something to be literature. These criteria can be readily expressed in terms of formal, material, efficient, and final causes. As already mentioned, we regularly use the term “literature” to refer to superlative writing (or speech). The four definitions I elaborate are particular explanations of why a text counts as superior verbal expression. A work of literature should be superior, ideally, in all four ways. I will elaborate, then, four definitions nestled inside the original definition, each one explaining the merit of the literary text from a different angle. Although I propose four ways of evaluating literature, which reinforce and corroborate one another, I argue that defining literature in terms of final cause provides the most comprehensive and compelling way of understanding what literature is about. This may strike some attentive Aristotelians as a bit odd, given that the usual focus on formal cause. I want to suggest, however, that the effect literature has on a reader is what matters most. I propose, then, a teleological account of literature, in line with Aristotle’s general world view. But more on this below. Literature is, in a single word, “superior.” Even worthwhile texts may not be literature because they are not superior enough. Doubtless, there are well-meaning pundits who oppose any notion of “superior texts” for all sorts of egalitarian reasons. It seems to me that these people do not believe in literature. Perhaps we could point to a crisis of faith in literature like the crisis of religious faith that has shaken modern-day Western civilization. But one cannot have what we call “literature” without unequal texts. Of course, what people say and what people believe may be two different things. It is one thing to argue against the idea of literary merit and it is quite another thing to put egalitarian notions of

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textuality into practice. Usually, appeals to one set of literary criteria are replaced with appeals to another set of literary criteria. However well-meaning such attempts are, they simply shift the goalposts so that they replace one notion of superior merit with another. In the Topics, a rather dry treatise about debating techniques, Aristotle gives examples of inadequate definitions. It is relatively easy to get the genus (the large group of shared nature) correct, he thinks, but debaters often run into problems with insufficient differentia.5 If, for instance, we want to define “ambition” (in a derogatory sense), it is not enough to explain the vice as “striving for honour for all men strive for honour.”6 To define that vice properly, we must specify that it involves striving for honour in an excessive or extreme way (the differentia).7 Again, to define what a covetous man is we must precisely specify “the quantity of money he aims at,”8 that is, that he aims at too much. When we define what incontinence (or intemperance) is, we “must state the quality of the pleasures,”9 that is, that the incontinent agent aims at dishonourable pleasures. In such cases, we have character traits that are superlatively bad. We have to include that negative judgment in the definition. I want to argue, here, that literature is superlatively good. Being good writing is not enough. Literature has to be good in an “excessive or extreme way.” It has to be so good that it is, so to speak, gold medal–winning writing. This sort of extremely positive judgment has to be included in the definition. But I digress. Let us now look at what literature is, viewed from the perspective of Aristotle’s four causes.

V . 2 D e f in it io n b y Formal Cause: T h e C h ic ag o S chool It would be amiss to neglect the role of the Chicago School in reviving Aristotelianism in the twentieth century. Suits himself completed degrees in philosophy at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s. His “anti-anti-essentialist” method was heavily influenced by the philosophical program of the “Chicago Critics,” a diverse group that included at least three generations of scholars: a first wave led by Ronald Salmon Crane, Richard McKeon, Elder Olson, W.R. Keast, Bernard Weinberg, and Norman Fitzroy Maclean; a second wave made up of critics such as Wayne Booth, Seldon Sachs, Ralph Rader, Mary Doyle Springer, and Austin Wright; and a third wave including, notably, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. Both the approach and the

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movement were referred to as the Chicago School of Poetics (“poetry” being a general term for literature), the Chicagoans, the Chicago Criticism, the Neo-Aristotelianism, and, more simply, genre c­ riticism (because of the emphasis on literary form). In the 1960s the teachings of the group were quickly pushed aside for more exciting options. Grant Webster, in a 1979 survey of “American Literary Opinion,” declared the Chicago movement moribund if not yet dead: “The usefulness of Neo-Aristotelianism as a way of responding to literature would seem to be almost nil; the insights and distinctions of the Chicago Critics have had the effect of burying Aristotle, not resurrecting him as a part of a usable past … The theoretical issues raised by the Aristotelians have become obsolete even before the death of their defenders.”10 Webster’s judgment reflects – with purposeful exaggeration – what happened during the turn toward more specialized brands of “formal” criticism. Michael Sprinkler reports: “What became known as the Chicago criticism exerted only limited influence on the practice of literary interpretation beyond the precincts of the University of Chicago. Its dissemination was confined largely (though not exclusively …) to the writing and teaching of Chicago-trained students, posted to various frontiers of higher education armed with the gospel of Aristotle. But not unlike the position of the literary theorist in many literature departments today, while every self-respecting department had to have one, there was little indication that mass conversions were in the offing.”11 Popularity is no gauge of truth. If the Chicago criticism was perhaps shortchanged by the zeitgeist, I will argue that it embodies, in a useful way, the perennial spirit of Aristotelianism. Despite harsh and often misleading opposition, the Chicagoans tried to make sense of literature through a philosophically sophisticated lens. I will take a moment, then, to try and set the record straight while responding to criticisms of this formal approach. W.K. Wimsatt, one of the movement’s harshest critics, excoriates the Chicago group in a cranky review of the 1952 Chicago School compendium Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern.12 Wimsatt, who presents the thick tome as the cornerstone and the stumbling block of the Chicago movement, criticizes what he sees as the book’s bloated prose style: “The book is long-winded and tiresome; it might well have been shorter by a third or a half without loss of substance.”13 It reads, he thinks, like “Aristotelian lecture notes,” featuring the characteristically “jumpy sequences of flat terms” and “final [i.e.,

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dogmatic] announcements.”14 All members of the group are, it seems, to be blamed for an all-round stuffiness and a reliance on pedantic repetition: “The lazy spirals of repetitious exposition, the trickles of almost indetectable emphasis through endlessly repeated congestions of the same quasi-technical language … half retrospect and half prospect. These are the hallmarks of the Chicago style.”15 Wimsatt, who prides himself in his up-to-date modernism, is highly irritated by the belletristic tone of Chicago criticism; he thinks their prose is too discursive, too philosophical, too old-fashioned for modern tastes, a complaint made by other critics as well. Gerald Graff concurs: “[The Chicagoans were] obscured by a style so elephantine and scholastic that it became a target of parody.”16 If, however, opponents found the Chicago style irksome, it is the philosophical content that really gets under Wimsatt’s skin. He strenuously objects to what he sees as the doctrinaire attitudes of critics who would force everything into an Aristotelian straitjacket. The Chicagoans proclaim, he says, that all critical methods are useful and pertinent while dogmatically insisting (following the lead of Crane) that only Aristotelian formalism can get the critical job done.17 In Wimsatt’s words: “Mr. Crane may believe his theory more flexible and more inclusive than [that of more modernist theorists]; he may believe that he has a better theory. But this would not make his theory less ‘dogmatic’ than anyone else’s. And if the word ‘dogmatic’ is taken as connoting not only commitment to a theory but a high degree of assurance and an intolerance of other theories, then Mr. Crane and his friends are especially dogmatic.”18 Wimsatt believes that the school’s Aristotelian triumphalism closed off any sensitivity to or accurate understanding of recent critical concepts and principles. He lambasts the hypocrisy of the group: “the shiftiness of their tactics, their [false] pluralism devoted to removing the systems of other critics, their dogmatism devoted to setting up their own [system] instead.”19 He concludes, “The Chicago critics expect too much of their system … They are the Scaligers, not the Aristotles, of modern criticism. Their program seems to me scarcely calculated to advance the cause either of literary criticism or of a vital neoAristotelianism.”20 (The reference is to Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484– 1558), an arrogant and brutally dogmatic defender of Renaissance Aristotelianism.) I cannot consider, here, the extent to which specific members of the Chicago circle successfully or unsuccessfully defended the Aristotelian

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cause, but surely Wimsatt misses the point. It is precisely the breadth and the abundant resources of Aristotelianism that make it an attractive methodology. Selecting the most wide-ranging method among a host of narrower alternatives is not narrow-minded, whatever one’s aversion to Aristotelian essentialism. The Chicago School adopted a synoptic approach in opposition to the specialist technical approaches of competing schools. I will return to Wimsatt’s criticisms, but we need to situate the Chicago School in terms of their time period. They were responding to movements like structuralism and the New Criticism that seemed to focus uniquely on the linguistic properties of texts. Mikel Dufrenne explains: “In structuralist criticism … the work is taken as language and criticism as meta-language.”21 Greig Henderson and Christopher Brown quote Barthes: “Literature is simply a language, a system of signs … [The business of criticism is] to reconstitute … only [the] system, just like the linguist.”22 The New Criticism championed a method of close reading that seemed to move in the same direction. As a reference work explains: “Each word of a poem [was to be] be scrutinized in detail with regard to all relevant denotations and connotations … This relatively exclusive focus upon … individual words … recommended New Criticism to many university teachers … for they now had New Criticism’s assurance that knowledge of the poem’s language and a good dictionary were the only prerequisites for literary study.”23 But language is the material cause of literature: the stuff out of which literature is made. To focus wholly on language is to restrict literary criticism to a study of material cause. Whereas Aristotle complained that the earliest thinkers focused (mostly) on material cause to the exclusion of other causes, the Chicagoans maintained that modern-day literary criticism was suffering from the same Pre-Socratic malady.24 Olson, along with other members of the school, wanted to shift attention to literary form. He argues that one cannot arrive at an appreciation of literary form solely through an examination of material cause: [The modern approach] attempts to derive the form from the matter. All such argument runs, obviously, in the wrong ­direction; it would infer the design of a house from the shape and weight of the bricks. No product is simply what it is because its matter is such and such; its matter is indeed a necessary, but

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not a sufficient condition of its existence and nature. A saw, for instance, is not a saw because the steel determined it should be. The reverse is the case; I wish to cut the fibers of the wood in a certain way: I must therefore have a blade of a certain kind; it must therefore be made of a substance capable of assuming a certain shape, and hard enough to retain that shape, hence steel. And, if I am to give a complete account, I must talk, not merely about the steel but about the form given it, and how it was given it, and the function of cutting.25 A complete description of a saw requires an account of material cause (mostly steel), formal cause (sharp, thin, serrated edge), efficient cause (steel making and sharpening), and final cause (cutting wood). Saying that a saw is made of metal is not enough. Many other things are made of metal without being saws. Literature is not just about language; it has a nature that is more than material cause. Olson and the group defend, then, a wider criticism that includes consideration of formal, efficient, and final cause as well. The language of a text deserves scrutiny, of course, but we also need to investigate the efficient cause of literature (the author), the formal cause (the genre), and the final cause (the aims or aspirations). Literature requires form to be a poem or a novella; there has to be an efficient cause, the author, that shapes it into that form, and there has to be a teleology (a purpose) that drives the effort of shaping it. We cannot give a well-rounded account of literature without providing some account of these coequal properties. Opponents such as Wimsatt were incensed that someone like Olson “should hope to come out of an argument about [literature] looking like a better holist than [other contemporary critics].”26 But Crane’s “holierthan-thou attitude” is not without basis. The Chicago Critics did, in fact, insist on an engagement with whole works, in a way that escaped rival schools of criticism. Crane, like other members of the group, situates the poetic whole at the centre of critical preoccupation: What a poet does distinctively as a poet is … by means of his art, to build materials of language and experience into wholes of ­various kinds … The criticism of poetry (in the large sense that includes prose fiction and drama) is … primarily an inquiry into the specific characters and powers, and the necessary constituent elements, of possible kinds of poetic wholes, leading to an

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appreciation, in individual works, of how well their writers have accomplished the particular sorts of poetic tasks which the natures of the wholes they have attempted to construct impose on them. For such criticism we obviously need analytic devices that will permit us to discriminate the various species of wholes that poets have made; to determine the number, character, and ordering of their functional parts; and to define the often quite different conditions of success or failure implied by the nature of each.27 This is why the Chicagoans focused on literary genre. Because one must begin any evaluation of an individual text by understanding what the writer sets out to do – what kind of formal whole the author had in mind – before determining whether it has superior merit – that is, whether it counts as literature. Are we dealing with a sonnet, rondeau, limerick, ballad, or ode? We need to know this before making judgments about the nature or worth of any particular text. Hostile critics like Wimsatt alleged that the Chicago group overlooked the language that is the poem to investigate extraneous matters. Wimsatt writes, “It is quite clear that [the Chicagoans] want or believe they want to study the poem, not its origins or its results. But two of the most important terms in the Chicago system are ‘pleasure’ and ‘purpose.’ And if these terms have even in Aristotle some tendency away from poems toward genetic and affective psychology, they have it more decidedly for the Chicago critics.”28 According to this line of thinking, the Chicagoans focused on genetic psychology, the feelings that made the poet compose the poem, and affective psychology, the feelings the poem elicits from the audience. In other words, they studied “the origins and the results” of the poem rather than the poem itself. They were led, thereby, into a different kind of non-literary subject-matter. In effect, they turned literary criticism into amateur psychology. The resulting debate overlapped with wide-ranging discussions about alleged fallacies: the “genetic fallacy,” “the intentional fallacy,” the “affective fallacy” (“latent affectivism”), the “heresy of the paraphrase,” and the “species fallacy.”29 More on this later; focus on Wimsatt’s main point for the moment. Wimsatt and colleagues maintain that the Chicagoans are distracted from the poem itself (understood as material cause) by a tangential focus on efficient and final causality – on authorial intention and intended audience response. But is this a fair criticism? Is it absurd to

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suggest that the critic may need to investigate why a poem was composed or gauge expected audience response to better understand the nature of a text? Texts are pushed into existence through some efficient cause; they are pulled to their successful completion by some deliberate intention or final cause. Understanding how or why this happens opens another window on literature. It seems narrow-minded to insist that such considerations are verboten. Literature has many purposes. Investigating these matters is hardly a distraction. Wimsatt also complains that the Chicagoans “have had little or nothing to say about the main issues raised by what they call the ‘dialectical,’ rather than ‘literal,’ criticism of our time – the relations which poetry bears to religion, morals, philosophy, psychology, science, and language.”30 This is a strange criticism for a purist like Wimsatt to make; it is also misleading. Whatever individual members of the group may have written or said, the Aristotelian position is more nuanced. It is not that poetry bears no relation to religion, morals, philosophy, psychology, science, and linguistics. It is that these matters come within the purview of the literary critic when they are connected to the purpose and aim of the literature. Specialists in these domains can better devote themselves to an independent per se exploration of that subject-matter. Literary critics are compelled to delve into such matters only when that would be helpful to an evaluation or interpretation of the texts under scrutiny. We should note one final criticism of the Chicago Critics. Wimsatt is upset about another fallacy, which he identifies as “the irrelevant introduction of general anatomy.”31 This is the mistake of giving too much philosophical background to the issue at hand. If, however, one ignores the underlying philosophical issues, one loads the dice in favour of those anti-essentialist, antirealist, anti-Aristotelian views that someone like Wimsatt takes for granted. Aristotelianism has this advantage: it can more than hold its own in philosophical debate, and at the same time it can rescue criticism from some dubious assumptions that pass uncontested in much contemporary ­discussion. But I have already covered this ground in the first chapters of this book. I do not mean to suggest, here, that the Chicagoans or their followers would agree with every aspect of the project I have undertaken. Except for McKeon, they were working critics focused on the teaching and evaluation of particular literary works. Philosophy cannot sufficiently or adequately address concrete cases in the same detail. Suffice

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it to say that whatever their shortcomings, the Chicago School managed to piece together a coherent orientation inspired by Aristotle. In hostile times, this was no small accomplishment.

V . 3 L it e r at u r e as Mi mes i s Let us begin our work of philosophical definition, then, by advancing a definition of literature based on the Aristotelian notion of formal cause in line with the general thrust of the Chicago School. From this formal perspective, literature can be defined as texts with superior formal features. What is literature? The very best novels, the very best epic poems, the very best one-act plays, and so on. We must begin, however, by clearing up a serious misunderstanding. Aristotle famously defines art as mimēsis (μίμησις) or imitation.32 As Philip Sidney, in his seminal Defense of Poesie, reports, “Poesie therefore, is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end to teach and delight.”33 Except that Sidney, along with more recent experts, misses out on an important aspect of Aristotle’s aesthetics. Aristotle does not understand mimesis in terms of any naive act of literal copying. As he himself explains: It is the function of a poet not to relate things that have happened, but things that may have happened, i.e., that are possible in ­accordance with possibility and necessity … The difference between historian and poet is that the former relates things that have ­happened, the latter things that may happen. For this ­reason poetry is a more philosophical and serious thing than ­history; poetry tends to speak of universals … A universal is the sort of thing that a ­certain kind of person may well say or do in accordance with ­probability or necessity – this is what poetry aims at.34 On Aristotle’s account, literature does not operate the way a photograph reproduces the scene in front of the lens; literature constructs a fictional world in which merely probable or plausible events occur. Poets are not historians. They take whatever liberties are necessary – exaggerating, rearranging, suppressing this or that detail – in order to achieve an aesthetic end: some sort of appropriate emotional response (for Aristotle, “the appropriate sort of pleasure”).35

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Aristotelian mimesis is, then, reality transformed, condensed, embellished, and redesigned, to make it an effective carrier of emotional and normative content. Literary imitation is to be understood as the rearrangement of reality for the purposes of artistic communication. Richard Janko comments: The Greeks drew no clear distinction between imitation, copying, impersonation, and representation – all these concepts were included in the word mimesis … According to Aristotle … we identify what is represented because it has some features of the actual object … Thus we recognize the sketch of a cow because it has four legs, horns, and so on. To the complaint that such a sketch involves a loss of detail, Aristotle would reply that this loss is accompanied by an increased clarity of basic form. This explains his evaluation of plot … for him, a clearly structured art-work is one preferable to one cluttered with formless detail.36 Imitation aims at universals, at a revelation of underlying essences. By removing distracting details and exaggerating whenever necessary, authors paradoxically produce a more truthful “copy” of reality that reveals the deep natures of things. Aristotle maintains, not merely that art imitates nature, but that it “completes what nature cannot bring to a finish.”37 Skilled artisans and artists produce objects that are superior to what unaided nature makes. When human art (or skill) makes houses (an example Aristotle uses), it produces better shelters than caves, holes in the ground, and bent-over trees. It improves on untouched nature. Likewise, when human skill devises reading glasses, magnifying glasses, microscopes, telescopes, and binoculars, it improves human vision as it exists in unimproved nature. But one can also think of the fine arts, including literature, as ways of perfecting nature. Music produces artificial sounds to devise beautiful harmonies. The painter applies distilled pigments in skillful ways to make nature even more brilliant. Even the photographer takes a picture from just the right angle in order to obtain what is, arguably, a superior visual effect. The storyteller, in turn, turns even true events into a narrative form that communicates, more effectively, the basic features of that episode. In the Defense of Poesie, Sydney also argues that the poet embellishes the material of history to produce a more pleasing account where

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“virtue [is] exalted and vice punished.” His approach to criticism is more didactic than Aristotle’s, but he follows the ancient philosopher in his comparison of poetry and history, arguing that poetry is a higher vocation because “the historian is bound to recite,” whereas the poet may “with his imitation make [history] his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting.”38 Poetry, for Sydney as for Aristotle, is a re-enactment designed for the reader’s edification. But there is a second way in which literature is imitation, which even philosophical commentators sometimes misconstrue. For Aristotle, literature is imitation because it is produced by human making. This is in keeping with the etymological root of the English word “poetry,” derived from the Greek ποίησις (poiēsis), a variation on the verb “ποιέω” (poieō): “to make something.” The traditional meaning of “poetry” is, then, the creation of something artificial or new.39 Aristotle says that “art imitates nature” (ἡ τέχνη μιμεῖται τὴν φύσιν).40 What do animals do when they reproduce themselves? They create new organisms, independent living wholes detached from the parent that efficiently accomplish their own ends (the aim of survival). But literary authors create new texts, which are new independent wholes detached from the author that efficiently accomplish an end (an aesthetic response of some sort). The comparison is even more apt because literature is, in some sense, an expression of human nature; it “reproduces” something that is, to a large extent, a copy of what we are. It is hard to imagine a literary work that does not represent something: an event, a human character, a feeling, a theory. It is, however, the skillful making that went into the work that makes it literature. Satires, fairy tales, allegories, autobiographies: these are all imitations in the Aristotelian sense because each has a form composed of parts that have been skilfully put together to produce an effect. Nicolas Cage, in the movie Next, announces: “Beauty is the summation of the parts working together in such a way that, nothing needed to be added, taken away or altered.” This summing up of parts – we might call it “beauty” or something else – is what Aristotle associates with art. This unity criterion – the parts fitting felicitously together to produce an efficacious, complete, independent whole – is what makes literature like a biological organism. In Aristotle’s mind, literature is intrinsically valuable because the different parts of a literary text united together enhance our contemplation of universal truths (as in the original meaning of theoría). Literature serves this purpose; it is not a literal copy of reality.

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Limiting mimesis to the realistic imitation of nature is a straw man. Aristotle considers music – “flute-playing, lyre playing, and … the art of the Pan-pipes” – as imitation.41 But music is not (at least not usually) about literally copying sounds in the world: the sounds of dripping water, the wind, rocks falling, footsteps, distinctive bird calls, and so on. Music is about devising highly artificial melodies played on contrived instruments to produce rhythm, harmony, melody, texture, and structure. Art critics have complained that mimesis is irreconcilable with abstract art, but an abstract painting is a whole composed of parts skilfully put together to produce an overall effect.42 For Aristotle, that is enough for something to be art. Literature, however, is not simply mimesis; it is superior mimesis. What makes something a superior example of its kind? In Aristotle, judgments of better and worse are based on function. But something cannot fulfil its function without the proper form.43 A superior airplane flies very well because it has been superbly designed. We could say something similar about literature. Literature has to be designed in the right way. It does not matter what genre we are discussing. The design of a good detective story holds the reader in suspense; the design of a good pastoral poem intensifies our appreciation of nature; the design of a good epigram skilfully condenses meaning in an arresting way. With literature, we have a text that felicitously achieves the intended effect because of the way in which the parts have been joined together. It is the superior design (formal cause) that produces a superlative effect. This is how the genre criticism of the Chicago School made sense of literature.

V . 4 F o r m a n d Genre The program of the Chicago School was relatively straightforward. If literature is “superior verbal expression,” we need a method for determining which texts are superior to others. The Chicagoans propose a method. What is literature? Texts that constitute superior examples of literary form. A sonnet that qualifies as literature will be a superior sonnet. A biography that qualifies as literature will be a superior biography. A belles lettres essay that qualifies as literature will be a superior belles lettres essay. On this account, to classify something as literature is to point to the quality of the writing, which has to be measured with reference to the overall poetic form. This, then, is to define literature

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in terms of formal cause. Literature is “verbal expression” (genus) that exemplifies “superior form” (differentia). On the Chicago account, mastery over a particular literary form is the salient feature of literature. We properly judge the success of a fable, for example, not by measuring how well or poorly it meets the criteria of a crime novel, but by evaluating how fully it realizes the possibilities inherent in the form of a fable. This is why we need to know what literary genre we are dealing with before determining whether we are dealing with literature. Knowing the formal requirements of different literary traditions is a prerequisite to good criticism. Here is an analogy. Judges at a blue-ribbon dog show will use different criteria to determine the best chihuahua and the best Irish wolfhound. Bull-ribbon chihuahuas are not blue-ribbon wolfhounds. Literature is like this. To claim that someone’s sonnets are literature is to claim, in effect, that they are champion, blue-ribbon sonnets, not limericks, or ballads. There are different criteria for blue-ribbon novellas and blue-ribbon examples of war journalism. The Chicagoans were incensed – the term is not too strong – because they saw criticism being overtaken by marginal preoccupations that were largely unrelated to these formal considerations. Here is an Aristotelian way of expressing this. We could say that each literary form constitutes a different literary species with a different essence. We need, then, to place texts in the correct categories – to recognize their essential characteristics – before we can properly evaluate them. Once we understand that this text belongs to the species “sonnet” rather than to the species “free verse,” we can better interpret it as an exemplary (or not so exemplary) member of its kind. Without determining the literary species (including hybrid species), we cannot understand the basic organizing principles that a particular text strives to embody. We lack any proper basis for judging or evaluating it. It follows from all this that texts with radically different formal properties may qualify as literature. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question: “what is literature?” We don’t have to accept that all genres are of equal value or significance. Surely, some possess pos­ sibilities for insight and wisdom that far exceed others. Sonnets, for example, possess potentialities that far exceed the potentialities of the best limerick. It need not follow that no limericks can be literature, but only that it is much harder for a limerick to be literature. Wise

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critics value some literary forms over other literary forms. But leave the resolution of such issues to the critics. It is enough to make the general point that literature is textuality that realizes the possibilities inherent in a specific poetic form. The realization of this potential is, from a formal, Aristotelian point of view, what makes literature literature. Determining whether a particular text is an instantiation of an exemplary literary form is a task for criticism, not philosophy.

