Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination 3030550486, 9783030550486

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Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination Edited by  Garry L. Hagberg

Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination

Garry L. Hagberg Editor

Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination

Editor Garry L. Hagberg Department of Philosophy Bard College Annandale On Hudson, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-55048-6    ISBN 978-3-030-55049-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Dina Belenko Photography / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Introduction: Ethical Reflection in a Fictional World

Our ethical sensibilities are in part cultivated by literary experience, and indeed by any narrative drama (e.g. film, television, and theater) that provides an occasion as well as the material for moral reflection. This resource can be too easily forgotten in philosophical contexts of ethical inquiry, owing to a too-ready dichotomy between fiction and fact: ethical reflection is about the real world and our place and our duties within it, and this makes fictional representations of that world seem to be at one remove from the topic at hand. Why not, we might think, deal with the real thing? But therein lies the error: it may be the case, against this simple dichotomy, that moral perception and moral sensitivity are more acutely, sharply, and finely honed in a world that is both less urgent than the real one of moral quandaries and that is more – often much more – linguistically precise and descriptively complete. It may be that the nuanced and detailed descriptions of morally relevant situations and circumstances as presented in literature lead us into a degree of perceptual and descriptive acuity that, through its precision and contextualized particularity, leads us in turn to a depth of insight that we otherwise would have missed. And thus, somewhat like an improvising musician who has practiced extensively prior to walking on stage to perform something she until that moment hasn’t seen or played before but for which she is nevertheless, because of that practice, equipped, we as moral creatures return to the world from literature and narrative experience having gained the v

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perceptual acuity, descriptive precision, and humane insight that significantly informs and inflects how we “play” a circumstance we haven’t exactly seen before. This volume is devoted to the exploration of this issue as it intertwines with a number of themes and texts. Part I focuses on the sometimes-unexpected ways in which knowledge is connected with virtue and how what we know can shape who we are, while Part II examines our relations to each other and our possibilities for interpersonal understanding and acknowledgement. Part III investigates in close detail some of the vices and virtues that have been portrayed in literature, showing that a descent into contextual particularity can reveal possibilities of virtues within vices and vices within virtues that, without such a descent, we might otherwise have too simply perceived and less interestingly described. And Part IV shows how literature can unearth ethical presuppositions that, once brought to the light of day, we come to see should not be regarded as given. And we see here how literature provides a distinctive occasion for this kind of openly reflective reconsideration. Milan Kundera once replied, in response to a question concerning what literature is for, that its purpose is to show that everything in human life is considerably more complex that we might initially have thought. That excellent answer reverberates through all of the work brought together here. Beginning Part I (On Knowledge as a Virtue), Toby Svoboda argues that Plato’s Ion is primarily ethical rather than epistemological, in that it represents an investigation into the implications of transgressing one’s own epistemic limits. Svoboda shows that the figures of Socrates and Ion are ethically juxtaposed in the dialogue, Ion being a laughable, comic, ethically inferior character – one who, despite promptings, cannot recognize his own epistemic limits. Socrates, by epistemic-ethical contrast, is an elevated, serious, ethically superior character who exhibits discerning and disciplined epistemic restraint. The point of the dialogue for Svoboda is thus to instructively contrast Ion’s laughable state with the serious state of Socrates, where the dialogue’s central argument is performative in nature rather than demonstrative and where ethical and epistemological issues become inseparable.

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Next, Vicky Roupa begins her discussion with the observation that Quixote is a wondrous caricature of a knight errant; steeped in images of fictional heroes, he undertakes to revive a tradition long dead, and in the process leaves behind some unforgettable images of knightly virtue turned sour. This caricature, however, is not simply a ploy meant to arouse laughter, but, as Roupa shows, also an occasion to revisit the emphasis on knowledge and good sense with which virtue has been aligned in the Socratic-Platonic tradition. Roupa sees that the challenge Quixote represents concerns the relation between reasoning and the ability to “get it right” in practice; by sundering these apart, she suggests, Cervantes forces an interesting reconsideration of the unity of thought and action. Closing Part I, Elisabet Dellming asks what Marilynne Robinson’s novel about the drifter Lila can tell us about narrative as a response to epistemic injustice. And how, she then asks, might we begin to understand this response in ethical terms? Dellming shows that Robinson’s narratives are consistently engaging with the possible as opposed to the actual, and in doing so they effectively challenge some of what can be central assumptions about truth and meaning. With this in mind, Dellming proceeds to examine how Lila, through her unswerving distrust of knowledge that comes in the form of certainties imposed on her by others, constitutes such a challenge. Dellming concludes by showing how Lila’s reticence underscores the ethical and epistemological implications of Robinson’s concern with narrative as a possible response to injustice. Initiating Part II (On Our Relations to Each Other), John Mischo begins his discussion with the famously paradoxical pronouncement attributed to Aristotle, “Oh my friends, there are no friends”, which as he says has for millennia haunted Western philosophy. Plato’s Lysis, Mischo observes, ceases abruptly in Socrates’ frustration over his inability to articulate the essence of friendship. And then for Kant and Derrida friendship also appears impossible. For Aristotle, Mischo also notes, lower forms of friendship are common, true friendships rare. The tragedy Timon of Athens is Shakespeare’s most wide-ranging dramatization of the philosophical problematics of friendship. For Shakespeare, as for the philosophical tradition, the barrier to friendship, Mischo shows, is economic—friendship must be extricated from economic exchange.

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Timon of Athens explores such a possibility. Or perhaps, as Mischo pointedly notes, impossibility. Paul Firenze’s chapter proceeds from the observation that Victor Frankenstein is nothing less than horrified when his patched-together creature stirs to life. But Firenze also observes that thirty years before Mary Shelley’s novel appeared, Immanuel Kant used a similar image of a composite creature to warn his readers against piecing together diverse experiences into a unified moral theory, saying that, rather than morality, we get “some bastard patched up from limbs of quite varied ancestry.” Firenze’s chapter thus explores the analogy between Frankenstein’s “patched up” creature and Kant’s. A Kantian reading of the novel, he shows, ties the creature’s monstrosity to its illegitimate lineage. But an important alternate reading, rejecting Kant’s purifying moral project, argues that the creature is made and not born monstrous by Victor’s primarily aesthetic rejection of his progeny. Paul Jenner, closing Part II, observes that the significance of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy for David Foster Wallace’s writings remains something of an under-explored topic, certainly by comparison with the substantial body of scholarship tracing the considerable influence of Wittgenstein upon Wallace. Cavell’s distinctive work on scepticism, Jenner suggests, offers a new perspective on the preoccupation with interiority that runs throughout Wallace’s writings. Drawing on Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon”, Jenner argues that this preoccupation is best understood not as reflecting a settled epistemological scepticism or solipsism, but rather as an exploration of what Cavell refers to as the threat and permanent possibility of skepticism – that is, as a threat to our relations to each other. Opening Part III (Virtue and Vice in a Modern World), Miranda Corcoran and Andrea Di Carlo begin by asking if we can consider the Sublime to be an early-modern notion? Of course, they insist, we can, as has been shown in studies of the concept of the Sublime in early-modern England. But what have never been sufficiently investigated, they suggest, are the intricate and revealing connections between the Sublime, feminism, and Puritan theology. Corcoran and Di Carlo’s chapter proceeds in two sections: in the first, they provide a critical and historical overview of the natural Sublime in Puritan virtue-focused theology by

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relying on the writings of the Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather; in the second, they investigate the contemporary legacy of the Puritan Sublime and its relationship to feminism in a film by Robert Eggers, The Witch (2015). The modern world and its fictional self-representations, they show, are shaped in part by subtlety-inherited conceptions of virtue and vice. Continuing Part III, Peter Paik’s chapter examines the role of betrayal in producing knowledge in the novel Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Paik takes up the question of how the experience of betrayal produces self-knowledge, engaging with the interpretation of René Girard that the renunciation of desire is at the heart of the novel. Paik shows that while Dangerous Liaisons does not precisely follow Girard’s model of ethical conversion, it nonetheless retains an initiatory form. For Paik, the key reversal in the novel consists of the seduction of the libertine by discourse itself, which takes place out of her deepest vice, that is, her desire to not only possess but also to vividly display the fullness of her mastery over individuals and the intricate situations in which they find themselves. In the final chapter of Part III, Manuel Carabantes begins with an interestingly unsettling and morally stark question: Are those who rule the world psychopaths? Enlightenment, in the sense of humanity’s struggle to master its destiny, in Horkheimer’s view has resulted in a morally blinded way of living. Carabantes’ position in this chapter is that such moral blindness, which he describes as a tool to succeed and therefore is especially noticeable in those who gain or seize power, is characteristic of the psychopath. To advance his point Carabantes starts from a foundational thesis argued by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment: that the evil characters of the literature of Marquis de Sade constitute a portrait of the prototypical man of the Enlightenment. He thus sets himself the task in this chapter to highlight the personality and socially deviant traits of those characters that are essential to psychopathy through the application, within his interpretation, of the PCL-SV (a screening checklist for psychopathological disorders). Carabantes suggests that his conclusion clarifies the profile of what is called the “successful” person of our time (where vice masquerades as

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virtue), who embodies what are too often taken, he argues, as fundamental ethical values of the inherited Enlightenment model. Moving to Part IV (Ethical Presuppositions, Reconsidered), Jan Grue, drawing our attention to animacy hierarchies of value, observes that they conventionally descend from the high point of conscious subjectivity and integrated animacy, down towards the other extreme of insensate or dead matter. But on Grue’s reading, John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner upends these hierarchies, aestheticizing (and idealizing) inanimacy. Noting that the novel was published just as posthumanist thought was beginning to take shape, Grue sees in the character Stoner the prefiguration of a distancing from the widely presupposed humanist view of life. That view, as an integrated and enduring tradition that is described by Peter Sloterdijk as an ‘exchange of letters’, is unearthed by Stoner within the novel. However, Grue further argues that Stoner’s unconventional posthumanist valuations are nevertheless dependent upon quite conventional sexist and ableist conceptions of embodiment. Thus Grue shows that the novel itself demonstrates both the persistence of idiologically determined evaluational criteria as well as the plasticity of these criteria in new, posthumanist contexts. Continuing the excavation and reconsideration of ethical presuppositions, in his chapter Hartmut von Sass begins by asking if it is or can be adequate to compare our treatment of animals with the Holocaust. Or, von Sass queries, do we meet here a case of normative incomparability? Then working against the backdrop of those questions, his chapter pursues three goals: first, it gives a more elaborated account of the concept of normative incomparability; second, it investigates an example, namely J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, that offers a “thick description” of a particular case in which we are confronted with normative claims about the adequacy or inadequacy of such comparisons; and third, the chapter moves toward a tentative or provisional outlook or way of seeing regarding the special demands made on us in dealing philosophically with the kind of severe or deep evaluative and moral disagreements that emerge from such cases. Closing Part IV, Garry L. Hagberg considers a deeply embedded picture or conceptual model of ethical thought that Cora Diamond unearths and subjects to critical scrutiny in connection with the experience of

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imaginative literature. Hagberg sees Diamond’s powerfully illuminating excavation of presupposition as particularly helpful, because it connects with both (1) the distinction between a false model of moral calculation or deduction on the one hand and genuine intricate moral reflection on the other, and with (2) the concept of improvisation (as Diamond takes the theme from Martha Nussbaum and further develops it). Hagberg, looking in closer detail at what improvisation is in music and how a fuller understanding of it can cast a special if unexpected light on the work of the moral imagination, then moves to an examination of Henry James’s early novel The American, finding in the details of its rewriting by James later in his life both a literary depiction of the improvisational dimension of moral thinking and interaction as well as a strong literary enactment of improvising within the range of implication as demarcated by the sentences of James’s younger self. The cultivation of the moral imagination occurs across the distinctions and categories of life; it certainly does not stay neatly on one side of the stark distinction between fact and fiction mentioned above. And so it is hoped that readers may see not only ways in which the chapters presented here uncover and articulate fact within fiction, but also how the chapters speak to each other both within their sections and across them: knowledge emerging as a virtue may intertwine with issues concerning our relations to each other; the exacting perception of virtues and vices may intertwine with our excavation and reconsideration of embedded moral presuppositions; our relations to another may be constituted by a unique combination of virtuous knowledge, an awareness of the intricate interactions of virtues and vices, and the removal of presupposition. Our imaginative entry into fictional worlds seems to often show – and show us how to more accurately and discerningly describe – the wondrous yet too easily shrouded complexity in life of which Kundera spoke. Annandale On Hudson, NY, USA

Garry L. Hagberg

Contents

Part I On Knowledge as a Virtue   1 1 Plato’s Ion as an Ethical Performance  3 Toby Svoboda 2 Foolhardy Yet Courageous: Is There Such a Thing as Quixotic Virtue? 19 Vicky Roupa 3 Knowing What Matters: The Epistemological and Ethical Challenge of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila 39 Elisabet Dellming Part II On Our Relations to Each Other  59 4 “But in a Dream of Friendship”: Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, the Gift, and the Moral Economy of Friendship 61 John Mischo

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5 Kant and Frankenstein: On Purity, Contingency, and “Patchwork” Morality 79 Paul Firenze 6 Plights of Mind and Circumstance: Cavell and Wallace on Scepticism 97 Paul Jenner Part III Virtue and Vice in a Modern World 115 7 “The Devils Territories”: Nature, the Sublime, and Witchcraft in the Puritan Imagination and Robert Eggers’s The Witch117 Miranda Corcoran and Andrea Di Carlo 8 The Ethics of Betrayal: Seduction and Initiation in Dangerous Liaisons135 Peter Y. Paik 9 Sade’s Psychopath as Prototypical Man of the Enlightenment151 Manuel Carabantes Part IV Ethical Presuppositions, Reconsidered 173 10 “A Kind of Purity”: Inanimacy, Disability, and Posthumanist Prefigurations in John Williams’ Stoner175 Jan Grue

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11 The Curious Case of Normative Incomparability: Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of Comparisons191 Hartmut von Sass 12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication: Cora Diamond, Henry James, and the Space of Moral Reflection231 Garry L. Hagberg Index265

Notes on Contributors

Manuel Carabantes  is presently affiliated to the Complutense University of Madrid. He graduated in philosophy there, followed by advanced work in STS (Science, Technology and Society), an interdisciplinary branch of philosophy. Following that path, he received his PhD cum laude with a thesis on Artificial Intelligence. More recently he has published a book and several papers, mainly in Spanish but also in English, focused on his main interests: STS, Artificial Intelligence, critical theory, psychology and epistemology. Miranda  Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first-century literature at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the co-editor (with Steve Gronert Ellerhoff) of Exploring the Horror of Super Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family (forthcoming from Routledge). She is a regular contributor to the online magazine Diablolique and is currently writing a monograph about adolescence and witchcraft in American popular culture. Elisabet  Dellming is a lecturer in English literature at Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. In her current research project, she studies the interconnection between imagination, epistemology and narrative ethics in the fiction of Marilynne Robinson, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Kazuo Ishiguro. She has previously published on imagination and knowledge in Penelope Fitzgerald. xvii

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Andrea  Di Carlo is a PhD student in History of Early-Modern Philosophy at University College Cork. His main areas of expertise are early-modern literature (Shakespeare and Milton), early-modern philosophy (Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, and the Sublime), Old English literature, and the uses of the Uncanny in literature and films. He is a regular contributor to the philosophical blog Apeiron. Paul Firenze  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, where he teaches courses in philosophy, ethics, and religion. He has published in such journals as Translation Review, Science and Engineering Ethics, and most recently in the online journal of popular culture Response. His current research project examines the ontology and axiology of information in the Swedish file-sharing religion of Kopimism. Jan  Grue  is Professor of Qualitative Methods at the Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo. He is the author of Disability and Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 2015) and numerous scholarly and literary works in Norwegian, most recently the autotheoretical volume Jeg lever et liv som ligner deres (“I Live a Life Like Yours”, Gyldendal, 2018). His primary research interests are embodiment, biopolitics, disability, normality and discourse analysis. Garry L. Hagberg  is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has also held a Chair in the School of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism and Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature as well as his most recent edited volumes from Palgrave, Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding; Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding; and Narrative and Self-Understanding. Co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature,

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Hagberg’s newest book is on the contribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood. Paul Jenner  is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. His research focuses on philosophy and literature, particularly the work of Stanley Cavell. He is currently working on a comparative study of Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, and Cavell. John Mischo  is Professor in the Department of English, Humanities, & Languages at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. He has published articles on Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. Peter  Y.  Paik  is HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University. He is the author of From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (Minnesota, 2010) and the editor (with Marcus Bullock) of Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered (Rutgers, 2008) and (with Merry Wiesner-Hanks) of Debt: Ethics, the Environment, and the Economy (Indiana, 2013). He has written on topics such as the new South Korean cinema, horror film, animé, ecocriticism, and apocalypticism in contemporary culture. Paik has also published articles on the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville and Philip Rieff. He is currently at work on a study of the concept of aristocracy and its afterlife in the modern period, focusing on the work of Stendhal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Isak Dinesen, Robert Musil, Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Houellebecq. Vicky  Roupa is Honorary Associate in Philosophy at the Open University where she has taught philosophy and humanities. Her research interests are nineteenth century German philosophy (especially Hegel) and ancient Greek philosophy. She also has interests in contemporary continental philosophy and the intersection of philosophy and literature. Her publications include “On Politics as Effectuation: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Encounter with the Hegelian Monarch,” Journal for Cultural Research Vol. 9, No. 4 (October 2005). Her monograph Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel is currently under review.

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Toby Svoboda  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University. His research focuses on ethical theory and environmental ethics, particularly climate change. He has published articles in Analysis, Environmental Ethics, Environmental Values, and Public Affairs Quarterly, among other journals. His most recent book is The Ethics of Climate Engineering: NonIdeal Justice and Solar Radiation Management (Routledge, 2017). Hartmut von Sass  is Professor for Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion as well as Heisenberg Scholar at Humboldt University in Berlin. Born 1980 in Rostock (Germany) he studied Theology and Philosophy at the Universities of Göttingen, Edinburgh, and Berlin. Between 2006 and 2013 he was assistant at the Faculty of Theology, University of Zurich, to complete his doctoral thesis in 2009 and to get his ‘habilitation’ in 2012. After visiting appointments at Claremont (CGU, ‘09), Oxford (Trinity, ‘12), Pasadena (Fuller, ‘14), and Berkeley (UC, ‘18) he took up his current position in 2019. Hartmut is the author of Language-Games of Faith (2010) and God as the Event of Being (2013) (both in German with Mohr Siebeck) and A Philosophy of Comparison (2021 with Bloomsbury). Now, he is working on a book on a modal conception of hope as well as on a research project on “religion and the emotions”.