V . 5 D e c o n s t ru c t io n and the War ag a in s t U ni ty The Chicagoans emphasized the unity of the text. This is why they placed so much importance on the notion of overall form or genre: formal cause is the source of overall unity, the glue that sticks the ­different parts together. As already mentioned, authors such as Crane and Olson were reacting to a New Critical emphasis on “close reading” that lifted individual words out of their original context and considered them on their own, ignoring literary form and disrupting the unity of the reading experience. For the Chicagoans, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts; thus, one had to begin with a larger understanding of the poetic whole before moving on to an investigation of specific parts. Form is, in this sense, prior to the material cause of language; we cannot evaluate how well language is used until we have a sense of the formal genre it is intended to exemplify. If, however, the Chicagoans opposed the rival New Criticism, recent deconstructionist critics are even more extreme. Postmodernist Hilda Gairaud Ruiz’s provocatively titled essay “Deconstructing Totalitarism: Fragmenting the Whole in Narratives” is an instructive example. In prose laced with ideological politicized overtones, Gairaud Ruiz champions a hopeful new “fragmentation.”44 She objects to a “dominant prevailing ideology” that “embodies wholeness or totality,” recommending “fragmentation” as “a force that resists [the] totalitarian ‘imposing [of a] uniform and harmonious whole.’”45 Unity is bad, she thinks, and disunity (as a means to diversity) is good. Cutting-edge writing needs to be purposefully disjointed in order to oppose the “fixed, hegemonic systems of thought” that impose monolithic ­versions of “transcendental and essential truth,” which are “formally acknowledged and transmitted by current cultural institutions such as the church, family, and formal school systems.”46

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Gairaud Ruiz is not the first person to see a value in purposeful fragmentation. (Witness Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.) Still, she attacks with a particular vengeance any critical focus on poetic wholes, presenting the decisive breaking up of all sources of literary and conceptual unity as necessary to a wider cultural war that opposes rulers and the oppressed. Presenting herself as something of a deconstructionist, she refers glowingly to the way Derrida “deconstructs” canonical texts using artful fragmentation. Terry Eagleton describes this Derridian method of disjointed analysis: “Derrida’s own typical habit of reading is to seize on some apparently peripheral fragment in the work – a footnote, a recurrent minor term or image, a casual allusion – and work it tenaciously through to the point where it threatens to dismantle the oppositions which govern the text as a whole. The tactic of deconstructive criticism … is to show how texts come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic; and deconstruction shows this by fastening on the ‘symptomatic’ points, the aporia[s] or impasses of meaning, where texts get into ­trouble, come unstuck, offer to contradict themselves.” 47 One might disagree with Derrida’s method of deconstruction on various grounds: because it sidesteps the main point of the text, because it turns criticism into desultory philosophical pronouncement, because it gets the meta­physics wrong. More to the point, here, is the way Derrida breaks up the text into disjointed, incoherent little pieces. It is like someone throwing a porcelain vase on a marble floor: we are left with shards, the vase is destroyed. One could argue, likewise, that deconstruction leaves us with fragments but no literature. Why should we accept that writing has to be pulled apart at the seams? In most cases, disjointed writing is an ineffective carrier of one’s message, whatever one’s political persuasion. Tellingly enough, Gairaud Ruiz does not follow her own advice. She does not throw down disparate notes on a page to demonstrate the importance of diversity; in fact, she does the opposite. She organizes her thoughts in an orderly, accessible fashion, taking the reader through her ideas, step by step, to their logical conclusion. It is the content of her essay, not its coherent form, that serves her political purpose. How she presents her ideas seems to be in direct opposition what she says. As always, there is no need to be simplistic about any of this. Great writers can effectively use disjointedness to produce desired effects. Masters of the aphorism like the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Samuel Johnson produced a form of

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literature that depends on a sort of disconnectedness. What one is looking for in a thinker like Pascal are punctuated bursts of inspiration, like lightning strikes – Bang! Bang! Bang! – so that we are overwhelmed by the sudden moments of wit and wisdom. Choppiness – disunity, if you will – becomes an essential property of this kind of literature. It needs to be there. But critics like Derrida and Gairaud Ruiz are making a deeper point. They think that formal unity is a bad idea because it mirrors the bad metaphysics of Western civilization. As already explained, Derrida sees himself as carrying on a war with traditional (Aristotelian) philosophy. Deconstruction is supposed to dislodge “the lynchpin or fulcrum of [the] whole thought-system”; to dissolve the “ultimate word, presence, essence, truth or reality” that glues everything together; to disrupt our belief in a “transcendental signified,” which he variously identifies as “God, the Idea, the World Spirit, the Self, substance, matter.”48 Deconstruction also has a political side. It is supposed to be a subversive weapon against bad authority. The enlightened critic is to smash to bits the bad essentialist metaphysics the ruling classes use to ­normalize oppression. Critics are, in Gairaud Ruiz’s words, to liberate “traditionally marginalized agents such as minority groups” by championing disunity, fragmentation, and deconstruction.49 But this kind of overly politicized interpretation is, mostly, stark caricature. Whatever the problems with Aristotle’s ancient political views, his metaphysics is not intended as political philosophy. Derrida pins the problem on the “transcendental signified” that connects everything altogether but Aristotle does not think of substance as an underlying glue that holds things together – that is the Lockean pincushion model of substance.50 Aristotle has a technical definition of substance: he believes in a pluralism of individuals; each substance is an independent individuality separate from other individualities of the same type, even when they share the same essence. It seems strange to accuse Aristotle, who believes in a wide diversity of distinct natural kinds, of imposing some sort of metaphysical homogeneity on the world. The idea that bad political systems can be traced to Aristotelian metaphysics rather than to Hobbesian self-interest takes a tremendous leap that overlooks the individual human moral failings that motivate oppressive systems. Eagleton, in discussing how the Romantics came to define themselves in opposition to industrial England and its “rationalist or

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empiricist ideologies enslaved to ‘fact,’” notes how “the literary work itself [came] to be seen as a mysterious organic unity, in contrast to the fragmented individualism of the capitalist marketplace.”51 Doubtless, the Romantics would have been surprised to learn that this notion of “organic unity” originated in the establishment figure Aristotle. But this is, more or less, how Aristotle views things. For Aristotle, art imitates nature. Think of a literary text like an organism. An organism has a soul – a formal cause – that holds it together and makes its different physical parts function effectively as a single unit.52 Dogs, for example, have a dog-soul that designs and animates their bodies to be like dogs. Now think of a literary text in parallel terms. A Petrarchan sonnet has a formal cause – a Petrarchan soul – that reworks its material cause – the language in which it is composed – to turn it into a Petrarchan sonnet. When someone like Derrida focuses exclusively on linguistic details and refuses to consider the “Petrarchan soul” of a Petrarchan sonnet, he is, in effect, extracting the poem’s “soul” and discarding it as unworthy of interest. In ignoring the ultimate source of unity – the Petrarchan genre – to expend his creative energies on marginalia, the deconstructionist breaks up the poem into a bundle of isolated properties that do not inhere in anything greater. (Reminiscent of Hume’s “bundle theory of the self.”) A deconstructionist cannot capture the essence of a Petrarchan sonnet, for that would require some consideration of the species to which it belongs and, at least in an Aristotelian system, some account of the Petrarchan “soul” that organizes its parts to efficiently accomplish its appointed tasks. Seen from a Chicagoan perspective, deconstructionists murder to dissect. But they also misunderstand the metaphysical tradition. In Aristotle, the soul is not a “transcendental signified” that passively sits inside the material cause, doing nothing. Aristotle writes that if we were to conceive of the eye as a separate animal, the soul of the eye would be the activity of seeing.53 Literary form – understood as the Aristotelian “soul” in the text – must be viewed as the “activity” of a text successfully doing what it has been designed to accomplish. The soul of tragedy – what holds a tragedy together – will be the activity of all the parts working together to make us weep; the soul of comedy will be the activity of all the parts working together to make us laugh. To ignore literary form is, then, to ignore what makes tragedy effective tragedy and comedy effective comedy. It is hard to reconcile any such strategy with responsible criticism. This is why the Chicagoans opposed

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new methods of criticism (beginning with the New Critics and moving forward) that omit serious consideration of the overall literary form as the proper starting point of criticism. They championed a holism based on genre considerations as the key to good criticism.

V . 6 D e f in it io n b y M ateri al Caus e: L it e r a r in e s s a n d F i cti onali ty We have devised, then, our first definition. Literature is textuality endowed with superior formal cause. But this is not enough, by itself, to explain what we can know about literature. If we want to push our project further, we need to examine material, efficient, and final causes as well. In this section, then, we will examine the role of material cause – the best language and the best subject-matter – as a possible defining feature of literature. But let us turn our attention, first, to what present-day critics have said about the issue. Contemporary critics who champion material cause as the ultimate key to understanding literature, ironically, call themselves “formalists.” This muddies the waters, for, considered from an Aristotelian perspective, they are materialists, not formalists. What Aristotle means by material cause is the “stuff” of which something is made. There are two basic ways, then, that these “materialist” critics have tried to define literature. (1) One group has tried to argue that literature is constituted by a unique kind of language-use, which they sum up in the concept “literariness.” (2) The other group has argued that literature is constituted by “fictionality,” by subject-matter that puts on display forceful expression rather than literal truth. There is something to both approaches. Let us consider each in turn before turning to an Aristotelian account of literature as superior material cause. Russian “formalists” and French structuralists have argued that the identifying property of literature is a special linguistic property they call “literariness,” which the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines as “the sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from non-literary texts.” As Gary Morson explains, these materialists believe that “‘literariness’ [is] what makes a given work a literary work.”54 This is to define literature in terms of material cause. What is literature? Verbal expression (genus) characterized by “literariness” (differentia), where literariness is embellished word-use. On this materialist account, literariness tends to be defined as the self-conscious use of language. We are not simply aware of what

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the words say; we can also be aware of how words function. This means using words in ways that draw attention to themselves. Eagleton explains with an apt example: “If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness,’ then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning – or, as the linguists might more technically put it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and the signifieds. Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like ‘Don’t you know the drivers are on strike?’ do not.”55 Literature, according to this account, requires a more intense, selfreferential use of language than we meet in ordinary contexts. Culler comments: “‘Literariness’ is often said to lie above all in the organization of language that makes literature distinguishable from language used for other purposes. Literature is language that ‘foregrounds’ language itself: makes it strange and thrusts it at you – ‘Look! I’m language!’ – so you can’t forget that you are dealing with language shaped in odd ways. In particular, poetry organizes the sound plane of language so as to make it something to reckon with.”56 Seen from this perspective, literature is “literariness.” It is verbal expression composed of a special sort of linguistic stuff. It does not use regular language but language that makes readers pay attention to the way it is being used as something remarkable in and of itself. The problem with modern “formalism” is that “literariness” is a very vague concept that is difficult to apply. Great authors do use language to slow down, intensify, and “defamiliarize” the reading process. But this is only part of what they do. And literariness exists outside of literature. Newspaper headlines pun outrageously: “Paris Mayor to Homeless: Go Home.” “Homicide Victims Rarely Talk to Police.” “Federal Agents Raid Gun Shop, Find Weapons.” “Statistics Show Teen Pregnancy Drops Off Significantly After Age 25.” These true headlines turn attention to the ways in which words are used. Does this make them literature? Probably not. We cannot identify any one linguistic strategy unique to literature the way we identify “feathers” as unique to birds. Bad poems, bad stories, and bad plays that are not literature also use language that draws attention to itself, they just don’t do it very well. It is not the fact that an author uses language to draw attention to itself that makes something literature; it is that some authors are able to do this in a superior way. The difference between literature and non-literature is

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the difference between superior and run-of-the-mill language-use, that is, between inferior and superior literariness. These modern formalists were purists; they wanted a science of criticism like linguistics. One cannot come to a determination about which texts are literature without making value judgments that exceed any purely scientific account of the way language is used. But the most serious problem with the literariness account of literature is that it ignores subject-matter. Literature is not, exclusively, language about language. It is language filled with “real meanings” that point to the nature of things in the world. Think of Heloise’s letters to Abelard.57 If Heloise has an erudite flair for embellished language, her letters are about something real: Abelard, herself, their love affair, her feelings, her thoughts, God, eternity. This is what she is talking about. She is not just talking about language, however much she relies on “literariness” to get her message across. The same obviously holds true for fiction. Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is about a prisoner, a labour camp, a work squad, sickness, a piece of sausage, a lucky triumph. Solzhenitsyn is not using words to describe words. He is describing a day in the life of an imprisoned person. This is what he is interested in. The concentration camp world he is describing is part of the content – part of the stuff that text is made of – and that counts, equally, as a material cause of this piece of literature. Literature uses words to produce a heightened effect. But these words have an outside reference. Suppose someone was to read Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea without feeling empathy for the embattled old man because he was too busy noticing how the words draw attention to themselves. Wouldn’t that be a mistake? Wouldn’t that miss out on what the story is about? There is a place for technical analysis, but a monopolizing concern that detracts from a main narrative or from any real-world reference in a text would be a myopia that reads literature for academic rather than literary purposes. The material cause of literature is language and subject-matter. There is then a second group of contemporary critics who have advanced “fictionality” as the stuff out of which literature is made. What, then, is literature? On this account, literature is verbal expression (genus) characterized by “fictionality” (differentia), where fictionality is imaginary or make-believe subject-matter. No less an authority than Derrida chimes in: “There is fictionality in all literature.”58 But Derrida, as is his wont, tries to make a

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philosophical point out of this. He wants to argue that literature is anti-representational; it has nothing to do with the epistemological project of Western metaphysics, which tries to truthfully mirror the world. As J. Hillis Miller explains, “Derrida stresses the way literature [is] … detached from any ascertainable referent.”59 Understood epistemologically, literature “hangs in the air.”60 Composed of “references without referent,” it does not correspond to anything in the real world and thus escapes any epistemological responsibility.61 This is almost the opposite of the wisdom approach advanced here. I have already argued (pace Wittgenstein) that this is how words get their meaning; by pointing to something outside themselves. There is a mirroring going on, even in fiction. Because the protagonist in a short story is a fictional character, it does not follow that the story is detached from all referents to the real world. Say, the character dies; death is a real thing in the world. Say, the character drives a car; people drive cars in the real world. Say, the character gets angry; people really get angry out in the world. A fictional story about someone falling in love might do a much better job of representing what falling in love is like than an eyewitness description of two people falling in love by an actual bystander. The fictional account still has a referent: love, which is a part of reality (whether we like it or not). But it is not only postmodernists like Derrida who emphasize the fictionality of literature. In a more traditional vein, René Wellek and Austin Warren point to the fictionality as the carrier of literary identity: The center of literary art is obviously … a world of fiction … The statements in a novel, in a poem, or in a drama are not ­literally true … There is a central and important difference between a statement, even in a historical novel or a novel by Balzac which seems to convey “information” about actual h ­ appenings, and the same information appearing in a book of history or sociology. Even in the subjective lyric, the “I” of the poet is a fictional, ­dramatic “I.” A character in a novel differs from a historical ­figure or a figure in real life. He is made only of the sentences describing him or put into his mouth by the author … Even [in] an apparently most realistic novel, the very “slice of life” of the naturalist is constructed according to certain artistic conventions … in choice of theme, type of characterization, events selected or admitted, ways of conducting dialogue. We ­discern, likewise, the extreme conventionality of even the most naturalistic drama

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not only in its assumption of a scenic frame but in the way space and time are handled, the way even the ­supposedly realistic ­dialogue is selected and conducted, and the way characters enter and leave the stage.62 All this seems true. Literature shifts the emphasis from any literal representation of truth to what effectively gets the message across or touches the reader. Still, the prior objection applies. Bad drama, bad poetry, and bad storytelling possess “fictionality” without being literature. Literature requires, not just fictionality, but superior fictionality. Bold-faced lies, superstitious nonsense, and sheer propaganda have more than enough fictionality, but that does not make them literature. Literature is fictionality done superbly well; indeed, done so well that it tells important truths about the world and makes them available to readers. Which is why we value literature so much.

V . 7 A r is to t e l i ani s m: D e f in in g   L it e r at u re Materi ally Considered from the perspective of material cause, then, we can define literature as verbal expression (genus) composed of superior matter (differentia). Superior matter means two things: superior use of language and superior subject-matter. Presumably, one needs both superior properties for something to materially qualify as literature. Aristotle uses the word hulē (ὕλη) to refer to material cause, which comes from the Greek term for wood or timber, understood as something out of which things are built. He himself supplies many examples of material cause. The bronze is the material cause of the statue; “fire and the elements, the material cause of physical bodies”; “letters, the [material] causes of the syllables”; “the raw material, the cause of art”; and the premises, the material cause of an argument.63 The material cause operates as an underlying substratum or hupokeimenon that persists through change. Except that Aristotle’s comments require some qualification. Later Neoplatonic interpreters including Plotinus, John Philoponus, and Simplicius came to view Aristotle’s lowest level of material substrate, what he called “prime matter” (πρώτη ὕλη), as a featureless privation that only takes on definite properties when it is imprinted with form. Mainstream commentator J.N. Findlay informs us that this later Neoplatonic account is, more or less, identical with the account of Aristotle. Findlay explains:

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Regarding matter Plotinus has a long, interesting treatise in which the Aristotelian accounts of Hyle [matter] are subtly combined with the accounts of the [formless] Receptacle in [Plato’s] Timaeus … This is a field in which there is genuinely a profound homodoxy between Plato and Aristotle, the Prime Hyle of Aristotle being only in name more substantial than the empty receptacle of Plato. Plotinus follows Plato, as also Aristotle, in r­ ecognizing an ideal … matter: the indefinite substrate, which is common to all the Eide [Platonic Forms], [and which] reappears, at another level, in the basic indefiniteness which underlies sensible instances … To this omnirecepient Prime Matter, Plotinus denies not only every ­sensible quality, but even bulk and size … How is such matter apprehended? Like the nothingness of space, not so much by a spurious act of thinking, as by the complete failure of such an act, that is by an indefinite unthinkingness anoia [lack of understanding] in which no clear content comes to light.64 This Neoplatonic view clashes, however, with Aristotle’s robust commitment to material cause as a source of explanation. If formal cause stamps all the properties onto the matter, this risks reducing basic material cause to pure property-less potentiality. But material cause must cause some of the properties in the thing. Otherwise, how could it be a “cause”?65 Aristotle’s term for “cause” is “αἴτιον” (aition), referring to whatever is responsible, blameworthy, or culpable for something. Material cause, then, must be responsible, blameworthy, or culpable for at least some properties in a physical object. There is an important lesson here for our understanding of literature. The Chicagoans opposed the modernist turn toward material cause because they believed that it neglected any consideration of literary form. But we do not want to go to the other extreme and ignore material cause altogether. Any extremism – exclusively formalist or exclusively materialist – is a mistake. Neither literary form nor literary matter does all the aesthetic work. Literature is, so to speak, super­ lative form and superlative matter, stuck together. A complete literary criticism needs to acknowledge both aspects of literature. In modern academia, specialist schools tend to isolate out one hallmark issue to the exclusion of other factors. The rivalry between the Chicago School and the New Criticism fostered an untenable dichotomy between formal and material cause. Although the Chicagoans did articulate, more successfully, a holistic interpretation of literature, we do not want to trace everything about literature to formal cause acting

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on its own. The matter of which literature is composed is not pure Neoplatonic negation, a featureless residue that only takes on the properties imposed on it by literary form. Material cause has a prior nature that produces the literary effect, causing a text to have the formal properties it has. Authors carefully choose their subject-matter and carefully choose the words they use because they have independent properties that can, then, contribute to a larger formal whole. On the view that I am advancing, matter has real causal agency. We must not overlook the way the author’s choice of subject-matter and language influences and determines the properties of the text. If Aristotelian holism is correct, we can focus on formal cause, beginning with the whole and moving to the parts, or we can focus on material cause, beginning with the constituent parts and moving to the whole. One cannot say everything about the whole simply by adding the parts together. (The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.)66 Still, one wants to leave room for an analysis that pays particular attention to material cause. Obviously, we never encounter matter without form or form without matter. This is true in metaphysics, but it also holds true for literature. An inquiry into material cause need not isolate the matter from the form (as the New Critics were wont to do). But we need to give the material parts their due. Literature is a little like cooking. It doesn’t matter what the recipe is. If one wants to produce a five-star meal, one needs good ingredients. If we start with spoiled ingredients, we will end up with unpalatable food. Literature, in terms of both language choice and subject-matter, has to be a mix of high-quality ingredients. Or any superior achievement becomes impossible. Critics can investigate subject-matter or language-use. Suppose we were to investigate Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals to discover how many times and in how many different ways she describes the moon. Or suppose we were to study the use of Dublin slang in Finnegan’s Wake. Unquestionably, these are legitimate concerns. But even here, a sort of analytic atomism that focuses exclusively on one aspect of subject-matter or language-use to the exclusion of other aspects seems un-Aristotelian. Subject-matters and words always work together and intertwine to produce an overall effect in line with Aristotelian holism. T.S. Eliot expands on the best use of words: And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others,

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The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, And easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together)67 Eliot does not rule out the use of commonplace words: what matters is how the words – old, new, precise, technical, or straightforward – work together to produce an overall effect: “the complete consort dancing together.” It turns out that words do not operate individually; they depend on one another for their effect. Even material cause operates holistically. This seems a felicitous expression of an Aristotelian perspective.

V . 8 Id e as as M at eri al Cause The claim that literature is composed of the best ideas is a mainstay of traditional criticism. Nineteenth-century critic C.T. Winchester writes: “What is literature? … Emerson says that it is a record of the best thoughts. ‘By literature,’ says another author, ‘we mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent men and women arranged in a way that shall give pleasure to the reader.’ A third account is ‘the best that has been thought in the world’ … [So] literature consists of all the books – and they are not so many – where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.”68 Winchester understands literature, in short, as the most eloquent presentation of the best ideas. But this is to define literature in terms of superior subject-matter, where the superior subject-matter is the best ideas. In further discussion, Winchester shifts his account somewhat and adds an important qualification: It might be a useful provisional definition of literature to say that it consists of those books that have permanent value … What gives a book permanent value? It must, clearly, contain something that will always be of value or interest to men; but that is not enough. A table of logarithms, a report of the State Board of Charities, the volumes that fill the shelves of a lawyer – we do not call these books literature. Yet they contain matter of permanent value … But some book made up of petty trifles of verse about garlands, and girls, and locks of hair we admit

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instantly into the category of literature … Now, why is this? … We have said that literature might be said to consist – not of those books that contain truths of permanent interest; but of books that are themselves of permanent interest. That test these graver books can hardly meet. The facts and truths they contain are, indeed, of permanent value, but the books are not. Because the facts and truths can be restated in other forms, applied in manifold ways, and so become part of the common stock of men’s knowledge, while the books themselves in which the truths were first stated shall perish utterly. The truths live; the books die. Nobody now needs to go to the original treatise of Newton to learn the essential truths of the theory of gravitation; they are incorporated into all physical knowledge and taken for granted in all physical discussion. Now, no book is literature in the proper sense of the word, if it is liable to be superseded next year or next century by another book saying the same things and ­saying them better. The book itself must have permanence and not be the temporary receptacle for the transmission of truth.69 Winchester’s “great books” account captures an important point. Universal truths by themselves are not literature. Knowledge on its own, without accomplished style, without eloquence, without literary form, is not literature. Literature is not mere information. It is not a “temporary receptacle for the transmission of truth.” On this point, the “heresy of the paraphrase” has it right. A paraphrase of a novel may be a worthwhile pedagogical exercise, but one cannot replace the novel with the paraphrase and end up with something equivalent. In literature, a particular way of using words moves us to appreciation. It is not just what is said but the way of saying it that is memorable. Viewed from the perspective of material cause, literature is textuality that features the momentous, superb, memorable use of subject-matter and language. It is not words per se, but words and their meanings – that is, the ideas they represent – that must be of the highest quality. We might define literature, then, in line with Winchester’s preoccupations, as “the best ideas most eloquently expressed.” Except that this might make it sound as if there are two criteria of excellence when there is only one. It is not as if “eloquence” and “the best ideas” can be disentangled in literature, at least not from an Aristotelian perspective. The Sophists identified eloquence with mere persuasion (at least that is how Plato portrays them). This amoral notion of rhetoric is at

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odds with the wisdom tradition in philosophy. On the wisdom epistemology proposed here, there is objective truth (and objective transcendence). Eloquence has to be measured against that firm background. Literature works on the level of particular word choices, not merely on the level of general ideas. This is why material analysis makes so much sense in literature. A bureaucratic report to the State Board of Charities is not literature, in large part, because the writing is nothing special. In literature, it is the superior particularity of verbal expression – word choice, sentence choice, paragraph choice – that that makes the text memorable. There is a role in literature for high effect: even for the flamboyant, ornate, or gaudy. But there is a place for simple, condensed expression. The Koine Greek of the New Testament cannot match the sophistication of Plato’s philosophical Greek, but it does not follow (as Augustine originally believed) that New Testament language-use is deficient. Are the Ten Commandments literature? They are general statements; they are not fiction; one might say they possess little “literariness.” Although this is ultimately a matter for critics to figure out, I would think that the Decalogue could be considered literature because it gives remarkable, influential expression to wise morality. In the case of literature, the particular way the subject matter is communicated must be memorable. One could argue that this is what happens with the Decalogue.

V. 9 In t r in s ic a n d E x tri nsi c Causali ty? But we cannot fully capture everything there is to say about literature solely in terms of material and formal cause. We can also define literature in terms of efficient and final cause. What is literature? Quite simply, it is verbal expression characterized by the best material cause, the best formal cause, the best efficient cause, and the best final cause. What, then, of definitions of literature elaborated in terms of efficient and final cause? Although some contemporary critics complain that any focus on efficient or final causality pushes the study of literature away from the text into extraneous factors, I will argue that we need to include some understanding of efficient and final causality in any complete account of literature. The efficient cause of literature relates to the creative activity that produces the work; the final cause of literature is in the intended effect (say, a specific emotional response). I will propose, then, a skill criterion for making literature (efficient cause) and an intrinsically valuable

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delight criterion for appreciating literature (final cause).70 Literature can be defined, following this template, as textuality that puts on display superior skill or as textuality that is, in a superior sense, delightful. I will further argue that what I have called skill is traditionally called (with good reason) “inspiration” or “genius” and that, in the case of literature, delight is sharpened to a transcendental point where human experience meets the ineffable. As it turns out, both efficient and final causality are often interpreted in religious or quasireligious terms: inspiration is, at its roots, a religious concept connected to the idea of higher divinities, whereas delight pushed to an extreme is akin to mystical experience. Once again, it goes without saying that in the case of literature, all four causes overlap. One cannot be a skillful writer unless one succeeds at things like word choice and sentence construction (material cause), unless one masters the formal requirements of the genre one is working within (formal cause), unless one makes a display of wit or intelligence (efficient cause) and unless one produces something that elicits a peak emotional response (final cause). Ideally, literature should be characterized by all four kinds of excellence. Modernist literary critics have, however, ruled out any serious investigation into questions of authorship or audience response. We need, then, to respond to the lingering prejudice against efficient and final causality before moving on to define literature in these terms. Monroe Beardsley and William Wimsatt have famously argued for what I will call a “intentional-affective fallacy” view. The intentional fallacy is associated with efficient cause; the affective fallacy, with final cause. On their highly influential account, it is an egregious mistake to examine either authorial intention (the intentional fallacy) or audience response (the affective fallacy). As they explain their twofallacy theory: The intentional fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins … It begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism. The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does) … It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem [in the audience] and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome of either Fallacy … is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.71

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These modernist critics identify the poem uniquely with material cause. They are concerned that any focus on efficient or final cause will shift attention away from the poem understood exclusively as language. But is a poem only material cause? This is already, as the Chicago School argued, an impoverished view of literature. There are many problems with this account. To begin with, B and W (Beardsley and Wimsatt) view efficient and final cause exclusively in terms of psychology. Literature begins, they think, in the psychology of the author and ends in the psychology of the audience. To investigate these matters is to play psychologist instead of literary critic. It would be better to say that literature begins in the intelligence and ends in the intelligence. Literature addresses the entire person: intellectually, cognitively, emotionally, and spiritually. Which means, among other considerations, that literature also has significant epistemological component: it is not just about psychology. Literature cannot be fully understood in terms of this psychological caricature. But there is an even bigger problem here. B and W do not think of such things in such philosophical terms, but (as Derrida might insist) one cannot overlook the influence of Western metaphysics. In situating any consideration of authorship or audience response outside the text, B and W rely, unwittingly, on a misleading distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic causality that we can trace back to the scholastics. Jakob Fink explains: “One of the important medieval distinctions applied to the four causes is between intrinsic and extrinsic: [in Aquinas’s words,] matter and form are called ‘intrinsic’ to the thing, because they are parts constituting the thing; the efficient and final causes, on the other hand, are called ‘extrinsic’ because they are outside the thing.”72 Imagine a house. The matter and form (shape) of a house constitute the house; thus they are, on this account, internal causes. The people who built the house (efficient cause) and the purpose for which it was built (final cause) are not part of the house, so they are external causes. If, then, we apply the same analysis to a poem, the matter and form of the poem will be internal causes, whereas the role of the author (efficient cause) and the audience response (final cause) will be external causes. Which is precisely how B and W think about poetry (although they do tend to ignore formal cause altogether). This scholastic view is deeply problematic. It is certainly not Aristotelian. In De Anima, Aristotle explains that in the case of living organisms, formal, efficient, and final causes are the same. The soul

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serves all three functions. As he puts it, “The soul is the cause of its body alike in all three senses which we explicitly recognize. It is (a) the source or origin of movement [the efficient cause], it is (b) the end [the final cause], it is (c) the essence of the whole living body [the formal cause].”73 But the living body is the material cause, so it turns out that in this particular case, all four causes are rolled up into one and placed inside and are somehow constitutive of the living body. So we cannot neatly divide the four causes into separate intrinsic and extrinsic categories. There are issues of exegesis I do not have time to pursue here. Note, however, that Aristotle has good reasons for taking this position. Aristotle’s word for the actuality of a living organism – entelechy (ἐντελέχεια) – inserts the idea of final cause inside the living being and makes it the efficient “engine” of the organism. In the life cycle of the butterfly, which Aristotle chronicles, something is located inside the larva that turns it into a butterfly.74 This inner impulse – the efficient cause – is already there, intrinsic to the thing. But couldn’t we say something similar about literature? Isn’t there something (so to speak) lodged inside a work of literature that makes it do the work it is supposed to do? Sijo, a three-line traditional form of Korean poetry, is an extended form of haiku, involving a twist or turn in the last line. (Scholars of haiku also refer to the pivot or swing line that introduces a surprising comparison or juxtaposition at the end of a haiku.) Suppose, then, we read one of these poems and are properly surprised by the poetic twist at the end. What is going on here? The poet has inserted a device into the poem to make us react in a certain way. Think of a poem as a car driving down the street. People sitting inside a car move because the automobile assembly-plant put an engine under the hood. Likewise, readers of sijo are properly surprised because the poet inserted a twist into the poem in the last line. There is something inside the poem – an efficient cause internal to the poem – that makes readers respond to it in the way they typically do. Now suppose someone were to say (as proponents of the intentional fallacy seem to do): “The design or intention of the automobile factory is not available” to car riders. Wouldn’t that be a very odd claim? We know what the automobile factory intended: they intended to make us move; that is why they inserted an engine under the hood. And we can say the same thing about the sijo poet. Of course, we know what

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the poet intended: he or she intended to surprise us, which is why they inserted a poetic twist in the last line. B and W claim that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.”75 What a very odd way of thinking about things! Authors do sometimes slip secret messages into poems, but that is not what authorial intention, in the main, is about. The sijo poet set out to write a sijo poem; that is, grosso modo, what authorial intention is about. Once we realize this, we are able to determine how successfully (or unsuccessfully) the poet completed the task at hand. A car accelerates when you push the gas pedal because the factory intended that to happen. Likewise, a suspense novel “speeds up” the mental concentration of the reader because the author intended that to happen. In each case, there is a formal device placed inside the artifact – a sort of entelechia – that makes it operate the way it does. One cannot neatly separate what something is from what those who designed it intended. In studying how an artifact was made (efficient cause) and the purpose it was designed to accomplish (final cause), we come to understand its nature. Literature is like an arrow aimed at a target. To describe this flying arrow without paying any attention to where it started (with the author) or where it ends (with an audience) would be to act as if it were a stationary arrow. (As Zeno gently points out, adding up motionless arrows at different locations does not produce a moving arrow.) B and W want to hold the arrow in their hands so they can analyze material cause. But the movement of the arrow matters. This is an important aspect of what an arrow is. Only an ideological materialism could restrict the study of literature to material cause. Just as tracing out the trajectory of a flying arrow helps us understand what an arrow is, paying attention to the efficient and final causes of literature helps us understand what a text is. Literature imitates life. A poem is not like something dead, static, frozen in time. The author implants an efficient and final cause into the text to be actualized by the reader. Reading produces a dynamic experience that unfolds according to its own mechanism, picking up momentum toward a desired end. In this sense, then, efficient and final cause can be thought of as intrinsic aspects of literature. They help make the poem what it is. The beginning and end of a text is already contained inside it for those who know how to read.