Part I On Knowledge as a Virtue

1 Plato’s Ion as an Ethical Performance Toby Svoboda

Plato’s Ion seems to be a commentary on what the poet or rhapsode knows in relation to poetic work, the answer being “nothing.” Having demonstrated that the rhapsode, Ion, cannot give a satisfactory account of what he knows in the Homeric poetry he recites, Socrates suggests that poets and rhapsodes, lacking both art and knowledge, produce or recite poetry only though “divine dispensation.” For this reading, the matter is purely theoretical and epistemological, the sole points at issue being the knowledge and skill of poets and rhapsodes. This paper, however, reads the Ion as primarily ethical rather than epistemological. Accordingly, the dialogue is not about what poets and rhapsodes know in the process of making, reciting, or commenting about poetry, but rather about the ethical implications of transgressing one’s own epistemic limits. The characters of Socrates and Ion assume great importance in this interpretation. These two figures are juxtaposed in the dialogue, Ion being a laughable, comic, ethically inferior character who cannot recognize his own

T. Svoboda (*) Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_1

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epistemic limits, Socrates being an elevated, serious, ethically superior character who exhibits disciplined epistemic restraint. This contrast turns on Delphic self-knowledge, which is profoundly ethical. Ion, lacking self-­ knowledge and hence unaware of his own epistemic limits, repeatedly makes excessive and absurd claims, such as that rhapsodes make the best generals. The point of the dialogue is to contrast this laughable state with the serious state of Socrates, who always respects his epistemic limits and hence avoids being laughable. This being the case, the “argument” of the Ion is not demonstrative but performative. I treat Socrates’ apparent thesis as an ironical tool for engaging Ion rather than as a serious, final position. Rather than arguing that poetry is a matter of divine inspiration and that poets and rhapsodes lack art and knowledge, the dialogue dramatizes the encounter of two very different sorts of ethical being. It displays the laughable and the serious, the low and the elevated, the ethically inferior and the ethically superior in conversation, trusting that the reader will concur with Socrates that the latter is preferable to the former. While the epistemological readings of the Ion remain coherent and respectable, this alternative, ethical reading may offer better avenues for engaging the dramatic spirit of this dialogue. I show that this interpretation coheres well with important passages from three other dialogues: (1) the preference for tragedy over comedy in the Laws, (2) the contrast between the laughable person and the serious person in the Philebus, and (3) the importance of self-knowledge and wisdom in the Apology. Gerald Else follows the conventional reading of the Ion insofar as he views Socrates as denying any knowledge or art on the part of poets, suggesting as an alternative that poets are divinely inspired. However, Else notes that this “defense” of divine inspiration is highly ironical. He sees Plato as a “preacher of reason” whose goal is to unmask poets and their expositors as “wholly irrational, subrational creatures, not knowing anything of what they do.”1 The hypothesis of divine dispensation is simply an under-handed, sarcastic way of mocking the poets and their thorough ignorance. At the close of the dialogue, Ion naively says it is better to be  Gerald E. Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry, ed. Peter Burian (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 8. 1

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divine than artistic (542a), unaware that Socrates is employing divine appellations solely to belittle him. On Else’s reading, this only underlines Plato’s ironical disdain for poets and rhapsodes, who are too ignorant to recognize their own naïveté. However, Else criticizes this irony for being “premature.” Referring to 533c-535a, in which Socrates offers an extended defense of divine dispensation as the source of Ion’s recital of Homer, Else says, “It is not Sokrates’ way to launch into a ten-minute discourse when the conversation has barely begun, or to explain to people why they do what they do before he has even asked them why they do it.” He proceeds to note that the hypothesis of divine dispensation is merely “negatively inferred” from Ion’s failure to account for his ability to recite and discuss Homer. According to Else, “This is not Sokrates speaking, it is the young Plato, pricking up his ears and charging into battle before he has even heard the trumpet.”2 My reading of the Ion concurs with Else that Socrates’ defense of divine dispensation is deeply ironical, but I see the irony operating in a different way and for a different purpose. Whereas Else treats it as an over-wrought, juvenile attack by Plato upon poets and their “subrational” ways, my reading treats this irony as a gentler, pedagogical tool that highlights the difference between Socrates and Ion as ethical beings. On this view, Socrates is not concerned with the correctness of any theory of how poetry is produced so much as he is concerned with the well-being of the soul. Divine dispensation is a provisional, ironical hypothesis that progresses the dialogue and better exhibits the contrast between the serious and the laughable. When Ion enthusiastically agrees with Socrates that he recites Homer through inspiration, despite his having previously agreed with equal enthusiasm that he recites Homer according to an art, his laughable nature is made apparent. According to my reading, Plato has Socrates ironically endorse divine dispensation in order to draw Ion’s absurdity and lack of self-knowledge to the fore, but Plato’s goal in doing this is to educate the reader rather than to disparage the rhapsode. The reader is confronted by a dramatic presentation of the laughable figure, one who lacks self-knowledge and foolishly makes absurd claims with naïve enthusiasm. One could see this as an attack on poets and rhapsodes  Ibid., 7.

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for being epistemologically inadequate. But my reading sees it as a warning against the ethical problems that ensue from disdaining the Delphic imperative, know thyself. The problem with Ion is not simply that he fails to explain how he recites and discusses Homer. The problem is rather that he fails to know himself and consequently maintains an unhealthy soul rife with inconsistency, laughableness, and ignorance. The laughable is directly broached in the Philebus. Socrates says the “ridiculous” is “a kind of vice which gives its name to a condition; and it is that part of vice in general which involves the opposite of the condition mentioned in the inscription at Delphi,” know thyself (48c).3 One is ridiculous because one is ignorant of oneself. Socrates maintains that there are three types of such ignorance. The first two are ignorance of one’s wealth and ignorance of one’s physical qualities: some tend to think themselves richer and some more beautiful than they really are. More prevalent and dangerous is the third type, ignorance of the qualities of one’s soul, according to which one views oneself as having more virtue than one really does. This is especially true of the virtue of wisdom (48e–49a). This condition, which is no doubt an evil one, can occur in both weak and powerful individuals. Only the former is properly ridiculous or laughable, because when laughed at he is powerless to exact revenge, but the latter is “powerful, terrible, and hateful, for ignorance in the powerful is hateful and infamous …” (49c). The powerful person who lacks Delphic self-knowledge is like a tyrant whose excesses and absurdities are dangerous and destructive. The weak person who lacks Delphic self-knowledge is relatively harmless, and one may laugh at him without having to fear reprisal. Such a person is laughable and ridiculous. I argue below that one important element of self-knowledge is awareness of one’s own epistemic limits, the boundaries beyond which one makes only unjustified claims. Such claims are absurd. Whether this absurdity is laughable or dangerous depends on the person whose absurdity is in question. As Socrates says, a self-ignorant tyrant is “hateful and infamous,” not because he is mistaken about this or that matter, but because his ignorance issues in gross injustice. There is little to laugh at  Plato, The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. W.  R. M.  Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1925). 3

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here. The self-ignorant weakling, however, is laughable, because his ignorance is not harmful in the same way as the tyrant’s. Neither tyrant nor weakling knows himself—each is ignorant of his epistemic limits, and each proceeds to make absurd claims. But only the latter is properly ridiculous. Hence, Socrates’ definition of the laughable individual: a weak person who lacks Delphic self-knowledge. The laughable is implicitly contrasted with the elevated or serious in the seventh book of the Laws, where the Athenian Stranger distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable forms of “choristry,” or performing arts, within the ideal city (816d).4 He concludes that laughable versions of these should have no place within a good city. The Stranger proceeds to note that even the work of tragic poets might be antithetical to the serious work of philosophy and politics. He imagines a troupe of tragedians approaching the city and asking permission to perform within, and he suggests that the city’s philosopher-legislators should give the following answer: “we ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the authors of a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as a representation of the fairest and best life, which is … the truest tragedy” (817a–b). These “tragedians” of the “fairest and best life” are suspicious of traditional tragedians. The latter may be permitted to perform only if their work proves to be complementary or superior to that of the former. The Athenian imagines making the following reply to them: “first display your chants side by side with ours before the rulers; and if your utterances seem to be the same as ours or better, then we will grant you a chorus, but if not, my friends, we can never do so” (817d–e). In the city recommended by the Athenian, the only type of “tragedy” permitted is that highly unconventional sort that either complements the philosophers’ “representation of the fairest and best life” or is itself such a representation. Of course, this is a strange use of the word “tragedy.” Richard Patterson recognizes that this new, “Platonic tragedy” is quite different from traditional Athenian tragedy, but he claims that there is nonetheless an important trait that they share: “tragedy is that branch of drama which is important, elevated, and serious; it is, if nothing else, spoudaios [serious], because it treats important matters in an elevated  Plato, Laws, volume 2, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1926).

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manner.”5 Like traditional tragedy, the work of dramatizing “the fairest and best life” in the city purports to be serious, elevated, and superior to those pursuits it deems laughable. It is precisely because traditional tragedy is not serious enough that the Athenian is skeptical of its deserving a place within the well-ordered city. Put another way, traditional tragedy is not tragic enough to be really counted as tragedy. This is why the Stranger insists it must satisfy the magistrates before being made available to the public. As Patterson notes, the Athenian considers himself an author of the “truest tragedy” because the task of forming perfect, noble citizens is the most serious task of all. In this sense, Socrates is the tragic figure par excellence, because he was “the most just and wisest man of his day”6—i.e., he was the most serious person of his day. Patterson rightly stresses that Socrates is not a tragic figure in the traditional sense, but only in the sense promulgated in the Laws. His death in the Phaedo, for example, is not a traditionally tragic moment, because death is not a misfortune to him: “separation of the soul from the body is a welcome release from earthly impediments to true wisdom.”7 The Phaedo is tragic only in the sense that it displays a serious person carrying out the serious, elevated work of philosophy. Whatever the exact place of traditional tragedy in the Laws, one appreciates that the contrast here between high and low, serious and laughable is a very important one. It is interesting, however, that the Athenian identifies an acceptable form of tragedy but not an acceptable form of comedy, which is dismissed out of hand as unbecoming of a superior person. He is willing to rehabilitate the word “tragedy” but not the word “comedy.” This seems to be because the Stranger privileges the serious over the laughable. Traditional tragedy purports to be serious, and although the Stranger judges it to be insufficiently serious and elevated, he at least recognizes that its goal is honorable. Hence, it is fitting to treat the philosophical “representation of the fairest and best life” as succeeding where  Richard Patterson, “The Platonic Art of Comedy and Tragedy,” Philosophy and Literature 6 (1982), 79. 6  Ibid., 80. 7  Ibid., 79. Else concurs that the Phaedo is not tragic: 186. 5

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traditional tragedy fails, and so the name “tragedy” is appropriate for it. But since comedy attempts to display the laughable, its very purpose is dishonorable, so there can be no acceptable form of it. Indeed, a comedy that succeeds may be more harmful than one that fails, since the former recommends the laughable more strongly than the latter. But the matter is not so simple. The Athenian Stranger distinguishes learning the laughable from putting it into practice. The relevant passage deserves to be quoted in full: For it is impossible to learn the serious without the comic, or any one of a pair of contraries without the other, if one is to be a wise man; but to put both into practice is equally impossible, if one is to share in even a small measure of virtue; in fact, it is precisely for this reason that one should learn them—in order to avoid ever doing or saying anything ludicrous, through ignorance, when one ought not (816d–e).

In order to be a wise person, one must be serious. But to be serious, one must know what constitutes a serious person, and this can only be known in conjunction with knowledge of its contrary, the laughable. Hence, to be wise, one must know the laughable without being laughable.8 Such a person recognizes the laughable and knows not to take it seriously. To complicate matters further, the serious and elevated are indeed privileged over the comic and laughable, but the latter are not censored and driven out of the city completely. The Stranger says that “slaves and foreign hirelings” can be employed to perform comedies, but honorable citizens should never do so. Moreover, there ought always to be “a novel feature in their mimic shows” (816e). In other words, the same comic spectacle should not be performed repeatedly, since this might numb the spectators and cause them to forget just how laughable these performances are. The laughable should be learned from in such a way that one fortifies  Might this be a clue to understanding Socrates’ claim in the Symposium that the accomplished dramatist should be able to compose both comedy and tragedy? This passage may be read as saying not that such a dramatist should compose both, but only that she could. Is the accomplished dramatist one who represents only the serious despite knowing the laughable as well? Or perhaps this dramatist displays the laughable in her work, but only for the sake of contrasting it with, and thereby recommending, the serious life. I argue below that the Ion is of the latter sort. See Symposium 223d. 8

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oneself in her seriousness. Despite all this, comedy is granted a place in the Stranger’s city, even if a subordinate, highly regulated one. Its position seems less tenuous than that granted traditional tragedy. As discussed above, “non-Platonic tragedians” must satisfy the city’s magistrates that their drama is serious and elevated in the same way as that drama which constructs “the fairest and best life.” If their drama is neither complementary nor superior to this “Platonic tragedy,” then they will not be permitted entrance to the city. The matter is different with “comic-acting.” Free citizens are barred from such acting, and they must avoid seeing repeat performances, but otherwise comedians need not justify themselves to the magistrates. Hence, the Stranger seems to hold that rightly regulated traditional comedy is less harmful to the city than traditional tragedy.9 In my reading of the Ion, I suggest that Socrates is presented as the “wise man” who knows the laughable without himself being such. If the Stranger is right that one cannot know one member of a pair without knowing its contrary, then Socrates must know the laughable, since Socrates is represented as serious, and knowing the serious as well as its contrary is a necessary condition for being a serious and elevated person. The character of Ion, on the other hand, is represented as thoroughly laughable, since he lacks knowledge of the serious. By the Stranger’s logic, he also lacks knowledge of the laughable, and the dialogue seems to illustrate this. Lacking knowledge of either the serious or the laughable, Ion makes every manner of ridiculous and absurd comment, betraying himself as a deeply laughable figure. Since this ignorance of the serious and the laughable has to do with his own character, the issue of self-­knowledge is quite important. As already discussed, the Socrates of the Philebus says that the laughable results from lacking Delphic self-knowledge (48c). By failing to satisfy the maxim inscribed at Delphi, Ion remains completely ignorant of himself. According to the Philebus, this is what makes him laughable, i.e. unaware of his own epistemic limits and unable to recognize his own ridiculousness. Socrates, on the other hand, is the perfect opposite of Ion. He is serious in virtue of his honoring the Delphic inscription, because this self-knowledge lets him recognize his own epistemic limits and hence acknowledge the true extent of his ignorance. He  See Else, 62, 63.

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is aware that transgressing these limits is laughable. He abstains from making absurd claims, nor does he engage in laughable self-praise. Knowing what the laughable person would be in himself were it present, he must also know what its contrary, the serious person, would be in himself. Staying within the epistemic bounds delineated by his self-­ knowledge, Socrates is able to be serious at least insofar as abstaining from absurd claims is an elevated and serious business. I now proceed to a closer examination of the Ion. Throughout this reading, I keep in mind the following question: in what sense is the Ion a comic dialogue? Else claims that “Plato’s own genius was comic rather than tragic,” and he mentions the Ion as one of his “comic masterpieces.”10 If my reading of the Ion is appropriate, however, it is comic only insofar as it represents a laughable figure who is ironized by a thoroughly serious figure who also knows the laughable. In keeping with the Stranger’s insight at Laws 816d–e, Socrates cannot be laughable, since then he would not be serious and elevated. However, he can know the laughable, indeed he must if he also knows the serious, and this knowledge permits him to detect the laughable in Ion and subject it to an ironical critique. Hence, Socrates has a great sense of the comic, but I argue that he is not himself comic. One must agree with Else that the irony of the Ion is thick, even if one does not see it operating in the same manner as he does.11 The dialogue wastes no time in establishing the ironical orientation of Socrates to the naïve arrogance of Ion. It opens with Socrates greeting Ion and hearing how the rhapsode has just won first prize in a contest, whereupon Socrates says, “I have often envied you rhapsodes, Ion, for your art” (530b).12 Socrates explains his “jealousy.” Not only should the rhapsode be well-­ adorned and handsome, but he should also be able to understand the meaning of a number of good poets, since otherwise he could not interpret these poets to his audience (530b–c). Socrates envies this understanding of poetry, which he ironically declares to be no less important  Ibid., 186.  Ibid., 8. 12  Plato, The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. W.  R. M.  Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1925). 10 11

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than the rhapsode’s physical appearance. Ion, oblivious to Socrates’ game from the very start, agrees that his “art” of understanding great poets is enviable, and he buffoonishly proclaims himself the best Homeric commentator who ever lived (530c–d). Socrates feigns delight at this, since Ion should therefore be able to provide an “exhibition” or display of this commentary. Ion offers to perform a recitation of Homer, but Socrates makes clear that the exhibition he is interested in is not a rhapsodic performance but rather a conceptual account of the rhapsode’s art. Socrates asks whether Ion is “skilled” in Homer only or in other poets as well. The rhapsode claims competence in Homer only, and the elenchus begins in earnest. Via a quick bout of dialectic, Socrates shows that Ion must be equally skilled in all poets, since they all treat the same subject matter, and hence an art that understands one should also be able to understand the others (532b). Confused, the naïve rhapsode asks why, if this is the case, he is not capable of listening to discussions of poets other than Homer, nor of offering any valuable comment about them. Indeed, he nearly falls asleep when the topic is not Homer (532b–c). Socrates suggests that this is because Ion lacks “art and knowledge” with regard to the poets. Shortly thereafter, Socrates adds that Ion speaks about Homer according to a “divine power,” which he also calls “divine dispensation.” Socrates illustrates this by the simile of the magnet, which can both attract and magnetize an iron ring, causing it to attract other rings and thereby create an extensive chain. In the same way, the muse inspires Homer, who in turn inspires Ion (533d–534c). So Ion lacks any knowledge or art about Homer—he is only the conduit of some divine force. While this view contradicts Ion’s earlier agreement with Socrates that the rhapsode possesses art and knowledge, he nonetheless endorses it enthusiastically, proclaiming that Socrates has touched his soul with his words (535a). While Socrates’ irony in professing envy of rhapsodes and their art is unmistakable, the buffoonery of Ion is no less obvious. Originally boasting about his first-place finish and proclaiming himself the greatest commentator on Homer, the rhapsode is afterward easily led to two contradictory views about his own profession. First, he agrees with Socrates that the rhapsode has an art. Soon after, he fervently concurs that the rhapsode performs via divine dispensation. The important point

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is not that Ion simultaneously holds contradictory views—actually, he relinquishes the former upon adopting the latter—but rather that he exhibits excessive naïveté in transferring so quickly and enthusiastically from one to the other. His is the part of a fool rather than of someone aware of his own epistemic limits. When Socrates asks whether he needs an explanation as to why the same “principle of inquiry” is present in all the arts, Ion replies that he does, “for I enjoy listening to you wise men” (532d). Of course, this misses Socrates’ point altogether. He asks Ion not whether he would enjoy listening to more words he happens to find pleasant, but whether he requires more elucidation in order to understand the point at issue. But Ion does not understand the argument. He simply throws his approval at Socrates, evidently for no other reason than that he enjoys having his soul touched. The contrast between Ion and Socrates is already great, but it grows at this point. Socrates declines the depiction of himself as wise, reserving that title only for the rhapsodes and the poets. He claims to “speak but the plain truth, as a simple layman might” (532d). Socrates’ insistence that the poets and rhapsodes are wise is ironical, but his refusal of the moniker “wise” for himself and his claim to speak only the plain truth are not ironical. I read this commitment to plain truth as a corollary of Delphic self-knowledge. Socrates knows himself, and hence he is aware of his own epistemic limits. Following the Philebus, to know oneself is to be serious and to be ignorant of oneself is to be laughable. The Ion, therefore, presents a juxtaposition of the serious and the laughable in the figures of Socrates and Ion respectively, because the former possesses self-knowledge and the latter lacks it. But whereas the Philebus offers only a quick commentary on the differences between the serious and the laughable, the Ion stages an intricate illustration of them, depicting the two side-by-side and thereby making a non-demonstrative, performative argument in favor of the serious. For this reason, Else’s dismissal of the Ion as “a youthful effort, not very carefully designed, not very coherently executed” is too quick.13 The irony of the dialogue may be “premature” in some ways, but it is much more than merely a disorganized attempt to

13

 Else, 9.