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To consider a text, the way some modernists do, as a material object detached from everything else is an aberration. The fundamental facts of author intention and audience response are an inescapable aspect of literature. Contrary to what B and W suggest, a proper investigation into these issues does not make the work disappear. It brings to light what is already there. Let us turn our attention, then, to definitions in terms of efficient cause.

V . 1 0 T h e In t e n t ional Fallacy Any attempt to define literature in terms of efficient cause will encounter one major obstacle: the lingering influence of the so-called intentional fallacy. We need to spend more time, then, responding to what some take as the first principle of sophisticated literary criticism.76 As I intend to show, it makes no sense to claim that we can have access to a text someone wrote but no access to what that author intended. Suppose, for example, someone hands you a cheque for one thousand dollars. What a nice surprise! The cheque includes your name, their signature, the proper date. Everything is in order. You go to the bank and withdraw the one thousand dollars. Wouldn’t it be strange if someone were to suddenly claim: “Don’t be naive; you can’t know what the author of the cheque’s intention was.” Surely, you – the happy recipient – would respond: “What do you mean ‘I don’t know what his intention was’? His intention was to give me one thousand dollars. It’s as clear as day. Who knows why he decided to be so generous, but thank you very much; I will keep the money.” Literature is like that cheque. Poets cannot put specific words into a poem and then claim they didn’t intend to do it. Of course they did. The poet freely and deliberately decided to write a poem in this way. To claim that we have no way of knowing what he or she intended is absurd. We know what the poet’s intentions were: to write a rondeau on the subject of unrequited love. One cannot write down sad words and not intend a sad response; write down frightening words and not intend a frightened response. One may wonder about the motivations of the author, but the text is the authorial intention reified for all to see. Literature arises out of some human purpose. It is like telling a joke. The comedian does not tell the listener: laugh! The comedian communicates something funny to the listener, who then laughs. Still, in laughing, the listener grasps what the comedian’s intention and responds appropriately.

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Suppose two people are playing chess. And suppose that after the game is over, the loser tells the other player, “Well, my moves weren’t intentional. You don’t know what was going on inside my head.” The winner would, surely, respond, “What matters is the strategy you decided on. That is what you intended to do.” What could it mean to say that the intentions of that losing chess player are inaccessible? Of course, we know what he intended. The moves he made are what he intended; each move required a deliberate choice and, as such, his losing strategy was saturated with personal intention. When poets write words on a piece of paper, it does no good to say, “We are going to study the material cause (the words) and not the author’s intentions.” The words are the author’s intentions, just as the chess player’s moves are his intentions. How can one separate the two? Or suppose someone were to venture, “We’ll study the form and not the author’s intentions.” The poet chose to write a rondeau. The details of the rondeau form are the author’s intentions. Intentions cannot be separated from poetic structure. To say that we have no access to the author’s intentions is incoherent. As if one were to say to the chess player, “I see all the moves you made but I have no record of your choices!” Of course, the anti-intentionalist critic will respond, “Oh, but that is not what we mean by the author’s intentions. We mean the secret desires hidden in the chess player’s darkest soul that made him move his rook to ‘E3.’” But this is a red herring. One would be justified in responding, “That’s not the issue. Whatever secrets you are after, there is overt intentionality put on display in his every move. We can speculate about why he made those moves, but his intentions are constituted by the moves themselves. Whatever motivations lie hidden in the deepest recesses of a chess-player’s soul, these are the moves he chose.” Contrary to what W and B suggest, the intentional fallacy is at best an enormous exaggeration. One does not have to master telepathy in order to access the poet’s intentions. Through careful reading of the word choices on the page, the intentions of the poet reveal themselves. Charitably construed, W and B were worried about misguided attempts to interpret texts biographically by delving into the unknowable personal circumstances surrounding authorship. They were reacting, they alleged, against interpretations of literary texts that amounted to little more than a search for biographical (or hagi­ ographical) details. But they went to the opposite extreme. Literature cannot be reduced to mere biography, but neither can it be reduced to

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material cause understood, mostly, in terms of definitions of words. One extreme does not justify the other. The diary of Anne Frank cannot be separated from the harrowing circumstances of the author’s tragic life. There are aspects of authorial intention that may remain irrecuperable. But the more general point seems undeniable: literature is permeated with perfectly accessible intention. We cannot read a text without wrestling with the choices the author made. One must be wary of deflecting attention in ancillary directions, but to think that interest in intention is misplaced is an oversimplification. Obviously, we cannot see inside an author’s soul: “Man sees the outward appearance, only God penetrates to the heart.”77 We have to infer the intentions of other people, which may be difficult – sometimes impossible – but no one believes it can never be done. If that was the case, how could the criminal justice system, where the standard of proof (moral certitude) is very high, establish mens rea – “guilty intention” – in order to gain a criminal conviction. To claim that an author’s (or a community’s) intentions are never discernable in literature is to posit an impossibly high evidential standard for belief. The degree to which we can understand motivations depends, of course, on the circumstances, but it is too much to stipulate that this is never possible. Discussion surrounding the intentional fallacy seems to confuse the particular and the universal. Literature escapes the limits of particular circumstances and, as Aristotle maintains, makes a universal statement. Imagine a great athlete, say a gold medal hockey player on the ice, playing great hockey. Can we appreciate that display of athletic skill without peering into the secret thoughts of that athlete? It seems we can. The player decides to pass the puck or body check or score a goal. In his award-winning play, we see “intention” expressed, embodied, reified in observable action. Literature is like this. Performance is not psychology. Suppose the hockey player tells us that he was inspired by his French Canadian grandfather, who taught him how to play. That might be heart-warming and help us appreciate something about the way he plays. But it is the performance we value; player’s “psychology” is only a secondary consideration. Psychological considerations should not distract us from what is going on: an extraordinary performance by a wonderful athlete who puts on display an impossibly high level of skill for our enjoyment. Mostly, great novelists are like the hockey player. Authors work intuitively. They are not spending their time sorting out what is going on inside their heads when they are writing great novels. The hockey

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player is busy playing great hockey; in just the same way, the novelist is busy writing a great novel. That is what matters. Aristotelian literary criticism was never motivated by a naive psychologism. Authors make choices without telling us why they make them. Still, the more skillful an author is, the better they are at communicating their literary intentions. Imagine telling an art student to draw a lion. The more proficient the student, the more recognizable the lion. A really proficient student can draw an angry lion, a submissive lion, an old lion, a dead lion in tall grass. That takes skill. Likewise in literature. A skilled author can make an audience feel sad, fearful, happy, confused, nervous, tranquil. And this is what literary intention is mostly about: achieving an aesthetic goal, as I explain below.

V . 1 1 A g a in s t t he Author: S ta n l e y F is h a nd Others The neophyte might think that the intentional fallacy is like a little blip on the radar screen of contemporary criticism. But this trope has had a very long reach, spawning all sorts of anti-authorial ideology, including Barthes’s well-publicized announcement about the “death of the author.” Consider, briefly, what the young Terry Eagleton and noted critic Stanley Fish have to say about the matter. We need to clear the way here for a proper consideration of efficient cause. In an early paper, the younger Marxist Eagleton overenthusiastically chronicles “The Revolt of the Reader Liberation Movement.” As he breathlessly reports: The growth of the Readers Liberation Movement (rl m ) over the past few decades has struck a decisive blow for oppressed readers everywhere, brutally proletarianized as they have been by the authorial class. Readers are less and less seen as mere ­nonwriters, the subhuman “other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of ­secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader. Reading … has taken to the streets and begun to affirm its power. What has been unleashed is nothing less than the central contradiction of the dominant textual ­economy – the fact that the reader must be ascribed certain ­quasiautonomous capacities at the very moment that he or she

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is rigorously subdued to a mere function of the text. So rapid indeed has been the r l m’s development that a genuinely ­revolutionary slogan, beyond mere textual reformism or readinggroup consciousness, is now beginning to emerge: “The authors need us; we don’t need the authors!”78 The missionary zeal of a younger Eagleton is well-intentioned, but this remains a very odd way of “interpreting” the relationship between author and reader. Why not depict the relationship of author to reader on the model of a relationship between mentor and student, friend and friend, confidant and confidant, lover and beloved, or even (strange as it may seem) business partner to business partner? Eagleton’s Marxist analysis offers a potent rhetorical flourish, but it begs the question. When faced with manuscripts that flagrantly “abuse” readers – as in the case of propaganda, partisan editorials, or jargon-riddled journal articles – we leave behind the domain of literature. Eagleton opposes any essentialist account that views literature as a form of benevolent communication that transfers something – a message, a feeling, an idea, an aesthetic experience – from author to reader. Suppose, then, without taking any of this too seriously, we represent what is happening in literature as a mathematical equation: what the author puts into the literary work ≈ [is approximately equal to] what the reader gets out of the literary work.79 Assume the arrow of causality runs one way; the author causes the reader to have a certain kind of experience by inserting something into the text, which the reader then retrieves. There will be inevitable complications, of course, but Eagleton wants to get rid of the model altogether. Liberated readers do not have to comply with authorial intention; they are to read their own meanings into a text. What the author puts into the literary work ≉ what the reader gets out of the literary work. Are we left with literature? This seems to replace literature with miscommunication. Eagleton’s passing enthusiasm for such things reflects the zeitgeist that provided a platform for Fish to work these ideas into some sort of logically defensible system. Fish is opposed to so-called essentialism. He says so. On his “reader response” account, literary texts do not possess any essentialist set of traits that distinguishes them from nonliterature. Literature happens when we read a meaning into a text; our own added interpretation is what turns a text into literature. How we approach the work is what matters.

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Fish’s views are extreme. He writes, “Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is there, but … it is [instead] a matter of knowing how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.”80 According to Fish, it is not the poet but the readers who create the poem. Literary works “are made and not found … they are made by the interpretative strategies we set in motion.”81 He continues: “Acts of [poetic] recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.”82 Fish uncritically accepts many of the anti-realist philosophical tropes I have already responded to in the first chapters of this book. He situates literature, not in a sequence of texts that satisfy objective criteria of merit, but in the community interpretations shared by academic experts on literature.83 In effect, Fish expels the author from the literary equation. Like Barthes, he evidently believes that the author has died (like Nietzsche’s dead god). He assumes, no doubt, that he has good metaphysical reasons for believing this. What then is one to do? Fish (along with his colleagues) turns the equation around and invites readers to insert meaning into the text. We need to reformulate our earlier equation to get: “What readers get out of a text ≈ what they themselves have put into that text.” The author has disappeared; there are only readers deciding what the text means. Literature is like a mirror; we readers look at it and find ourselves staring back at ourselves. One might think that reading our own meanings into texts turns literature into something entirely subjective. But in Fish’s system, it is not the individual reader but a whole community of readers – prominently, literary critics, professors, and theorists – who give us the tools we need to turn something into literature. They devise “a publicly available system of intelligibility” that “furnish[es] us with categories of understanding” we can then use to invest texts with literary meaning.84 Fish insists: “This does not … commit me to subjectivity because … the ‘you’ that does the interpretative work … is a communal you and not an isolated individual.”85 In terms of our earlier equation: “What the individual reader gets out of a text ≈ the meaning the reader’s interpretative community puts into the text.”

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An individual reader who strays from community standards has, on this account, made a mistake. It is hard to make epistemological sense of Fish’s theory. As James Pelan explains, Fish eliminates subjectivity “by maintaining that readers always must acquire their assumptions from communities to which they belong.”86 But communities, as well as individuals, are fallible, fickle, partisan, even ideological. Presumably, they sometimes come up with bad readings and bad meanings. There seems to be no room for such shared mistakes in Fish’s theory. Why should the community (whoever they are) decide what is the legitimate meaning of a text? Why shouldn’t an insightful – if unconventional – reader determine the meaning of a text? As Mill insists in On Liberty, eccentric individuals who do not play by conventional rules sometimes get things very right when the surrounding society gets things very wrong. Fish argues that the evaluative standards of a community determine “normal” language-use and terminology. Suppose we have rival interpretations of a word, a phrase, or a passage. How can we decide between them? Fish assures us, There is a distinction to be made between the two [different usages] that allows us to say that, in a limited sense, one is more normal than the other … To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, because that category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal forever; some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings they enable seem “naturally” available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances.87 Fish rejects any “transcendental” sense of what is “normal,” “natural,” “truthful,” “correct,” or “right.” What is “normal” is what society believes and accepts. There is no objective, eternal standard for what is normal, natural, truthful, correct, or right because social conventions change over time. Still, with what the community believes functioning as an ultimate epistemological authority, Fish can point to something outside of subjective individual opinion that offers grounds for interpretation.

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Fish uses the term “institutional” to warn us away from transcendental truths of any kind. We must content ourselves with a sociological inquiry into conventional meanings. This is, however, to propose “objective” standards that are not, on closer inspection, objective standards. We are, bluntly put, to acquiesce to the prejudices of our own community. We are to replace individual solipsism – because I believe, it must be so – with a collective solipsism – because the majority believes, it must be so. How does this tyranny of the majority help us escape the underlying epistemological quagmire? If the beliefs of the interpretive community are not based on evidence – good, hard, objective evidence – why should we pay them any respect? The beliefs of the community only deserve loyalty to the degree that they correspond to something larger than the fact that they are the beliefs of the community. Fish is yet another theorist who has successfully managed to squeeze knowledge out of the literary equation. On an Aristotelian account, we can gather evidence for our interpretive opinions (in a qualified way). We can correct mistakes by appealing to logic, science, history, morality, religion, tradition, universal human experience, even ­intuition. Fish replaces such epistemological resources with group-­ solipsism: the reigning intellectual orthodoxy is best because it is the reigning intellectual orthodoxy. Fish is certain that nothing lasts forever (except perhaps the truth of that absolutist claim), whereas literature teaches us that some things do endure. This is how we are able to read literature from distant eras and places, written in other languages, involving strange religious beliefs and political principles, about individuals who live and die for causes we no longer identify with, and come away with understanding, empathy, and even a fierce identification with villains and heroes, as if we had been there with them and lived among them. The unexamined notion that truth changes drastically, with each new historical epoch, is an enormous simplification. Aristotle endures. And literature deals with basic human realities that stay the same: people still eat, drink, fall sick, fight battles, betray their friends, fall in love, have children, lust after political power, tell lies, feel guilty, sacrifice themselves for greater causes, pray to the gods, hope for life-after-death, and face moral dilemmas. In spite of appearances, not that much has changed. Fish is, technically, a Sophist; I mean this in an exacting, philosophical sense. Plato’s Athenian summarizes the Sophist position: “They

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actually declare that … there is no such thing as a real and natural right, that mankind are eternally disputing about rights and altering them, and that every change thus made, is from that moment valid, though it owes its being to convention and legislation, not to anything you could call nature.”88 This is Fish’s position in a nutshell. But unless there is some epistemological underpinning to Fish’s theory, why should we accept it as anything more than another instance of social conformity? Fish’s relativistic account of knowledge and literature is just the sort of misology Socrates railed against, expressed in modern idiom. In Fish’s epistemology, we project meaning onto things as if there were no meaning already there. But the Renaissance poet who writes a love poem would be chagrined to find that his poem is now interpreted by a scholarly community as sarcasm, satire, comedy, or farce. It doesn’t matter if everyone in a particular community believes this: the fact that mistaken people agree with one another about something does not make it true. And it does not follow that the poem means what we all agree it means. If someone tells a good joke, the proper response is to laugh. You might not laugh because you misunderstand, because you don’t have a sense of humour, because you have a toothache. If, however, it is an excellent joke and there are no problematic circumstances, you will laugh. This is what literature is like. The person who tells the joke intends the joke; they are trying to make you laugh. This is authorial intention. If you weep as the comedian tells his jokes, something has gone amiss. It does not matter if the whole audience is weeping with you. There is a failure here. It may be the comedian’s or the audience’s fault, but that would not change the fact that something has gone wrong. Fish, much like B and W, has an excessively narrow account of authorial intention. In reading literature we are trying to respond to the text in an appropriate way – in the way the author intended. Fish gets rid of authors and replaces them with the attitudes of the scholarly community. As if it is the audience, not the comedian, that makes the joke. It would follow, on this account, that there are no great comedians, only great audiences. Communication requires the transmission of content. Content is more than material cause. Someone who writes a horror story wants to communicate a horror story. If we accept that readers sometimes misunderstand texts – an infallible reader is an impossible construct – then we have to suppose that there is a difference between legitimate

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and illegitimate readings. The competent reader will know that they are reading a horror story and will feel the appropriate emotions. When literature is successful, there is a cause-and-effect relationship between what an author puts into the literary work and what the reader takes out of that work. There is the transmission of something according to the tried-and-true formula: what the author puts into the literary work ≈ what the reader gets out of the literary work. The text itself offers the definitive standard of interpretation. To eliminate this as the basis for conscientious reading is to give up on literature. Those who assume that authorial intention is inaccessible sometimes seem to posit an exclusive disjunction: (a) we must achieve a perfect understanding of the author’s original intentions, or (b) we cannot achieve any understanding of the author’s original intentions: A or B but not both. This is the old Enlightenment manoeuvre of demanding more epistemological warrant than is ever possible. We need to aim, more reasonably, at middle knowledge, as Pascal says, at a place between everything and nothing, where evidence-based knowledge of a middle sort is possible. Knowing something but not everything is not the same as knowing nothing at all. This ability to know – not perfectly but adequately – is what makes literary criticism a proper science based on intelligent observation and reasonable inference. Knowers in other fields share the same status. In his writing, Fish makes much of the fact that he was able to trick his graduate students into thinking that non-poetic works were poetry. (Was he influenced by the AI literature?) But what does this prove? Consider the following Greek poem: warm oneself at the fire lest the city be burnt by fire This is easily interpreted. Soldiers sitting around a “campfire” sharing stories with one another inculcates, perhaps, a sense of solidarity and fraternal bonding that makes one an effective defensive force against enemy soldiers who would burn the city to the ground. Except that this is not a poem but the English definition of the Greek verb “ΘΕΡΩ ” (θερέω, to heat) in the standard Liddell and Scott. It seems, then, that we can turn something that is not poetry into something that looks like poetry. Which only means that we must be careful before jumping

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to hasty conclusions. But unless we identify literature with the opinions of present-day readers (as Fish does), there is no epistemological problem here. Appearances can be deceiving. People, even educated people, make mistakes. That is all.

V . 1 2 E f f ic ie n t C ausali ty: S k il l , D e l ig h t, In s p irati on, Geni us As I have already argued, literature is a success word. Successful accomplishment is what matters. This requires, in the case of literature, superior skill. We could define literature, then, as verbal expression (genus) that demonstrates superior skill (differentia). Except that even this seems to understate the case. Traditionally, literature was thought to originate in inspiration or genius. Consider, then, these two efficient causes of literary creativity. When Socrates discusses literature in the Ion, he argues that poets (and rhapsodes) operate through a θεία μοίρα (theia moira), a divine gift (or appointment) that endows them with a supernatural potency. He posits divine inspiration as the efficient cause of poetry. It takes the power of the muses, it seems, to lift our mental powers to such a pitch that they produce the best poetry. Poets must be stirred by something beyond the human ken. According to Socrates, they do not operate using knowledge, technique, or any practice or craft that can be learned. This is not an issue Aristotle spends much time on. Suffice it to say that Aristotle situates the highest form of intelligence in a mental power that he describes, literally, as the “poetic intellect” (νους ποιητικός, nous poiētikos), where the term “poetic” refers a capacity to make (from ποιέω, poieō, “I make, do, create”).89 Aristotle asserts that this poetic mind – which makes thoughts by drawing them (so to speak) on the empty slate (the tabula rasa) of the passive mind – is divine. It is “immortal and everlasting.”90 But this, at the very least, locates intelligent operations in a supernatural source, for Aristotle is thinking, here, of some mental capacity of preternatural skill and accomplishment (as I have discussed elsewhere).91 It is not so far a step to move on from this general account of human thought to literary accounts of inspiration. But I do not have time here to investigate Aristotle’s scattered comments or to chronicle the history of the idea of inspiration. Simply note that the concept has unavoidable religious roots. From a pagan

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belief in oracles to the pronouncements of the Old Testament prophets, religious traditions make an appeal to various types of divine inspiration. The divine reaches down and lifts up human powers to a new level of truth and eloquence, as in the New Testament account that views scripture as γραφὴ θεόπνευστος (graphē theopneustos) or, literally, “God-breathed” writing.92 Although I will not pursue these comparisons here, it should be obvious that mainstream Western tradition has multiple resources for dealing with these issues. Turn, for the moment, to briefly consider the overlapping concept of genius. Here again, many thinkers from different epochs share different ideas about genius. Darrin McMahon observes, “For genius, from its earliest origins, was a religious notion, and as such was bound up not only with the superhuman and transcendent, but also with the capacity for violence, destruction, and evil that all religions must confront.”93 This religious notion of genius as a dangerous commodity – as skill so superlative it can destroy as well as create – corresponds to more secular humanist accounts of genius from the eighteenth century onwards. (One is reminded of the Faustian bargain as a template for genius: selling one’s soul to the devil in exchange for all knowledge.) But, again, I cannot review the history of the concept here. What is important in this context is the way the concept encapsulates an irreducibly mysterious and transcendental level of skill. Any serious acceptance of the possibility of genius as the source of literature ends in mysterianism; as with bouts of inspiration, we are left with a creative leap so superbly eloquent that it seems impossible to explain. Genius is more than a lucky guess, more than trial-anderror, more than a felicitous fit of irrationality. The genius arrives at the right, correct, astute conclusion through some unaccountable burst of pure intelligent creativity. There is a quantum leap to an original result that cannot be explained merely in terms of what went before. As Kant insists, there is no mechanism, no formula, no teachable method that explains how artists and thinkers manage such original intellectual feats. The genius may break the established rules to arrive at something far more efficacious than could have been thought possible. On the older view, literature depends on a leap – through inspiration or genius – to superbly eloquent expression. Inspiration and genius are, to borrow a term from inductive logic, “ampliative.” The author manipulates particular subject-matter through poetic form to produce a larger effect. If literature (unlike history) is about the universal,

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literature opens up some particular case or event or character to some larger insight and emotional effect. The particular becomes an archetype or exemplar for something universal. Taking concepts like “inspiration” and “genius” seriously jars with a scientific reductionism that demands an explanation of everything. Inspiration has an obvious religious connection, and even genius is supposed to be divine, even devilishly divine. (Paganini, to cite another example, was rumoured to have made a pact with the devil in return for his musical genius.) One may tone down traditional concepts in line with the needs of modern secularism. We could, perhaps, interpret “inspiration” as emotional intensity and “genius” as a highly competent level of intelligence. But this seems lame. Ordinariness, even the best ordinariness, should produce ordinary texts, not literature. Traditional commentators relied on concepts like inspiration and genius because they believed that no one could arrive at superlative texts without superlative efficient cause. Of course, if we replace the Western canon with an egalitarianism of texts that refuses to accept qualitative differences in talent and intelligence, we will not need inspiration or genius to explain anything. But what would that leave us in the way of literature? However one defines these terms, they bear witness to the seemingly obvious fact that there must be something of extraordinary talent that produces texts of extraordinary merit. A belief in the power of potent individuality is a mainstay of the Western liberal tradition. Notions of inspiration or genius fit in well with an emphasis on individual eccentricity particularly when it is seen as the best source of great originality. Still, we should not overlook the contribution of historical and social context to intellectual achievement. Schopenhauer, who maintains that the proportion of geniuses in humanity “is scarcely one in a hundred millions,” reports: “By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny.”94 Acknowledged geniuses like Michelangelo, Mozart, and Shakespeare were obviously monumentally capable people. Still, they developed their creative talents within fortuitous (though not necessarily pleasant) historical circumstances. To sum up. We can define literature as verbal expression (genus) produced by superlative efficient cause (differentia). But there are two (overlapping) ways we can describe the differentia. We can define

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literature as textuality (genus) produced by inspiration (differentia) or as textuality (genus) produced by genus (differentia). Historical commentators felt the need to come up with extraordinary explanations for extraordinary effects. To be inspired is to reach a pitch of creativity that can only be explained through an appeal to something transcendental; to be a genius is to have a source of intelligent energy inside oneself that can only be explained through an appeal to something transcendental. If, then, literature is verbal expression with a transcendental edge, it makes sense to identify the efficient cause of literature with a transcendental reality that visits the author (inspiration) or inhabits his or her mind (genius). I leave the attempt to come up with a scientific explanation for this to others. But let us must move on to formulate a definition of literature in terms of final cause.

V . 1 3 F in a l Cause: T h e Telos o f L it erary Genre Final cause is, for Aristotle, the most important cause. It is not, as the stereotype has it, that Aristotle thinks that all natural phenomena have a final cause.95 Where final cause takes pride of place is in biology. Final cause is “that for the sake of which” something exists.96 Bodily organs are good examples of this: livers are designed for filtering blood, intestines are designed for digestion, eyes are designed for seeing. But Aristotle also points to examples like an anthill, a spider’s web, and a swallow’s nest as things with a final cause.97 In these cases, we have an artificial construction that was put together to achieve a purpose. The anthill provides shelter; the spider’s web, food; a swallow’s nest, a nursery. We cannot explain what is going on in each case without reference to that purpose. I will argue, however, that literature is something made by Homo sapiens for some reason or other; we cannot fully understand what it is without understanding the purpose it is designed to accomplish. In discussing the role of final cause, Aristotle points to human artifacts like a house, a saw, and a wall.98 In every instance, the nature is determined by the purpose or goal to be achieved. As already explained, in the case of the saw, the material cause (iron or steel), the formal cause (sharp teeth), and the efficient cause (blacksmith) are required by the final cause (the need to cut wood). This is why final cause is most important – because it determines the other three causes. What, then, is the final cause of literature?

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One regularly finds literary critics describing or classifying specific literary genres in terms of their final causes. David Malkiel, for instance, quotes from period thinkers Antonio Minturno, Samuel Johnson, and Azariah dei Rossi, who comment on the moral role of funeral epitaphs. According to Minturno, epitaphs are intended to “inspire the reader to imitate” the most illustrious virtue.99 According to Johnson, “the principle intention of epitaphs is to perpetuate … examples of virtue.”100 According to dei Rossi, their “only purpose” is “to remind” the reader that “his righteous actions will be kept in mind by the God of recompense.”101 In all three cases, these historical thinkers identify moral education as the purpose of this literary genre. Here is Gilbert Highet, more recently, distinguishing between invective, lampoon, comedy, farce, and satire: “The purpose of invective and lampoon is to destroy an enemy. The purpose of comedy and farce is to cause painless undestructive laughter at human weaknesses and incongruities. The purpose of satire is, through laughter and invective, to cure folly and to punish evil; but if it does not achieve this, it is content to jeer at folly and expose evil to bitter contempt.”102 This is, again, to identify distinct literary forms in terms of final cause. Someone writing a farce, for example, sets out with a specific goal in mind: to innocently poke fun at human foibles. If, for example, authors are aiming to punish evil with cruel invective, they are writing something else, satire perhaps. Farce, then, is defined according to final cause. There is no need to be overly sophisticated about this sort of identification strategy. Margriet Ruurs, in a how-to-do children’s book about writing poetry, describes the various functions of poetry for younger readers. She writes, “Often the purpose [of] a poem will be self-­ expression. The purpose of creating tongue-twisters or silly rhymes can be to have fun with language … But mostly, we will look at poems as a way to put thoughts and feelings into a package that is fun to create and that appeals to the reader.”103 This is, in effect, a children’s definition of poetry in terms of final cause. We could even set it out more formally. Poetry is “writing” (genus) that has three purposes: self-expression, fun with language, and to amuse author and reader (differentia).