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discredit poetry.14 Below, I defend the interpretation that Socrates only ironically employs the hypothesis of divine dispensation. Far from committing himself to the view that poets and rhapsodes are divinely inspired, Socrates playfully suggests divine dispensation in order bait Ion into fully disclosing himself as laughable. By taking the bait with such naïve enthusiasm, Ion highlights the difference between himself and Socrates, and the reader can see for herself which of the two figures is ethically preferable. Suzanne Stern-Gillet criticizes those who take at face value Socrates’ claim that rhapsodes and poets work according to divine dispensation. According to her, the dialogue “features Socrates in his usual sarcastic mood, yet the sarcasm, as often as not, has gone unnoticed.”15 She suggests one should take Socrates’ endorsement of divine dispensation “[o] nly half seriously.”16 There is reason to believe that Plato does not “invariably dismiss as noxious the manifestations of the non-rational soul in the lives of human beings.”17 Nonetheless, Stern-Gillet recognizes that Socrates is making fun of Ion when he proposes that the rhapsode is divinely inspired: “once it is realised that Socrates’ tactics consist in taking away with one hand the compliments that he dishes out with the other, the sarcasm becomes apparent.”18 Socrates effectively says that Ion knows nothing of poetry and does not deserve to be praised for his performances, since the gods are ultimately responsible for his inspiration. Ion is too simple to recognize that this is no compliment, and he eagerly endorses whatever Socrates says. Indeed, the dialogue closes with Socrates asking whether Ion wishes to be called “dishonest or divine.” If Ion recites and expounds Homer according to an art, then he is dishonest, because such an artist must know the skill by which he works, and yet Ion claims to be unable to explain his art to Socrates. If, however, Ion works according to divine dispensation, then his inability to explain his recitation and exposition of Homer is to be expected, since he would simply be an ignorant and talentless individual who happened to be a conduit for the gods.  Ibid., 7.  Suzanne Stern-Gillet, “On (mis)interpreting Plato’s Ion,” Phronesis 49:2 (2004): 169. 16  Ibid., 178. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid., 180. 14 15

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Hence, the appellation “divine” is no compliment, yet Ion welcomes it, since it is “far nobler to be called divine” than dishonest. Socrates assures the rhapsode that he deserves this “nobler” title, since he is merely “divine” and not “artistic” (542a–b). This irony-charged reference to the divine suggests nothing more than ignorance, confusion, naïveté, and foolishness on the part of Ion. Ion’s absurdity reaches its peak when he claims to be the best general in Greece. To be fair, Ion is led to this claim by some dialectical maneuvering on the part of Socrates, but his being so easily led to such an excessive declaration further indicates Ion’s lack of self-knowledge. The matter begins when Ion says the rhapsode’s art consists in knowing what is fitting for each person to say (540b). Ion softens this claim when Socrates asks whether the rhapsode knows better than the pilot and the doctor what the latter two should say, but he insists his claim is valid for the general, at least insofar as he himself knows what a general should say (540c–d). Socrates slyly consents that Ion is no doubt an excellent general, but this must be on account of his having the art of generalship rather than the art of poetry. Here Ion becomes stubborn. He maintains that the arts of generalship and rhapsody are one and the same (541a). Nonetheless, he contradicts himself upon admitting that a good rhapsode is a good general but not vice versa. Not noticing this contradiction, Ion claims to be the best rhapsode in Greece. When Socrates asks if he is not also the best general in Greece, Ion magnificently proclaims, “Be sure of it, Socrates; and that I owe to my study of Homer” (541b), thus capping his steadily-built absurdity with a final flourish of the laughable. This is a chronic case of self-ignorance. For one example, Ion does not see that the same logic applies in the instance of the general as in those of the pilot and doctor. He evidently has no reason for opposing Socrates’ claim that the general speaks better about military issues than the rhapsode, since he grants Socrates this same point in the cases of the doctor and pilot. Nor does he recognize that he contradicts himself when he admits that generals do not make the best rhapsodes, despite having just asserted that the art of the rhapsode and the general is identical. Finally, his declarations to be the best rhapsode and best general show that he has learned nothing from the dialectic, which should have demonstrated to him that he is not currently justified in making either of those claims.

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This particular rhapsode is ignorant of his own epistemic limits, naively unaware that each of his assertions is unjustified, and ridiculously committed to a view of himself that is completely unsupported by any good reason. It is difficult to imagine a worse case of self-ignorance. Awareness of one’s epistemic limits may not be the whole of Delphic self-knowledge, but it is certainly an important component. In the Apology, Socrates famously accounts for his wisdom: “what I do not know I do not think I know either” (21d).19 Having been pronounced the wisest of all persons by the oracle at Delphi, Socrates claims to have been initially troubled, since he was aware of being ignorant in many areas in which others claimed knowledge and wisdom. Upon investigating these purportedly wise people, however, Socrates soon discovered their fraudulence, eventually concluding that his own wisdom must simply be awareness of his own ignorance and respect for the limits of his knowledge. To be wise, one must abstain from making unjustified claims, and this is only possible if one knows oneself and one’s epistemic limits. Like Ion, the poets in the Apology cannot give an adequate account of the “fine things” they say in their poetry, but they nonetheless considered themselves “the wisest of men in other things as well, in which they were not.” This leads Socrates to suggest the same ironical explanation as he does in the case of Ion, namely that the poets compose their poetry according to inspiration rather than knowledge, remaining ignorant of their own work (22b–c). Recalling that the Philebus treats naïve over-estimation of one’s own wisdom as the worst and hence most laughable kind of self-­ignorance (48e–49a), one sees why Ion and the poets are laughable. The self-knowledge that is lauded in the Apology, as in the Philebus, is not purely an epistemological matter. Socrates defends awareness of and respect for one’s own epistemic limits because of its ethical significance, not just because he is a pedant for exactitude and correctness. This, of course, is why he proclaims that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology, 38a). Given that the serious person and the laughable person are intimately connected to self-knowledge and self-ignorance respectively, one sees why the serious and the laughable are matters of  Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1966). 19

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considerable ethical importance. Since to be laughable is to be ethically deficient, and since to be serious is to be ethically advanced, the position of Ion is a deeply troubling one. It is in this way the Ion provides a non-­ demonstrative, performative argument favoring the serious and elevated over the low and laughable. By presenting two characters who exemplify the laughable and the serious, and by putting them into conversation, the dialogue makes a powerful appeal to the reader. Witnessing the severe dissonance of the serious and the laughable, observing their respective natures, and seeing how ethically problematic the laughable person is, the reader cannot help but prefer being serious to being laughable. Following the advice of the Athenian Stranger, the Ion assists the reader in being serious, because it helps one know both the laughable and the serious, knowledge of both being necessary in order to live in the latter fashion. Being committed to truth, Socrates declares that he is not one of the wise. Ignorant of himself, Ion cannot recognize his own epistemic limits, hence his excessive ignorance, naïveté, and ridiculousness. The point of the Ion is not to defend divine dispensation as the best explanation of poetry and rhapsody, but rather to illustrate that the life of Delphic self-­ knowledge is ethically better than the life of naïve self-ignorance. The discussion of art and divine dispensation is only the occasion for this more important issue to disclose itself. One must go to the Philebus and the Laws for an explicit discussion of the appropriate concepts, because the Ion performs rather than explains the laughable and the serious. The serious Socrates is dramatized as an exemplar of the serious life, and the laughable Ion serves only to reinforce this by way of contrast. Socrates also fits the Athenian Stranger’s requirement that the serious person must know the laughable without being such. He is able to expose the ridiculousness of Ion because he knows the laughable as the contrary of the serious, and his being seriousness entails such knowledge. Well aware of the absurdity and laughableness of Ion, Socrates displays an acute sense of the comic, yet he himself is never laughable. By the same token, one might say that the author of the Ion knew both the serious and the laughable, since he is able to represent them in such a way that the former is privileged and recommended to the latter as ethically better. I close by considering now whether the Ion is a comic dialogue. William Desmond asks an intriguing question and provides an interesting answer:

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“Can philosophers laugh at themselves? Answer: Socrates? Very much so.”20 While this contention deserves to be explored, it does not seem to be true of the Socrates of the Ion. In order to laugh at someone, that person must be laughable, and Ion’s interlocutor is certainly not this. Socrates is presented as thoroughly serious, knowledgeable of the laughable but totally unlike the laughable rhapsode. He does have a sense of the comic insofar as he employs ironical, humorous methods to unmask the ridiculousness of Ion. This humorous irony and the laughable character of the rhapsode might be sufficient grounds for treating the Ion as a comic work. But a reconsideration of the Laws suggests a more interesting and less obvious categorization of the dialogue. The Athenian Stranger treats comedy as nothing more than “laughable amusements” that should be closely monitored (816e). If one speaks of comedy in this sense, then the Ion is not chiefly a comic dialogue, because it is much more than mere amusement. On the contrary, its primary purpose is ethical instruction in the most serious of all matters, wisdom. Accordingly, the Ion seems much closer to that “truest tragedy,” which the Stranger defines as the “representation of the fairest and best life” (817b). Since the dialogue employs the laughable Ion not for the sake of entertainment but rather for the sake of ethical instruction, and since this ethical instruction concerns the serious task of cultivating wisdom, it seems more appropriate to view the dialogue as tragic rather than comic. The Socrates of the Philebus insists that one cannot know the serious and elevated without knowing the laughable and low, so Ion plays an important role by exemplifying the latter pair. But the performance of the serious Socrates is central, and the purpose of the dialogue is to illustrate that the serious person is ethically superior to the laughable person. In this sense, the Ion is very much a tragic dialogue, “a representation of the fairest and best life.”

 William Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic: Speculation, Cult, and Comedy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 341. The passage continues: “Aristotle? Not much. Descartes? Not at all. Kant? Not at all. Hegel? Now and then. Nietzsche? An astonishing buffoon—I repeat his own word, with some admiration. Husserl? Not at all. Heidegger? I cannot find it. Derrida? At others, yes. At himself? No, not at all.” 20

2 Foolhardy Yet Courageous: Is There Such a Thing as Quixotic Virtue? Vicky Roupa

One of the central endeavors of Plato in his dialogue Meno is to establish that so-called virtues (courage, moderation, etc.) are not in themselves such but only become virtues when accompanied by understanding, wisdom or knowledge.1 As Socrates puts it in 88b “when a man is reckless without understanding, he is harmed, when with understanding, he is benefited”; and again in 88c “therefore, in a word, all that the soul undertakes and endures, if directed by wisdom [phronēseōs], ends in happiness, but if directed by ignorance [aphrosunēs], it ends in the opposite.”2 It is hard to imagine a character more out of step with this Socratic view than  I follow the English translation of Don Quixote by Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). References are given in the text by page number. References to Plato’s dialogues are given to the standard Stephanus pages. All Greek cited has been transliterated. Note that I have employed ē for eta and ō for omega. 2  Plato, Meno, trans. G.M.A.  Grube, in Complete Works, ed. J.M.  Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). 1

V. Roupa (*) Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_2

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Cervantes’s Don Quixote, a character who, in defiance of common sense and Socratic admonition, shuns all exhortation to phronēsis and rushes headlong into the most reckless and mindless adventures so much so that the figure of an emaciated knight against the backdrop of windmills has become emblematic of futility and folly. Don Quixote is the anti-Platonic hero par excellence, at least if by Platonism we mean the kind of intellectualism, defended by Socrates in a number of Platonic dialogues, according to which rational thought is a necessary contributing factor to attaining virtue.3 For surely, the mixture of recklessness, mindlessness and indiscriminate pursuit of an aim that is itself anachronistic and hopeless (the revival of knight errantry in seventeenth century Spain), cannot win Quixote a reputation for reasonableness and good judgment, nor can it possibly end in happiness. This portrayal of Quixote, however, turns out to be deceptively simple when one moves from the first part of the novel, which includes such famous episodes as the assault on the windmills and the mistaking of an inn for a castle, to the second. Unfortunately, this part of the book is less well-known than its famous prequel, with the result that its central character is often reduced to a buffoon that never learns but only ever repeats the same follies.4 Worse still for those keen to tease out the complex philosophical issues arising from Don Quixote, ignoring the middle sections of the book can lead one to overlook the challenges posed by the character of Quixote to a theory of virtue bent on defining moral action in terms of rational thought and understanding. For in those sections the character appears to have undergone inner development and growth; no longer a fool out of touch with reality, Quixote emerges as capable of reasoning upon, and offering an account of, his own motives, aims, and choice of means. It is this Quixote, I argue, that represents a challenge for Plato’s account of virtue as involving a pronounced rational/cognitive  See Heda Segvic, “No One Errs Willingly: The Meaning of Socratic Intellectualism,” in A Companion to Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007): 171-85. 4  See the editor’s Introduction to Anthony J. Cascardi, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 1, where it is commented that the novel is “unjustly treated when reduced to a few scenes from Part 1.” See also Roberto González Echevarría, Love and the Law in Cervantes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 112–13. 3

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element in the form of a kind of knowledge or wisdom which should in principle be expressible in words and communicable to other people.5 In the following sections I examine the nature of this peculiar challenge – peculiar, in that it is dramatized and insinuated, thus eliding the classical, since Aristotle, trope of argument and refutation that would have reached Cervantes through the Renaissance rhetorical tradition.6 The suppression of this trope should not blind us to the philosophical import of Cervantes’s undertaking; in imagining a hero so unlike (but also, as we shall see, so like) Socrates, Cervantes creates new possibilities of philosophical engagement that connect with Platonism as much as they depart from it. In what follows I stage a confrontation between Quixotic and Socratic virtue attending to the interplay between knowledge and ignorance, prudence and daring, philosophical argument and dramatic characterization. Focusing on a particular episode from Book II of Don Quixote, the adventure of the lions, I sketch out the difficulties its central character represents for the theory of intellectualism. I consider the plausibility of a specifically Quixotic kind of virtue, and conclude by highlighting areas where Quixote meets Socrates, though, as I argue, never on equal terms and never without ambiguity.