V.14 T h e G e n e r a l P u r p ose of Li terature: T r a n s c e n dence Definition of literary genres in terms of final cause is, then, a common enough strategy. In each case we get a definition that follows a basic formula. What is the literary genre? It is textuality (genus) that is

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designed to accomplish some specific purpose (differentia). This was, in effect, the strategy of the Chicago School. But what about literature more generally? We need a general definition of literature, one that applies to all literary genres. I want to go further, then, and define literature in terms of the accomplishment of one overarching purpose: pulling readers towards an experience of the transcendent. This pull towards something that cannot be fully contained in language is, I will maintain, a central feature of all literature. If literature is verbal expression that superbly accomplishes its task, one does not want a well-written car manual or a well-written chemistry textbook to count as literature. Even if these technical uses of language superbly accomplish their specific tasks, they do not qualify as literature. If literature superbly accomplishes what it sets out to do, we need to specify what this task entails. We need a substantive account of final cause that only applies to literature. I have already argued that literature must satisfy a skill and delight criterion in order to qualify as “superior verbal expression.” If the skill criterion has to do with efficient cause, what I will call “the delight criterion” has to do with final cause. But we have to be careful about the term “delight.” Delight, in this technical sense, does not have to be pleasant. Literature (like art) is about sorrow as well as joy, about tragedy as well as merriment, about the sublime and terrible as well as the beautiful and the consoling. Better to think of delight, technically, as “intrinsically valuable” experience; as experience that is worthwhile enough to be valued for its own sake. What counts as “delightful” in this broader sense involves all sorts of memorable, enriching, compelling, meaningful, insightful experiences. The purpose of literature, then, is to provide an experience that lifts the whole person to this higher level of awareness, to some conscious involvement with a state of superior emotional and cognitive worth. What is the effect of great literature? Ideally, we are struck with wonder, captivated, unable to put the book down, laughing uncontrollably, deeply troubled, swept away. We say that this book “opened my eyes”; “it was a revelation”; “I can’t stop thinking about it.” Whether we describe the desired aesthetic effect as appreciation, catharsis, amazement, reverence, edification, or insight, we are left with a sense of overwhelming value. A text fails as literature when something gets in the way and we end up with what is trivial, un­important, superficial, boring, mediocre, false, sentimental, or even arbitrary. Literature transcends the ordinary discourse we are mired in for most of our lives.

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Literature exists for the sake of provoking a certain quality of experience that takes us to the margins of human thought and emotion. It is, for authors and readers, a way to come as close to the transcendent as possible. This is why we value the reading of literature for its own sake – because it produces the utmost delight, an experience that is intrinsically valuable. This is not to limit literature to one specific type of subject-matter. It is not the specific subject-matter but the superior treatment of that subject-matter that produces an experience of the transcendent. And, in any case, the transcendent is the very biggest category; it includes all sorts of content. There is purposeful paradox at work here. Literature expresses the inexpressible. It utters the unutterable. It is uses words to communicate what words are powerless to describe. Literature brings us – obliquely, mysteriously – to the threshold of peak emotion and insight and beyond. This is, I believe, the identifying trait and the general telos of all literature. It may be that great writers do not enunciate all this in words, but they intuitively feel the irresistible pull towards to communication of something of ultimate value. The stereotypes of a rigid Aristotelian fundamentalism miss the point. On this Aristotelian account, literature is language struggling to move beyond the limits of the linguistic. It is language that reaches outside of itself. How is that possible? Through make-believe, through figures of speech, through symbolism, through plot, through wordplay. But this is not an easy thing to explain, for the transcendent is bigger than our categories. Human beings experience what is beyond all telling. They need to communicate this to other human beings, and they do this in endless ways. To identify a love poem, a satire, a comedy, or an autobiography as literature is to say that it evokes and impresses upon the reader an overpowering sense of something that makes life larger, higher, broader, and deeper than our usual descriptions could indicate. Literature makes life more meaningful and, perhaps, more sorrowful and disturbing. We value it because it pushes us outside the mundane systems of thought and feeling inside which we usually operate. This is how literature is like religion. Not because of subject-matter, but because it reveres and celebrates the transcendent. This makes literature a natural ally of religion. It operates a parallel track to the transcendent. It would be unfair to say that art and literature are richer than ordinary life – that they are everyday life on steroids, so to speak – for that would be to undervalue life. Literature does not compete with

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life; it illuminates what goes unnoticed. It magnifies and transfigures what is already momentous, subtle, harrowing, tragic, or funny. It reproduces and represents – sometimes through purposeful distortion  – the deeper significance of things. It moves beyond mere particularity to embrace and embody something universal and transcendent. We sleepwalk through existence; literature wakes us from our dogmatic slumbers. I am not suggesting that when authors sit down to write they need to think, “How can I write about transcendence?” The poet wants to write a great poem; the novelist wants to compose a great novel; the playwright wants to create a great play. They work within formal traditions that orient their efforts towards a goal that is intuitively felt and discovered. Still, an effective poem, novel, or play has to push the boundaries to some out-of-the-ordinary epiphany or it would not be superior text; it has to graze the transcendent or it would be less than literature. Despite protracted theoretical wrangling, we know, mostly, what is literature: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is literature; Don Quixote is literature; the New Testament is literature; Keats is literature; Greek mythology is literature; La Fontaine’s fables are literature; even Charlotte’s Web is literature. More marginal cases are a matter for dispute. To claim that a text is literature, one has to make the case that it has a very powerful effect on the conscientious reader, pushing them to some pinnacle or peak moment of appreciation. The old idea that the best readers – for example, good critics – read with authority is close to the truth. What matters in individual cases is not expertise in logic, but sensitive judgments based on a sort of literary wisdom that develops over time through diligent reading. Equating literature with an experience of the transcendent may remind some readers of Kant’s account of the sublime (another window on the transcendent).104 According to Kant, we experience the sublime when we confront an overwhelming magnitude or vast power that defeats our rational capacities. This produces a negative experience of fear or dread. But our rational capacities may be defeated in more positive ways. In catching a glimpse of the beautiful we may be caught up in something much bigger than ourselves, something we cannot rationally comprehend, explain, or describe. Except that this sort of peak encounter may be joyful in the highest degree. Suffice it to say that literature needs to be open to both positive and negative experiences of the ultimate.

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I have already argued that human life is shot through with the transcendent. God is the highest level of transcendental possibility, but even if this level did not exist, that would not eliminate the transcendent. The atheist Sartre comments, “It is by pursuing transcendent goals that man is able to exist; man, being this state of passing-beyond, and seizing upon things only as they bear upon this passing-beyond, is at the center of passing-beyond.”105 Human nature is, for Sartre, forever reaching towards something higher; this is essentially what it means to be human. Whatever is true theologically, literature (like religion) offers one avenue for coming to grips with this natural human propensity. Granted, there are many exaggerated, sentimentalist, new-age claims made about the transcendental. If, however, modern logicians such as Kurt Gödel and Alfred Tarski proved the inconclusiveness of any sufficiently complex arithmetical system, mainstream traditional philosophy has long since accepted that human knowledge always points to things beyond itself.106 Language is able to make claims that exceed its capacities, and – this is the important point – the failure is not due to a mistake, to imprecision, to a lack of intelligence or clarity. In the case of literature, there is a purposeful reaching beyond, which, when successful, pulls or pushes the reader to a level that, decisively and paradoxically, transcends all our answers and systems. One might think that Aristotle’s scientific philosophy leaves little room for any serious involvement with the notion of transcendence. I do not have the space to do a detailed, specialist exegesis of Aristotle here. I would argue, however, that Aristotle himself posits a meta­physical cosmos that is brimming over with transcendence. On his original account, transcendence is a logical consequence of clear thinking, not an aberration. But I must postpone any such discussion for another day.

V . 1 5 T h e Id e a l Reader We have arrived, then, at a definition of literature in terms of final cause. Literature is textuality (genus) that successfully achieves a transcendental purpose (differentia). Or, in an equivalent formulation: literature is verbal expression (genus) that successfully manages to produce the highest levels of delight in readers (differentia). But more needs to be said. Literature requires a great author, but it also needs competent readers (or listeners). The exaggerations of reader-response criticism aside, an author cannot communicate something to the reader without a

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reader who is capable of understanding what has been said. Think of a radio signal. For literature to achieve its purpose, the author has to send out the signal, but we also need a good reader like an antenna who can pick up the signal. There are better and worse antennas. Many an undergraduate has found Spenser impossible, Milton a bore, and Wordsworth a snoozefest. Their opinions are not taken as definitive. Kevin Vanhoozer argues that an “ideal reader” is “simply an effect of textual rhetoric,” “a textual construct, an implication of the text.”107 Ideal readers “do not exist” except perhaps in the imagination of authors as the audience they address in their writing. But not everyone agrees. Some critics posit, as the best interpretative stance, an ideal reader who, in Carl Kaestle’s words, “would share virtually all of the author’s knowledge and instincts.”108 Katie Wales defines this “ideal reader” as one “who would properly and completely understand the meanings and significances of a text, without the inadequacies or subjectivity of response of real readers.”109 Seen from an Aristotelian perspective, knowledge is a matter of understanding the nature of something and responding appropriately. This is not unique to literature. We see something. What’s that? A rattlesnake! We jump out of the way! Competent reading becomes an almost impossible feat if we believe that we cannot know the nature of things in the world. If, however, knowledge of natures is available, reading literature becomes another unsurprising way of penetrating into the heart of things. Just as we can react appropriately when we see the rattlesnake, we can react appropriately when we see into the essence of a work of literature. Individual readers bring different talents, tastes, skills, and experiences to reading. There is nothing invidious about this. Think of a book like a person: call her Gloria. Gloria’s son, her next-door neighbour, her business partner, her grandmother, may have different observations to make about Gloria, but this does not mean that there is no one person called Gloria on whom all these different people can have different truthful perspectives. Or compare literature to a historical episode. Many people in Europe remember many different things about the Second World War. It does not follow that there was never one event with an objective nature called the Second World War. It may be impossible to provide a complete description of that nature, but what happened happened. Literature is like this. Different people come away with different insights into Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Any

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interpretation can be further amplified, extended, developed. This is how it should be. But this does not prove that there is nothing objectively true about works of literature. The young Eagleton, responding perhaps to the Romantic glorification of the author, construed literature as a battleground between authors and readers. I have argued that literature is a more cooperative endeavour. Great authors provide readers with an opportunity for contemplation, what Aristotle calls theōria. Aided by the lens of literature, we can understand and appreciate the world directly, intuitively, without argument, in imitation of Aristotle’s God, who sees everything, understands everything, appreciates everything in a glance. Competent readers, somehow or other, participate in Aristotelian divinity, at least to some degree or from some perspective. They contemplate a spectacle of meaning unfolding, sometimes in the smallest details, that actualizes the potential for wisdom. Literature is like putting on spectacles so that we can read the world “like a book.” It is like looking through a telescope. Or a microscope. The point is to see something we are too obtuse to notice and tend to overlook. Mystics and saints manage contemplation on their own. As I have already said, they do not need literature. Literature is for the rest of us. Literature sometimes wrestles with unpleasant truths and unsettling subject-matter; it may stir up negative emotions like fear, sorrow, indignation, disappointment, suspense. Still, from an Aristotelian point of view, literature is uplifting in that very basic sense of lifting readers up to some pinnacle of wisdom that provides a perspective on the world as it ought to be understood and appreciated. We come to know the world by reading literature. We delight – even when it is bittersweet – in knowing what is true. In the last chapter, I will argue that literature has a necessary moral component. Simply put, the best literature is not in the business of harming people, of spreading falsehood, of glamourizing evil. It is about theōria: seeing the world as it really is. And that is a moral thing to do.

V . 1 6 T h e E n d o f Theory: D is t in c t io n s   Secundum Rationem I have elaborated four definitions of literature: Literature is verbal expression (genus) characterized by superior matter cause, superior formal cause, superior efficient cause, and superior final cause

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(differentia). But we must not lose sight of the fact that these four definitions all refer to the same thing. Ideally, superior matter, form, efficiency, and purpose are conjoined in a single text. When this ­happens, we call that text “literature.” This is, of course, to identify literature with a rather exalted form of aspiration. Perhaps, then, we are aiming too high. The critic might complain that the definition of literature I have formulated is evaluatively loaded, that is, that what falls under the definition is not all literature, but just a subset of literature, that is, good literature. Maybe we should say that even bad literature is still literature; perhaps there is a value to having a more neutral definition that would include as literature, for instance, works written primarily for entertainment, that do not aim at a transcendent or moral purpose. There are two possible responses to this sort of worry. First, when we call a text literature, we are not saying that it is perfect in all respects. We are saying that it satisfies, in some momentous way, these four criteria of excellence. Winters comments: “Probably no poem is perfect in the eye of God.”110 Indeed. Even great texts have their shortcomings. An analogy may help. Imagine someone judging a figure-skating performance. The skater may be better or worse in this or that respect. No skater turns in a perfect performance. But at some point, the performance is so good, so superior, it takes our breath away. That is like literature. At some point, for whatever reason, texts seem to be so good as to become momentously meaningful and superlatively valuable. This is a judgment call. All texts have weaker and stronger elements, but at some point, we judge that they have crossed the threshold. There is no general rule for deciding such things. This is a matter to be decided on an individual basis by an astute critic or clairvoyant reader. It is, we could say, a matter of literary casuistry. And there is a second issue. In the academic painting tradition, connoisseurs divided art into five categories: (according to rank) history painting, portraiture, genre painting, landscape, still life. But what about these lower forms of art? Can a still life be a masterpiece? Can a genre painting or a landscape qualify as great art? The general idea was that one could identify superior even extremely superior performances in each category. So we could perhaps deal with literature in the same way. Raymond Chandler is not Dostoevsky; yet one might insist that within the detective genre, he is a good author or even a superior author and that his

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work counts as literature in some important but less grandiose way. The present author is open to the suggestion that there may be minor masterpieces of a humbler variety: nursery rhymes, proverbs, sermons, newspaper reports, detective stories, diaries, and so on. This seems to be in line with the genre approach of the original Chicago School. The word “literature” seems to suffer from an inevitable sort of ambiguity. We might classify as literature any text that strives towards superior accomplishment when it comes to formal, final, material, or efficient cause. This might enlarge the canon unnecessarily. One does not want a literary canon so broad that it includes everything, but it can be wider than some fastidious pedants imagine it to be. Still, ­literature in the finest sense – the most valuable pieces of verbal expression – will include some meeting with transcendence. This can happen in a multitude of ways – but how and when and where this kind of meeting or awakening takes place is better left for literary critics to decide; this kind of determination is beyond the bailiwick of the working philosopher. I have suggested that we can evaluate what is and is not literature by a fourfold analysis of a composition in terms of matter, form, efficient cause, and purpose. Looking at reality from four different perspectives is a legitimate and worthwhile intellectual operation. But we should not mistake the divisions we make inside our heads with some ontological separation between different things in the world. What is separable in thought is not necessarily separable as an object. As the medieval philosophers argued, what is divided in the mind (secundum rationem) is not necessarily divided in the world (secundum rem). Hence the scholastic distinction between things that are different “according to being [secundum esse]” and things that are different “according to understanding [secundum intelligi].”111 The Aristotelian doctrine of four causes is about distinctions made in the mind, not about distinctions made in the world. To say that literature has four causes is not to say that literature is four different things but only to argue that there are four different perspectives from which we can view the very same text. All of our four definitions apply to the same one thing. We learn something when we look at literature from four distinct vantage points. But these perspectives also overlap in important ways. In a much-discussed paper, Steven Knapp and Walter Michaels rather precipitously announce the end of literary theory. They want

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to reject any mental division of the text into its different aspects as illegitimate or even impossible.112 Knapp and Michaels explain: “The theoretical impulse … always involves the attempt to separate things that should not be separated: meaning from intention, language from speech acts … knowledge from true belief … Our point has been that the separated terms are in fact inseparable.”113 If, however, we think the different aspects of literature are deeply joined (which they are), it need not follow that the mental analysis is never a useful thing to do. As long as we do not confuse our epistemology and our metaphysics, there should be no problem here. Knapp and Michaels base their argument on the idea that one ­cannot distinguish authorial intention from the meaning of texts. They explain, The clearest example of the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable is the persistent debate over the relation between authorial ­intention and the meaning of texts. Some theorists have claimed that valid interpretations can only be obtained through an appeal to authorial intentions … But once it is seen that the meaning of a text is simply identical to the author’s intended meaning, the project of grounding meaning in intention becomes incoherent … It can neither succeed nor fail; hence theoretical attitudes toward intention are irrelevant. The mistake made by theorists has been to imagine the possibility or desirability of moving from one term (the author’s intended meaning) to a second term (the text’s meaning), when actually the two terms are the same. One can neither succeed nor fail in deriving one term from the other, since to have one is already to have them both.114 Call “authorial intention” “A” and “the meaning of a text” “B.” Knapp and Michaels maintain that theoreticians mistakenly try move from A to B. But because A = B, it makes no sense to propose a strategy of moving from one to the other. So, theory is impossible. Except that their analysis is more than a little too tidy. Is it true to say that A = B? It depends, as always, on what one means. If we define “meaning” as what a reader gets out of the work and “intention” as what the author puts into the work, they are not exactly the same, even on an Aristotelian theory. A critic can usefully

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approach a text by studying what the reader is doing or by studying what the author is doing. The fact that there is one text that joins author and reader together is no reason to disqualify examinations that focus on one aspect or the other. There is nothing here to show that a division of critical tasks, judiciously applied, is impossible. Different interpretative devices may all have the same referent; they may all point to the same text. It does not follow that specialized routes of analysis are redundant, illegitimate, or misleading. If we can approach the same literary work from many different vantage points, this is a useful thing to do. Ironically enough, commentators who followed the Knapp and Michaels debate assumed that they had exposed some deep flaw in the “representational,” realist metaphysics I have argued for here. Quite the contrary: it is a misunderstanding of the mainstream realist tradition that caused the problem in the first place. Mainstream metaphysics was never committed to any literal “representationalism” (or naive realism) that uncritically mapped every mental category onto a precisely corresponding ontology. That is postmodern mythology. As I have already shown, the medievals carefully noted the difference between secundum rationem distinctions and distinctions secundum rem. This is standard in the tradition. Knapp and Michaels portray themselves as champions of practical criticism. Theory, they claim, is the hegemony of an outside group – theoreticians – who impose foreign standards on practitioners. In their words, “theory … is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without.”115 This has a familiar ideological ring to it. But the idea that the “practical” investigation of literature can operate in the absence of general theoretical standards seems incoherent. Any in-depth discussion of a particular text will rely inevitably on knowledge that comes from outside that text and even from outside literature. In this book, I have argued that literary appreciation presupposes a realist metaphysics best exemplified in the philosophical tradition that grew out of Aristotle. I have argued that literature is a transcendental preoccupation, capable of producing value that transcends one particular context and that relates to the human condition universally. Literature escapes the limits of time and place, which is why we revere it, preserve it, study it – because it reaches a level of objective insight and appreciation that demands deference from competent judges in any age.

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V . 1 7 A V e ry F e w Examples One might wonder, then, what, in practice, a truly Aristotelian literary criticism would look like. I hesitate to consider specific works of literature because the reader might disagree, of course, with my own literary tastes and still agree with the Aristotelian methodology. But let us survey a very few works. The point of criticism is not to discuss everything about a text (which would be impossible). It is to choose some useful or insightful perspective that can help us better understand, evaluate, and appreciate the work. The Aristotelian perspective presents many points of departure. But one shouldn’t be simplistic about such things. If one focuses on the novel use of language or punctuation – in, say, E.E. Cumming’s “anyone lived in a little how town” – one is focusing perhaps on material cause; but perhaps one is trying to explain how effectively his use of language communicates something to the reader, which involves efficient cause. But, again, one cannot have efficiency without a final cause, understood as a task to be completed (as Aristotle continually says); yet, again, one cannot complete that task without relying on the proper poetic form. So, although critics typically focus on this or that aspect of a text, everything works together. We need to keep that in the back of our minds. We do not need a manual Aristotelianism, a regimented, rigid understanding that reduces our understanding of literature to a set of bullet points. Much could be said, but let us focus here, briefly, on the idea of transcendence. Consider some examples of how the poetic tradition deals with such subjects. Cummings makes a good start. Here, then, is Cummings commenting on the incomprehensibility of the world: O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked

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thee ,has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover

thou answerest

them only with spring) It seems lame to give a prose explanation of Cummings’s poem – all the sweetness goes out of it.116 Surely, he is insisting that there is an ineradicable mystery about the world that persists – delightfully, cheerfully, cheekily – ever opaque, ever inaccessible, out of the reach of the explainers. The poem reiterates, in large part, the thesis of this book except that Cummings has, perhaps, a more jaundiced view of religion. But leave that aside. Move on to other examples. Dante, Blake, and Wordsworth (to choose poets somewhat haphazardly) chronicle manifestations of the Divine in the world as an Incommensurable something that somehow surfaces, bidden or not, setting out the deepest patterns and shapes in things. Dante tells us, for example, that “all things have order and … form, which makes

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the universe resemble God.”117 (He borrows this imitation theology from Thomas Aquinas, who borrowed it from Aristotle.) If, however, the universe resembles God, Dante insists on the ineffable nature of God at the end of the Divine Comedy, where he has a vision of a love so perfect it cannot be properly expressed in words. On this poetic orientation, the poet spends his or her time discovering in the world traces of a transcendental God that cannot fit inside human understanding. Blake outlines a poet’s aspiration: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / and Eternity in an hour.” 118 Surely the goal here is for the poet (or reader) to somehow grasp the essence of what is invisible, allencompassing, fundamental, above logic, and above sense-­perception. Wordsworth chronicles, in turn, the “presence”: Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.119 Even the professed atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley (whose atheism is perhaps closer to an angry agnosticism) composes a “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” that describes “The awful shadow of some unseen Power [that] Floats though unseen among us.”120 This is not the place to get into debates about Deism, or Catholicism versus Protestantism, or Christianity versus other religions, or nature mysticism versus institutional belief (etc.). Let us turn, instead, to William Empson’s poetry. Empson, who referred to the Christian God as “the torture-monster” (in Milton’s God and elsewhere), was no friend of theism. His last and most famous poem (which he called “hopelessly bad,” a sly diversion perhaps) has to do with his decision to give up writing poetry: It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange. The more things happen to you the more you can’t Tell or remember even what they were.

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The contradictions cover such a range. The talk would talk and go so far aslant. You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.121 This is not the place for any close reading. But what is this poem but another – in a more pessimistic, even cynical tone – invocation of the ultimate, impenetrable mystery that completely shuts out the possibility of deep knowledge? As length of life increases, the contradictions pile up; the more you think, the worse it gets; the risk of insanity looms precariously on the horizon. Something dangerously mystical – a deep blankness that defeats words – lurks here, something transcendental we cannot bear, resolve, or explain away. Beyond words, beyond description, beyond explanation, we come face to face with an ineffable whiteness that is the ground or floor or source of everything, which ultimately leaves the sensitive writer flummoxed or at a total loss for words. Of course, poetry is not about the mere fact that the transcendental exists; it is about where to find it, how to find it, how we should feel about it, think about it, represent it, evaluate it, communicate with it, and so on. In Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” we find a carpe diem poem that seems anything but contemplative. But that is too quick. At the end of the poem, the poet speaks of rolling all one’s strength and sweetness “into one ball” in order to “tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.” (Surely, this is an allusion to scoring a goal in the mob street-football played in those days). Scoring here is a euphemism for sexual consummation or at least successful courtship (in the sense of both parties falling in love with each other). Marvell boasts that the couple’s lovemaking will change the course of the heavens. If Moses made the sun stand still by praying, their intense courtship “will make him run.”122 The moralist might contest the hedonism in the poem, but, I think, that is too simple. Courtship, romance, and, of course, physical sexuality (which may be wedded to love) all provide a way into the world of angels. This speeding up of time that the poet ardently desires has to do with bringing heaven down to earth. It has to do with capturing a transcendent effect in which the poem itself participates using wit and elegance. The raptures of the lover transform the mundane into the extraordinary, pushing us into a mystery at the centre of existence. This is a book about an Aristotelian approach to literature. If poets discover a world brimming over with intimations of the Divine, if they

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express such discoveries in enthusiastic and even extravagant turns of phrase, Aristotle’s overall world view posits a reality that keeps mirroring the Divine. Aristotle believes that a life spent in metaphysical contemplation is the happiest life because looking on images of God has, after all, an inevitable aesthetic effect.123 It fills us with wonder. We can conceive of literature as an alternative attempt at true wisdom that relies on eloquence rather than logical argument. I have argued that this “transcendental template,” which is really Aristotelianism revisited, provides the best model for what we mean by “literature.” Seen from this Aristotelian perspective, literature provides a life-giving respite from the many reductionisms that permeate public discourse in our present age. I want to be clear. I am not denying that other schools of criticism have valuable features. If a feminist wants to look at a poem from a woman’s perspective, if a formalist prefers to focus on language, if the Freudian finds psychoanalysis an interesting angle, if the New Marxist situates an author’s convictions in an economic class structure, if one discusses sexuality, gender, colonialism, or ecology: all well and good. But these competing alternatives often seem – at least among the most enthusiastic practitioners – to be presented as absolute explanations of everything important. The fact of transcendence can remind us that there is a mystery that never stops giving, that is never exhausted, that never fits, quite exactly, into the boxes of our rigid classification systems.

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6 Morality and Literature

V I. 1 A g a in , a W is d o m Approach I have argued that all literature is wisdom literature. In the present cultural context, it seems terribly risky to equate literature with philosophical wisdom. Of course, if by “philosophical wisdom” we mean specialized academic, technical, or historical knowledge of philosophy, literature is (mostly) not about this. We can, however, identify philosophical wisdom with the adoption of a sensitive, perspicacious perspective on the human condition, and surely literature has something to contribute to this overall understanding. Some people seem to think that wisdom is emotionless. This caricature allows us to distinguish between wisdom, which is about knowledge, and literature, which is about emotion. But this is too simple. The old Stoic idea that emotion (and delight) sometimes get in the way of a rational view of the world is not without merit, but it goes too far. How could we separate wisdom from emotional experience? The wise are not computers, all brains and no heart. The wise must respond to things in an emotionally appropriate way. This means feeling wonder when we should feel wonder, feeling joy when we should feel joy, feeling sorrow when we should feel sorrow, feeling righteous indignation when we should feel righteous indignation. The wise appreciate the world for what it is, which means that they are appropriately moved, stirred, stimulated, by what they see. I have argued for realism and against skepticism. Given the usual qualifications, we can gain knowledge of the world. But there is a twist. Literature is about transcendence, where human fallibility meets

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something of a higher order that it cannot fully grasp. I have already argued that realism is not opposed to the ineffable. If transcendence is “out there,” then radical skepticism is not the answer; epistemological humility is the answer. We can only know what we can know. (Not a tautology.) To the extent that we can know it. Humility is an indispensable feature of wisdom. To qualify as literature, an author must go one step further than explanation and inspire through some superlative use of language. Words are aids to rational thought: they help us see what is “out there.” But words can also perpetrate cognitive violence; they can make the false seem true, divide the undivided, reify the non-existent, ossify into simplistic tropes and partisan prejudices. Literature is about appreciating things for what they are. Even theatre of the absurd provides some kind of answer to the eternal conundrum: why is there something rather than nothing? For no reason at all, it would seem. Much contemporary criticism conflates realism with positivist exaggerations. Full scientific knowledge of everything is not possible. If, however, human knowledge is limited, it is another thing to say that it is impossible. Literature may push us toward a full-bodied experience of what some would call indeterminacy, uncentredness, or anti-logicism. But the toppling Western metaphysics one encounters in the critical literature never happened. The existence of the ineffable does not invalidate realism. In Aristotle’s system, only God has complete metaphysical knowledge. Human knowledge can yet aspire to the divine.1 Aristotle thinks of human wisdom as an imitation of the theōria of God. Aristotle’s God is not the world’s largest encyclopedia, the largest database, the largest compendium of facts possible. Aristotle’s God knows intuitively, in one mysterious sweep, everything that instantiates the good, the beautiful, the necessary, the real, the eternal. His theoretical knowledge is far above human capacity, but Aristotle’s wise philosophers emulate, ever so slightly, this epistemological achievement, momentarily incorporating an appreciation of the whole in their contemplation. I have argued that literature plays a parallel role here. Seen from a wisdom perspective, literature – that is, superlative writing – has to be truthful. Falsehood is a defect. It gets in the way of genuine ­eloquence. The best writing has to put some sort of reality on stage so that the reader can make sense of it from a bigger perspective.

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Literature (and art, generally) provide an occasion where, as long as the concentration holds out, we can experience the pleasurable aesthetic attention that characterizes Aristotle’s God. Aristotle writes that the wise man is, intellectually, “the most self-sufficient.”2 Intellectually, most of us cannot operate at peak levels of intellectual appreciation and understanding without outside help. Literature supplies that help, prompting, inciting, guiding, and goading the reader into that mental state of truthful astonishment that parallels the mental state of God and the philosophical sage. Literature is an avenue to “perfect happiness” understood as a species of rapt attention  – theōria – that knows and feels the import of knowledge at the same time. This coincides with the idea that literature carries us to a transcendental edge of the human condition. Aristotle seems at times to downplay the moral component of philosophical wisdom. There is a reason for this. The art of ethical reasoning, politics, and practical decision-making must constantly adjust itself according to the particular circumstances of the moment.3 Aristotle goes so far as to suggest that lower animals can have practical wisdom to the degree that they have to take care of themselves. Taking practical care of ourselves cannot be the most important thing in the world. This cannot be what wisdom, in the best sense, is about. For Aristotle, sophia – what translators often render as “philosophic wisdom” – surveys, understands, and appreciates the world from as general a level as possible. Human thought climbs upwards to that point at the top of the pyramid where all forms of knowledge converge. At the top of the Divided Line, on the highest rung of the ladder of knowledge in the Symposium, the philosopher stands in contemplation. Few ever aspire to, let alone reach, those heights. But ordinary mortals – the rest of us – can catch a glimpse of this possibility, not only through philosophy but also through literature. In Plato and Aristotle, the philosophical sage feels wonder at how perfectly everything fits together. In Aristotle, however, there is no gap between “is” and “ought.” Nature has moral significance; some things are better exemplars of their nature; some things are not. Value is inherent in things. The world, which struggles to imitate God, is soaked in cosmological moral significance. If, then, philosophy opens a window on the moral aspects of the world, so do art and literature, which are not so much expository as inspirational. This means,

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however, that there is an inescapable moral dimension to literature – hardly a popular view today. Criticism has to acknowledge normative content to fully account for the literary endeavour.

V I. 2 C a n L iterature M a k e U s B e t t er People? The strict enforcers of morality, for good or ill, have always harboured a certain suspicion of poetry, perhaps through overzealous scruples about moral practice. Further back in history, philosophers and ­cultural critics would respond to the moral condemnation of art and literature by defending them on the grounds that they make us morally better people. The claim that literature should serve a moral purpose was not regarded as a sentimental bromide dropped into a conversation by naive or childish readers. Those who championed the cause of literature believed they could prove its worth by showing how literature morally improves us. I want to argue that any Aristotelian approach to literature must involve some sort of moral criticism. But there is room here for misunderstanding. Some works of literature may be thoroughly didactic; they may have, as a principal aim, the teaching of moral lessons. Clearly, the medieval morality play Everyman is literature even though it is an explicit exercise in moral catechism (in more complicated ways than sometimes supposed). But didacticism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for literature. Seen from an Aristotelian perspective, didacticism is a more specialized manifestation of a broader ethical impulse that motivates all art and literature. I am not going to discuss Aristotle’s specific approach in the Poetics here. It is enough to say that there is ineradicable moral content to Greek tragedy, which Aristotle acknowledges. Aristotle does not propose, in any simplistic sense, a didactic reading of tragedy, but throughout the Poetics he is often responding to Plato’s blanket condemnation of literature. But specialist textual exegesis is matter for another discussion. Mostly, I want to focus here on moral criticism in the English-language tradition. We moderns tend to think of morality as an onerous burden. (This is part of the Kantian heritage.) The problem is that we enjoy reading literature. If morality has to be unpleasant and reading literature is a delight, then literature must be, it seems, a different thing from morality. Except that Aristotle believes we should enjoy being moral. He

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reports: “Lovers of what is noble find pleasant the things that are truly pleasant; and virtuous actions are such, so that these are pleasant for them … The man who does not rejoice in noble actions is not even good; since no one would call a man just who did not enjoy acting justly, nor any man generous who did not enjoy generous actions; and similarly in all other cases … So, virtuous actions must be in themselves pleasant.”4 On an Aristotelian account, then, there is no contradiction between pleasant literature and pleasant morality. Literature is fun; morality is fun. It is only when we ourselves are bad or when bad circumstances intervene that morality becomes burdensome. If anything, the aesthetic pleasure we derive from literature parallels the aesthetic pleasure moral people get from being good. The Reformation emphasis on the wickedness of human nature turned morality into a matter of muscular exertion against a depraved nature (as in Kant). But Aristotle is not a Puritan in any stereotypical, rigourist, world-hating sense. He recognizes the importance of temperance, of course, but his virtue-ethics emphasizes the need to cultivate human nature, not reject it. In Aristotle, morality is not, primarily, a matter of obedience to the moral law but a matter of realizing one’s full potential as a human being. Literature is an aid to self-realization. If literature makes us smarter, if it provides an occasion for contemplation (theōria), if it makes us see what the world is really like, then it is a means to Aristotelian virtue (ἀρετή) understood in terms of general human excellence. Aristotle (and the ancients generally) believed that it is ignorance, not lack of willpower, that is the main cause of immorality. Once we understand the true nature and value of things in the world, the motivation to do what is right will take care of itself. Even when it comes to weakness of will (akrasia, incontinence), Aristotle traces the problem back to a temporary lapse in moral knowledge. Agents who lose self-control are “like men asleep, mad, or drunk.”5 They are unable to think straight, and they lose, momentarily, their ability to distinguish between right and wrong. When they recover, they regain self-control. Aristotle informs us that because “virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating rightly, there is nothing more important than acquiring and cultivating the power of forming right judgments.”6 This is where literature comes in. Literature helps us appreciate things “so we can love and hate rightly.” Literature makes us laugh when we should laugh; it makes us feel empathy when we should feel empathy;

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it portrays ugliness as it should be portrayed; it fills us with indignation when we should react with indignation. This is all part of morality. Even nonsense poetry has an important moral task: lightheartedness, whimsy, and melodious sound do contribute to the good life. Morality is, in part, about making human goods available in abundance. When we read literature as the Aristotelian understands it, we share in a truthful vision of the world. It does not follow, obviously, that every reader of literature acts morally. But the first step toward morality is a correct perspective on things. This is how literature pushes us toward moral understanding and, hopefully, even moral behaviour. We can at least hope that willpower will follow the understanding. (That is the traditional view.) This ancient account of morality is not a naive, sentimentalist, Pollyanna perspective. There are complications, of course. Aristotle believes that we need external goods such as health, physical wellbeing, friendship, and a minimum of material prosperity if we are to enjoy unblemished happiness. If, however, life is often filled with hardships, Aristotle believes that morality is a sort of training regime that carries us more happily through life’s vicissitudes. Moral individuals also suffer, but with the reserves of discipline and character that moral practice supplies, they will suffer less than everyone else. And however much they suffer, this suffering will not be accompanied by the pain of a guilty conscience and keen regret. When Aristotle claims that morality is inherently pleasurable, he means that anyone who is able to properly appreciate morality will find it enjoyable. Our defective characters, blind spots, and partisan prejudices may get in the way. Aristotle realizes this. His point is that morality is objectively delightful. A wise individual in possession of all his facilities will find happiness in the contemplation and practice of morality. Wicked people, of course, will find morality exceedingly unpleasant. The traditional moralist objection to literature is that it tells lies. Fiction is literally untrue. And even literature that purports to deliver a truthful representation of an event or situation may sway our emotions and make us less rational. If, however, Aristotle would look unfavourably on any text that maliciously deceives readers about something important, this is not the same as using poetic license to highlight universal truths about the world. Literature comments on human experience in general. It may do this, sometimes, by inventing exaggerated fictions and whimsical fantasies. What matters, on an

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Aristotelian account, is a truthful enlargement of the reader’s vision. Literature that succeeds as literature faithfully represents the world via a felicitous combination of cognitive judgment and appropriate emotional appeal.

VI .3 A B r ie f H is to ry o f Moral Cri ti ci sm in t h e E n g l is h T radi ti on Down through history, moralists of every stripe have criticized literature. Xenophanes, the Pre-Socratic philosopher and theologian, complains that “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all sorts of things which are matters of reproach and censure among men: theft, adultery and mutual deceit.”7 Socrates likewise objects that the Greek poets legitimize immorality with ignoble religious fictions, using language in dangerously effective ways to awaken base appetites, incite uncritical emotions, and overpower the cool, calm voice of reason. This is why he banishes poetry from his utopian city, saying that poetry can only return if some philosopher is able to demonstrate that she does not represent a threat to morality. Many critics and commentators, in different eras, have taken up Socrates’s challenge and responded with moral arguments in favour of poetry and literature. Let us briefly review, then, authors in the English tradition who propose a moral interpretation of literature. I will consider comments from Sir Philip Sidney, Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, and John Gardner. As it turns out, Aristotle is not alone in linking morality and literature. Sidney argues for a didactic conception of literature in his seminal Defense of Poesy. He claims that it is not technique but moral content that makes poetry poetry: “It is not riming and versing that maketh a poet … but it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by.”8 Poetry engages the reader’s rapt imagination, not merely by its pleasurable effect, but as an aid and encouragement to morality. (Note that Sidney is out to defend poetry – and what better way to defend poetry than by pointing out that it has a positive influence on public morals. But it would be too clever to read irony into his argument, which earnestly comments on an essential connection between literature and morality.) Sidney insists that poets are better moral teachers than historians, because history is filled with villains who win and saints who lose, whereas poets make it their business to see to it that the saints win

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and the villains lose, so that “virtue [is] exalted and vice punished.”9 Poets are also more effective moral teachers than philosophers and theologians because they can leave aside obscure arguments, using concrete stories and eloquence to influence readers. Sidney writes: “[The poet] cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale … which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner … [He thus] intend[s] the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue; even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things, by hiding them in such other as to have a pleasant taste.”10 Winters calls this trope “the Horatian formula, which combines the didactic with the hedonistic, telling us that the function of literature is to provide instruction (or [moral] profit) in conjunction with pleasure, to make instruction palatable.”11 As Suits used to say, on this Sydneian model, poetry is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. The poet “giveth so sweet a prospect into the [moral] way as will entice any man to enter into it.”12 Consider, next, Arnold, who, although he avoids the strict didacticism of Sydney, provides another ringing endorsement of the moral element of poetry. In the preface to a collection of Wordsworth’s poetry, he insists that Voltaire was right in thinking that the energetic and profound treatment of moral ideas … is what distinguishes English poetry … It is important to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas … to the question: How to live[?] … We [are attracted], at times … [to] a poetry of revolt against [morals] … Or [to] a poetry indifferent to [­morals] … but where the form is studied and exquisite. [Yet] we delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our ­delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life … A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life.13 On Arnold’s account, the best poetry has to be ethical, not because it teaches a moral lesson, but because human life is so permeated with ethical values that any serious treatment of human experience will

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have a moral aspect. One cannot describe, evoke, or imitate human experience without touching on what we all value. Turn, then, to Babbitt and Winters, already discussed, who propose arguments for a literature of moral constraint in the face of what they both saw as a self-indulgent Romanticism. Babbitt seems more Kantian than Aristotelian. Still, he argues that great authors in the canon bring moral order into inspirational chaos. They practise a classical eloquence allied with formal and moral restraint so as to hold desire and imagination in check. Great literature happens when epiphanies of enthusiasm and imagination are properly balanced by a muscular classicism that ensures harmony, order, proportion, pose, and ethical decorum. Winters comments that his own “moralistic” conception of poetry “is not original, but is a restatement of ideas that have been current in English criticism since the time of Sidney, that have appeared again in most of the famous apologists for poetry since Sidney, especially in Arnold and in Newman.”14 Winters maintains that although this moral “concept of literature has not been adequately defined in the past … it has been loosely implicit in the inexact theorizing which has led to the most durable judgments in the history of criticism.”15 On this account, then, the moral interpretation of literature has been, historically, the mainstream position in English criticism, even though its adherents may have failed to philosophically elucidate what remained, largely, an intuitive theoretical framework. Winters situates the poetic impulse in morality understood broadly as a normative evaluation of human feelings and experiences. The literary tradition, he thinks, constantly builds upon itself, enlarging the possibility for intelligent feeling and good behaviour, according to objective moral standards. “The poet,” he tells us, in striving toward an ideal of poetic form … is actually striving to perfect a moral attitude toward that range of experience of which he is aware. Such moral attitudes are contagious from poet to poet, and … from poem to poem. The presence of Hardy and Arnold, let us say, in so far as their successful works offer us models … should not only aid us, by providing standards of sound feeling, to test the soundness of our own poems, but, since their range of experience is very wide, they should aid us … to grow into regions that we had not previously mastered or perhaps even discovered.16

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Winters believes, then, that poetry is joined to morality at the hip. He recognizes, of course, that rascals and scallywags have managed to produce good poetry (through some specialized sensibility). Nonetheless, he suggests that in general, poetry should “increase the intelligence and strengthen the moral temper [and that] these effects should naturally be carried over into action, if, through constant discipline, they are made permanent acquisitions.”17 Consider, finally, Gardner’s 1978 book On Moral Fiction, which unapologetically insists on the central role of morality in literature.18 Gardner is not a trained philosopher, but his heartfelt introduction is worth quoting at some length. He explains what his book is about: My basic message throughout … [is] drawn from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest, and standard in Western Civilization down through the eighteenth century … [This] ­traditional view is that true art is moral … Art is essentially and primarily moral – that is, life-giving – moral in its process of ­creation and moral in what it says … [Art] destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation … Nothing could be more ­obvious … than that art should be moral and that the first ­business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production’s moral worth … [Art] is not didactic … [but it] tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action.19 Gardner believes that novels, in particular, offer a privileged venue for moral exploration. They map out, in an almost scientific way, the consequences of human behaviour. They hold a magnifying glass up to the inner mechanisms of human guilt, shame, hubris, happiness, or fulfilment, chronicling which life-strategies are successful and which are not. In an interview in The Paris Review, Gardner comments on the difference between good and bad artists: “The good artists … [are] creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life … that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss.”20 The bad artists of Gardner’s epoch are, he thinks, caught up in existentialistic despair; they are mouthpieces for a self-congratulatory and cynical pessimism that turns away from the moral impulses that

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naturally arise in human nature. They do not merely tell us how bad things are; they gloat about meaninglessness and vice. Gardner’s book, which contained unflattering commentary on eminent writers, was highly contested. Novelist John Updike responded testily, “The world has changed, and in a sense we are all heirs to despair. Better to face this and tell the truth, however dismal, than to do whatever life-enhancing thing [Gardner] was proposing.”21 Except that despair spins the truth in a negative direction; it panders to pessimism, to moral cowardice; it whimpers and whines. As Kierkegaard suggests (below), it is a way of escaping reality. Gardner also complains about a formalism that focuses purely on the technical. Formalists turn the study of literature, he thinks, into the study of language. Gardner counters that language that has been emptied of real-world meaning – and, in particular, of moral content – does not amount to much. Eloquence is a not a matter of mere cleverness or linguistic bravado; it is a matter of putting words together in a way what means something sound and true. To sum up. Sydney views poetry as a didactic enterprise; Arnold believes that the salient characteristic of English poetry is moral engagement; Babbitt thinks of literature as inspiration held in check by morality; Winters claims that the poet is striving to perfect a moral attitude toward life in general, and Gardner thinks of literature as truthful exploration of good and evil. Aristotle could be seen as supporting all these views. Although this is not the place for any close examination, much of his Poetics is intended as a response to Plato’s negative moral evaluation of Greek tragedy. But Aristotle goes even further. In his Politics, he argues that immoral art should not even be allowed: “Since we do not allow improper language, we should also banish pictures or speeches from the stage which are indecent.”22 Aristotle only reluctantly allows selected groups of citizens to watch burlesque comedy (when the religious festivities proscribe it) if they are mature enough to resist its “evil influences.”23 Immoral art is inferior art, not merely from an artistic point of view, but in terms of its deleterious effects on the body politic.

V I. 4 T h e D e at h o f M o ral Cri ti ci sm? Some recent criticism does focus on the moral content of literature. Witness Wayne Booth’s pleas about the ethical importance of what we read, Berys Gaut’s arguments that ethical criteria should shape our

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criticism of art, Martha Nussbaum’s assertions that literature presents us with “paradigms of moral activity,” H.J. Blackham’s insistence on the importance of “moralistic” fable literature, and Jèmeljan Hakemulder’s exploration of the psychological effects of moral literature.24 But despite a rather modest upturn in such discussion, moral issues have long ceased to occupy the centre of scholarly attention.25 S.L. Goldberg (2009) laments that, despite deep roots in a notable tradition, the moral evaluation of literature continues “to be dismissed as naive, old-fashioned, and not worth doing.”26 Eugene Goodheart attributes the lack of interest in the moral ­content of literature to three overlapping factors: the waning influence of moral critics such as F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, the adoption of a self-consciously scientific model of humanities research, and the overwhelmingly skeptical orientation of more recent post-structuralism.27 Marshall Gregory advances a different explanation. As he somewhat painfully observes: By the end of the 19th century, ethical criticism’s fatuity had brought it to the lip of the very cliff over which it was about to be pushed by a great many intellectual and societal forces … What began as a fairly local – that is, British – late 19th-century backlash against ethical criticism swelled throughout the 20th century into a tsunami of new ideas from all across Europe and America that swept ethical criticism away. At the academic and professional levels ethical criticism was killed, crushed, ­annihilated … Persistently throughout the entire 20th century, the higher the prestige of other modes of criticism ascended – first, New Criticism, and, second, postmodernism – the lower the prestige of ethical criticism descended.28 As Gregory suggests, the “official” banishment of ethical concerns from recent literary criticism was attended by a sharp rise in heated political rhetoric. Gregory is indignant: It is curious, however – and, more than curious, it tells a ­compelling story about the inescapability of ethical concerns – to note that no matter how forcibly 20th-century critics tried to manage the house of criticism such that ethical criticism was kept locked in some Closet of Disrepute, the human concerns

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from which ethical criticism springs kept pushing it back into the middle of the room. During the nearly forty years of postmodern hegemony in criticism, it was considered almost an intellectual felony punishable by ridicule-unto-professional-death to ­introduce ethics in literary theory, yet politics played a vastly important role in theory during this entire period. The fact that political theory and the agendas of political policy are always nested inside ethical assumptions was an inconvenient fact that simply never got mentioned.29 Gregory lambasts the politicization of criticism (with its implicit moral biases), but the death of moral criticism is also one localized effect of an epistemological uneasiness we now entertain about moral convictions generally. If one wants to recover the moral sense of literature, one has to reject the soft moral skepticism of the age, but that is business for another time.

V I. 5 P h il o s o p h i cal Roots o f C o n t e m p o r a ry Amorali sm On the Aristotelian account, any attentive probing of reality will hit upon moral realities that are an inescapable part of human experience. This Aristotelian objectivism about moral values has taken a beating as of late. An influential anti-moralism is often traced back to Nietzsche, the “bad boy” of German philosophy, but Nietzsche borrows heavily from the ancient Greek Sophists, who argued that morality is not a matter of nature (φύσις, physis) but a matter of artificial convention (νόμος, nomos). In opposition to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the mainstream tradition, the Sophists adopted a cultural relativism, insisting that different societies champion and enforce radically different and even opposing moral standards. Our moral beliefs are determined by the surrounding society. They are a social construction, No moral system is better than any other. Nietzsche sides with thinkers like Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Antiphon, rejecting, as a metaphysical superstition, the Socratic notion that morality could be an objective feature of the world.30 Nietzsche believes in nature “red in tooth and claw.” “Every morality is,” he writes, “a piece of tyranny against nature, likewise against reason.”31 Our very sense of what is right or wrong arises, not from any rational evaluation of the world, but from childhood obedience to authority: “The content

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of our conscience is everything that was during the years of our childhood regularly demanded of us without reason by people we honoured or feared.”32 “To be moral … to be ethical means to practice obedience towards a law or tradition established from of old.”33 Nietzsche discusses “the illusion of moral judgments”: “There are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment, that it believes in realities which do not exist. Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation. Moral judgment belongs, as does religious judgment, to a level of ignorance at which even the distinction between the real and the imaginary is lacking. To this extent moral judgment is never to be taken literally: as such it never contains anything but nonsense.”34 This is, by now, a familiar trope. Morality is something we project onto the world. It has nothing to do with what actually is. I will not try to sort through the contradictions in Nietzsche’s thought here. J.L. Mackie proposes a more genteel version of moral antirealism in his aptly titled classic, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Mackie flatly asserts: “There are no objective moral values.”35 Nothing in the world is intrinsically noble, beautiful, or good, or – at the other end of the spectrum – intrinsically vicious or evil. To believe that there are objective moral values is to be a dupe; it is to adopt attitudes and beliefs that are naive, superstitious, uncritical, unscientific. Unlike Nietzsche, Mackie goes out of his way to downplay (or disguise?) the normative ramifications of his views. He claims that “a man could hold strong moral views and, indeed, ones whose content was thoroughly conventional, while believing that they were simply attitudes … he and other people held.”36 Can one remain as strongly committed to ordinary moral values while believing that morality is nothing but an invention of enforced social conformity? If Nietzsche is a vociferous Sophist, Mackie is a genteel Sophist. But his views seem, just as effectively, to sap morality of any sense of higher authority. Shane Drefcinski, in a reference to Allan Bloom, describes his own experience in the university classroom: Bloom’s controversial book The Closing of the American Mind begins with a noncontroversial observation that is as true today as it was when the book was published in 1987 – most college students believe truth is relative. Bloom writes, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every ­student entering the university believes, or says he believes,

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that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard this proposition as not self-evident astonishes them.” My own experience teaching philosophy courses confirms Bloom’s observation, at least with respect to ethics.37 Drefcinski’s classroom experience can, indeed, be universalized. My own experience as an ethics professor has been much the same. Almost every university student concludes that they must believe that moral truth is relative. To believe in old-fashioned morality lacks intellectual credibility. There may be glaring inconsistencies in any such view, but this is where we are today. Mackie’s antirealism can be seen as an early attempt to secure a background theory for non-cognitivism, the Humean idea that morality is exclusively a matter of sentiment rather than reason.38 A more sophisticated non-cognitivism makes a legitimate logical point. If, however, morality is only about feelings (non-cognitivism) and if we cannot know the true nature of the world (antirealism), how could we ever determine whether our feelings are an appropriate response to reality? Nietzsche, not afraid of worrisome conclusions, tells us straight-up that all behaviour is, fundamentally, the same. When one strips off the pious disguises, underneath it all, every human action is motivated “by the individual’s intention of procuring pleasure and avoiding displeasure.”39 It follows that wicked behaviour has the same “innocent” intention as good behaviour. R.M. Hare, a leading voice from an earlier generation, tells us – straight out – “that we should seek to maximize satisfactions.”40 Whether we seek pleasure/satisfaction for ourselves (Epicureanism) or for all of us together (utilitarianism), this is all that remains of human aspiration. Add to this a single-minded liberal emphasis on consent as the sole criterion for morality, and this puts an end to any Aristotelian-like pretensions to moral realism. Metaphysically, the universe is a physical plenum and a moral vacuum. Morality is, at best, disguised self-interest, mutually beneficial agreement, or, in darker cases, the control of one group by another. Human behaviour is an elaborate way of pleasing ourselves, individually or collectively, for better or worse, with or without everyone’s agreement. Nothing more. All these various influences, pushed this way and that in light of popular exaggerations, strengthen the general impression that morality

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is soft, subjective, even irrational. Add to this the accepted stereotype that different cultures and historical eras always disagree about morality. Eliminate the religious tradition as any credible resource for a higher power promulgating moral law and we are where we are today. In light of such a confluence of anti-moral attitudes, moral criticism seems a hopeless aspiration. The old idea that literature champions “civilized” values – or humanitarian values, or even edifying values – seems to be largely meaningless, simplistic, naive, even oppressive. In the present context, it is unsurprising to see morality pushed aside in general public discussion and literary criticism. If moral judgments are not worth much, it would be misguided to fasten onto them as a central issue in critical interpretation. More recently, in the cultural wars, a voluble politicization has eclipsed moral preoccupations and conventional morality is regularly dismissed as conformist, oppressive, racist, and unenlightened. Pushing it to the margins of critical discussion seems a liberation.

VI . 6 P au l D e M a n : U p s i de-Down Bi nari es These anti-moralist influences show up, to highlight only one conspicuous example, in the work of the brilliant but personally troubled critic Paul de Man, a leading light in “the Yale school of deconstruction.”41 De Man’s critical perspective cannot be entirely separated from his duplicitous personal life, which I will not explore here. His favoured method of critical analysis focused on a close reading of the contradictory rhetorical possibilities in writing understood as pure text or écriture. A favourite ploy was the use of binary oppositions – fact/ fiction, memory/imagination, guilt/innocence, self-knowledge/­ self-deception, inward/outward, moral/immoral – to explode conventional readings and decentre texts so that unambiguous or unequivocal interpretations seemed impossible. The whole point of this project was to put on display with cosmopolitan erudition the utter indeterminacy of literature and the failure of traditional morality and metaphysics, a common enough trope in deconstruction. Consider de Man’s treatment of Rousseau’s Confessions, a text he uses to showcase his own flamboyant approach to criticism. De Man points out that Rousseau, in writing about a sordid incident from his own past, exposes his own guilty behaviour to the world while simultaneously excusing it. He comments: “It is always possible to face up to any experience (to excuse any guilt), because the experience always

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exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a fiction, it escapes from the constraints of guilt and innocence.”42 Given de Man’s postmodern anti-realism, the difference between guilt and innocence gets lost in the shuffle. We cannot tell the difference, in any definitive way, between morality and immorality, between literature and life, between human invention and what is objectively there. But this makes any robust take on moral requirements impossible. If we cannot make knowledgeable distinctions about the true nature of events and things, if everything becomes an appearance we project onto the world, morality becomes a hopeless task. Everything collapses into skepticism. De Man maintains, more generally, that public excuses are performative utterances that simultaneously produce and eliminate guilt.43 They involve the act of “recapitulating the exposure in the guise of concealment.”44 They “generate the very guilt they exonerate.”45 This adds a level of complexity that can be used to sensational effect. Exposure becomes concealment; hiding becomes revelation; the act of owning up to a moral failing becomes an act of excusing it away; guilt becomes innocence; fiction, reality. The point of this exegetical game is to flip everything around, to spin it backwards, to turn it inside out or upside down, so as to generate paradoxes that transform the most solid moral assertions into aporias. The moral of the story is supposed to be that morality – understood as some overriding, outside criterion of authoritative judgment  – has been debunked. The ­avalanche of glittering inversions is supposed to explode the logo­ centricism of the Western tradition (and take our breath away with their acrobatic, transgressive inventiveness). Giles Gunn argues that such “playful cynicism” is “the only viable critical stance.”46 But de Man’s transgressive metaphysics is not an innocent distraction. Rather, it is another despairing manifestation of a generalized skepticism that marks the modern age. And to what end and for what effect? De Man is not interested in anything so oldfashioned as truth, goodness, beauty, or God. At this late stage, those items are passé. But doesn’t this risk turning literary theory into a game of erudite trivia that is morally, metaphysically, and epistemologically empty? Even supposing the world is as insidiously evil as de Man’s collaborationist Second World War career suggests, this is, as

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Gardner would have said, to play some highly elaborate technical games while, all around us, Rome is burning. Not only is this in bad taste; it is unintelligent. That morality should be viewed, by literary critics like de Man, as a worrisome limit on eloquent self-expression is unsurprising. Consider Carol Jacobs who in more recent work seems determined to repudiate any morality that would establish “boundaries” or “well-marked ­difference limits that must not be transgressed.”47 Jacobs advocates a new “literary ethics” that “does not simply tell us what to do,” that is neither “prescription” nor “negation,” “a nontyrannical ethical no longer irrevocably bound to a must.”48 There may be something poetical here, but mostly this is a straw man attack on traditional accounts of morality. To equate tyranny with moral obligation, as if every restriction on human behaviour is somehow unjust, oppressive, or a foreign imposition, is very simple. To eliminate all the boundaries between right and wrong (as if boundaries are an intrinsically bad thing) is to play a similar game to de Man. Contrary to what Jacobs suggests, moralists like Aristotle knowingly investigate the many complications of everyday life as well as grey areas of moral interpretation. They are subtle, measured observers of the human condition. To launch into a wholesale attack on all morality is, in Aristotelian eyes, to fight against human happiness and selffulfilment. What would be the point of that?