1

The Aphrōn Hero: Confronting the Lions

The adventure of the lions, which occurs in Part II of the book, marks a turning point in the novel. One of the few successful undertakings which Quixote survives unscathed, this adventure results in enhancing Quixote’s reputation given that his exploit is witnessed by two others who then recount the feat to Quixote’s companions. And yet, the episode is  On the importance of being able to offer an account for one’s beliefs, see Terence Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 21–3; hereafter abbreviated PE. On Cervantes’s challenge of the philosophers’ authority, see Diana de Armas Wilson, “‘Unreason’s Reason’: Cervantes at the Frontiers of Difference,” Philosophy and Literature 16, no. 1 (April 1992): 49–67 (49). 6  Anthony J. Cascardi, “Two Kinds of Knowing in Plato, Cervantes, and Aristotle,” Philosophy and Literature 24, no. 2 (October 2000): 406–23 (410–11); hereafter abbreviated “TKK”. See also Anthony J.  Cascardi, Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 21. 5

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triggered by an immodest and unreasonable desire on the part of Don Quixote to prove himself. No provocation has been offered, no one deserving Quixote’s aid has been harmed, no widow or long-suffering maiden, of whom Quixote has been the self-appointed protector, has summoned him. Quite simply, on encountering a cart with two large African lions being taken to the King of Spain, Quixote bids the lion-­ keeper to open their cages and turn them out so he can fight them and “let them know who Don Quixote of La Mancha is” (p.  560). Don Diego, a gentleman that has been traveling with our two heroes for a little while, tries to reason with Quixote. Knights errant, he sensibly points out, should engage in adventures with some prospect of success but this one is desperate, “for the valor that crosses over into temerity has more to do with madness than courage” (p. 561). Apart from that, the lions have not gone against Quixote, and furthermore it would be improper to challenge lions meant to be presented to the King. But Quixote brushes aside Don Diego’s arguments, as he does those of the other characters on the scene who implore him to desist from this folly, and gets ready to face the lions. The common sense to which Don Diego gives voice in this passage is overwhelming. What reason could there be for Quixote to engage in a battle he does not stand a single chance of winning? More importantly, even if he did somehow manage to vanquish the two animals, what could he presume to “let them know”? To sum up the situation, Don Quixote is rushing into an adventure doomed to failure from the start; the profound inequality of the fight means he has no hope of vanquishing the lions;7 and even if he did subdue the animals by some strange quirk of fate, he would not have thereby achieved his final aim, to “let them know who Don Quixote is.” The best he can therefore hope for is to give his companions a demonstration of his courage; instead, his companions now deem him completely and utterly mad. Notwithstanding the defense  Cervantes accentuates the hopelessness of the task by having the fictional author of the book, Cide Hamete Benengeli, address his character directly: “You on foot, you alone, you intrepid and of a noble mind, armed only with a sword, and not one of those with a dog on the blade, and with a shield not made of bright and shining steel, you stand waiting and anticipating the two most savage lions ever born in the African jungle. May your own deeds sing your praises, most valiant Manchegan” (p. 563). 7

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of madness Plato has proposed in other dialogues, such as the Phaedrus, Quixote’s madness in this instance does not seem to be defensible by any conceivable means, and it certainly will not end in happiness if the lions decide to get their paws on their aggressor. Contrary to all expectations, the lions do not tear Don Quixote to pieces – they ignore the challenge and do not come out of their cages at all. Quixote has won the day even though it is through sheer luck rather than a superior fighting ability. However that may be, Quixote has demonstrated a courage that takes everyone by surprise, and far outstrips anything he has attempted so far. For Socrates, however, this would probably not be good enough. Despite his victory (which chiefly consists in staying alive after having exposed himself to such a grave danger), Quixote has exhibited what Socrates would call andreia aneu nou or courage without understanding. Although it is not completely clear in the Meno what this understanding consists in and how it is to be secured, it is easy to see that Quixote’s conduct does not tick any of the boxes of virtuous action: it is not undertaken with a recognizably rational aim in view, it is more likely to harm the actor (Quixote) than not, and finally, it is more likely to impede his happiness and welfare than promote it. Surprisingly, when he later joins his companions who had fled to escape the carnage, Don Quixote acknowledges that his earlier behavior must have seemed to them foolish and mad, which would be no marvel, “because my actions do not attest to anything else” (p. 566). He undertakes, therefore, in true Socratic fashion, to offer an “apology,” i.e. an account of his life and actions in order to counter the charges of irrationality and madness brought against him. Explaining that he has chosen the life of arms, he compares the relatively comfortable life of a knight stationed in the court of the king to the exertions and pains facing an itinerant knight, and concludes that since it has been his lot to belong among the ranks of the latter, he cannot help “but attack all things that seem to me to fall within the jurisdiction of my endeavors”; and so, it was my rightful place to attack the lions which I now attacked, although I knew it was exceedingly reckless, because I know very well what valor means; it is a virtue that occupies a place between two wicked extremes, which are cowardice and temerity, but it is better for the valiant

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man to touch on and climb to the heights of temerity than to touch on and fall to the depths of cowardice; and just as it is easier for the prodigal to be generous than the miser, it is easier for the reckless man to become truly brave than for the coward; and in the matter of undertaking adventures, your grace may believe me, Señor Don Diego, it is better to lose with too many cards than too few, because “This knight is reckless and daring” sounds better to the ear of those who hear it than “This knight is timid and cowardly.”

To which Don Diego replies: I say that everything your grace has said and done has been balanced on the scale of reason itself (pp. 566–7).

As the sensible gentleman testifies, what comes as a surprise in this passage is its compelling logic. It turns out that upon embarking on the adventure of the lions Don Quixote had not been completely lacking in rational considerations; instead, his undertaking was a calculated attempt to make progress towards his final aim, true valor. Notwithstanding the reference to the Aristotelian mean, however, Quixote’s speech does not altogether signify a return to the fold of philosophic virtue. Though undertaken with a vestige of nous, as required by Socrates in the Meno, the exploit cannot be deemed to be the outcome of phronēsis or wisdom. Quixote is here claiming that the conquest of virtue requires an excessive exertion, i.e. an exertion whose extent cannot be calculated in advance. The rationale for this exertion appears to be the following: given his aim to successfully emulate the virtue of a knight errant, Quixote needs to act in such a way as to approximate the bravery of the famous knights of the past whom Quixote takes as his models. This specifically Quixotic imperative, however, comes up against the hero’s difficulty to calculate the right degree of courage he needs to exercise if he is to attain his aim. It is possible that he could make a wrong judgment and miss an opportunity that calls for his timely intervention; on the other hand, it is equally possible that he might exhibit “more” courage than is called for in a certain situation. But the former scenario is unbearable for Quixote whereas the latter can at worst result in some injuries (as has, in fact, happened every so

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often). In the first case, what is at stake is our hero’s sense of duty and his reputation, in the second just his bodily integrity. He therefore prefers to err on the side of temerity than timidity, and will gladly risk a few blows – if this is likely to bring him closer to his aim – than be saddled with the stain of cowardice.8

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The Quixotic Challenge to Intellectualism

How does this peculiarly Quixotic virtue differ from the kind of virtue Socrates sketches out in the Meno? Assuming that Quixote’s idiosyncratic moral code is indeed a species of virtue, it constitutes an aphrōn aretē, not directed by the kind of prudential moderation (mēden agan, i.e. “nothing in excess”) that ordered the Greek engagement with the world. But according to the conceptual rubric of the Meno such an aretē would be a contradiction in terms. Socrates makes this argument in two steps; first, he establishes in 77b–78a the thesis (also known from the Apology) that no one knowingly desires bad things. To do so would entail desiring things one knows are going to be harmful for one and make one miserable and unhappy. But no one wishes to be miserable and unhappy, therefore no one knowingly wants what is bad. The second step involves making a strong case for the claim that virtue is impossible without knowledge (86e–88c). Proceeding on the hypothesis that virtue is something good and beneficial, Socrates examines instances of beneficial things (such as wealth, strength and beauty) and inquires whether these are unqualifiedly beneficial or sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful. Predictably, the latter turns out to be the case, and Socrates now seeks to identify the condition under which these things are beneficial or harmful. “Is it not,” he asks his interlocutor, Meno, “the right use of them that benefits us, and the wrong use that harms us?” (88a) Pertinently to our discussion, Socrates uses the example of courage to drive the point home  It may be objected that Quixote here appears to be more concerned with his reputation than with attaining genuine virtue. A concern with reputation and success, however, was not alien to the Greek conception of aretē; see Alexander Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. xxxi, 4, 37; hereafter abbreviated VA. 8

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(recklessness without understanding is harmful, with understanding it is beneficial), from which he draws the global conclusion that all human undertakings will end in happiness provided that the soul undertaking them is guided by wisdom; by contrast, if the soul is directed by ignorance, these undertakings will end in misery (88c).9 It is not difficult to see that in his speech Quixote professes a special kind of ignorance. He tacitly admits that he doesn’t know how to “get it right” in matters of courage; he says he prefers to lose with too many cards than with too few, but lose he will unless, of course, chance favors him as in the adventure of the lions. Could it be that Quixote gives himself over to this excessive exertion in the hope that by trial and error he will inadvertently stumble upon the kind of knowledge Socrates allies with virtue? No, this does not seem to be the case either; Quixote does not learn from experience, and the sound judgment he displays in other issues evaporates completely when it comes to matters of knight errantry. If judgment is the ability to extract a rule or principle from a particular situation, Quixote does not have this ability. In fact, experience does not teach Quixote anything at all. This should be taken in a double sense: first, there is not a single experience that can shake his belief in knight errantry (which, he thinks, is his vocation), and second, no experience can give him a measure of what works and what doesn’t on the basis of which to modify his future conduct until he can get it roughly right. What is more difficult to establish is whether this lack of wisdom is harmful for Quixote and leads to unhappiness. Quixote and Sancho Pancha have suffered privation, hardship and a good number of beatings in the former’s pursuit of knightly virtue. But should we conclude that Quixote’s aims and choice of means are harmful and have made him miserable and unhappy? This will depend on our definition of “harmful” and “beneficial”; undoubtedly, if we take “harmful” to include that which violates bodily integrity and “beneficial” that which invariably preserves it, then Quixote’s recklessness has certainly harmed him. But it is doubtful that this is Socrates’ definition, or that the content he gives to  The word used to denote “wisdom” here is phronēsis, “a very difficult word to translate”, as Aubert-­ Baillot notes, meaning “thought”, “intellectual perception”, “sense”, “prudence”, “practical wisdom.” See Sophie Aubert-Baillot, “De la Φρόνησιϛ à la prudentia,” Mnemosyne 68, no. 1 (January 2015): 68–90 (68). 9

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happiness necessarily excludes bodily hardship. On the contrary, there is ample evidence in the dialogues that Socrates neither identified happiness with pleasure nor opposed hardship to the happy life.10 This is corroborated by Socrates’ defense at his trial where he argues that the risk of death should not be taken into account by “a man who is any good at all” because such a man “should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong” (28b–c).11 It is clear, therefore, that for Socrates, to defend oneself against unjust accusation even on pain of death is preferable and a higher good than being fearful of death on the grounds that death annihilates any further prospects of happiness. To summarize the argument we have established so far, Quixote’s character represents a particular challenge for an intellectualist account of virtue, i.e. one that strongly correlates virtue with knowledge, inasmuch as Quixote shows himself capable of reasoning and deliberation about his aims and choice of means but consistently fails to “get it right” in action; if this were a game of darts, he would consistently fail to hit the target despite numerous hours of practice and obsessive engagement with the game. What an intellectualist theory of virtue appears to be missing, therefore, is an account of how, given a certain aim which is itself not disgraceful, one can make the right choice of means that are appropriate and proportionate to that aim and ultimately help promote it. It is not sufficient to argue that knowledge just is the ability to choose correctly because that would imply that “knowledge,” as a distinct cognitive element that accompanies courage, is epistemically empty: if by “knowledge” we mean the ability to choose correctly but fail to define this knowledge substantively, then by correlating virtue with knowledge we have not added any content to the definition of virtue except that it needs to be accompanied by the ability to make the right choice of means. But that is precisely the problem: in being called upon to show, say, courage, one needs to know how to show courage; either one does it intuitively (in which case, “knowledge” does not mean anything other than some non-­ discursive understanding of what to do) or one does not know how to do  On the question of happiness vs. pleasure see Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 204–5. 11  Plato, Apology, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). See also Vlastos, p. 209. 10

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it and requires guidance (which, if it is not forthcoming, inevitably entails the agent getting caught up in the Quixotic conundrum). This is not only a problem for our understanding of courage but all the virtues; if there is some sort of knowledge involved in attaining, say, temperance or moderation, intellectualism needs to furnish an account of such knowledge that is not empty, i.e. it does not simply project on to that virtue an additional element it names “knowledge” without explaining what that knowledge is and how it can help the agent attain the virtue in question. Socratic intellectualism has been criticized for failing to make a distinction between a cognitive/rational component in action and a quite different volitional/affective one, which may be at odds with the former (as occurs, for instance, in desiring and eating a food which one knows is harmful for one’s health, known as weakness of the will or acrasia). It is plain to see, however, that Quixote’s conundrum is not acrasia, but a kind of cognitive dissonance between Quixote’s theoretical understanding of his aims and the practical difficulty he has in employing the right means.12 Might we say, then, that Quixote is not truly courageous but only foolish and rash? In the next section I turn to the dialogue Laches, which offers a limited defense of such foolishness, to see whether we can find in it a modified intellectualist account that accommodates Quixote.

3

Reading the Laches as Drama

The Laches raises the question of courage on multiple levels; although the starting point of the dialogue is a narrow one – whether Lysimachus and Melesias ought to entrust their sons to an expert in hoplomachia or training in armor – already at the beginning we get an inkling of how multifaceted courage is; upon meeting Laches and Nicias, Lysimachus tells them that he would like their opinion on this matter because he knows that, having formed a judgment, these people say exactly what they think  Cf. VA, p. 28: “The problem then seems to be this. Socrates’ ethical intellectualism makes him believe that once people acquire knowledge of virtue, they will be able to tell what the good thing to do is in all circumstances, and will in fact do it. They will therefore always act well and be happy. But the transition from knowledge to action seems highly doubtful.” 12

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(178b).13 They thus exhibit, we may assume, a certain kind of courage: that of their convictions. Plato is here making a subtle point: there is more to courage than expertise in weapons. The dialogue is a good example of Socratic dialectics by which is meant not eristics  – which attempts to throw one’s opponent off course by means of aggressive questioning and refutation – but a dialogical attempt at defining and clarifying the terms of the debate. In this sense, it appears on the surface as an altogether more comradely affair – as befits a discussion between former comrades in battle – than the Meno where Plato’s argumentative strategy seems to be that of inducing a state of perplexity by puncturing holes in Meno’s intellectual presumptuousness.14 Reading the Laches as a purely philosophical exchange, however, without concern for the characters that Plato dramatizes, risks setting us off on the wrong track. Key to the dialogue’s broader context is that Laches and Nicias, the two generals whose opinion is sought on the matter of courage, would later be defeated in battle and die a disgraceful death.15 These events are not referenced in the dialogue – which is dramatically set at an earlier time – however, it is safe to assume that Plato relies on his readers’ knowledge of Laches’ and Nicias’ eventual humiliation to make a subtle philosophical point: the positions each conversant defends on the matter of courage are a reflection of their life, character, and life choices; similarly, their blind spots in philosophical argument are not unrelated to their actual shortcomings.16  Plato, Laches, trans. R.K.  Sprague, in Complete Works, ed. J.M.  Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). 14  Laches and Socrates retreated together at the battle of Delium, where the Athenians were defeated by the Boeotians. 15  On the historical background to the dialogue, see Walter T. Schmid, On Manly Courage: A Study of Plato’s Laches (Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. 1–24; hereafter abbreviated MC. 16  I therefore follow in my reading of the Laches an interpretive strategy proposed by Martha Nussbaum in a paper on Plato’s Symposium: “Plato believes it important to see a theory as growing out of, and, in turn, inspiring, particular choices and ways of living. He wants to show us certain connections between belief and behavior, and also how concrete experiences of a certain sort could tell for or against holding a theory.” Martha Nussbaum, “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium,” Philosophy and Literature 3, no. 2 (Fall 1979): 131–72 (138). See also George Kimball Plochman’s Foreward to MC: “It is an assumption, but a sound one, that Plato knew thoroughly the eventual defeats of the two generals [...] as well as their shortcomings that brought these about, causes resting upon their severally inadequate conceptions of the main virtue upon which success in war must depend. So Plato could put into their mouths intimations of this short13

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The passage that promises to give some vindication of Quixotic courage as it diverges from the well-known correlation between knowledge and virtue occurs when, having abandoned his first definition of courage as too narrow, Laches attempts a more comprehensive definition as a “sort of endurance of the soul” (192c). At Socrates’ instigation, it is added that in order to be fine and noble this endurance needs to be accompanied by “wisdom” [meta phronēseōs], but if accompanied by “folly” [met’ aphrosunēs], it is harmful and injurious (192c–d). Whilst this seems to be bringing us back to intellectualist territory, it is not Socrates’ last word on courage, as he then goes on to compare the man who endures in battle – his willingness to fight based on his knowledge that “others are coming to his aid, and that he will be fighting men who are fewer than those on his side, and inferior to them” – to “one in the opposite camp who is willing to remain and hold out” (193a). It is clear to both interlocutors that the latter is more courageous; in fact, “foolishness,” as the interlocutors concede, does not necessarily compromise courage but rather seems to be a prerequisite of courageous action in certain cases. Thus, the man who shows endurance in a cavalry attack without knowledge of horsemanship is deemed more courageous than the man with this knowledge. Similarly, “the one who endures with knowledge of slinging or archery or some other art [technēs] is less courageous” (193b), whilst those who would be “willing to endure in diving down into wells without being skilled [...] are braver than those who are skilled in these things” because “such people run risks and endure more foolishly than those who do a thing with art” (193c). It may be objected that this barrage of examples is part of Socrates’ argumentative strategy to bring Laches to a state of perplexity by showcasing the internal contradictions of his definition – as he explicitly does with Meno in the dialogue of that name – and thus prompt a more cogent definition. Whilst this may be true to a certain extent, it is also interesting to note how swiftly it throws the intellectualist position into doubt. Although Socrates will indeed resort to an earlier stipulation that (P1) foolish daring and endurance is disgraceful and harmful, whilst (P2) sightedness as well as anticipations of the men’s consequent downfall, hints whose true significance only readers of the dialogue, not the generals portrayed, could fully assess” (p. xii).