V I. 7 A r is to t l e ’ s M oral Reali s m This is not the place for any in-depth introduction to Aristotle’s moral philosophy (which I have provided elsewhere).49 Consider briefly why Aristotelian moral attitudes are so different from contemporary accounts. There are various points of disagreement. To begin with, Aristotle takes morality seriously as a real property of things in the world. Morality is not something contrived or invented. The world in which we move, and live, and have our being has moral properties that must be acknowledged. We can do this with or without help from philosophers. In Aristotle’s system, an amoral human being – someone without any robust sense of morality – would be a “brute” (θηρίον), a savage beast. He or she would be an animal. Aristotle could not even understand critical attempts to consider human aspiration from an amoral perspective. Granted, we all fail at morality. It is difficult to push our

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feelings and actions in the right direction when selfishness, hardship, anger, apathy, or sheer laziness get in the way. Heroic love may make little sense from a self-interested perspective, but it does not follow that morality is irrational. On Aristotle’s account, morality is nothing more and nothing less than an intelligent guide to human success. Only the intellectually defective can fail to see this. If moral properties somehow exist in the world, Aristotle is not overly skeptical about the possibility of coming to know what they are. He thinks that sound moral claims are, more or less, like other epistemological claims. They constitute a form of knowledge. Later authors in the mainstream tradition such as Thomas Aquinas specified that we should aim at a degree of certainty (certitudo) proportional to each subject matter.50 Certainty in moral philosophy is not certainty as it applies to chemistry. Still, the truths of chemistry and the truths of morality both depend on the same reliable interaction of an intelligent human mind with the surrounding world. This is in line with the spirit of Aristotle’s own thought. Mackie is worried about the non-physical nature of morality. But to claim that things (or behaviours) in the world are good or bad, beautiful or ugly, just or unjust, is not to look for a new species of physical properties. It is to claim that such assertions conform to objective standards of evaluation. Human intelligence devises a nomenclature, a moral arithmetic if you will, for measuring the normative features of things. The question is whether this faculty is reliable or not. Aristotle says yes; those of postmodern bent say “probably not,” or “we can never know,” or even “morality is already dead.” Aristotle does not try to prove morality. In common law jurisprudence a guilty conviction requires not logical proof but moral “certitude.” This is a better model for moral reasoning. Successful jurisprudence demands the right kind of certainty, the certainty that properly applies to matters of jurisprudence. It is not as if anything goes. Magistrates must strive to be impartial; the prosecution must appeal to precedent; the accused is innocent unless proven guilty; verdicts must conform to the evidence; the punishment must fit the crime. Morality operates according to similar rational principles, and a similar level of epistemological conviction is all we need for moral reasoning. Aristotle would resist any reduction of morality to our likes and dislikes, our shared prejudices, our financial or political interests, our cultural history. Aristotle believes morality is something more than consensus, personal preference, adept rationalization, financial

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interest, social agreement, or political ideology. He believes that we can, with mental effort, identify biases and blind spots, pushing ­ourselves to a more even-handed and fair approach. We can reason objectively about means and ends. Modern thinkers tend to reduce morality to rule-obeying behaviour: don’t steal, don’t tell lies, don’t murder. But that covers a very small subset of human activity. On Aristotle’s virtue ethics account, anything that contributes to human flourishing has an ethical aspect. Playing the piano very well can be a moral aspiration: concert pianists bring joy to others and themselves through their own self-realization. They could very well be moral heroes. Aristotle expands the scope of morality to cover the entire range of human behaviour and aspiration. Aristotle distinguishes between moral and intellectual virtues, but this distinction is misunderstood. Moral decision-making is itself a species of intelligence reserved for human beings. A technically smart chemist who moonlights as a serial killer would be, in Aristotle’s eyes, an intellectual brute. One can teach animals to do tricks surprisingly well: circus bears can be trained to ride bicycles; parrots can be taught to speak; dogs can, with surprising precision, herd sheep. This is what the wicked chemist is like: he has learned a specialized intellectual skill, but he remains an animal. A super-smart animal, but something less than human. In an age of analysis, we posit dichotomies: emotion versus reason, “is” versus “ought,” science versus religion, the soul versus the body, freedom versus morality, the individual versus the community. These divisions may play a useful epistemological role, but, in Aristotle, holism is the order of the day. We can use reason like a scalpel, but, ultimately, we have to stich everything back together and view life as a seamless whole. Morality is what humans do – often, badly – but it is an inescapable part of human aspiration (even confused and selfdefeating human aspiration). Inasmuch as literature embodies what makes us human, it has a moral aspect. It need not be the focus of a particular discussion or inquiry, but it is always there, waiting for discovery and comment. Morality does not magically evaporate when we philosophers want it to disappear. The Nietzschean anti-moralism is a Sisyphean task in reverse: we keep trying to roll the moral boulder downwards into the abyss of moral nihilism only to watch it roll back up the slope of ordinary human nature. In everyday life, individuals struggle to tell the truth, keep their promises, stand strong in times of conflict, and

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control their appetites. They feel regret, guilt, and shame when they fail at such basic tasks. Anti-realists who insist that we ought to rebel against morality only manage to invent a second, higher morality – a new “ought” – that the more enlightened are obliged to obey. In the Poetics, Aristotle rescues tragedy from Plato’s charge of immorality, seeing it, not as a source of moral infection and spiritual pollution but as a cleansing mechanism, a cathartic agent of moral hygiene and even holiness. But Aristotle does not view Greek tragedy in didactic terms. Different forms of literature do conspicuously different things. To insist on the moral content of literature is not to say that we should read a novel as if it were a medieval morality play. All I am saying here is that, in Aristotle’s system, moral considerations permeate literature as they do all human achievement. I have argued that an Aristotelian criticism should conceive of literature in religious terms, not as a vehicle of doctrinal indoctrination but as an opening to the transcendental. As already explained, literature supplies opportunities for intelligence gathered up in an artful and superlative moment of beholding of what is fundamental, real, meaningful, and true. Literature provides an avenue for contemplation (theōria), facilitating a divine-like gaze upon the world. To derive morality from the Divine is a common religious strategy. Greek tragedy has its own account of fate (or karma) that revolves around a notion of poetic justice (a concept that has fallen out of favour among exegetes). Aristotle does not disavow such theological/ moral explorations, but he locates morality, more importantly, in a world that is striving to emulate God. On this sort of account, the circling of the planets, the reproduction of animals, and the mixing of the elements all participate in an orderly unfolding of events that aims at God as a final cause. Humans aim to be God-like in a more reflective, intelligent way. This is what philosophy is about. But this is also, I am arguing, what literature is about. It may seem strange that the philosophy of an ancient Greek pagan more known for his scientific outlook than for any religious discernment should provide the basis for a moral account of literature. In Aristotle, however, human endeavour links up to the wisdom perspective, and the wisdom perspective winds its way back to morality and to God. I have argued that literature is an encounter with the transcendental, but that encounter is not something separate from morality. Literature pushes us towards a fuller life, one that Aristotle

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identifies, in the most successful cases, with wisdom. When we successfully engage with wisdom, however, we move up to a level of aesthetic appreciation that is, according to Aristotle, the best, the most pleasant, and the most God-like state possible.

V I. 8 A K ie r k e g a a r d i an Addendum: M o d e r n Des pai r Aristotelian literary criticism is wide, not narrow. There are many compatible avenues of analysis. Turn, for example, to the modern existentialist Søren Kierkegaard – at first glance, a most un-Aristotelian thinker. If we could neatly sum up the differences between Aristotle and Kierkegaard, we might be tempted to say that Aristotle proposes objectivity as an epistemological ideal, whereas Kierkegaard places the emphasis on inwardness and subjectivity. This is overly simple. Still, Kierkegaard (directing his account against Hegel rather than Aristotle) proposes a relentlessly inward search for philosophical truth, through an experiential sort of self-exploration that puts one in touch with one’s authentic self. Kierkegaard believes that absolute truth is unattainable and that metaphysical systems are fragmentary and dangerous because they make systematic claims that falsify living human experience, riding roughshod over the particular, fallible, concrete reality of human life. It may seem, then, that any literary criticism based on Kierkegaardian principles would be opposed to the Aristotelian paradigm I have sketched out here. Quite to the contrary, I want to show that an Aristotelian approach to literature is entirely compatible with a genuinely Kierkegaardian one. Kierkegaard identifies, at the heart of modernity, a cancerous despair born of a personal sense of disappointment and failure. We all want to be Caesar, but we fail; we fail utterly. Kierkegaard explains, “When the ambitious man whose watchword was ‘Either Caesar or nothing’ does not become Caesar, he is in despair … Precisely because he did not become Caesar, he now cannot endure to be himself.”51 This selfloathing fills his every waking moment for he is continuously in touch with himself – that is, with the person who failed to become Caesar. Even if the despairing man had become Caesar, Kierkegaard believes he would still be in despair, for becoming Caesar is just another, more fanciful way of ridding ourselves of who we really are.

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Kierkegaard traces despair back to an inextricable self-hatred. Despairing agents want to be rid of themselves, but we cannot get rid of ourselves: that is a metaphysical impossibility. Kierkegaard explains: Despair is precisely self-consuming, but it is an impotent selfconsumption which is not able to do what it wills; and this impotence is a new form of self-consumption, in which … the despairer is not able to do what he wills, namely, to consume himself … [He feels a] gnawing canker whose movement is ­constantly inward, deeper and deeper, in impotent self-­ consumption. The fact that the despairer does not consume ­himself is so far from being any comfort to the despairing man that it is precisely the opposite, this comfort is precisely the ­torment … This precisely is the reason why he despairs … because he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot become nothing.52 Kierkegaard believes – insightfully – that we can be in despair without knowing it. Despair is an ontological condition: it is not just about how we happen to feel about ourselves. “One form of despair is precisely this of not being in despair, that is, not being aware of it.”53 Indeed, “not to be despairing may mean precisely to be despairing.”54 A smug, self-satisfied socialite may be immersed in despair, while someone in the throes of angst and dread may be moving out of despair towards authentic self-knowledge. Kierkegaard advises, “One may make a mistake and confuse despair with all sorts of transitory dejection or grief which pass away without coming to the point of despair. In this respect despair is unlike bodily sickness; for not to be sick cannot possibly mean to be sick; but not to be despairing may mean precisely to be despairing.”55 Kierkegaard’s self-satisfied, unknowing despairer is like Aristotle’s morally ignorant man whose conscience is so corrupted that he does not know the difference between right and wrong.56 Because they are living a phony life out of touch with their true selves, Kierkegaard’s despairers are unable to acknowledge their tragic status and will not be motivated to change their unsatisfying way of life. Hidden despair, the despair of the seemingly successful, is then an utter calamity. This insidious condition is such “that it can be so hidden in a man that he himself does not know it!”57

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Kierkegaard insists that those who feel despair are often less despairing than those who are pleased with themselves. If I feel despair, this may provide a therapeutic push in the right direction; this may force me to contend with the underlying cause of the disease, viz., the condition of self-alienation that Kierkegaard associates with modernity. Kierkegaard writes, “one who without affectation says that he is in despair is after all a little bit nearer, a dialectical step nearer to being cured than all those who … do not regard themselves as being in despair.”58 According to Kierkegaard, in modern society “the rare, the very rare exception is that one is not in despair.”59 Whatever the precise causes of this modern malaise, it seems to find abundant expression in criticism and literature. Witness Sylvia Plath’s short poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (1961): … The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God […] The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Plath’s poetry has a shrill intensity and an uncertain moral compass. The moon, that golden orb that illuminates soft romantic evenings, has been replaced by a sickly face that grimaces, mouth wide open like a zero, like the dreadful figure in Munch’s Scream. Plath’s moon does not shine down on Arnold’s melancholy Dover beaches; it drags menacing tides up and over the edges of the poet’s cramped personal life. But Plath is not alone. One might turn to countless authors – Kafka, Camus, Ionesco, Brecht, Beckett, Shaffer, and so on – for a description or a diagnosis of this modern moral disease of despair. So, what does this have to do with Kierkegaard and Aristotle? Begin with Kierkegaard. Those who bristle at any moral understanding of literature seem to be engaged in this project of self-alienation that Kierkegaard identifies with despair. The moral element in human judgment is the human element in human judgment. Getting rid of morality means getting rid of ourselves. Literature voided of moral content is empty of one central source of human aspiration.

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Uttering the Unutterable

Kierkegaard is, after all, a religious writer. He maintains that we are first and foremost spiritual beings and that modern positivism has blocked off access to our deeper spiritual selves. Because “the majority of men live without being thoroughly conscious that they are spiritual beings,” they collapse into despair.60 “Despair is expressed precisely by the fact that a person is unaware of being characterized as spirit.”61 Translated into the language of this book, Kierkegaard’s despairing agent denies the transcendental – the transcendental that can be found inside the agent. In Kierkegaard, the kingdom of God is inside all of us – not merely outside in some faraway heaven. Truth is a subjective journey inward, but the destination is a meeting with the Christian God. There is a spark of the transcendental inside us that we must confront if we are to restore contact with our deepest selves. Kierkegaard has Revelation to guide him, but Aristotle has Homer, Greek temple culture, and metaphysics. Aristotle is not combating the modern zeitgeist that denies the transcendent; if anything, he is proposing a more restrained and intellectualized account of the transcendent in opposition to a robust pagan exuberance that expresses itself in polyvalent mythology. But we cannot take the transcendental out of Aristotle without neglecting the final cause of the cosmos. In both Kierkegaard and Aristotle, thoughtful contemplation is a window onto the transcendental, variously construed. Kierkegaard has a darker Protestant account of human nature – we are all sinners needing to be saved through some interior movement of grace. Still, even in Kierkegaard, human self-realization is linked to a contact with the Divine, a contact that happens, in his own case, through an autobiographical philosophy that comes very close to literature. On an Aristotelian account, literature has a moral side. Kierkegaard, like Aristotle, views morality not as a matter of external conformity but as authentic self-realization. Seen from this perspective, any bold Nietzschean rhetoric about freeing ourselves from the prison of morality is only another expression of the modern despair, a rejection of an indispensable aspect of who we are and an alienation from an interior transcendental source that provides meaning and structure to human lives. One could complain that Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy signals a decisive rupture with traditional Aristotelian essentialism. This is misleading. Loosely put, Kierkegaard pushes philosophy inward towards a meeting with the transcendental inside the individual soul

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whereas Aristotle pushes philosophy outwards towards a transcendental final cause of everything that exists. One could argue that both aim at some sort of transcendental apprehension. Despite differences in method, the Aristotelian paradigm for literary appreciation is largely compatible with a Kierkegaardian approach. The same could be said for many other literary and philosophical treatments that may seem, at first glance, opposed to Aristotelianism.

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Notes

C ha p t e r O n e  1 Zhuangzi, Basic Writings, 141.  2 Winters, In Defense of Reason, 2.   3 Ibid., 21.   4 Ibid., 22.   5 Taylor, “Religious Literary Criticism,” 124. He continues, “that has been lacking in recent decades.”  6 Ibid.  7 Ibid.   8 Brother Leo, “Religion in the Study of Literature,” 4.   9 Matthew 17:2. 10 Luke 9:29–39. 11 “Nature has distinguished between the woman and the slave … But among the barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves.” Aristotle, Politics (Jowett) I.2.1252b1–6. 12 In an intriguing passage, for example, Aristotle writes, “Those principles whose activity is bodily cannot exist without a body, e.g. walking cannot exist without feet. For the same reason also [those bodily principles] ­cannot enter from outside … It remains, then, for reason alone so to enter [the body from the outside] and alone to be divine, for no bodily activity has any connection with the activity of reason.” Generation of Animals (Platt) II.3.736b22–8. There are other relevant passages. 13 Ibid., Economics (Armstrong) III.3. (No Bekker numbers.) 14 Cf. Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals. These issues have received abundant attention in the secondary literature.

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Notes to pages 10–24

15 For an extreme case, see Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, in ­particular, “Aristotle as ‘Cuttlefish,’” 30–46. 16 Bodéüs, Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals; McClymont, “Reading between the Lines.” 17 Gerson, Aristotle and Other Neoplatonists. 18 I will take up these technical issues elsewhere. 19 There is extensive commentary that picks up steam with Dodds’s 1966 essay, “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex.” 20 Brown and Franke, Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy, xii. Cf. Ames and Hall, Thinking from the Han. Thanks to Jiayu Zhang. 21 Ibid. 22 A more recent translation: “The Tao that can be told / Is not the eternal Dao. / The name that can be named / Is not the eternal name. / The ­unnameable is ­eternally real. / Naming is the origin of all particular things.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Mitchell), 1. 23 Ames, “Getting Past Transcendence,” 8. 24 Taylor, A Secular Age, 15. 25 Gordon, “Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God,” 670. 26 Ibid., 673. 27 Abbey, “Secular Age,” 15. 28 Gordon, “Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God,” 670. 29 Taylor, A Secular Age, 20, 16. 30 Goris and Aertsen, “Medieval Theories of Transcendentals.” 31 Descartes, Correspondence (Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, Kenny), 25. 32 Such as Meinong and Descartes. 33 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 380–1. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Sachs, “Aristotle: Poetics.” 38 Cf. the first line of William Empson’s last poem: “It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.” 39 For example, in Aristotle’s discussion of the principle of non-contradiction in his Metaphysics, IV.3-6, in ancient Skeptical arguments about “the ­criterion,” in Pascal’s De l’Esprit géométrique et de l’art de persuader and in Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) “Achilles and the Tortoise.” 40 Plato, Republic 509d–511e; 533d–534a. Cf. Bloom translation: Republic, 464n39. 41 Plato, Seventh Letter (Bury) 341c–d.

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42 Ibid., 342e–343a. 43 Cicero, De Natura Deorum (Rackman) II.xxviii.71–2. Original parenthesis. 44 Hoyt, “Etymology of Religion.” Hoyt sides with Cicero while discussing other alternatives. 45 Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, 131–2. 46 Cited in Gillman, Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 226. 47 Hoyt, “Etymology of Religion,” 127. 48 For Thales, see Aristotle, De Anima I.2.405a19–21, I.5.411a7–9. (Note that throughout the following chapters, I emend translations from the ­original Greek where necessary for grammatical consistency or to ­modernize style. Relevant philological disagreement is discussed.) 49 Phlegyas was said to have committed many other sins as well. 50 Virgil, Aeneid VI.617–20. 51 Eagleton, Reason, Faith, & Revolution, xi–xii. 52 Ibid, xii. 53 In, for example, A General View of Positivism. 54 In Latin: “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.” Or, in an earlier version: “Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora.” [It is useless to do with more what can be done with fewer.] Ockham, Tractatus de Corpus Christi, 29, qtd in Maurer, Philosophy of William of Ockham, 123. 55 Chatton, Reportatio, 1. d. 30, q. 1. a. 1., quoted in Maurer, “William of Ockham,” 127. 56 Cf. Groarke, “Following in the Footsteps of Aristotle.” 57 Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” 150–6. 58 Ibid., 153. 59 Cf. Aristotle, Physics II.4–8, Eudemian Ethics VIII.2, Magna Moralia II.8, Rhetoric I.5, Metaphysics VI.2.

C ha p t e r T wo   1 Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, 1.22.   2 Smallwood, “Criticism, Valuation, and Useful Purpose,” 714. Smallwood’s ­pragmatic response seems half-hearted.  3 May, Enlightenment in America, xiv.   4 Cited in Williams, “Faith No More.”  5 Descartes, Discourse on Method (Cottingham), 2.18–19.   6 Bailey, “Introduction,” in Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 10.   7 Descartes struggled against a skepticism spawned by the renewed interest in Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century.

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Notes to pages 39–58

  8 Descartes does not question everything despite giving every indication that he intends to do just that. See Popkin, History of Skepticism.   9 Selden and Widdowson, Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 120–1. 10 Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 49. 11 Young, Untying the Text, i. 12 Selden and Widdowson, Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 125. 13 Aristotelianism realism was never “naïve.” Some advance “direct realism” as the more accurate term. Cf. Le Morvan, “Arguments Against Direct Realism,” (2004); Niesiobędzki, Id Quod aut Id Quo,” 3–28. 14 Saussure, Nature of the Linguistic Sign, 842. 15 Campbell, “Structuralism,” 199–200. 16 Baudrillard, “From the Precession of Simulacra,” 1939. 17 Ibid., 1937. 18 Ibid., 1936. 19 Ibid. 20 My Italics. Ibid., 1937. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Cunningham, “Logocentrism,” 583–4. 24 Spivak translates it as “There is nothing outside the text” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158–9). Merquior’s translations: “there is no outside to the text” and “there is no outside-the-text” (From Paris to Prague, 220). “De hors-texte” means, literally, “outside-text.” 25 Cunningham, “Logocentrism,” 583–4. 26 Adamson, “Deconstruction,” 25. 27 My italics. Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” 275. 28 Derrida, “As If I Were Dead,” 218. 29 Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” 273. 30 Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” 209. 31 Rolfe, “Deconstruction in a Nutshell,” 275. The Norris quote, from Deconstruction Theory and Practice, xi. The Derrida expression, from “The Time Is Out of Joint,” 25. 32 The examples are from Le Larousse. 33 Derrida, “Différance,” 932–49. 34 Ibid., 947. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 949.

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37 Cf. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “Complex Ideas of Substance,” II.xxiii.2ff. Locke’s expression here is “something he [the believer] knew not what.” 38 Friedrich, “The Enlightenment Gone Mad (II),” 76. Citations from Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” 80, 95. 39 Ibid. Citations from David Lodge, Small World, 118. 40 Cf. Culler, On Deconstruction, 149n10. 41 Plato, Timaeus (Lee), 29c–d. 42 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.16.2.Resp. 43 Schulz, Veritas est adequatio intellectus et rei. 44 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (Cooper), 153–6. 45 Dicker, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, 30. Dicker makes reference here to Paton, Kant’s Metaphysics of Experience (cf. 1:166). 46 Ibid. 47 Moore and Bruder, Philosophy, 141. 48 Cf. Thomas Kuhn’s famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 49 Winters, In Defense of Reason, 12–13. 50 Cf. Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, I:471. Chapter T hr ee  1 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 227.   2 Hacking, “Leibniz and Descartes,” 51.  3 Ibid.  4 Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, 162.   5 For more extended discussion, see Peregrin, “Extensional vs. Intensional Logic,” 832–3, Church, Introduction to Mathematical Logic, 24–5.   6 Dummett, “Truth,” 141.  7 Talasiewicz, Philosophy of Syntax, 88.   8 Cf. Demopoulos, Logicism and Its Legacy, 10.   9 Snapper, “Logicism, Intuitionism, and Formalism,” 208. 10 Empson, Structure of Complex Words, viii. 11 Crockett, “Structure of Complex Words by William Empson,” 269–70. 12 Dummett, Frege, 434. 13 Ibid., 433. 14 Ibid., 434. 15 Ibid. 16 Wolf, “Philosophy of Language.” 17 Stoll and Enderton, Encyclopedia Britannica, “Set Theory.”

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Notes to pages 80–95

18 Kölbel, Truth without Objectivity, xii. 19 Ibid., xii–xiii. 20 Cf. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, XII.3. 21 Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.7.92b3. 22 Reid, “Art and Knowledge,” 124. 23 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Hicks), “Plato,” III.19. 24 Reid, “Art and Knowledge,” 118–19. 25 Cf. Langer, Philosophy in A New Key. 26 Druig, 262. In other words, “we must be able to articulate, reason, ­understand, and meaningfully perceive the world in a logical manner with feelings and emotions” (256). 27 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics III.6.1011b25, Categories 5.4a36–b2. 28 Reid, “Art and Knowledge,” 117. 29 Ibid., 117–20. 30 Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence, 161. 31 Ibid., 160. 32 My translation of the relevant passage as quoted in ibid., 160. 33 My translation, cited by ibid. (from Bergson’s Le Rire). 34 Pocklington and Tupper, No Place to Learn, 90. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 90–1. 38 Cf. Plato, Phaedo 89d–91c, Republic 411c4–e3, Laches 188c. 39 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Ross and Urmson) VI.3.1139b14–17ff. “The states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of ­affirmation or denial are five in numbers, i.e. art, knowledge, practical ­wisdom, philosophical wisdom, understanding.” 40 For much discussion of this issue, see Lavery and Groarke, Literary Form, Philosophical Content. 41 Plato, Republic VII.518b–d. 42 Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (Pickard-Cambridge) 34.183b36–184a8. 43 Ibid., Nicomachean Ethics (Ross), VI.7.1141a12–13. 44 My translation. Ibid. VI.7.1141a19–20. 45 Ibid. (Rackham) VI.8.1142a16–18. The point is that this restriction of wisdom to older people does not only apply to moral wisdom but to ­wisdom, metaphysics, and science generally. 46 Ibid. VI.6.1141b5–7. 47 Ibid. VI.7.1141b2–3. 48 Ibid. VI.6.1140b31ff., 1141b1. Hence the reference to Anaxagoras and Thales (and earlier philosophers) who were known to be

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practically foolish because they spent too much time staring up at the changeless heavens. 49 Ibid. (Ross) VI.7.1141a31. 50 Ibid. (Rackman) VI.7.1141b2–3. 51 Ibid. (Ross) VI.13.1145a8–9. 52 Ibid. X.7.1177a23–6. 53 Ibid. X.7.1177b1–2. 54 Ibid. X.7.1177a33–b1. Aristotle continues, “the wise man can perhaps contemplate better if he has colleagues, but still, he is the most self-­ sufficient.” Dialogue (conversation) is, evidently, a help to knowledge. 55 Ibid (my translation) VI.10.1143a25–8. The terms Aristotle uses are so very general, precise exegesis is difficult. 56 Cf., Plato, Republic (508e2–3). 57 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Rackham) V.11.1143b11. 58 Ibid (Ross) II.6.1106b18–23. 59 Gardner, “The Art of Fiction.” 60 Groarke, An Aristotelian Account of Induction, 121–2. 61 Ibid. 62 Emerson, “Editors to the Readers,” 3. 63 Cf. “Appendix Three: Words on Play,” in Suits, Grasshopper, 217–34. 64 Aristotle, Poetics (Fyfe) 5.1449a32–5. Cf. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy. There is no scholarly consensus on such issues. In a review of Aristotle on Comedy W.W. Fortenbaugh concluded, Caveat lector! 65 Kieran, “Tragedy versus Comedy.” 66 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 155–6. 67 Nehamas, “Subject or Abject.” 68 Cf. Epicurus’s “Letter to Menoeceus” in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Yonge), X.131: “When, therefore, we say that ­pleasure is a chief good, we are not speaking of the pleasures of the debauched man, or those which lie in sensual enjoyment, as some think who are ignorant, and who do not entertain our opinions, or else interpret them perversely; but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and the soul from confusion.” And ibid. X.136: “Now, freedom from disquietude, and freedom from pain, are states of pleasure.” 69 Throughout Fear and Trembling. 70 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 71. 71 Ibid, 65. 72 Ibid., 60. 73 Cf. Schmitt, Concept of the Political. 74 Barthes, Image-Music-Text (Heath), 147.