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courage is a noble thing (193d), the conclusion to be drawn from these premises is not that foolish daring and endurance can never be courageous, despite the certainty with which this conclusion seems to assert itself. If there is an inconsistency here, as indeed there must be, it is not between foolishness and courage, as it is truly the case that sometimes foolish people act more courageously than those who calculate wisely. But if that is right, where does it leave us with regard to Quixote’s aphrōn aretē which seems to be akin to that of the person who is willing to endure and hold his ground even though he is outnumbered and outgunned, the man who endures in a cavalry attack without knowledge of horsemanship, or the one who is willing to go down a well without the relevant skill? And secondly, where does it leave us with regard to Socratic intellectualism that has been decisively affirmed in so many other instances? A first tentative suggestion would be that it is premature at this stage to squarely oppose Quixotic virtue to Socratic aretē on the basis of foolishness (aphrosunē) alone. Yes, Quixote is rash and imprudent, but so is the man who is willing to go down a well without the relevant skill, and yet we think that man more courageous than the one with the relevant skill. However, it would be equally premature to denounce the intellectualist correlation between courage and knowledge as this seems to be affirmed in a number of dialogues.17 In the Laches, too, the intellectualist position is raised again by Nicias, who, upon seeing the argument end in an impasse, takes up the investigation anew, crucially returning to the link between courage and knowledge. Before we go on to examine Nicias’ arguments, though, it is important to keep in mind that the impasse that marks the end of Socrates’ exchange with Laches is not due to a logical inconsistency which calls for the abandonment of the premises as false but rather to the fact that Laches’ proposed definitions are partial and inadequate, and require refinement and reconsideration. Thus, it is not wrong that a man who is willing to stand his ground whilst knowing that he is outnumbered be considered more courageous than the one who relies on superior forces, even though it would be wrong to accept on the  See, for example, Protagoras 345c–e, where Socrates defends his notorious “no one errs willingly” thesis. 17

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strength of that example that prudence plays no role in courage. But if this is right, then we need to think carefully about the kind of argumentative strategy Plato employs in the dialogue; as Irwin has argued, Socrates is not “trying to test his interlocutors’ logical skills,” but requires them “to say what they really believe about the moral question he raises” (PE, p. 20).18 As we have seen, the theme of saying what one really believes runs deep in this dialogue, suggesting that here it is not so much a matter of Socrates’ inducing a state of perplexity in order to shatter the shaky foundations of his interlocutor’s beliefs, but rather a quest for a comprehensive account of courage where partial definitions and limited perspectives that purport to cover the whole of courage be exposed for what they are and suitably revised. This needs to be borne in mind when Nicias revisits the role of knowledge in courage noting that he has often heard Socrates say that every one of us is good with respect to that in which he is wise and bad in respect to that in which he is ignorant, leading to the supposition that if the courageous man is good, it is clear that he is wise (194d). However, this definition will not satisfy Socrates either, despite the correlation it posits between wisdom and virtue. Assuming, as Nicias does, that courage involves some sort of knowledge, what is this knowledge knowledge of? Nicias’ answer, and with it, his inevitable downfall, as we shall see in a minute, is that it involves knowledge “of the fearful and the hopeful,” of the things that justifiably induce fear, and therefore are to be avoided, and those that justifiably induce hope, and therefore are to be undertaken.19 It takes some knowledge of the historical background to understand why Socrates is unhappy with this answer. The vital clue in the passage that follows is the reference to “seers,” i.e. those that claim to be able to see what will happen in the future – a subtle hint at Nicias’ later defeat at Syracuse which was partly due to his delay to give the withdrawal order on a seer’s advice.20 Socrates questions the implicit reference to knowledge of the future in Nicias’ definition: “We regard as fearful things those  See also MC, p. 101: “Possibly [Socrates] does not intend simply to refute this conception but to probe it, understand it better, discover its strengths and weaknesses.” 19  Or, in an alternative translation, the “knowledge of what is to be dreaded and dared”; see MC, p. 132. 20  See MC, p. 9. 18

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that produce fear,” he says, but fear “is produced not by evils which have happened or are happening but by those which are anticipated.” “It seems to me,” Socrates continues, “that of the various things with which knowledge is concerned, there is not one kind of knowledge by which we know how things have happened in the past, and another by which we know how they are happening at the present time, and still another by which we know how what has not yet happened might best come to be in the future, but that the knowledge is the same in each case” (198d). An intriguing objection, it might be thought, and one verging on the technical and the contrived; why should Socrates object to Nicias’ definition on account of whether it refers to the past, the present, or the future? My suggestion here – and with this I hope to summarize what I think is unique and often overlooked about Socrates’ intellectualism – is that Socrates is making a point concerning how the knowledge involved in courage also entails a certain ignorance. Nicias’ aim is to restrict the sphere of such ignorance as far as possible, and correspondingly expand the scope of his knowledge and control. His notion of courage, therefore, is a highly technical one which relies on the capacity to make informed decisions based on factual knowledge, and ignores or downplays the necessary structural role ignorance plays in ethics.21 The problem at which Socrates hints here is that overreliance on the technico-prudential dimensions of courage – the military science that accelerates hope and daring – could lead to the opposite result. In fact, Nicias’ experience shows that prudence based on science and knowledge of the facts can go both ways: it can underpin courage by surveying the current situation and drawing appropriate conclusions and courses of action, or it can lead to excessive fearfulness about imagined risks, and ultimately hesitation and defeat. More than that, ignorance has an existential dimension, which Nicias’ definition suppresses; there are things that we, as humans, cannot hope to know, such as, for example, whether death is a bad thing, a good thing, or an indifferent thing.22 This ignorance is built into the very fabric of  See W. Thomas Schmid, “The Socratic Conception of Courage,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1985): 113–29 (113–17). 22  See Apology 29a–b: “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils.” 21

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who we are, and conditions our moral dilemmas. Nicias sees this conditioning as an impediment to courage, an obstacle that has to be overcome so that we can make competent and expert choices. Socrates, on the other hand, takes this ignorance as his starting point. There are people, he says in the Phaedo, that consider death a great evil, and “the brave among them face death, when they do, for fear of greater evils.” But it is “illogical to be brave through fear and cowardice,” and the same goes for the other virtues, e.g. moderation, which some people practice for “fear of being deprived of other pleasures which they desire.” But, says Socrates, “this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins” (68d–69b).23 In the stock exchange of virtue, the only real currency is, according to Socrates, “wisdom.” Given this shift in perspective, how does Quixote’s courage fit in with this new understanding of virtue we have been sketching? Quixote’s stab at courage appears in many ways as a comedic reversal of Socratic virtue; where Socrates knows how to act, Quixote does not. As with all reversals, however, there are important parallels between the model (Socrates) and its flip side (Quixote); like Socrates, Quixote has a clear hierarchy of values which he is determined to defend at the risk of death or injury. Although the incident with the lions is a one-off where things work in Quixote’s favor, Quixote is not bothered by the possibility that things might have gone the other way because his intent is to establish his credentials as a courageous knight, not to survive the adventures he throws himself at unscathed. In this sense, he is very much like Socrates; he does not fear injury or death because in his own stock exchange of values, his commitment to knight errantry is a more important good than bodily integrity. Notice also that Quixote’s daring is relevant to his aims, as his pursuit of courage derives from his overall aim of reviving the Golden Age of knighthood. In this sense, there is consistency between Quixote’s aims and choice of means, which suggests at the very least a certain degree of understanding of the task he has set himself. But, it will be objected, Quixote is delusional! He not only pursues a plan with no hope of success  Plato, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A.  Grube, in Complete Works, ed. J.M.  Cooper (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1997). 23

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but, in addition, fails to hit the target every time! Indeed, there is a considerable difference between Quixote and Socrates in this respect: the latter seems to be hitting the target consistently, be it with his deeds (e.g. his courageous retreat at Delium) or his words (his ability to lay bare his interlocutor’s blind spots).24 If there is something that Socrates, unlike Quixote, knows, that is how to act in each situation in a way that is appropriate and fitting, and that includes “big” things (e.g. his trial) as well as “small” things (dressing appropriately at a symposium).25 This suggests that in addition to a clear hierarchy of goods and a personal code of conduct that informs his choices, Socrates also has worldly wisdom – a wisdom that others envy and want to extract from him even as he insists he has none.26 Is this quality that Socrates has (and Quixote does not) “knowledge”? If it is knowledge of some sort, it is certainly not of a theoretical kind that can be set out in the form of a syllogism for the benefit of those who want to learn it. Nor is it sharply opposed to ignorance, because as we have seen, this knowledge includes ignorance over the nature of death as one of its presuppositions. Although this knowledge may be hard to capture in a graphic and easily presentable form for the benefit of those who want to emulate it, there is no doubt that Socrates placed its pursuit “at the very center of his life,” as Nehamas argues, and, in pursuing that wisdom, he “succeeded in living a virtuous life” exhibiting “the very knowledge he claimed not to have” (VA, p. 49). Plato clearly thinks that this knowledge, elusive though it is, is a precondition of true virtue; but what does that entail for Quixote who lacks it? To answer this question we need to look more closely at the dramatic action in the novel. We recall that, much as Quixote shares some of Socrates’ qualities, the quality he does not share is Socrates’ worldliness, his intuitive understanding of how to act appropriately in different  In this sense he is like Plato’s ideal statesman who, as Cascardi puts it, “combines knowledge by measurement and number with practical wisdom, or a sense of ‘what to do when’.” “The ideal statesman recognizes the differences between the two epistēmēs and knows when to call upon each one” (“TKK”, p. 409). 25  See Sarah Kofman, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 16–18. 26  See Kofman, p. 20. 24

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situations, and ability to be flexible with his pleasures and pains without compromising his code of conduct.27 Because he is aware of this difficulty, Quixote gives himself a Kantian imperative of sorts: “always act in such a way that your deeds promote your overall aim of knight errantry,” supplemented by a second imperative: “always err on the side of excess.” Cervantes’s resolution of the episode with the lions is ingenious because it means that the calculus devised by Quixote miraculously works; instead of landing him in further trouble, his excessive criterion hits the mark without ever hitting the mark, and in this paradoxical function it produces the opportune result. A different result would not only have spelled the end of the novel, but, moreover, it would have reinforced the traditional prudential teachings (expounded at another chapter by the Canon of Toledo – where, interestingly, Plato’s theory of mimesis is alluded to) that books of chivalry are harmful and false.28 That Cervantes avoids this eventuality heralds the arrival of a brave new world where it is not only possible for reality to imitate literature – thus reversing the Platonic order of mimesis – but in addition, mad and imprudent pursuits can occasionally be successful. We can now see the affinities between the Socratic and the Quixotic endeavor; just as the former revolves around exposing our moral deficiencies and blind spots, and is meant to induce a state of perplexity and wonder as the necessary starting point for introspection and growth, so the latter involves a journey through the troubled waters of madness as a necessary stage to self-discovery. Where Cervantes and Plato part company is in how they envisage the end point and result of this journey; in the stock exchange of virtue, Socrates has reached the top and leaves the game with all the cards in his hand. In Don Quixote, by contrast, madness is neither exonerated nor made good, with the imprudent Quixote – now  See the comparison Kofman draws between Socrates and his disciple Aristodemus: “The master’s bizarre behaviour is disconcerting for his disciple, who seems unaware that Socrates is master of his own body as well as of opposing possibilities; he has not pledged himself either to sobriety or to self-mortification, and he is not committed to limiting his pleasures, for he has an astonishing capacity to retain his full strength, consciousness and lucidity in the midst of bodily excesses” (Kofman, p. 18). 28  “TKK”, p. 406; see also the analysis in Giselle von der Walde, “Mimesis En El Quijote: Una Lectura Platónica de Su Práctica Imitativa (A Propósito de I, Caps. 49–50),” Ideas y Valores 55, no. 130 (April 2006): 23–37. 27

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in his deathbed – awash with feelings of disillusionment and regret for his former folly. Plato’s chief message is that loss is remunerated; in Cervantes’s fictional world, by contrast, loss is complete and without recompense. And yet, at the end of each story, there is love. Despite their differences, both heroes are loved by those who have been in their presence (Socrates by his disciples and associates, Quixote by his squire Sancho Pancha), but also by those who read about them in these books of literature-­cum-philosophy or philosophy-cum-literature.29 This love, different though it may be in each case, is testimony to a goodness each character points to: a worldly and knowing type in the case of Socrates, mad and imprudent in that of Quixote. By loving them, we are responding to a good in who they are, and that suggests a commonality beyond intellectualism.

29

 On the theme of love in Don Quixote see González Echevarría, pp. 1–16.

3 Knowing What Matters: The Epistemological and Ethical Challenge of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila Elisabet Dellming

When novelists privilege the possible over the actual, that is, when they dignify what could have been by rendering it into a narrative, they inevitably make an ethical stance. Consequently, in refusing to accept the actual as the sole source of knowledge, the possible of the fictive subverts a whole set of assumptions about the world, assumptions that taken together make up what Foucault spoke of as the episteme.1 In Lila (2014),2 Marilynne Robinson returns to her preoccupation with  I refer here to Foucault’s notion of the episteme as the established truth of any given cultural/ historical context. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge Classics, 2002). 2  Marilynne Robinson, Lila (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); hereafter abbreviated L. As this chapter progresses it will help to keep some details of Lila’s life story in mind: Abandoned on a stoop as a small child; taken in by Doll; wandering from field to field as a migrant worker during the Depression; no opportunity for schooling; prostitution in St. Louis; marries a Congregationist minister; has a child. Other details as discussed take their place within this long-­ form narrative. 1

E. Dellming (*) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_3

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alternative epistemologies as the novel posits a consistent resistance to the episteme insofar as it collapses its power and instead shifts the epistemic authority to individual subjects and their lived experience. The last sentence of Lila aptly sums up the ethical and epistemological challenge presented by all Robinson’s fiction: “Someday she would tell him what she knew” (p. 261). This simple yet ambiguous ending simultaneously foregrounds the ever-present possibility of narrative as the “open-ended invitation to ethical and poetic responsiveness” that Richard Kearney speaks of (p. 156)3 and which is underpinning the novel as well as consolidating its active resistance to full present as well as (possible) future disclosure. Put differently, this vague promise about something that might happen points to a dynamic where there is conscious abstention from revelation (in the present) paired with a keen sense of the importance of epistemically and ethically viable knowledge as a present and future possibility – regardless of whether this knowledge will be communicated within the framework of the narrative or remain a possibility, what Husserl terms the irreal, accessed only through imagination.4 And yet, while this dynamic of irreality privileges the possible as the ethical position, it simultaneously demonstrates the impossibility of complete narrative revelation. This kind of narrative resistance seen through the eyes of Robinson’s fiction, depends to a large extent on the withholding of knowledge and a suspicion of the terms of words and of narratives. For this reason, the foregrounding of the temporal aspect in the statement “Someday she would tell him what she knew” is decidedly significant: throughout the novel this indeterminate relation to time is highlighted. Indeed, Lila’s resistance to the epistemic order also involves a refusal to accept the order of time as a given. Therefore, Lila’s relation to and experience of time are both intimately connected to her notions and reservations about knowledge. In other words, for her, lived time conditions the essence of knowledge. What ultimately connects lived time, imagination, and knowledge is narrative. But narrative, as Lila shows, unmistakably constitutes a fundamentally deceptive order precisely  Richard Kearney, On Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 156.  Maurice Natanson suggests that “‘Irreal’ does not mean ‘unreal’; ‘irreal’ signifies a turn away from the given fact or event in a situation of any kind to, instead, the possibility of that fact or event.” (The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998), pp. 26–27. 3 4

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because of the unreliability of temporal order as a condition for ethically and epistemically just knowledge. In that sense, narrative is less about significance through order than an opening up of possibilities, and a prompt to the discovery of authenticity by way of an ethical imagination. Significantly, Lila frequently “knows” while at the same time deliberately withholding that knowledge from those around her. But she also quite often does not know or cannot remember and it is partly this temporal disorder that puts the notion of the linear order of time into question. The epistemic order Foucault speaks of also entails an imposed temporal order and it is in the light of this consistent subversion of the epistemic temporal order that Lila’s resistance should be read. Clearly, this resistance is one where – as the numerous temporal phrases relating to knowledge in the novel demonstrate – the delimitations between past, present and future are subverted by the fictive possibilities underpinning them. Lila’s lived experience of time then both informs the novel and constitutes its ethical nexus. Already in her first novel, Robinson explored the ethical aspects and possibilities of narrative: Housekeeping (1980)5 rejects the episteme of the Fingerbone small town world as Sylvie and the narrator Ruth ultimately obliterate all traces of themselves as they move across the railway bridge towards an indefinite but, one senses, epistemically vindicated ending. More specifically, Sylvie and Ruth’s passive resistance has taken on a higher narrative significance. The predominant metaphor in Housekeeping is, as William Burke points out, transience as “a difficult spiritual path offering the consolations of intuitions, epiphanies, and transcendent experiences,”6 and these aspects of transience are also part of withdrawal as a mode of being in Lila; to leave, to move away is, in that sense, to elude attention and thereby a way to escape the power exerted by the episteme, to withhold oneself from the infringement on one’s integrity as a subject. In Gilead (2004),7 the Reverend John Ames narrates his life to his young son in an attempt at retrospective sense-making and (perhaps,  Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping. (London: Faber and Faber, 2005).  William M.  Burke, “Border Crossings in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” Modern Fiction Studies. 37.4 (1991): 716–724 (722). 7  Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago Press, 2005). 5 6

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one suspects) self-justification, and in doing so he exposes his own vulnerability and unreliability as narrator while quite obviously and unsuccessfully hiding his resentment over his ne’er-do-well god son Jack’s prodigal re-appearance as well as Jack’s quite vocal resistance to the epistemic order of his background. Indeed, Ames hides from himself as much as he hides from the world. At the same time, as Laura Tanner’s reading makes evident, the aging Ames’s progressive withdrawal from his own life gives him the “diminished role of observer rather than participant.”8 And yet, Jason Stevens remarks how his “testimony … frequently turns to the finitude of language” as he describes how he ritually burns the sermons he has saved in his attic,9 and thus, metaphorically, Ames turns silent and this silence becomes his last if largely unnoticed attempt at resistance. Robinson’s third novel Home (2008)10 shifts focus from Ames to Jack and his sister Glory (the latter being the narrative’s main focaliser), and in doing so, she shifts the epistemic authority of the narrative as well. Both Glory and Jack are bound by filial loyalty – if not reverence – to an episteme that is both inadequate and unjust in terms of their own lived experience; in the world of their father and Reverend Ames, what they “know” is unaccounted for and because of this, systematically, if not necessarily deliberately, under-valued. In exploring these epistemic shifts and imbalances, Robinson highlights how conventional modes of understanding the world can be challenged and rethought through the fictive as an open-ended response in Kearney’s sense. Significantly, Gilead, as Rachel Sykes points out, in Hebrew “means hill or mound of testimony, a location of reckoning and of possibility.”11 This notion of the possibilities and reckoning inherent in Robinson’s epistemological challenge lies at the heart of Lila as well. In Lila then, this challenge advances a critique of the tacitly accepted modes and structures of knowledge. Significantly, Lila’s refusal to speak  Laura E. Tanner, “‘Looking Back from the Grave’: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead” Contemporary Literature XLVIII. 2 (2007): 227–252 (240). 9  This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. Ed. Jason W. Stevens. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. 2016), p. 1. 10  Marilynne Robinson, Home (New York: Picador, 2008). 11  Rachel Sykes, “Reading for Quiet in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58:2 (2017): 108–120 (117). 8

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what she knows constitutes a resistance to what Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice. In Fricker’s terms, epistemic injustice means that the power of the episteme fails to acknowledge certain subjects as knowers in their own right and thereby prevents them from “becoming who they are.”12 Here Lila is similar to Housekeeping but while Housekeeping’s most prominent figure of resistance is transience, Lila centres instead on the clandestine as the dominating trope.13 In other words, by refusing to communicate what she does know  – just like the narrative withholds knowledge from the reader  – Lila’s lived experience of time cannot be ordered. And yet, Lila’s obscure past – as well as her indeterminate present  – is probed for answers to epistemological questions, answers to which posit tentative delimitations to her existence as well as to the narrative as such. Narrative revelation or, equally, lack thereof, centres on Lila’s epistemic power which will also have implications for her ethical authority, that is, as the narrator confirms Lila’s position as a knower it also grants her the ethical power over the narrative14; she is the one who “knows” and her knowledge – albeit unrecognised – is shown to, indeed, matter. Central to this epistemic and ethical authority is the clandestine as a way to come to terms with who she is, where she comes from and what it all means insofar as it becomes a vantage point from which the challenge to the episteme can be explored. Robinson’s fiction, in that sense, provides a certain kind of justice but not simply for her characters but for the narratives as such, and, consequently, for imagination as a mode of knowledge as the irreal supersedes the actual.

 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5. 13  I am here taking the cue from Scott Davidson, who in his introduction to Michel Henry’s Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, points to a key element in Henry’s philosophy as stemming from Henry’s experience as a secret agent within the French resistance: “Through his participation in the resistance, Henry gained an appreciation of the clandestine dimension of life. Unable to say what he really thought or who he really was, it was in the resistance that Henry came to the realization that the true life is invisible. The clandestine sense of life, as a pathos that can only be experienced within oneself, remains a constant preoccupation throughout all of Henry’s writings”. Henry, Michel. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. Transl. Scott Davidson (London and New  York: Continuum, 2009), p. viii. 14  See Peter Robert Brown “‘There’s Something about Mary:’ Narrative and Ethics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”. Journal of Narrative Theory. 36.2 (2006): 228–253. 12

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The clandestine moreover provides Lila with a privileged space in which Lila can get a real sense of the world and as such is generative of meaning similar to what Katy Ryan speaks of as a “generating absence” in Housekeeping.15 From this perspective, the clandestine constitutes a resistance to a world of meaning inhabited and constructed as well as controlled by others. Considering the clandestine as a central aspect of life significant to Lila entails being attentive to the oscillation between absence and presence, withdrawal and appearance as well as to the shifts between silence and utterance. Significantly, domestic spaces in the novel are spaces that function as metaphors for confinement, for being both physically and existentially limited as well as limiting and Lila never comfortably hides in these spaces but from them: “…and she had waked up early and slipped out of the house and walked away past the edge of town and followed the river to a place where the water ran over rocks and dropped down to a pool with a sandy bottom. She could watch the shadows of catfish there once the sun came up. She sat on the bank, damp and chilly, smelling the river and barely hearing the sound of it, hidden in the dark, not because she thought anyone would be there, but because she always liked the feeling that no one could see her even when she knew she was alone” (p. 20). Lila is defined through this self-sought physical invisibility as a separate mode of existence: “In the dark of the morning, in her nightdress, with her bar of soap, she walked down to bathe in the river. No one could see her. She could hardly see herself ” (p. 37). The fact that she is almost invisible to herself is noteworthy because it prompts the question of apperception and ontology and puts emphasis on the difference between being-when-seen and being-when-not-seen. This acute awareness is most clearly demonstrated by Lila’s ambivalent relationship with her husband: “When he was in the house she kept the door to her room open. She sat at the table and did her copying and paged through the books he had given her, since she knew he might look in from the hall. /…/ She shut the door and locked it when the Reverend left the house, and then she sat in the corner on the floor and hugged her knees to her chest and closed her eyes and thought” (pp.  107–108). The  Katy Ryan, “Horizons of Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Simone Weil” Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (2005), 349–364 (350). 15

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c­landestine plays a key role here, particularly in terms of a seemingly purposeless hiding. Passages like this one concern Lila’s invisible life and they manifest the emphasis on sparse instances of what she knows and experiences as her real life. Lila’s subject-world is veiled in these seemingly pointless acts as they contribute to assert her being-in-the-world. Interestingly, hers is a particular kind of hiding, one where she almost obliterates herself from any possibility of assessment or view in a total all-encompassing concealment. The hiding of oneself when hiding appears to be utterly unnecessary highlights how resistance as agency can be constructed out of the insistence of separateness, of how (lived) knowledge can only be attained through the temporal aporia of the clandestine, indeed, how ontology as such is complete unrelatedness and timelessness. Consequently, Lila’s self-hood can only be constituted when she is alone and invisible. This clearly points towards a parallel, independent and unseen existence: with the Reverend, by no means an ominous presence, being there in the house with her, Lila is nonetheless the object of someone’s gaze; it is not only that he might look at her and that she will be uncomfortably aware of that look, but also that knowing and sensing this look, she becomes something other than herself, in fact, less of a self at all. Indeed, his presence, inevitably, represents the episteme that she, instinctively, knows she cannot adjust to. Only when alone with her thoughts, is she free to consider all the numerous questions on existence, and to exist freely in the fictive space of possibility. Put differently, Lila’s clandestine withdrawal is constitutive of a sense of irreal self and, for her, this constitution can only take place with the epistemically unjust world firmly shut out and made all but irrelevant. In her thoughts, “the old life” as drifter  – to a certain extent the key to her mode of knowledge  – is turned out, explored and examined. For her, the cold water of the river, as a re-appearing emblem of her drifter life, moving through wild, non-­ domesticated spaces, serves to remind her of herself as open-ended: “Her hands still smelled like river water, and her hair. She still felt a little more like who she was. That was a help” (p. 23). Lila’s thoughts, ever meandering around the wandering life of her and the elusive figure of her mother substitute Doll and the other drifters all seem to come back to the epistemological as well as ontological question of if, why, and how it all “matters.”

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While resisting the epistemological order of the Reverend’s world, Lila still yearns for things to make sense, particularly insofar as it could be reconciled in some sort of relation to the knowledge world that she senses is fundamental to her husband. And yet, for Lila, it really has to matter, to be meaningful. If and how things matter, then, are questions that cannot be by-passed but cannot be fully answered either. For the narrative to matter in the sense of narrative bringing a temporal order and interpretation on events, for Lila, in the end, two epistemologically competitive narratives to come together is essential. If the drifters and, perhaps, Doll most of all, are left out of the episteme that the Reverend centres his whole life and being around, how can she, herself, be part of it as who she is to such a large extent is connected and dependent on the drifter life she used to be part of, a being-in-the world so, it would appear, entirely disconnected to the well-intentioned orderliness of Gilead and the Reverend Ames: “How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened. But if it did matter, how could the world go on the way it did when there were so many people living the same and worse?” (p. 112). There appears to be no way for Lila the character or for Lila, the narrative, to fully reconcile these competing epistemologies: “That was existence, and why didn’t it roar and wrench itself apart like the storm it must be, if so much of existence is all that bitterness and fear? Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning” (p. 112). For Lila then, it is pivotal to find an answer to the question of “why things happen the way they do” (p.  29) and how what happens can be made to mean something. The clandestine becomes the only way of (really) being as herself, and the more securely safe from view, the more real, the more of an alternate, irreal epistemic authority can emerge and take hold. Similarly, Lila’s thoughts are superordinate to whatever she manages to say; her speaking comes across with less conviction and less reality than her thoughts and it is only through her thoughts that she can process her lived knowledge and explore the fictive possibilities of existence. Her epistemological quest is in this respect one of silent resistance. While the clandestine functions as a fictive space where knowledge is questioned but also imagined, sensed and experienced, the breaks in that

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silence, the emergence out of the silent withdrawals are, in themselves, highly significant. In the novel, the spoken, however, is not necessarily presented as vocalised thoughts. On the contrary, the spoken frequently comes across as abrupt and foregrounded as “strange,” effectively jarring with the “lived” knowledge of the pre-communicative, contrapuntal to the peculiar possibility of the clandestine. Lila’s spoken voice becomes a rupture in the silence, and as such, rather than revealing her thoughts and understanding instead emphasises the impossibility of sense-making in and through utterance. Reconsidering her own prior question about “why things happen the way they do” (p.  59), she tells Ames “‘I been wondering why I even bother. There must be a reason, but I don’t know what it is’” (p. 59). And yet, clandestinely, sitting alone at night in the doorway, she does appear to possess a hint: “She thought she could unravel the sounds the river made, the flow over the rocks where there was a little drop into a pool, the soft rush of the eddy. Now and then there were noises, some small thing happened and disappeared, no one would ever know what it was. She thought, All right, if that’s how it’s going to be. If there had not been that time when she mattered to somebody, she could have been at peace with it. Doane was just the world being the world. It was Doll taking her up in her arms that way. Live. Yes. What then?” (p. 59). As Lila’s consciousness registers the small events that “no one would ever know what it was,” her perception of them make them part of her and part of what it means to be and to live. In that it could be said that she attains an alternate episteme, a life-world where meaning is constituted in resistance to epistemic injustice. Lila’s being-in-­ the-world in this manner constitutes a narrative space of fictive possibilities where life as it is lived is being revealed. It is done so, however, only in the unknown and unseen small occurrences that no one – except for her and only at this very moment – will “ever know what it was.” As such they become apt metaphors for Lila’s self-constitution and quest for authentic knowledge. But indeed “What then?” The logic of her thinking appears to be that if something at some point mattered, that “she mattered to somebody” it must have some larger meaning, some point to it, however obscure, and her pursuit of an epistemically viable understanding of what that meaning is makes her pursue the uttermost questions of knowledge and the construction of meaning: “Hard as she tried, all she

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could remember were skirts brushing against her, hands not so rough as other hands. That might have been the one who made her live. What did it matter. In the evenings when it was too dim to read she wrapped herself in her blanket, huddled up in a corner so that her face and her feet were covered, and thought or dreamed, slept or lay awake. If Doll was her mother she wouldn’t have to steal her, so Lila knew that much. What could matter any less than where she came from? Well, she thought, where I’m going might matter less. Or maybe why I’m here by myself in the dark wondering about it” (p. 37). One significant aspect of this passage deals with the impact and importance of memory for sense-­making, what Laura Tanner speaks of as “the presence of absence.”16 In the form of a memory fragment “the one who made her live” appears but also the more tangible memory of Doll. This passage also points to another epistemologically significant aspect of Lila: what Lila grapples with here are pertinent existential questions about meaning (and whether meaning is at all possible) but it is to an equal extent about the constitution of possible selfhood through silence and hiding, something that is systematically undermining the explanations of the order of things provided by other characters. Whereas the ability to name and categorize creates a sense of order and epistemic stability, this sense of stability is deceptive and, the narrative of Lila makes evident, is easily challenged. This becomes particularly clear in the passage in which Lila is a (significantly) silent witness to a conversation between Ames and his old friend, the Reverend Boughton, about missionaries and the uncertain fate of all those in China still unconverted despite the efforts of Western missionaries, and only afterwards asks her husband about the discussion: He tried to explain and she tried to understand. He said, “I believe in the grace of God. For me, that is where all these questions end. Why it’s pointless to ask them.” But he seemed to be telling her that Boughton might be right, that souls could be lost forever because of things they did not know,  This is something Laura Tanner has discussed in relation to Housekeeping where the absence of Ruth and Lucille’s mother all the same has a tangible presence (p. 235). See Tanner, “Uncomfortable Furniture: Inhabiting Domestic and Narrative Space in Marilynne Robinson’s Home”. Contemporary Women’s Writing. 7.1 (2013): 227–252. 16

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or understand, or believe. He didn’t like to say it, he had to try different words for it. So she knew he thought it might be true. Doll probably didn’t know she had an immortal soul. It was nothing she ever mentioned, if she ever thought about it. She probably wouldn’t even have known the words for it. All those people out there walking the roads all those years, hardly a one of them remembering the Sabbath. Who would know what day of the week it was? Who wouldn’t take work when there was work to be done? What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but weather? They knew what time of the year it was when the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging. They knew it was morning when the sun came up. What more was there to know? (p. 21)

Here Lila as narrative is explicitly challenging received knowledge, and does so in various different ways: the implied questions about whether you can be predestined to damnation if you do not know of belief or have faith in themselves have epistemic importance and Lila astutely identifies this problem as she considers knowledge along with its meaning for being-in-the-world. Whereas Ames appears to admit to the limits of knowledge and assumes the position of accepting grace as something that puts an end to “all these questions,” Lila suspects that this position is a way to avoid properly or even honestly addressing the question. In fact, their epistemic positions are emphatically different as faith for the Reverend intervenes where knowledge ends while for Lila all knowledge is by necessity mediated through lived experience. To put it differently, while the Reverend’s turn is to the transcendent, significantly, Lila in her instinctive affinity with the drifters’ unknown, clandestinely lived lives, automatically identifies with the immanence of their way of knowing the world. She is implicitly distancing herself from Ames’s efforts at a verbal account of, and, ultimately, moratorium on something that cannot be explained. Indeed, Ames’s “explanation” does not really explain things in a way Lila can assimilate and accept – and precisely because of this, both its foundational veracity and its reasonableness are put into question. Perhaps most importantly, Lila does not feel entirely convinced Ames believes it himself; part of what is at stake here is the efficacy and authenticity of explanation.

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This implicit failure of explanation constitutes a subversion of Ames’s epistemology: Lila’s focus is on what she and the other drifters actually knew from their own lived experience, what they (quite literally) sensed. She clearly displaces and resists conventionally received knowledge (in Husserl’s terms, she is bracketing the “natural attitude”) while simultaneously seeking for things to “make sense” the way they appear to do to others. From this perspective, the statement “He tried to explain and she tried to understand” can be said to effectively summarize a recurrent and central motif in the novel that is also perpetually subverted. The consistent and reappearing hints of a possible (future) revelation at the end of the novel meanwhile confirms that Lila is the one who really knows, and will, at some point, emerge from her pre-communicative zone of silence17 to speak of what she knows: “Someday she would tell him what she knew” (p. 261). However, the certainty of this prospect is undermined by the indefinite “someday,” an indeterminacy that nonetheless asserts Lila’s access to knowledge and her epistemic or even eschatological authority: she is the one with power to disclose or, equally significant, not to disclose what she does know or might know. Consistent with this uncommunicativeness, the events leading up to Doll taking Lila away, and their drifting life together is an unspoken secret between the two of them: “They never spoke about any of it, not one word in all those years. Not about the house Doll stole her away from, not about the old woman who took them in” (p. 13). The strange, hidden and inexplicable resonate with Lila as it seems in tune with how she experiences the world and her peculiar mode of being in the irreal of the clandestine. It becomes her response. In Lila, instances of strangeness function as metaphors of defamiliarization as they signify the possibility for authenticity and open-endedness. As she seeks such authentic essence, Lila adopts concealment, consistently favoured over communication and in this self-imposed mode, she can think and explore different, if  Ariane Mildenburg refers to Virginia Woolf ’s notion of a certain type of silence as the basis of art: “that pre-communicative dimension of experience which Woolf, Stein and Stevens highlight as the source of creativity. ‘It may be that there is a zone of silence in every art,’ Woolf writes in ‘Walter Sickert.’” Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond. Ed. Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg. (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 49. Insofar as Lila’s silence is a prerequistite for her selfhood just like the silences and blanks are central to the narrative, the zone of silence is an apt metaphor for art and the connection between experience and imagination. 17

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sometimes conflicting, notions of meaning. In other words, the clandestine as mode of being is the pre-requisite for her to become who she is. Her world of silent resistance thus implies an unspoken challenge while she effectively conceals herself from others in a metaphoric enactment of turning away from unfair knowledge. This fundamental “blank” in Lila’s life history also makes for a significant “blank” in the novel. Indeed, Lila’s self-confessed “ignorance,” her lack of formal education and other conventionally acquired knowledge are shown to constitute a peculiar yet real, authentic knowledge. What she seeks to recover is a knowledge that can to some degree account for her own experience of the world while at the same time being acquired and mediated through this experience, a knowledge that is immanent to her own condition for being-in-the-world rather than transcendent to it. Notably, names, for Lila, do not represent the immanent reality of phenomena. On the contrary, the arbitrary nature of language is frequently foregrounded as Lila persistently questions the basis for knowledge and doubts that knowledge can be attained through conceptualization and nominalization. What then is in a name? Does it really give us access to the ontology of phenomena? Does it have power to reveal to us their inner being? And what justification is there to rely on what things are called for their essential properties? Lila’s own name is a case in point: when, as a small child, she was taken by Doll from the stoop of the house from which she had been shut out, she had no name she knew of. An old woman (nameless) whom they stayed with called her Lila: “‘I’ve been thinking about ‘Lila.’ I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.’ ‘Maybe,’ Doll said. ‘Don’t matter’” (p. 10). This exchange demonstrates an important conflict to which the novel repeatedly returns, that is, the dubious notion of a name having significance and actually being able to constitute the essence of what it names and the questioning of this.18 The name, to Doll (and Lila later reflects on  A similar situation is when Lila is asked to suggest a “stage name” by the proprietress of “the house in St. Louis”: “she said, ‘Doll, I guess,’ and the woman snorted, which is how she laughed. She said, ‘We already got a Doll. Had two of them till a couple of months ago. The one ran off with some salesman. She’ll be back pretty soon. Think she’d have better sense. So you ain’t Doll. We don’t have no Rose just now. Put a little henna in your hair–Rose’ll do. Ruby. We’ll think of something.’” (L. pp. 182–183) 18

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whether indeed this was her “real” name), does not matter and carries no real significance or permanence. In other words, the name does not in itself authenticate Lila. Her last name was given to her in an equally arbitrary manner: when Lila attends school for one year, the teacher understands her name to be Lila Dahl; having misheard Doll’s name she assumes it is her surname, resulting in Lila being thought of as of Norwegian descent: “…and there was no one anywhere alive or dead with her name, since the first one belonged to the sister she never saw of a woman she barely remembered and the second one was just a mistake” (p. 68). The hap-hazard way in which Lila has acquired her name and genealogy is suggestive of precisely the essential randomness in naming in the first place. Similarly, language’s capacity to convey knowledge more generally is repeatedly questioned: “There was a long time when Lila didn’t know that words had letters, or that there were other names for seasons than planting and haying” (p. 10). When asked in school (the one year she did go to school) what country they lived in, Lila responds in terms of her own experience, thus revealing her worldly ignorance: “The corn was tall, the sun was hot, the river was high for that time of year, so she said, ‘Looks to me like pretty decent country.’ That is what Doane would have said about it. And the children laughed …” (p. 118). For her, the name United States of America has no real significance. For “the USA” to represent any of the land her life-long transience has brought her to is, in her mind, both ludicrous and irrelevant. Still, language holds a curious fascination for her and insofar as they resonate with her own lived experience she attempts to have concepts make sense if only in the most concrete way: “Lila heard about the Crash years after it happened, and she had no idea what it was even after she knew what to call it. But it did seem like they gave it the right name. It was like one of those storms you might even sleep through, and then when you wake up in the morning everything’s ruined, or gone” (p. 15). She is acutely aware of how not being able to provide names will inevitably put you on the spot: “Garlands. Tinsel. Everything has a name. Everybody else knows the name and they think you’re stupid if you don’t know it” (p. 209). And yet, the implicit question is whether knowing the word for something will actually increase understanding: “Did she feel annoyance before she knew the name for it?