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Notes to pages 108–21

 75 Ibid.  76 Ibid.  77 Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 45.   78 Davis, “Babbitt, the Moral Imagination, and Progressive Education,” 53–4.   79 Wilson, “Notes on Babbitt and More,” 48.  80 Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, 69.   81 Cf. Winters, In Defense of Reason, 385–7.   82 Ibid., 553.  83 Ibid., 10.  84 Ibid., 33.  85 Ibid., 26.   86 Ibid., 20–1.   87 Ibid., 26.   88 Cf., for example, Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics VII.14.1248b3–6.   89 Gaius Musonius Rufus in Discourses of Epictetus (Matheson) 3.6, 354.   90 Jirásek, “Religion, Spirituality, and Sport.”   91 See Jirásek’s paper for many social science references.  92 Aristotle, De Anima (Smith) II.4.415a26–b1; Cf. Plato, Symposium, 207b–d.  93 Ibid., Protrepticus (Hutchinson and Johnson).  94 Ibid., Nicomachean Ethics X.8.1178b20–4, 1178b32. Cf. Protrepticus, B44.   95 Lacey, “Laws,” 122.   96 Ladyman, “Theories and Theoretical Terms,” 413.  97 Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy, 4n3.  98 Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, 200.   99 Again, cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.8.1178b20–4, 1178b32 and Protrepticus B44. 100 Sorabji rejects the idea that thinkers such as Plato and Plotinus believe in non-discursive thinking. This is extreme. Cf. Sorabji, “Myths about Non-Propositional Thought.” 101 Ibid., 298. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. As evidence for the second point, he refers to Metaphysics VII. II.1037a33b7, where Aristotle “says the subject is identical with its essence.” 104 Von Fritz, “νοοσ and Noein in the Homeric Poems,” 90. 105 Ziguras, Aristotle’s Rational Empiricism, 163. Ziguras argues that Aristotle’s account of induction mirrors the objective idealism that

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one finds in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. See “4.13: “Kurt von Fritz on νοῡϛ in Homer and the Pre-Socratics,” 154–66. Note, the verb νοῑεν = νοέω. 106 As in Aristotle’s Historia Animalium or History of Animals. 107 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Ross) X.7.1177b18–25. 108 Ibid. (Rackham) X.7.1177a15–18, 1177b27–8. 109 Ibid., Metaphysics XII.9.1074b33–4. 110 Cf. ibid., Magna Moralia II.15.1212b37-1213a7. 111 Ibid., Nicomachean Ethics (Ross) X.8.1178b30–2. 112 Cf. Cingalia Aristotle and Meander on the Ethics of Understanding, 68. 113 Aristotle, Poetics IX.1451b5–7. 114 Cf. Ibid., Posterior Analytics II.19. For a treatment of this whole ­discussion, see Biondi, Aristotle, 10–11, 228, 235–6, 257–61. 115 Cf. Groarke, An Aristotelian Account of Induction, 207–8 for references and explanation. Groarke calls this mental exercise “recognition.” 116 Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 11.1452a30ff, 16.1454b19ff. 117 Also, the discovery that Philomela, whose tongue has been cut out, is able to orchestrate by weaving a picture of her rape into her embroidery and, also, Oedipus’s final realization that he has killed his father and married his mother. 118 Cf. Ziguras, Aristotle’s Rational Empiricism, 164; Von Fritz, “Nous, Noein and their Derivatives,” 224. (Cf. Homer, Iliad 3.399.) 119 Plato, Timaeus (Jowett) 29d–30a. 120 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.8. 121 Plato, Theaeteus (Jowett) 155d. 122 Aristotle, Metaphysics (Ross) I.2.982b12–20. 123 Ibid., I.2.983a12–20. 124 Heidegger, What Is Philosophy?, 6. 125 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Rackman) X.7.1177b19–23. 126 Ibid., X.7.1177a24–27. 127 Ibid., Politics 2.1.1253a10–11, 1253a30. 128 Ibid., Nicomachean Ethics (Ross) II.1.1103b1. 129 Ibid., I.3.1094b28–1095a1. 130 Ibid., I.3.1094b13–27. 131 Ibid. 132 There is much conjecture about who this Demetrius really is. Probably not Demetrius of Phalerum, to whom the manuscript was traditionally ascribed. 133 Demetrius, Demetrius on Style (Roberts) III.209, 167, 217, 171, 211, 167, 219, 171, 220, 171. 134 Original italics. Leavy, To Blight with Plague, 7–8.

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Notes to pages 134–49

135 Ibid. 136 As Aristotle suggests in Nicomachean Ethics, VII.1.1145b1–7.

C ha p t e r F o u r   1 Suits, Grasshopper, 217. Unless otherwise indicated, I use the third edition.   2 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Anscombe) # 66.    3 Ibid. # 67.   4 Suits, Grasshopper, 211.    5 Ibid. (1st ed.), 55.   6 Ibid., 21.    7 Myers, “Who Killed Literature?” Myers is somewhat inconsistent, but overlook that here.    8 Kamuf, “Fiction and the Experience of the Other,” 156.   9 Ibid., 156–7.   10 Ibid., 157.  11 Robson, The Definition of Literature, 13.   12 Ibid., 18.  13 Castle, The Literary Theory Handbook, 7.   14 Rader “Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation,” 250.   15 “Generally accepted opinions [ἔνδοξα] … are those which commend ­themselves to all or to the majority or to the wise – that is, to all the wise or to the majority or the most distinguished of them.” Aristotle, Topica (Forster) I 100b22–3. Cf. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1.6.1216b31–5.  16 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (Irwin and Fine) II.10.93b29–40.  17 Suits, Grasshopper, 201.   18 Wilkins, “Essentialism in Biology,” 395.   19 Views expressed, for example, in Dewey’s The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, Popper’s The Open Society, Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and Hull’s “The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy.”   20 Wilkins, “Essentialism in Biology,” 397–8.   21 Ibid., 397; Popper, Open Society, 25ff.   22 Wilkins, “Essentialism in Biology,” 399; Quine, From a Logical Point of View, 173ff. One notes in Quine the same metaphysical suspicion one finds in Wittgenstein. Quine turns a metaphysical doctrine about the nature of things into a semantic doctrine about the meanings of words.   23 This is Wilkins’s paraphrase of Alison Stone’s “Essentialism and AntiEssentialism in Feminist Philosophy.”   24 In Scriven, “The Logic of Criteria.”   25 Wilkins, “Essentialism in Biology,” 399–400.

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26 Ibid., 406. 27 Cf. Richard Boyd’s well-known “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa,” and “Kinds, Complexity and Multiple Realization.’” 28 Wilkins, “Essentialism in Biology,” 406. The incident is recounted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers VI.20. 29 Aristotle, Poetics (Fyfe) 23.1459a4–8. 30 The Greek runs: “τὸ γὰρ εὖ μεταφέρειν τὸ τὸ ὅμοιον θεωρεῖν ἐστιν.” Notice the use of the verb form of the term “theôria” (or theory), previously discussed. 31 Aristotle, Poetics (Fyfe), n. 1. 32 Cf. Groarke, Aristotelian Account of Induction, 217–20. 33 Köstenberger and Patterson, Invitation to Biblical Interpretation, 667. Interior quotations are from Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 105; Ryken, Words of Delight, 169; Frye, Great Code, 54. 34 Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 21.1457b. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle equates ­metaphor and simile: “The simile is also a metaphor … since they are really the same thing.” Aristotle, Rhetoric (Roberts) III.4.1406b20–7. 35 Aristotle, Topics (Pickard-Cambridge) I.17.108a6–12. 36 He is discussing metaphor from analogy or proportion. Aristotle, Poetics (Butcher) 21.1457b20–4. 37 Aristotle, On the Soul (Smith) III.2.426b3. 38 Ibid., Nicomachean Ethics (Ross) V.3.1131b3–5. 39 Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19.100a3–10. 40 Aristotle, Topics (Pickard-Cambridge) II.18.108b7–9. 41 Ibid., II.18.108a36–8. 42 Ibid., I.18.108a37–108b31. 43 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 9. 44 Ibid., 8. 45 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Ross) VI.4.1140a10–15. 46 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.17.99a-28–9. 47 Hence Aristotle’s inductive syllogism about bilelessness and longevity in Prior Analytics II.23.68b8–36. 48 Cf. Eagleton, “What Is Literature?,” in Literary Theory, 1–14. 49 Culler, Literary Theory, 17–18. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 20. There is more to say below. If, however, Culler readily identifies “songs, transcriptions of conversations, and autobiographies,” as less than literature, this suggests that non-literature is clearly different from literature. And yet the general point of his argument seems to be that no clear difference exists.

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Notes to pages 158–77

52 Ibid., 21–2. 53 Ibid., 20. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 39–40. 56 Ibid., 18. 57 Ibid., 36. 58 My italics. Ibid., 21. 59 Cf. Ellis, Theory of Logical Criticism. 60 Culler, Literary Theory, 22. 61 Pollan, “Weeds Are Us.” 62 Culler, Literary Theory, 34. 63 Ibid., 24. 64 Ibid., 25. 65 Ibid., 29. 66 My italics. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Anscombe) §43. 67 Ibid., §23. 68 Ibid., §1. 69 Ibid. 70 Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “definition.” 71 Wittgenstein (Anscombe) § 28. 72 Cf. Ellis, “Wittgensteinian Thinking in Theory of Criticism.” 73 Plato, Meno 80d–81e. 74 Cited in Suits, Grasshopper, 199. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 206–7. 77 In his Battle of the Books, Swift compares modern authors to spiders, and ancient authors to bees. The inimitable Henry Veatch borrows this comparison for his Two Logics, 11–16. (He sides with the ancients.) 78 Suits, Grasshopper, 206. 79 Ibid., 208–9. 80 Bacon, Novum Organon, XLIIV. 81 Ibid., LXI. 82 Good, “A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland.” 83 Gibson, What Is Literature?, 191. 84 Suits, Grasshopper, 219. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Groarke and Tindale, Good Reasoning Matters! 98. 88 Suits lists two possible objections to his own definition: (1) “that it [is] too broad by including [things] not called games” and (2) that is “is too narrow because it excludes something … called a game” (Grasshopper, 211).

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281

C ha p t e r F i ve  1 Aristotle, Physics II.3.194b16–195a25, Metaphysics V.2.1013a24–1014b30.   2 Although some of his modern and historical interpreters do.  3 Aristotle, Physics II.7.198a24–7.  4 Ibid., Metaphysics (Ross) I.3.984b14–15.   5 Aristotle is corroborating the point: “by omitting any differentiae [we] fail to state the essence of the term.” Aristotle, Topics (Pickard-Cambridge) V.8.146b30–1.   6 Ibid. V.8.146b23.   7 Ibid. V.8.146b20–2.   8 Ibid. V.8.146b25–6.   9 Aristotle continues, “It is not the man who gives way to any sort of ­pleasure … who is incontinent, but only he who gives way to a certain kind of pleasure.” Ibid. V.8.146b26–8. 10 Webster, Republic of Letters, 123. 11 Sprinkler, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Chicago Criticism.” 12 Wimsatt, “Chicago Critics.” 13 Ibid., 54. 14 Ibid., 55. 15 Ibid., 54–5. 16 Graff, Professing Literature, 236–7. 17 “Mr. McKeon a specialist in the history of philosophic systems … looms massively and portentously behind the whole Chicago effort.” Wimsatt, “Chicago Critics,” 52. 18 Ibid., 57. 19 Ibid., 74. 20 Ibid., 73. 21 Dufrenne, Esthetique et philosophie, 132–3. Discussed in Ames, “Structuralism, Language, and Literature,” 94. 22 Henderson and Brown, “Structuralism.” 23 Childs, “New Criticism,” 120–4. 24 According to Aristotle, Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus mistakenly assumed that matter was “the only cause”; Anaxagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles tacked on efficient cause (to “move things and bring them together”), but ignored formal and final cause; the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus explained everything solely in terms of material cause (atoms and empty space); the Pythagoreans explained everything in terms of form (geometrical shape); the Monists, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and Melissus, reduced everything to a single formal or material substance,

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Notes to pages 186–94

and Plato explained everything in terms of form. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.3.983b20ff, I.3.984a17–18, I.3.984b30–1, I.4.985b5ff, I.5.985b23ff, I.5.98620ff, I.6.987b2ff. 25 Olson, “William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction,” 62. Olson is responding here to the linguistic side of modern criticism, but as he says on the same page “the subject-matter hypothesis and the linguistic hypotheses are fundamentally the same, being only separate developments from the same general hypothesis.” 26 Wimsatt, “Chicago Critics,” 61. 27 My italics. Crane, “Introduction,” Critics and Criticism, 13. 28 Wimsatt, “Chicago Critics,” 68. 29 Cf. with respect to the “intentional fallacy”: “They are always ready to appeal outside the poem to the intention of the poet.” Ibid., 69. Re: the species fallacy: the “point of reference … is so heavily schematized that it … lie[s] outside the composition itself – in the name or theory, for ­instance, of some poetic ‘species.’” Ibid. The heresy of the paraphrase was named after the title of a chapter in Cleanth Brooks’s 1947 collection of essays The Well Wrought Urn. Winters had discussed this. 30 Wimsatt, “Chicago Critics,” 73. 31 Ibid., 54. 32 Throughout Aristotle’s Poetics, for example. 33 Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 23–4. 34 Aristotle, Poetics (Janko), IX.51a37–51b11. 35 Ibid. (Sachs) 23.1459a17–23. 36 Ibid., (Janko) “Introduction,” xv. 37 Aristotle, Physics (Hardie, Gaye) II.8.199a15–18. Ὅλως δὲ ἡ τέχνη τὰ μὲν ἐπιτελεῖ ἃ ἡ φύσις ἀδυνατεῖ ἀπεργάσασθαι, τὰ δὲ μιμεῖται.” 38 Sidney, Defense of Poesy, 52. 39 Cf. Aristotle’s distinction between doing and making in Nicomachean Ethics V.2.1140a1–6. 40 Aristotle, Physics II.2.22. 41 Ibid., Poetics (Sachs) 1.1447a14–27. Sachs translates “harmonia” (ἁρμονία) as harmony, but surely Aristotle has in mind music in general. (Cf. n. 5.) 42 Cf. Hagberg, “Aristotle’s ‘Mimesis’ and Abstract Art.” 43 Hence Aristotle’s argument about the rational life as the function of human nature as in, for example, Nicomachean Ethics I.7.1097b22ff. 44 Gairaud Ruiz, “Deconstructing Totalitarism,” 9–2. 45 Ibid., 11. (Internal quotation: Childers and Hentzi, Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, 510.)

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283

46 Ibid., 15. 47 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 116. 48 Ibid., 113–14. 49 Gairaud Ruiz, “Deconstructing Totalitarism,” 16. 50 Cf. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.iii.19. Locke also uses the term “substance” to refer to individual objects like tables, houses, trees, and so on. Aristotle does have a theory of prime ­matter, but that is a more complicated issue. 51 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 17. 52 “Aristotle defines the soul as “the form of a natural body having life potentially within it.” Aristotle, De Anima (Smith) II.1.412a20–1. 53 “Suppose that the eye were an animal: sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye … when seeing is removed it is no longer an eye.” Ibid., De Anima (Smith) II.1.412b17–22. 54 He is borrowing a theme from Roman Jacobson. Morson, “The Russian Debate on Narrative,” 215. 55 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 2. 56 Culler, Literary Theory, 28. 57 I assume the letters are authentic, the majority opinion. But even if they were not authentic, the same point holds. 58 Derrida, Acts of Literature, 49. 59 Miller, “Literature and Scripture,” 215. 60 Ibid., 209. 61 Ibid. 62 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 15. 63 My translations. Aristotle, Physics II.3.194b25, 195a12–17. 64 Findlay, “Neoplatonism of Plato,” 36. Plato describes the “Receptacle” as shaking – but it has to be something if it is able to move. 65 Cf. Byrne, Aristotle’s Science of Matter and Motion; De Haas, Philoponus’ New Definition of Prime Matter, xii, n. 2. 66 “The totality is something besides the parts.” Aristotle, Metaphysics (Ross) VIII.6.1045a 8–10ff. 67 Eliot, Little Gidding (V.216–23) 207–8. 68 Winchester, Some Principles of Literary Criticism, 36–7. 69 Ibid., 38–40. 70 Cf. Groarke, “Intensional Definition of Art.” 71 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” 21. 72 Fink, “Introduction,” 14. (Aquinas, De principiis naturae, 3.352.) Cf. Aveling, “Cause.” 73 Aristotle, On the Soul (Smith) II.4.415b8–28.

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Notes to pages 210–29

  74 Cf. Ibid., History of Animals V.19. 551a1ff.   75 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Intentional Fallacy,” 3.   76 Cf. Groarke, “Following in the Footsteps of Aristotle.”   77 Samuel 16:7.   78 Eagleton, “Revolt of the Reader,” 449–52.   79 Cf. Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” 723–4. Discussed below.  80 Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 327.   81 Ibid., 331.   82 Ibid., 326.   83 This is a modern-day trope. When it comes to visual art, one finds a ­similar line of reasoning chez authors such as Paul Ziff, Arthur Danto and George Dickie.  84 Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 332.   85 Ibid., 331.   86 Phelan, “From Data, Danda, and Disagreement,” 1032.  87 Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 308–9.  88 Plato, Laws (Taylor) 889e–90a.  89 Aristotle, De Anima III.4.429b32–430a2.   90 Ibid. III.5.430a24.   91 Cf. Groarke, Aristotelian Account of Induction, 325–62. More ­commentary forthcoming.   92 2 Tim 3:16. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful.”  93 McMahon Divine Fury, xiii.  94 Schopenhauer, Art of Literature, “On Genius.”   95 There are complications. For example, Aristotle suggests that rain falling from the sky is not, properly speaking, teleological. Cf. Aristotle, Physics II.8.198b11–19. Yet he also suggests that the cycles of day and night, rain and dryness, season after season do have a final cause (God).   96 Cf. Ibid. II.9.200a34.  97 Ibid. II.8.199a26–30.   98 Ibid. II.9.  99 Malkiel, Stones Speak, 77. 100 Ibid., 76, n. 42. The quotation is from Johnson’s “Essay on Epitaphs” (Gentleman’s Magazine) in the Oxford Authors collection Samuel Johnson, 97. 101 Ibid., 77. 102 Highet, Anatomy of Satire, 156. 103 Ruurs, The Power of Poems, 16. 104 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Critique of Judgment.

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285

105 Sartre, “Humanism of Existentialism,” 61. 106 Cf. the Incompleteness Theorems and the Undefinabilty Theorem. 107 Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, 150. 108 Kaestle, “History of Readers,” 44–5. 109 Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics, 208. 110 Winters, In Defense of Reason, 11. 111 Henninger, “Durand of Saint Pourçain,” 325. Cf. Maurer, “William of Ockham,” 381. 112 Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” 742. For discussion see Mitchell, Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. See also Knapp and Michaels, “A Reply to Richard Rorty,” Critical Inquiry (1985); “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,” Critical Inquiry (1987); “Reply to George Wilson” Critical Inquiry (1992), Fish, “Towards Uncritical Practice,” Butcher, “Unbinding Traditions,” and many other sources. 113 Ibid., 741. 114 Ibid., 724. 115 Ibid., 742. 116 Cummings, “O sweet spontaneous,” 53. 117 Dante, Divine Comedy (Cary), (Paradise: I.100–3), 288. 118 Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” (lines 1–4), 286. 119 Wordsworth, “Tintern Abby,” (lines 96–114) 89. 120 Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 526. He writes, in a note: “There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.” (In Queen Mab [VII, n. 13] 803.) 121 Empson, “Let It Go,” 99. 122 Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” (lines 41–6), 107–8. 123 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X.8.1079a31–2.

Chapter Six   1 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X.7.1177b21–1178a1.    2 Ibid. (Ross) X.7.1177b1.   3 Ibid. VI.7.1141a20–5.   4 Ibid. I.8.1099a13–21.   5 Ibid. VII.3.1147a12.   6 Ibid., Politics (Jowett) VIII.5.1340a15–18.   7 Xenophanes, Xenophanes of Colophon (Lesher) 11, 22.    8 Sidney, “Defense,” par. 17, 15.    9 Ibid., par. 34, 23.

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Notes to pages 249–56

10 Ibid., par. 34, 26. 11 Winters, In Defense of Reason, 3. 12 Sidney, par. 36, 25. 13 Arnold, William Wordsworth, xvi. 14 Winters, In Defense of Reason, 28. 15 Ibid., 2. 16 Ibid., 23. 17 Ibid., 28. 18 Gardner, On Moral Fiction. (Cf. his “Idea of Moral Criticism.”) 19 Ibid., 5, 6, 15, 18, 19. 20 “Ibid., “Art of Fiction.” 21 Garner, “John Gardner.” 22 Aristotle Politics (Jowett) VII.17.1336b13–15. 23 Ibid., VII.17.1336b20–3. 24 Cf., for example, Booth, The Company We Keep; Gaut, “The Ethical Criticism of Art”; Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible”; Blackham, Fable as Literature; Hakemulder, The Moral Laboratory. 25 Cf. Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack, Mapping the Ethical Turn. 26 Goldberg, Agents and Lives, 5. 27 “There is no single account of why ethical criticism has lost authority.” Goodheart, “Friends,” 23. 28 Gregory, “Redefining Ethical Criticism,” 273–4. 29 Ibid., 276–7. 30 Thrasymachus is Socrates’s early opponent in the Republic; Callicles, a student of Gorgias. Callicles may have been a real or merely a fictional character. Either way, he epitomizes the thinking prominent in some Athenian circles. Cf. Groarke, “Callicles.” 31 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (from A Nietzsche Reader, Hollingdale) #89, 105. Nietzsche, always slippery, suggests further that “the tyranny of such arbitrary laws” may be a part of the workings of nature. What is important, for our purposes, is the way this trope of artificial morality ­permeates his work. 32 Ibid., The Wanderer and His Shadow (Hollingdale) #59, 85. 33 Ibid., Human, All Too Human (Hollingdale) #48, 75. 34 Ibid., Twilight of the Idols, “The Improvers of Mankind” (Hollingdale) #93, 119. 35 Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 15. 36 He distinguishes between first- and second-order views about morality, between meta-ethical and normative belief. Ibid. 37 Drefcinski, “The Superficial Sophistication of Moral Relativism,” 56.

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38 Variously referred to as emotivism, intuitionism, non-cognitivism, and expressivism. Espoused by figures such as Moore, Stevenson, Richards, Ayer, and Hare. 39 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Hollingdale) #49, 76. 40 Hare, Freedom and Reason, 123. 41 Leave aside the scandal about de Man’s personal life that erupted after his death. Cf. Balfour, “De Man’s Itineraries,” 12–13. 42 De Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” 293. Cf. Lehman, Signs of the Times, 209. 43 Borrowing the concept from J.L. Austin. 44 De Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” 286. 45 Ibid., 299. 46 Gunn, Criticism and Society, 42. 47 Ibid. 48 Jacobs, Skirting the Ethical, xvi, xvii. 49 Cf. Groarke, Moral Reasoning, 147-201. 50 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics I.1; Matthew Kostelecky, “Not Induction’s Problem”; Elenore Stump, “Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge.” 51 A motto attributed to Cesare Borgia. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death (Lowrie), 26. 52 Ibid., 26. 53 Ibid., 33. 54 Ibid., 37. 55 Ibid., 35. 56 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII.8.1150b29ff. 57 Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death (Lowrie), 41. 58 Ibid., 39. 59 Ibid., 33. 60 Ibid., 39. 61 Ibid., 37.

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W o r k s b y A ri s totle Countless individual editions and translations are available in print and online. For the general reader, some of the most important sources: Collected Works Aristotle in 23 Volumes, various translators, editors. Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, various dates. With Greek. (Includes among other items Art of Rhetoric, translated by John H. Freese; Demetrius on Style, translated by W.R. Roberts; Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Harris Rackham; Poetics, translated by William Hamilton Fyfe; Topica, translated by Edward S. Forster.) Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. 2 volumes. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1984. (Includes among other items Categories, translated by John Loyd Ackrill; Economics, translated by Edward S. Forster and G.C. Armstrong; Eudemian Ethics, translated by J. Solomon; Generation of Animals, translated by Aurthur Platt; Metaphysics, translated by William David Ross; Nicomachean Ethics, translated by William David Ross and James O. Urmson; On the Heavens, translated by John Leofric Stocks; Physics translated by R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye; Poetics, ­translated by Ingram Bywater; Posterior Analytics, translated by Jonathan Barnes; Prior Analytics, translated by A.J. Jenkinson; Rhetoric, translated by W. Rhys Roberts; Topics, translated by Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge; Politics, translated by Benjamin Jowett.) Works of Aristotle. 12 volumes. Edited by William David Ross and John Alexander Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–52. (Includes among

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Individual Volumes Aristotle: Selections. Translated with introduction, notes, and glossary by Terrence Irwin and Gail Fine. (Includes Posterior Analytics.) Indianapolis, i n : Hackett, 1995. Aristotle’s Ethics: Writings from the Complete Works. Revised and edited with an introduction by Jonathan Barnes and Anthony Kenny. Princeton, n j: Princeton University Press, 2014. Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary. (Greek Text.) Edited by William David Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. De Anima. Translated by John Alexander Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931. Ethica Nicomachea. (Greek text.) Edited by Ingram Bywater. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Metaphysics. Translated by William David Ross. (Two volumes.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins. Chicago, i l: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated with introduction, notes, and glossary by Terrence Irwin. Indianapolis, i n : Hackett, 1999. Nicomachean Ethics. (Bilingual edition.) Translated by Harris Rackham. Cambridge, m a: Harvard University Press, 1934. Nicomachean Ethics. Translation, introduction, and notes by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis, i n : Hackett, 2004. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by William David Ross. Internet Classics Archive. Accessed 5 November 2020. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/ nicomachaen.html. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated with an introduction by William David Ross and revised by John Lloyd Ackrill and James O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Ziguras, Jakob. “Aristotle’s Rational Empiricism: A Goethean Interpretation of Aristotle’s Theory Knowledge.” Philosophy PhD thesis, University of Sydney (Australia), 2010. Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu 莊子, Master Zhuang) Zhuangzi: Basic Writings. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

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Index

Abby, Ruth, 18 academic community, 89–91, 220, 253, 255–6 accidental traits/properties, 147 Adamson, Joseph, 53 Aertsen, Jan, 19 affective fallacy, 208 agency, 204 agnosticism, 239 ambiguity, 115–16 Ames, Roger, 16 amoralism, 254–7 anagnorisis, 125, 126 analysis: atomism in, 204; ­panoramic, 35–6 analytic philosophy, 72, 81 animals, humans as rational, 130 anti-essentialism: anti-, 136–40; of Hull, 148 anti-intentionalism, 213. See also intentional fallacy antirealism: in Baudrillard, 48, 50–1; critique of, 63–8; reality in, 82. See also Derrida, Jacques; language: -games; realism antisemitism, 105–6 appreciation, 131–2

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Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas Aristotelian literary criticism, 237–41 Aristotelianism: and bad ­transcendence, 114–16; vs ­contemporary views, 259; ­criticism of, 254; essentialism, 10, 143, 149; fundamentalist approaches to, 228; literary ­criticism, 130–5; logic, 82, 83; mimesis, 190; misconceptions of, 14; morality (importance of), 245; noumena vs phenomena (Kant), 20; realism, 68–71; spirit of, 183; stereotypes of, 228; ­substance in, 58; textual sources in, 7; truth, 118–23; utility of, as a methodology, 185. See also Chicago School Aristotle: on arguments, 97; art as imitating nature, 197; ­biographical depictions of, 8; categories in, 19; contemporary interpretations of, 3, 7–8; ­contrasted with Plato, 9–10; De Anima, 209–10; ­definitions

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310 Index

in, 144, 150, 180; on the Divine, yearning for, 117; Economia, 8; on emotions, 97; essentialism of, 8–9; on ethics, 92, 132; Ethics, 97; on females vs males, 8; first principles in, 35; four causes, theory of, 178–82; God in, 120, 122; happiness in, 4; on ­inspiration, 114; on the ­intellectual life, 88; intelligence in, 92–3, 95; knowledge in, 25, 69, 126, 173; living beings in, 155, 157; logic in, 101; material cause in, 198, 202; on metaphor, 153; Metaphysics, 128; moral realism of, 259–63; morality in, 260–1; Nicomachean Ethics, 92–3, 120, 122, 132; as a Platonist, 24; on poetics, 222; Poetics, 7, 262; Politics, 130, 252; politics of, 9; Posterior Analytics, 144; Protrepticus, 117–18; religiosity of, 9–10, 28, 36, 59, 96, 129, 262–3; on ­science, 31; scientific naturalism of, 36; self-realization in, 246; on sophists, 93–4; the soul in, 197, 209–10; substance in, 151; synthesis in, 35; textual sources in this book, 12; theory in, 122, 124, 127–9; Topics, 182; on tragedy, 11, 125; on truth, 86; virtues in, 261; wisdom (account of), 92–6, 243; world view of, 241. See also final cause Arnold, Matthew, 249–50, 252 art: categories of, 233; good vs bad, 251–2; and imitation/mimesis, 7, 189, 197; and nature, 130, 190, 197