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Would she have felt she had the right to it?” (p. 112). This latter problem brings us back to the current of epistemic injustice running through the narrative: “It had begun to seem to her that if she had more words she might understand things better” (p.  113). However, the notion of the relation between names and meaning is clearly an unstable one and even if Lila thinks of herself as “rough and ignorant” (p.  115) and believes “nearly anybody must understand more than she did,” the narrative effectively illustrates the epistemic injustice that she is repeatedly the object of even in relation to the Reverend: “So the only ideas she had were a child’s ideas, and she knew how they would sound to him. He’d try not to smile, and his voice would be very kind. But he seemed to know she had to be told everything that she wouldn’t know what to ask. The earth goes around the sun. It spins and it tips. All right” (p. 117). Again, the passage narrating Lila’s shame at being laughed at for not knowing what the United States of America is, reveals the arbitrariness of nominalization: “At the front of the room there was a map of the United States of America. A painting of George Washington. A flag with forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes. These things had a kind of importance about them that Lila had never even heard of before. She’d thought the world was just hayfields and cornfields and bean fields and apple orchards. The people who owned them and the people who didn’t. And towns” (pp. 118–119). The names of places, the signs where the referent is obscure if you cannot grasp the connection again raises the question of what matters. The site of significance is indeterminate and meaning therefore will always remain “brighter and farther away” as it seems to Lila after “missing a few meals” (p. 11), metaphorically foregrounding knowledge in terms of poverty, a sensuously inscribed metaphor for the “radical subjectivity” of Henry’s notion of “invisible life” (Henry, p. 21). Indeed, Lila’s clandestine mode of being is also what grants her epistemic justice to the extent that it, in a fundamental way, challenges the episteme as being perpetually and inevitably external to lived experience. This radical subjectivity, furthermore, is manifested in the configuration of the narrative as a whole and it functions as a correlate to Lila’s life-story insofar as it is structured around the present interspersed with stream-of-consciousness like flashbacks from Lila’s life before arriving in Gilead, a life where the everyday struggles of the group of drifters’

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outdoor existence are contrasted with the suffocating atmosphere of “the house in St. Louis” where she prostituted herself for a time; Lila is forever associating the orderliness of domesticity with imprisonment and confinement. Even the Reverend’s modest and “safe” house can provide no real or permanent comfort as she realizes going back to the shed by the river: “She was sitting on the stoop in the sun, just for a minute, thinking about things. How good the sunlight felt on a chilly morning, and how familiar that old parched wood smell was, and how strange it seemed to be at peace where she had been so lonesome before, to be more at peace than in the old man’s house, kind as he always was” (p. 145). There is in fact a constant pull towards the temptation to leave, to move away from domesticity: “The problem is, she thought, that if someday she opened the front door and there, where the flower gardens and the fence and the gate ought to be, was the old life, the raggedy meadows and pastures and the cornfields and the orchards, she might just set the child on her hip and walk out into it, the buzz and the smell and the damp of it, the breath of it like her own breath, her own sweat” (p.  256). These two instances together form a poignant contrast to the lack of comfort she feels in regular houses.19 Significantly, on the very first page of the novel, Lila is turned out of a house to sit on the stoop and it is in this situation “miserable as could be” (p. 3) that Doll, the elusive, saving presence finds her. In the same way, her resistance is conveyed through the clandestine and (seemingly) pointless efforts at concealment.20 This instinctive inclination to avoid being looked at echoes the singularity of Sylvie in Housekeeping; Sylvie prefers sitting in darkness with darkness not primarily as protective shield but as a way of bracketing the light as representing the suspiciously transparent and orderly, conventional and oppressive. Hiding when hiding seems pointless and unnecessary puts a clear emphasis on a deep-rooted resistance to an arbitrary and epistemically unjust order, an order that censors the unwillingness to toe the line, to adapt and to adjust. Even more importantly, the clandestine reveals the process of  This can be compared to Home and the main character Glory’s sense of her father’s house: “this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent” (Home p. 102). 20  Robinson does something similar in Home where the ne’er-do-well Jack takes refuge from the main house to a shack in the barn. 19

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Lila’s active unknowing of the world, expressing her radical subjectivity through silent thoughts, articulated but unspoken. Lila as a novel serves to challenge knowledge as mapped out through the episteme as a prerequisite to grasping meaning while giving voice to the possibility of an authentic being-in-the-world and, consequently, verbalizing the question what it means “to know” something. In this move to give narrative voice – mostly through the conveyance of thought rather than speech  – to what the world around her would deem ignorant, the novel articulates a critique of taken-for-granted knowledge as such, not least of which, in Lila (as in both Gilead and Home), originates from the Bible. The world as it is consistently constructed in these three novels is to such a great extent founded on the Biblical interpretation mediated through the Reverend Ames (already quite extensively formulated in Gilead) as the basis of human knowledge and human existence and in that it provides its epistemology as well as its ontology. However, this foundation, when considered more carefully, as mediated through the interpretations of the Congregationalist and Presbyterian traditions of the Ames and Boughton families respectively does not stand unchallenged. It becomes quite obvious both in Gilead and to an even greater extent in Home that doubt of the automatic re-­ articulation of the givens is dangerously close at hand. In Gilead, as well as in Home, the prodigal Jack’s elusive and yet authentic presence – in fact far more than his voiced “flippancy” as his father calls it – uncovers the epistemic injustice in the two old men’s seemingly unchallenged control of knowledge and therefore also of truth. When Lila (also a character in Gilead and Home) starts reading the Bible she has stolen from Ames’s church, she chooses what the Reverend considers a “strange” first choice, Ezekiel, but it is precisely its visionary and radical strangeness – its irreality – that resonates with her: “Salted babies, sparkling calves’ feet. Strange as it was, there was something to it. Well, there was the strangeness of it” (p.74). Ezekiel’s vision, however intellectually impenetrable, for her, is something that she can sense as something worth contemplating, not despite of its strangeness but precisely because of it. It is entirely real and peculiarly applicable for her as she attempts to interpret it: “Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands, but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of

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a life, because she was all alone in it, She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out. And when Doll took her up and swept her away, she had felt a likeness of wings. She thought, Strange as all this is, there might be something to it” (p. 68). It is in fact in the strangeness as strangeness that she intuits its possible reality. Lila always feels “strange and alone” (p. 23) but in this strangeness there is a curious autonomy and knowledge can only be accessed through a cognizance with that strangeness. Immersing herself in the passages from Ezekiel and copying them out, Lila experiences immanently what she reads as she reads it and delves into an exploration of the strange as an apt image of the possible. One of the basic tenets of narrative is its revelation of something unknown and whereas Lila undoubtedly does this, it also enacts a parallel, reverse process of concealment, of defamiliarizing that which appears familiar. Through the focalizing lens of Lila’s consciousness, the painstaking examination of her own perceptions and memories is traced but the narrative never discloses all and, in the end, Lila’s silent attunement to unknowing makes her resistant to conventional assumptions about knowledge. It is in this light that the radical subjectivity of silent resistance as a challenge to Reverend Ames’s episteme should be regarded. Lila’s efforts to determine her own origins in that sense become significant for how she envisions the end. Her doubts about the salvation the Reverend Ames assumes as a certainty ultimately posits an implicit critique of what she instinctively appears to sense as a lack of coherence or meaningfulness. The Reverend refers to the mystery and to what cannot be known and while his honesty is not necessarily put into question, for Lila, this still appears as an evasion, as he clearly assumes a position of knowledge despite his consistent efforts to downplay his own authority in the matter. For this reason, for him as well as for the narrative as a whole, his position as the one who explains with Lila as the one who tries to understand becomes increasingly problematic insofar as his explanations are less factually than epistemologically challenged by Lila. Here an epistemic reversal seems to take place as Lila is the one in actual attunement with the idea of mystery as for her, mystery, is the one thing easily grasped, everything else being only likenesses: “It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible were the places where it touched earth” (p. 226).

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In other words, the Biblical books deemed “difficult” by Ames are the ones resonating with Lila the character as well as with Lila the novel as they are in attunement with the clandestine, hidden, invisible and strange. Ultimately then, what Lila rejects is not the Bible as such but the way it is being appropriated and mediated through Ames. In this context, Lila’s reservations about nominalisation and epistemology are primarily articulated through the careful conveyance of Lila’s thoughts as she resists vocalising her thoughts and her own modes of knowing the world with the split between thinking and speaking being highlighted. Lila is repeatedly calling attention to how Lila in her interaction with the world is indeed a separate being from her clandestine and perhaps more real self. In the end, this is what confirms her epistemic authority. She is the one who knows.

Part II On Our Relations to Each Other

4 “But in a Dream of Friendship”: Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, the Gift, and the Moral Economy of Friendship John Mischo

Diogenes Laertius reported that Aristotle once made this pronouncement to his students: “O my friends, there are no friends.”1 The paradoxically elusive nature of friendship is a vexed philosophical problem that traces back to Plato’s Lysis and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Well into the Renaissance philosophical questions regarding the definition, essence, and even the logical possibility of friendship remained unresolved. The  The attribution of the quote to Aristotle is problematic. It may be apocryphal; more likely it results from an early mistranslation. Nonetheless its impact on the philosophical history of the philosophical treatment of friendship is profound, as it is repeatedly cited over the centuries, notably by Montaigne and Kant. For a discussion of the textual history of the quote see Giorgio Agamben, “The Friend,” in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 25–37. Also see Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 174–77. 1

J. Mischo (*) Department of English, Humanities, & Languages, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Durant, OK, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_4

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Lysis ends in aporia—while the existence of friendship is undisputed, the dialogue cannot synthesize the various lines of inquiry into a clear statement of its nature. Perhaps the insuperable barrier to doing so has been the difficulty in extricating friendship from economic relations. If friendship is itself a kind of exchange there remains the possibility that it could be degraded to a form of self-interested profiteering. If friendship is to be genuine, therefore, it must be located in what Derrida refers to as the “aneconomic sphere.”2 As economic exchange is seen as nullifying friendship, various other forms of exchange have been proposed, notably in the classical era by Seneca and Cicero, who attempted to ground it in a gift economy. However, this solution is problematic, for the gift of friendship can itself become a kind of exchange that threatens to reproduce the economic dynamic of self-interested calculation. As Derrida argues, for a gift to be a gift—freely given with no necessary reciprocation—it must be recognized as such by both donor and recipient (GT, pp. 12–15). But this recognition seems to annul the gift as gift by creating in the recipient an indebtedness that demands some kind of return, for even to acknowledge the gift with gratitude, or merely to acknowledge it, is to engage in a kind of reciprocal exchange. And so a crux: The gift of friendship becomes a logical impossibility, for a genuine gift precludes any necessary return. Timon of Athens (c. 1605–1608) is Shakespeare’s most extensive treatment of the problematic dynamics of friendship.3 As does The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–1597), it explores the problematic intrusion of money into relationships among friends. Shakespeare’s major sources for the Timon character were Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s first-­ century Lives (1579) and, directly or indirectly, Lucian’s early

 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 7; hereafter abbreviated GT. 3  “Friendship” appears eight times in Timon of Athens. It appears three times in Henry V and no more than once or twice in any other play. “Friend” and “friends” occur a combined total of forty-­ eight times. Compared to Timon the most frequent usage of these two words is in Julius Caesar (42) and Coriolanus (39). These data have been compiled using the online concordance of the Open Source Shakespeare website. In Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works the theme of friendship is central to the first 126 of the Sonnets, which are addressed to an unidentified young man. 2

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second-­century satirical dialogue Timon, or The Misanthrope.4 By the early modern period Timon had become an archetype of misanthropy and an object lesson in financial imprudence. In Shakespeare’s episodic narrative, Timon lavishes his companions with banquets, gifts of gold, horses, and other valuables until his estate is bankrupt. Timon’s servants then approach, one after another, all those to whom Timon has shown his generosity to request aid for their master in his time of need, only to be refused. After suffering these betrayals by his false friends Timon withdraws to a cave in the wild and dies after several bitter exchanges with former friends and strangers. How does Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens address the possibility, or impossibility, of friendship? This essay examines the question from three perspectives. Part 1 examines friendship within the context of a “pure” economic exchange wherein friendship is directly motivated by self-­ interested profit and therefore not truly friendship. Part 2 examines friendship within a system of gift exchange that attempts but cannot transcend the purely economic. Part 3 examines how the play dramatizes an attempt to obviate or transcend gift exchange in order to realize true friendship. I will maintain that for Shakespeare such true friendship is indeed conceivable, and that, while it may not be realizable, nonetheless exists as an ethical ideal, one that is most concretely embodied not by Timon but by his servants and particularly by his steward Flavius.

1

“ Traffic Confound Thee”: Pure Economic Exchange

The philosophical tradition has, since Plato, seen commerce as inimical to friendship. Early in the Lysis, Socrates remarks to Menexemus and Lysis that “I will not ask you . . . which is the wealthier, for you are friends, are you not? . . . And friends, they tell us, share and share alike; so in this respect . . . there will be no difference between you.” The trajectory of the Lysis attempts to ground friendship in something other than its use value  Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 6, Other “Classical” Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 235–41. 4

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without ever locating that ground.5 Aristotle, however, is more accommodating and pragmatic than Plato regarding the mixing of self-interest with friendship. Books VIII and IX of the Nichomachean Ethics distinguish between three types of friendship: the highest form is termed “complete,” which is “the friendship of good people similar in virtue; for they wish goods in the same way to each other insofar as they are good, as they are good in their own right. Hence they wish goods to each other for each other’s sake.”6 Here friendship entails an exchange of goods but is not motivated by self-interest. Friendship precedes exchange; it is not constituted by exchange. The two lower forms of friendship are those of pleasure and utility. Friendships of pleasure are those of a convenient and transient companionship; friendships of utility are those in which one merely gains some good or service. Aristotle does not dismiss these lower types of friendship for entailing exchange; they are simply accepted as common and even beneficial to human society. Nonetheless, Aristotle recognizes that the two lower forms are motivated by self-­interest. One loves the friend “not in his own right” but because “they gain some good for themselves” as in friendships of utility or “because he is pleasant to them” as in friendships of pleasure. Aristotle does regard friendships of pleasure as superior to those of utility, for pleasure provides mutual enjoyment, whereas it is “mercenary people who form friendships for utility” (NE, p. 121, 1156a; p. 126, 1158a). However, the lower forms of friendship are not antithetical to the higher form, for complete friendship does not necessarily preclude an exchange of goods; rather, it allows for such exchange by subsuming the lower forms within itself. As such, for Aristotle, exchange is not an a priori barrier but rather irrelevant to any genuine friendship. Pure economic exchange, by which is meant exchange based entirely on self-interest, is depicted infrequently in the play, but necessarily, for it serves as a foil to other higher forms of exchange. In the play’s first scene there is a brief negotiation over a jewel between Timon and the Jeweler  Plato, Lysis, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters, trans. J. Wright, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p.  149, 207c; hereafter abbreviated LY. References are to page number then to the numbered section of the Greek text. 6  Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), p. 122; 1156b; hereafter abbreviated NE. References are to page number then to the numbered section of the Greek text. 5

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that serves to highlight the difference between simple economic transactions and other types of activities more characteristic of friendship. Timon refuses the merchant’s initial sale price as inflated, to which the Jeweler replies, “My lord, ‘tis rated/As those which sell would give” (1.1.177–78),7 that is, at cost, equivalent to a cliché like “I can get it for you wholesale.” Timon is astute enough to realize that mercantile exchange is founded upon profiteering and he thus dismisses the Jeweler’s disingenuous posture that he is offering his goods with no regard toward his profit as “[w]ell mocked” (1.1.182) or pretended. Timon clearly recognizes the difference between pure economic exchange and gestures of friendship, forcefully rejecting the former. Here Timon dismisses what for Aristotle is the lowest form of friendship, that of utility, as a merely monetary transaction. The first scene of the play thus functions to delineate a kind of noxious exchange repeatedly referred to as “traffic,” as when Apemantus, Timon’s servant later enjoins a curse upon the allegorical “Merchant” character: “Traffic confound thee, if the gods will not! …Traffic’s thy god; and thy god confound thee!” (1.1.248, 250). Act 1 depicts another form of pure economic activity founded upon self-interest: attempts to profit via a courtly patronage system driven by flattery. Patronage differs from mercantile exchange in that it assumes a conventional veneer of friendship, and as such would be a relation of utility. Herein tokens of friendship—words and gestures—are proffered as gifts when in actuality they are disingenuous gestures of friendship that seek monetary recompense. The play opens with the entrance of the Poet and the Painter, who have arrived at Timon’s house to offer their works to Timon in order to benefit from his “large fortune … his good and gracious nature” and from the “[m]agic of bounty” famously associated with him (1.1.59–60; 1.1.7). Timon accepts the poem and painting as tokens of friendship, addressing the Painter as “my friend,” and telling the Poet, “I thank you; you shall hear from me anon.” Timon assures the Painter, vaguely, that “I like your work, /And you shall find I like it” (1.1.162–63; 1.1.169–70). Significantly Timon’s remarks promise the two artists some  Citations from Timon of Athens are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2003). References are to act, scene, and line. Evidence suggests that Timon was written in collaboration with Thomas Middleton. See Bevington, p. 1293. 7