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artifacts, causes of, 178–9 atheism, 239 Augustine, 169 Austin, J.L., 81 authorial intention, 107, 211, 220, 221, 229. See also intentional fallacy authority: arguments from, 68; and deconstruction, 54, 196; ­literature as, 73; of readers, 229; and religion, 109 Babbitt, Irving, 89, 110–12, 115, 250 Bacon, Francis, 175 Bailey, Andrew, 39 Barthes, Roland, 107–10, 127, 185, 215, 217 Bataille, Georges, 104 Baudrillard, Jean, 48–52, 60 Beardsley, Monroe, 208–9. See also intentional fallacy beauty, 179, 191 Beckett, Samuel, 98 Bergson, Henri, 86, 88 Berkeley, Goerge, 70 binary oppositions, 257, 261 biography, 213–14 biology, 148 Blackham, H.J., 253 Blake, William, 238, 239 Bloom, Allan, 255–6 Bodéüs, Richard, 10 bodily organs and final cause, 225 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 62–3 Booth, Wayne, 252–3 Boyd, Richard, 151 Brown, Christopher, 185 Brown, Nahum, 16

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Index

Callimachus, 95 Calvinism, 112 Carroll, Lewis, 23, 176 Castle, Gregory, 141 casuality, 207–12 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 51 catharsis, 23, 129 Caulfield, Holden, 51 causality: philosophy as explaining, 128. See also material cause cause-and-effect, 63–4, 66, 94 celebrities, in academia, 90 Chatton, Walter, 29–30, 31 Chatton-Occam debate, 29–30, 31 Chicago School, 182–9; Aristotelian approach of, 9, ­182–3; on criticism, 193; ­criticism of, 187, 188; Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, 183–4; critique by, 197–8; critique of, 183–4; form, emphasis on, 194; material cause, opposition to, 203; ­Neo-Aristotelianism of, 3; vs New Criticism, 203–4; strategy of, 227; and structuralism, 185; ­teleology, 31 Christianity: Reformation, 246; the Transfiguration, 6 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 25–6, 27 close reading, 185, 194, 257. See also reading Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 26 colour (perception of), 65 comedy, 84, 101, 127, 212; ­purpose of, 226; vs tragedy, 102. See also laughing Comte, Auguste, 29 conscience, in literature (Babbitt), 110

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consciousness, 88 contemplation, 120, 232 content, 220–1 Continental philosophy, 72 copying. See mimesis Cornford, Francis, 119 cosmology. See Plato Coubertin, Pierre de, 117 Crane, Hart, 113, 184, 186–7 Crane, Ronald Salmon, 9 criticism: moral, 248–54; natural language approach to, 116; ­politicization of, 254 Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern (Chicago School), 183–4 Crockett, Campbell, 77–8 Culler, Jonathan: on defining ­literature, 157–9; formal ­diversity objection, 164–5; poetry in, 167; semantic ­objection, 160–4; shared ­properties objection, 165–8; and structuralism, 41 Cumming, E.E., 237–8 Cunningham, Valentine, 52–3 Dante Alighieri, 238–9 Darwinism vs essentialism, 148 Davidson, Donald, 80 Davis, Glenn, 111 decentring, as centring critic, 60 deconstruction: Derrida’s definitions of, 53–4; goals of, 196; politics of, 196; as rival to metaphysics, 53; tactics of, 195; against unity, 194–8. See also de Man, Paul definitions, 121; belief in, 153; ­definitions of, 142–4; vs ­descriptions, 181; difficulty of, 141; impossibility of, 156, 158;

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312 Index

as like a metaphor, 153–6; by material cause, 198–202; ­nominal vs scientific, 144; origins of, 173–7; science by definition, 150, 153; Wittgenstein on, ­169–70. See also four causes, theory of (Aristotle) dei Rossi, Azariah, 226 delight, use of term, 227 de Man, Paul, 257–9 Demetrius, 133–4 Derrida, Jacques: criticism of, 60; death of metaphysics in, 127; deconstruction, 53–4; différance, 55–6, 57, 58, 59; eschatology in, 59; on fictionality in literature, 200–1; logocentrism, 52–3; metaphysical skepticism, 52–60; praise for, 195; reception of, 59–60, 195; the trace in, 57–8; via negativa legacy in work, 57 Descartes, René, 21, 38–9, 70, 271n7 descriptions: vs definitions, 181; of physical objects, 186 descriptive definition of literature, 140–1 despair, 98, 264–5 Dicker, Georges, 64 différance (Derrida), 55–6, 57, 58, 59 Dillon, John, 24 Diogenes Laertius, 86, 95, 151–2 disjointed writing, 195 Divine: Descartes on the, 21; and inspiration, 222–3; in ­literature, 238–9 divinity: and literature, 123–7; ­orientation to, 4–5 Dodgson, Charles, 23

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Drefcinski, Shane, 255–6 Dummett, Michael, 75, 78 durée (Bergson), 86 Durig, Alexander, 86 Eagleton, Terry: on defining ­literature, 156, 232; on Derrida, 195; literariness, 199; on the Readers Liberation Movement, 215–16; on religion in criticism, 29; on romanticism, 196–7 Eckhart, nomen innominabile, 58 Economia (Aristotle), 8 education, 94, 96. See also academic community efficient cause, 207–8, 222–5, 237 efficient/moving cause, 178, 179, 186 Eliot, T.S., 30, 110, 204–5 Ellis, John, 151 eloquence, 98, 206, 252 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 101, 205 emotions, 97, 242, 261 empeiria (knowledge by experience), 173 Empson, William, 239–40, 270n38; The Structure of Complex Words, 77 Enderton, Herbert, 79–80 endoxa, 134–5 Enlightenment, 38, 40 entelechy, 210 Epicureanism, 256 Epicurus, 4, 275n68 epistemology: faith to skepticism within, 41; and humility, 243; in literary theory, 37; and logic, 76; and metaphor, 154–5; ­suspicion of, 37. See also knowledge

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Index

epitaphs, 226 eschatology, 49, 59 essence, use of term, 150, 151 essentialism: Aristotelian, 143, 149; Culler on, 163–4; vs Darwinism, 148; definitions, 147; examples of, 146; methodological, 148–9; straw man, 147–53. See also anti-essentialism ethics: Aristotle on, 92; habits, importance of, 132; as inside us (Aristotle), 114; literary, 259; and reading choices, 252–3 etymology: of différance, 55–6; of literature, 143–4; of religion, 25–7; of theory, 119 evaluating: love, 115; as part of human experience, 103; texts (Chicago School approach), 187; transcendence, 110; writing, 166–7 evidence, 71 Evola, Julius, 105–6 experience, 24, 86 explanation: under vs over, 31 extrinsic casuality, 207–12 fallacies, 108, 188, 208–9, 212–15 fallibility, 67; and Aristotelian inquiry, 69; of communities, 218 family resemblances, 144–7, 168 feelings, 86, 127 fiction. See literature fictionality, 33, 198, 200–2 final cause, 178, 179, 181, 207–8, 225–6, 237. See also teleology Findlay, J.N., 202–3 first principles, in Aristotle, 35, 68 Fish, Stanley, 60, 107, 215–22 form, 192–4, 195–6, 204

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313

formal cause, 178, 179 formal diversity objection, 164–5 formalism, 158, 198, 252 Foucault, Michel, 103–5 four causes, theory of (Aristotle), 178–82 fragmentation, 194–5 Frege, Gottlob, 75, 76, 78 Friedrich, Rainer, 59, 60 Fritz, Kurt von, 121 Gairaud Ruiz, Hilda, 194 games, 136, 137–8, 168–72 Gardner, John, 98, 251–2 Gaut, Berys, 252 genius, 207–8, 223, 224. See also inspiration genre and form, 192–4 genus vs differentia, 155, 163, 171, 177, 180, 200, 222, 224–5, 230 Gerson, Lloyd, 10 Gibson, Arthur, 176 Gladstone, W.E., 26 glue-stick (Chatton), 29–30 God: in Aristotle, 120, 122, 127, 243; and attention, 244; (dis)belief in, 38; contemplation by, 124; emulation of, 262; as ­highest level of transcendental possibility, 230; imitation of, 127; philosophical conceptions of, 23; theōria (as doing), 120; thoughts as touching (Descartes), 21; as thought-thinking thought (Aristotle), 122–3; as a “­torture-monster” (Empson), 239; as the transcendent, 102; universe as resembling, 239; ­wisdom of, 96

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314 Index

Gödel, Kurt, 230 Goldberg, S.L., 253 Good, Alex, 176 Good, the, in Plato, 24 Goodheart, Eugene, 253 goodness, 179, 182 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, 105 Gordon, Peter, 17–18 Goris, Wouter, 19 Graff, Gerald, 184 Greek loyalism, 7–8 Gregory, Marshall, 253–4 Gunn, Giles, 258 Hacking, Ian, 73 haiku, 210 Hakemulder, Jèmeljan, 253 happenstance, 31 Hare, R.M., 256 hedonism and reading, 4–5 Heidegger, Martin, 128 Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea, 200 Henderson, Greig, 185 hermeneutics, 37, 84 Highet, Gilbert, 226 history, 248–9; literature, ­compared with, 231–2; Marxist/ Hegelian view of, 51 honorific definition of literature, 140–1 horos/horismos (definition), 180 Hoyt, Sarah, 26–7 Hull, David, 148 human beings: amoral, 259; as ­politikon zōon, 9; as rational animals, 130 Hume, David, 81 humility, 243 humour: responses to, 220

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Humpty Dumpty, 176–7 Hurka, Thomas, 136 ideas as material cause, 205–7 images, 49, 51 imitation, 189–90; of God, 127; and God’s contemplation, 124; as a human activity, 52; literature as, 191; mimesis, 7, 52; music as, 192 imitation theology, 239 immanence vs transcendence, 17, 19–20 individualism, 111 induction, 101, 153 information, literature as, 206 inspiration, 114, 207–8; discourse on, 224–5; as a religious concept, 208; religious connotations of, 224. See also genius institutional, use of term, 219 intentional-affective fallacy, 208–9 intentional fallacy, 108, 208, ­212–15, 282n29 intentions, 211, 214. See also ­intentional fallacy interpretation, 167 intrinsic casuality, 207–12 intuition, 85–8, 125, 126 Jacobs, Carol, 259 James, William, 22 Janko, Richard, 190 Jewishness, 105 Jirásek, Ivo, 116–17 Johnson, Samuel, 226 judgments, 255 Kaestle, Carl, 231 Kamuf, Peggy, 139–40

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Index

Kant, Immanuel: antirealism in, 20; Copernican revolution of, 44; ­literary theory (legacy in), 44; nouemna vs phenomena, 20; objectivity in, 131; phenomena in, 44; space, 64; sublime in, 229 Kernanto, Alvin, 139 Kieran, Matthew, 102 Kierkegaard, Søren, 104, 195, 252, 263–7 Knapp, Steven, 234–6 knowledge: in Aristotle, 25; Aristotle on, 69; through direct revelation, 126; enjoyment of, 129; by experience (empeiria), 173; of fallibility, 69; ­impossibility of, 140; as ineffable (Plato), 93; and intuition, 85, 87; levels of (Plato), 24; limits of (Aristotle), 25; and literature, 74, 130, 140, 144; and logical proof, 85; moral claims as form of, 260; origin of (Aristotle), 155; in philosophy (Western), 69; as proof, 73–4; specialized, 90. See also epistemology Kölbel, Max, 80 Köstenberger, Andreas, 154 Langer, Suzanne, 86 language: as an activity, 169; beyond, 228, 230; -games (Wittgenstein), 168–72; ­insufficiencies/deficiencies of, 56; and metaphysics, 180; ­natural, 73, 79, 85; onomatopoeia, 56–7; ordinary, 46–7; (non)performativity of, 171; ­performativity in, 85, 258; plain, 84; post-structuralist view of, 42;

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punctuation, 237; as self-­ referential, 50, 53; self-referential use of, 199; speech-act theory, 81; as trap for meaning (Zhuangzi), 4; and the world, 171. See also definitions; ­structuralism; words laughing, 14, 84, 101, 212, 220, 246; as a catharsis, 23 Lear, Edward, 84 Leavis, F.R., 253 Leavy, Barbara, 134 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 73 lexicography, 144 linguistics, 153 literariness, 33, 198–9, 207 literary criticism: Aristotelian, 3, 9, 130–5; logic in, 77; modernist, 208; qualities of, 132; scientific project within, 42; semiotic, 44–8; Wittgensteinian games in, 138. See also intentional fallacy literary studies: objecthood of, 139 literary theory: antirealism in, 67–8; end of, 234–5; ­epistemology (suspicion of), 37; Kantian legacy in, 44; ­religion in, 29 literature: as about metaphysics, 82; as about wisdom, 84; as an artifact, 156–7; canon, 224, 234; causes of, 186; communication in, 57; conscience in (Babbitt), 110; definitions of, 10, 84, 136, 139–40, 142, 143–4, 153–62, 166, 174–5, 189, 192, 198, ­202–6, 207–12, 222, 224–5, 230, 232–3; and divinity, 123–7; enjoyment of, 130; essentialist views of, 216; as evaluation of

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316 Index

text, 159–60; everyday understanding of, 140; as exceeding language, 22; expression in, 228; failure in, 227–8; fiction content of, 73; as form of induction, 101; formal properties of, 166; as fun, 246; goodness of, 182; greatness of, 233–4; as great writing, 142, 181, 205, 222, 227, 229; history, compared with, 231–2; as ­imitation, 191; as information, 206; interpretation (role of), 167; and intuition, 85–8; and knowledge, 74, 130, 144; as ­literariness, 199; and meaning, 4, 84, 109; metamorphosis in, 6–7; as mimesis, 189–94; modern concept of, 158, 161; and ­morality, 11, 14, 242–67; as “non-paraphrasable” (Winters), 5; objectivity in, 74; ordinary usage of term, 142; ­phenomenological descriptions of, 87–8; and philosophy, 99, 168; vs p ­ hotography, 189; plague, 134; prejudice in, 15; Proust on, 87–8; as psychology, 209; reductionist views of, ­213–14; and religion, 11, 135; as religious, 13–14; r­ eligious content of, 6; religious view of, 262; and representation, 191; and science, 31; and self-­ realization, 245–8; and selfreflexivity, 165–6; Socrates on, 222; subject matter of, 200; ­subtractive function of, 87–8; teleology of, 228; telos of, ­225–6; theorizing vs reading, 123; and theory, 119; and

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t­ ranscendence, 15–16, 22, ­100–3, 115, 226–30; truth in, 99, 202, 247; as undefinable, 141; use of term, 97; value of, 3–5, 98; vs weeds, 161; Winters’s theory of, 113; wisdom, 11–15, 96–8; words, use in, 200. See also four causes, theory of (Aristotle); moral criticism living things, 151, 178, 209–10 Locke, John, 58, 283n50 Lodge, David, Small World, 60 logic: Aristotelian, 82, 83; ­contemporary versions of, 78; and epistemology, 76; and ­induction, 101; and intuition, 125; propositions, 76; ­statements, examples of, 76; and ­transcendence, 230; ­transcendentals in, 19. See also analytic philosophy logocentrism (Derrida), 52–3 logos (ratio), 155 love, 103–4, 115 Luke (Gospel writer), 6 Mackie, J.L., 255, 260 Maclean, Norman, 9 Malkiel, David, 226 Marvell, Andrew, “To His Coy Mistress,” 240 Marxist analysis, 215–16 material cause, 178, 179, 180, 198–207 matter and form, 204 Matthew (Gospel writer), 6 May, Henry, 38 McClymont, John, 10 McKeon, Richard, 9 McMahon, Darrin, 223

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Index

meaning: Barthes on, 108; and ­literature, 109; as logical syntax, 78–9; real, 81–5; as social ­convention, 171; and truth, 74–8; as use, 81; as in usage, 169; of words, 201 medieval philosophy, 234 Melzer, Arthur, 10 metamorphosis, 6–7 metaphors, 83, 153–6 metaphysical realism, 17–18 metaphysics: in Baudrillard, 50; bifurcated approach to, 20; ­dismissals of, 18; and formal unity, 196; as ground, 35; and language, 180; and ­representationalism, 236; ­skepticism about, 44, 52–60 method, rules of (Descartes), 38–9 methodological essentialism, 148–9 Michaels, Walter, 234–6 Mill, John Stuart, 4, 218 Miller, J. Hillis, 201 mimesis, 7, 189–94 mind: in Aristotelianism, 70; knowledge of world, 67; in ­medieval philosophy, 234; and spatiality, 64; structuring role of, 62; translation of, 121; use of term, 121 Minturno, Antonio, 226 misogny, 105–6 modernism, 41, 112, 208, 212 modern life, 18, 263 moral criticism, 248–54; in present, 257 morality: a-, 254–7; Aristotle on, 114; boundaries of, 259; ­contemporary discourse on, 261; as evidence, 71; of funeral

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317

epitaphs, 226; im-, 246; as likes/ dislikes, 260; and literature, 11, 242–67; and nature, 244; ­necessity in Aristotelian criticism, 245; non-physical nature of, 260; as objective, 254, 259; as pleasurable, 247; and poetry, 113; in secularism, 18; as self-interest, 256; and transcendence, ­evaluation of, 110; and wisdom, 244; as wisdom in action, 15 Morson, Gary, 198 music, 190, 192 Musonius Rufus, 116 Myers, David, 139 mysticism, 15, 21–2, 59, 71, 113, 232 naive realism, 64–5 names: the nameless (the Tao), 16–17 natural language, 73, 79, 85, 116. See also ordinary language nature: and art, 130, 190, 197; determination of, 225; and morality, 244; Nietzsche on, 254. See also final cause negative theology, 20 Nehamas, Alexander, 104 Neo-Aristotelianism, 3, 36–7, 136. See also Chicago School neoclassicism, 111 New Criticism, 9, 185, 194; vs Chicago School, 203–4 news headlines, 199 New Testament, 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 60, 112, 127, 254, 255, 256, 286n31 Nightingale, Andrea, 119 nomen innominabile (Eckhart), 58

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318 Index

nominal definitions, 144 normality, 218 nothing, 140 noumena, 44–5, 108, 148–9. See also Kant, Immanuel nous, Neoplatonic use of, 121 novels, 251 Nussbaum, Martha, 253 objectivity, 70, 219, 254, 259 objects, 19, 146–7 Occam’s Razor, 29–30, 31 Olson, Elder, 9, 185–6, 282n25 Olympic Games, 116–17, 164–5, 167–8 opacity, 21 ordinariness, 224, 228–9 ordinary language, 87, 175–6. See also natural language; plain language organic unity, 197 ostensive definition, 169–70 Other, the, 109 paganism, 28 painting, 233 panoramic analysis, 35–6 pantheism, 19–20 particularity, 224 Pascal, Blaise, 23, 221 pastoral poetry, 127 Patterson, Richard, 154 Pelan, James, 218 persuasion, 206 philosophy: academic branches of, 72, 80; and concretization, 188; as imitating God’s ­contemplation, 124; and ­literature, 5, 99, 168; as path to wisdom, 128; rhetoric in,

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133; wisdom, 242; and wonder, 128 Phlegyas (Virgil, Aeneid), 28 photography vs literature, 189 piety, 28 Pilkington, Anthony, 87–8 plague literature, 134 plain language, 84. See also ­ordinary language Plath, Sylvia, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” 265 Plato, 9–10, 24, 61, 86, 93, 127 Plato Centre (Trinity College, Dublin), 24 playfulness and transcendence, 102 pleasure: in Chicago system, 187; contrasted with delight, 227; ­dishonourable, 182; and God (in Aristotle), 244; and morality, 247; and reading, 4; seeking of, 256 Pocklington, Tom, 89, 90–92 Poesie, 189 poetry: analysis of, 237–40; ­authorial intention in, 212; descriptions of, 5; haiku, 210; interpretation of, 220; moral content of, 248; as moral ­expression, 112–14; non-poetry as, 221; pastoral, 127; as perfect, 233; of Plath, 265; Sijo (Korean poetic form), 210–11; Socrates on, 248; sonnets, 193, 197; ­suspicion of, 245; transcendental in, 240; for younger readers, 226 political religion, 105–7 politikon zōon, 9 Pollan, Michael, 162–3 Popkin, Richard, 39 Popper, Karl, 148–9

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Index

positivism, 81, 243 post-structuralism, 42–3, 253. See also structuralism progress, belief in (Enlightenment), 38 proof, 79–81, 133 propositional thinking, 121, 143 Proust, Marcel, 87–8 Pullman, Philip, 38 punctuation, 237. See also language Quebec, 56–7 Quine, W.V., 167–8, 278n22 Rader, Ralph, 141 ratio, 155 reader-response theory, 107, 230–1 readers: authority of, 229; and author relationship, 216; ­competency of, 230–1; creative roles of, 217; the ideal, 230–2; types of, 217–18 Readers Liberation Movement, 215–16 reading: benefits of, 141; close, 185, 194; as elevated pleasure, 4; experience of, 211 realism: anti-, 48, 258; in Aristotelianism, 68–71, 272n13; Baurillard’s rejection of, 52; and the ineffable, 243; ­metaphysical, 17–18; naive, 64–5; and p ­ ostivism, 243. See also antirealism reason, vs emotions, 261 recollection, doctrine of, 173 reflective inquiry (Pocklington/ Tupper), 89–90 Reformation, 246 Reid, Louis Arnauld, 85, 86–7

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relativism, 254, 256 religion: and authority, 109; belief, 239; community aspect of, 28; definitions, 15, 25–8; and human experience, 14; judgments related to, 255; and Kierkegaard, 266; and literature, 5, 11, 13–14, 135; moral restrictions within, 27; negative perceptions of, 29; political, 105–7; popular ­conceptions of, 135; of sexuality (Foucault), 103–5; of sport, 117; terms for the utlimate in, 13. See also antisemitism representation, 191, 236 representationalism, 49 reproduction, 179 resemblance, 153–4 rhetoric, 133 Riefenstahl, Leni, Triumph of the Will, 106 Robson, W.W., 140–1 Rolfe, Gary, 54 romanticism, 5, 110–12, 158, ­196–7, 232 Rorty, Richard, 72 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 111, 257–8 rule breaking, 172 Russian formalism, 158, 198 Ruurs, Margriet, 226 Sachs, Joe, 23 sacred, the, 18 sadomasochism, 104 Salinger, J.D., Catcher in the Rye, 51 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 230 Saussure, Fernand de, 41, 45–8, 60. See also semiotics; structuralism Schmitt, Carl, 106

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320 Index

scholasticism, 39, 209 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 224 Schulz, Gudrun, 62 science, 31, 131, 150, 153; ­shortcomings of, 30–1 scientific definitions, 144, 152–3 Secular Age, A (Taylor), 17–19 secularism: critiques of, 26; Eliot on, 30; and language, 224; morality in, 18 secular transcendence, 116–18 Selden, Raman, 41, 42 self-absorption, 15 self-interest, 256 self-realization and literature, 245–8 self-reflexivity as defining literature, 165–6 semantics, 79–81, 160–4 semiotics, 44–8 sentences, truth-value of, 75 set theory, 79–80. See also semantics Seventh Letter (Plato), 24 sexuality, 103–5 shared properties objection, 165–8 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 239 Sidney, Philip, 189, 191, 248–9, 252 Sijo, 210–11 simulacra. See Baudrillard, Jean skepticism, 37–8, 39–40, 43, 67, 91. See also Descartes, René skill, 207–8 slavery, 7–8, 269n11 Smallwood, Philip, 37 “smartness,” 93 “snip-ism,” 12 social spaces, 18 Socrates, 91, 93, 222, 248

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Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 200 sonnets, 193, 197 sophia, 244. See also wisdom Sophism, 219–20, 254 Sorabji, Richard, 120–1, 276n100 soul, the, 197, 209–10 species problem, 148 speech-act theory, 81 Sprinkler, Michael, 183 state, the, 106 Stoicism, 242 Stoll, Robert, 79–80 structuralism, 41–2, 44, 185. See also post-structuralism subjectivity, 109, 218, 266 sublime, the, 97–8, 229 substances, 58, 151, 178, 283n50 Suits, Bernard: biographical details, 9, 182; on family resemblance theory, 144, 146; on games, 177, 280n88; Humpty-Dumptyism in rational discourse, 176–7; on mental life of Aristotle’s God, 102; philosophical definition, 142, 173–4, 175; on Sidney, 249; vs Wittgenstein, 136–9 survivors, in “plague literature,” 134 Swift, Jonathan, 70, 280n77 syntax, 78–9 Tao Te Ching, 16–17, 270n22 Tarski, Alfred, 79, 230 Taylor, Charles, 17–19 Taylor, Dennis, 6 teleology, 31, 178, 186, 225–6, 228, 284n95 texts, 54, 57, 193, 212, 229

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Index

theatre of the absurd, 243 theia moira (divine gift/­ appointment), 222 theism, 20 theology, 4–5, 13, 84, 129, 239 theory: as activity of beholding truth, 118; in Aristotle, 122, 124, 127–9; definitions, 118; end of, 232–6; etymology of term, 1 ­ 19–20, 279n30; and ­feelings, 127; and ideology, 236; and literature, 119; ­transcendent in (need for), 30 Thomas Aquinas, 62, 239, 260 trace, the (Derrida), 57–8 tragedy, 11, 102, 125, 127, 129, 245, 262 transcendence: and authorial ­intention, 229; bad, 114–16; as cross-cultural, 16; ­definitions, 15–19, 102; ­evaluating, 110; God as, 102; historical use of term, 19; vs immanence, 17, 19–20; and ­literature, 15–16, 100–3, 115, 226–30; location of, 129; and logic, 230; of love, 104; ­misplaced, 107; in modern ­philosophy, 20; non-religiosity and, 19; as not the impossible, 21; objectivity of, 100, 102; as “out there,” 23; as pan-­ historical, 16; and playfulness, 102; in poetry, 240; rejection of, 218; secular, 116–18; of sex, 104; and subjectivity, 109; in theory (need for), 30; use of term, pejorative, 53. See also Secular Age, A transcendental objects, 19

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321

Trilling, Lionel, 253 Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl), 106 truth: absolute, 263; Aristotelian, 118–23; in Aristotle, 86; as attainable, 263; difficulty of ­telling, 261–2; in Frege, 75; in ­literature, 99; and meaning, 74–8; as objective, 207; ­representation in literature, 202; -statements, 74–5; ­subjectivity of, 266; and theory, 118; Thomas Aquinas on, 62; and world view, 247 Tupper, Allan, 89, 90–92 Unitarianism, 26 unity, 194–8 university education. See academic community unutterable, the: attempts at ­uttering, 113–14; literature as uttering, 4, 13, 100, 228; nomen innominabile (Eckhart), 58 Updike, John, 252 Vanhoozer, Kevin, 231 Veatch, Henry, 82 via negativa, 20, 57, 59, 104 vices, 182 virtues, 173, 261 vividness, 133–4 Wales, Katie, 231 Warren, Austin, 201–2 Webster, Grant, 183 weeds vs literature, 161–3 Weinberg, Bernard, 9 Wellek, René, 201–2 wickedness, 95

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322 Index

Wilkins, John, 147, 148, 149–50, 151–2 Wilson, Edmund, 112 Wimsatt, William, 208–9. See also intentional fallacy Wimsatt, W.K., 183–4, 187, 188 Winchester, C.T., 205–6 Winters, Yvor, 5, 70, 112–13, 233, 250–1, 252 wisdom: in Aristotle, 92–6, 243; as emotionless, 242; hierarchy of, 96; literature, 11–15; and ­literature, 84, 96–8; moral aspects of, 244; and old age, 97, 247n45; philosophical, 242; ­philosophy as path to, 128 wisdom literature, literature as, 242 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: on games, 137–8; language-games of, ­168–72; on similarities and ­differentiation, 145; Suits on, 137

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Wolf, Michael, 79 wonder, 23, 128, 241 words: in Baudrillard, 49; ­lexicography, 144; meanings of, 80, 84, 169, 201; as signs, 143; use in literature, 200; on use of (Eliot), 204–5; violence via, 243. See also language Wordsworth, William, 238 writing, 181, 195 Xenophanes, 248 Young, Robert, 42 Zhuangzi, 4 Ziguras, Jacob, 121, 125, 277n105

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