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form of recompense but without any explicit monetary reference. Timon, it seems, understands the conventional workings of patronage: by deferring compensation he effectively masks its economic essence. The artists, unlike the Jeweler, are not rebuffed, and while his promise to the artists is clearly a form of economic exchange it is nonetheless within the sphere of friendship—at least from Timon’s perspective. We know, however, that the motive of the artists is crass. As the Poet has previously confided, alone, to the Painter, multitudes “tender down/Their services to Lord Timon” and that whoever “drops down/The knee before him … returns in peace /Most rich in Timon’s nod” (1.1.58–59; 1.1.64–66). Whether Timon recognizes their self-interested motives is unclear—it does not seem that he does—but it is clear to Apemantus, the all-seeing fool, who understands that patronage operates through flattery, and who thus castigates Timon for his ignorance: “He that loves to be flattered is worthy o’ th’ flatterer” (1.1.237–38). And here is Timon’s first mistake regarding the nature of friendship; he confuses social conventions of friendship with true forms of friendship. He does not heed Cicero’s warning that “nothing is to be considered a greater bane to friendship than fawning, cajolery, or flattery.”8

2

“ I Am So Far Already in Your Gifts”: Friendship and Gift Exchange

As depicted in the banquet scene, Timon actively seeks to secure friendships grounded on pleasure (1.2). He is truly sociable and enjoys creating occasions where friends “share a bounteous time/In different pleasures” (1.1.266–67). Such generosity entails, of course, providing goods as well as pleasures, and so meets the criteria for Aristotle’s two lower forms of friendship. Timon is quite successful in establishing many such friendships, but while he has many friends, he has no single, true friend. He errs in thinking that generosity precedes and secures friendship; he does not  Cicero, De amicitia, in Cicero: De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library 154 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923): 103–211 (p. 199; 25); hereafter abbreviated DA. References are to page number then to the numbered section of the Latin text. 8

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understand that, conversely, friendship is what fosters the spirit of generosity itself. As Cicero maintains in de Amicitia, benefits accrue to friendship as a kind of surplus: “And yet love is further strengthened by the receiving of a kindly service [and] when joined to the soul’s first impulse to love, there springs up … a marvelous glow and greatness of goodwill” (DA, p. 141, 9). Timon never conceives clearly what differentiates true friendship from other kinds of friendship—and here particularly in not grasping the role of gift-giving within the sphere of friendship. Seneca’s De beneficiis, available to Shakespeare in several English translations, provided the early modern era with a lengthy, meticulous analysis of as well as practical advice regarding gift-giving.9 Seneca declares the gift to be “the chief bond of human society” and contrasts two different economies: “he who gives benefits imitates the gods, he who seeks a return, money-lenders.” Examining the gift from the perspective of the benefactor, he defines it as “the act of a well-wisher who bestows joy and derives joy from the bestowal of it, and is inclined to do what he does from the prompting of his own will.”10 As to the gift itself Seneca insists that the value of the gift lies in the goodwill that generates it. He takes pains to differentiate the material phenomenon of the gift from its psychic components. It is not the good or service provided that constitutes the gift. The “mark of friendship” is that gift-giving becomes an “incorporeal” exchange and that the “transaction is performed within our minds!” (OB, p. 361, 6.1; p. 119, 2.34). Where Timon obviously “bestows and derives joy” from his benefactions—he is an accomplished gift-giver—a problem arises from his inability to accept gifts. Examining the gift from the perspective of the recipient, Seneca insists that gifts must be received with a spirit of gratitude. And although the gift is to be given without expectation of return, the recipient is nonetheless obliged to reciprocate. So for the giver to refuse gestures of gratitude is to annul the original gift and the friendship upon which it was based. This type of refusal is dramatized early in the  Nicholas Haward translated the first three books of De beneficiis under the title The Line of Liberalitie in 1569. Arthur Golding’s complete translation appeared in 1578. 10  Seneca, On Benefits, in Moral Essays, vol. 3, trans. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library 310 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 19, 1.4; p. 155, 3.15; p. 23, 1.5; hereafter abbreviated OB. References are to page number then to the numbered section of the Latin text. 9

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play. Timon has previously redeemed Ventidius from debtors’ prison, but when Ventidius later arrives to “return those talents/Doubled with thanks” Timon refuses the sum, explaining, “Honest Ventidius. You mistake my love. /I gave it freely ever; and there’s none/Can truly say he gives, if he receives” (1.2.6–7; 1.2.9–11). In the Senecan ideal of friendship Timon is required to accept Ventidius’ gesture of gratitude and to accept the countergift. However, he instead views the gesture as contaminating the purity of his gift in its seeming to revert to a pure economic transaction, with interest, the principle doubled. The incident with Ventidius poses two problems. First, the relation of the countergift to the gift, and second, the question of how to quantify the countergift in relation to the gift. In its pure form as conceived by Timon the gift is liberally proffered (“I gave it freely”) with no expectation of return. Thus any reciprocation in the form of a countergift appears a priori to be excluded if the gift is to retain its status as gift. Seneca, as we have seen, attempts to evade this complication with the idea that the expression of gratitude is in itself sufficient, and that no tangible gift need be returned. This solution, though, does not quite work, as the expression of gratitude can itself become a kind of countergift and therefore a repayment similar to a financial transaction. Seneca concedes this logical inconsistency and, ultimately, contents himself to accept it as a “paradox . . . that he who receives a benefit gladly has already returned it” (OB, p. 115, 2.31). The gift/countergift exchange thus creates an asymmetrical creditor/debtor relationship, a dynamic instanced in the play when a minor character balks at accepting gifts from Timon. Typically, Timon’s companions joyfully accept his largesse, but the First Lord hesitates to accept a jewel from Timon, replying “I am so far already in your gifts— ”(1.2.172). The Lord’s remark intimates that he feels burdened by an already unrepayable debt and by being reduced to the uncomfortable position of a debtor. While Timon is not conscious of the possibility that a gift could produce such anxiety in the recipient his fool Apemantus once again clearly, and cynically, perceives that a gift can easily generate resentment: “Who dies that bears not one spurn to their graves/Of their friends’ gift?” (1.2.140–41). Apemantus’ comment implies that a pure gift, strictly defined as that which is given with no expectation of return, cannot retain its ontological status as gift in that any gift necessarily establishes an insuperably economic creditor/debtor relationship.

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The countergift raises another question regarding quantification: how does one measure what one “owes” to the gift giver? While Cicero and Seneca are silent on the prior, related question of how much it is appropriate to offer as a gift, both discuss at length how one must quantify, or rather not quantify, when reciprocating. Both reject outright any form of quantitative calculation within friendship. Cicero states that “such a view”—that reciprocal giving within friendship must maintain an exact equality—reduces friendship to a “petty accounting” that requires “an exact counting of credits and debits” (DA, p. 169, 16). Seneca acknowledges that gift exchange often results in non-equivalent reciprocation but sees such asymmetry as irrelevant. It is not a matter of quantifying goods and services but rather considering the intention that motivates the recipient’s reciprocation of the gift. It is not how much is returned, but rather the spirit in which it is returned. Seneca thus cautions that gift-giving among friends should not degenerate into a form of competition. A friend who cannot reciprocate with equal quantity “has not been conquered.” For if one were to “match the giver against the recipient, taking into consideration, as you must, their intentions in themselves, the palm will belong to neither. .. No one, therefore, can be outdone. .. if he desires to make a return—if he matches his benefactor in spirit, even though he cannot match him in deeds.” While friends may be “unequal in fortune” a gift from a friend is repaid if the reciprocal gesture is “equal in intention” (OB, p.  297, 5.3–4; p.  301, 5.5). Cicero and Seneca resolve the problem of quantification by removing the countergift from its material manifestation. Both stress that what is to be measured is not the equality of commodities exchanged, focusing instead on the symmetrical and mutual spirit of friendship that underlies the symbolic material exchange. This solution, however, does not apply to Timon. Driven as he is by adherence to his idea of the pure gift he will not allow for any form of return; his insistence on maintaining such purity renders irrelevant any application of Cicero’s and Seneca’s ideal of friendship as an aneconomic equality between friends. It must be noted that Timon’s conception of gift-giving is substantially and strangely inconsistent. Despite his desire to impart only pure gifts he simultaneously engages in gift-giving wherein reciprocation is expected. He envisions a community of friends in which gifts circulate to the

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benefit of all. When the First Lord—a foil to all the other avaricious aristocratic friends of Timon—pleads with him to “use our hearts, whereby we might express some part of our zeals” Timon replies that “the gods themselves have provided that I shall have much help from you: how had you been my friends else? . . . O you gods, think I, what need we have any friends if we should ne’er have need of ‘em? . . . Why, I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? Oh, what a precious comfort ‘tis to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another’s fortunes!” (1.2.88–89, 94–96, 100–105). Timon implies that in his current state of superfluous wealth he is in no need of their generosity. Were he to need a share of their wealth, however, he is confident his friends would supply him. He has fantasized just such a scenario, desiring a poverty that would bring him “nearer” to his friends. By emphasizing the circular nature of the gift Timon effectively negates the gift in the context of the Senecan ideal. As for Seneca, “he who gives a benefit in order that he may get it back has really not given it” (OB, p. 233, 4.13). The shift from pure gift to reciprocal exchange downgrades friendship to the lowest of its Aristotelian forms in conceiving it in terms of its utility. Timon’s celebration of a circular economy of friendship, one that works to redistribute shares to those in need, further deviates from classical ideals of friendship that concurred in dismissing the idea that friendship can be based upon lack. Plato’s Lysis argues against the idea (LY, p. 166, 221d). And Cicero regards true friendship as issuing from a plenitude of love: “For it is love (amor) from which the word ‘friendship’ (amicitia) is derived”), not lack, “for friendship springs rather from nature than from need” (DA, p. 139, 8). Yet another problem related to Timon’s conception of a circular gift economy is that it presupposes some form of record-keeping wherein all parties are obliged to remember specific transactions. But any memory of a gift is inadmissible within the ideal of the pure gift. For within true friendship gifts are to be forgotten. For Seneca, “How sweet, how precious is a gift, for while the giver will not suffer us to pay even our thanks, which he forgot he had given even while he was

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giving it!” (OB, p. 61, 2.6). In Derrida’s stricter conception of the pure gift the gift cannot even be perceived as a gift (GT, p. 16).11 Eventually Timon depletes his wealth and finds himself in the situation he had fantasized about when he “wished” himself “poorer.” His expectation that his friends will reciprocate his generosity proves delusory. In Act 3.1, his servant Flaminius approaches Lucullus with “nothing but an empty box, sir, which in my lord’s behalf I come to entreat Your Honor to supply” (3.1.16–18). Lucullus, upon the arrival of Flaminius, assumes it to involve the bestowal of yet another gift, as his aside indicates: “One of Lord Timon’s men? A gift, I warrant . . . I dreamt of a silver basin and ewer tonight.” Lucullus obviously remembers Timon’s prior gifts, but instead of reciprocating he now criticizes Timon’s prodigality, noting that “many a time” he advised him to “spend less” (3.1.5–7; 3.1.24–26). Within the context of gift exchange this response is a non  sequitur and shifts to an economy of self-interested prudence. Lucullus does not seem conscious of any need to reciprocate and instead regards the request as an attempt to secure a loan, and an imprudent one at that, for this “is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security.” Flaminius replies, “Let molten coin be thy damnation, /Thou disease of a friend” (3.1.42–44; 3.1.53–54). Similar refusals to assist Timon unfold in the following two scenes; at the end of Act 3 one of Timon’s servants concludes, “now all are fled, / … Now his friends are dead” (3.3.37–38). Ironically the gifts Timon had bestowed upon his friends were financed by loans from those very friends, and at the end of Act 3 their servants approach Timon not with countergifts but with overdue bills. Timon’s ideal of a friendship constituted by circular gift exchange collapses. What remains is only pure economic exchange. He comes to a tragic recognition of his error. “Creditors? Devils!” he exclaims (3.4.105). His final gesture to his friends is to invite them to a banquet; in contrast to the feast depicted in 1.2 this one is not sumptuous. When the dishes are uncovered there are only stones in steaming water to be served to what he refers to as “you knot of mouth-friends” (3.6.89). Timon now falls  Also see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 101. 11

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tragically into irreversible misanthropy. He curses all of Athens and vows, “Timon will to the woods, where he shall find/Th’unkindest beast more kinder than mankind” (4.1.35–36). By Act 4 it is clear that Timon’s dream of friendship has failed. As to why and how three answers present themselves. First, his insistence on maintaining the purity of the gift—one that denies any form of reciprocation—does not recognize the logical impossibility of the pure gift. Second, and in contradiction to the imperative that the gift be given with no expectation of return, he simultaneously insists that the gift must be reciprocated in order to secure givers and recipients in bonds of friendship. A third reason for his failure lies in his inability to differentiate true from false friends. The friendships he establishes more closely resemble the two lower forms of Aristotle’s categories of pleasure and utility. Timon’s tragic errors are thus conceptual as opposed to moral; despite these errors he is admirable for being so intensely driven by the true spirit of friendship. And his failure is not the final word on the possibility of its realization, for within the community of Timon’s servants the ideal persists.

3

“Not of Heaven But of the Earth”

The dominant critical tradition of Timon of Athens has focused on the play as a didactic satire. These interpretations look back to its second-­ century source in Lucian’s depiction of the Timon figure as foolishly extravagant in his generosity. Davidson, for example, sees this as the standard early modern view of the play. Following Erasmus’ interpretation, he considers it a satire of “a man, once wealthy, who has ruined himself through generosity.” In these readings the object of the satire is Timon himself in his inability to adhere to classical norms of moderation. Höfele interprets the play as a satire of “universal brotherhood.” Wallace reads the play as Shakespeare’s satire of early modern “nonsense” regarding gift giving and specifically of the Senecan ideal itself.12  Clifford Davidson, “Timon of Athens: The Iconography of False Friendship,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1980): 181–200 (184). On Timon’s lack of prudence and failure to

12

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Another line of criticism interprets Timon from the anthropological perspective of Mauss’s theory of the gift. These readings dismiss Mauss’s celebration of an idealized circular gift economy that functions to secure and solidify social bonds. Kahn, for example, focuses on the “lethal ambiguities” of Timon’s gifts and on how he attempts to “subdue” others with an excessive generosity that by its very excess cannot be reciprocated by those of inferior economic status. Chorost concurs with Kahn in characterizing Timon as a potlatcher whose “generosity” and refusal to accept countergifts masks his motive to establish his own status and power. In Chorost’s words Timon “only talks a circular gift economy,” one that actually works to destroy any “bonds of friendship.”13 Both these critical traditions concur in seeing Timon as ethically flawed. A third line of interpretation, however, celebrates Timon as an ethical exemplar. Jackson rejects the anthropological interpretation that reduces Timon’s generosity to aggressive potlatching and argues that “Shakespeare offers very little opportunity to condemn Timon’s giving and much more opportunity to praise it.” Basing his reading on Derrida’s insistence that the gift is logically impossible, Jackson instead locates Timon’s tragic error in his blindness to that impossibility. That Timon “sought an impossible escape from the circular economy” marks his ethical greatness. Insofar as the play is a satire it is not Timon’s generosity that is targeted. Rather, for Jackson, “Timon seeks to give; that he remains trapped in a world of exchange condemns the world, not his efforts.”14

understand Seneca’s counsel on benefits see Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 20. Andreas Höfele, “Man, Woman and Beast in Timon’s Athens,” Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003): 227–35 (234). John M.  Wallace, “Timon of Athens and the Three Graces: Shakespeare’s Senecan Study,” Modern Philology 83, no. 4 (1986): 349–363 (362). 13  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990). Coppélia Kahn, “‘Magic of bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1987): 34–57 (35, 39). Michael Chorost, “Biological Finance in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,” English Literary Renaissance 21, no. 3 (1991): 349–70 (350–51). 14  Ken Jackson, “‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and God in Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2001): 34–66 (50, 51, 48). On the tension between the didactic and ethical dimensions in Timon see Robert B. Pierce, “Tragedy and Timon of Athens,” Comparative Drama 36, nos. 1–2 (2002): 75–90 (81–82).

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Montaigne’s “On Friendship”—and Shakespeare was unquestionably familiar with Montaigne’s writings—attempts the most radical early modern reformulation of friendship, one that transcends both economic and gift exchange by theorizing it as an intersubjective relation. Two friends occupy one subjectivity; friendship is a monistic rather than dualistic entity that renders questions of exchange irrelevant. The essay describes Montaigne’s four-year relationship with the now-deceased Étienne de La Boétie, as “one soul in two bodies, according to the fit definition of Aristotle.” For Montaigne there is no question as to the possibility of a complete friendship in the Aristotelian sense—his friendship with La Boétie is sufficient evidence of that. What is, rather, unthinkable for Montaigne is the idea of giving itself, or of any kind of exchange, within true friendship. Montaigne does not eschew or attempt to evade economic language in his description of friendship, referring to it as a “noble commerce.” And that is because for Montaigne the conventions of language are incapable of capturing the essence of friendship. Within friendship the idea of any exchange is logically absurd. Concepts such as giving, gratitude, and reciprocation are eliminated, “for as I acknowledge no thanks to myself for any service I do unto myself, so the union of such friends, being truly perfect, makes them lose the feelings of such duties, and hate and expel or one another those words of division and difference: benefit, good, duty, obligation, acknowledgment, prayer, thanks, and such their like are things being by effect common between them: wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives, children, honor, and life.”15 In this way friendship does not precede giving, as it would for Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca. Instead it negates any conventional references to matters of generosity and reciprocity and even the conventional language of ethics (“duty,” “obligation,” etc.). Montaigne thus inverts the common position that reciprocal exchange renders friendship problematic or impossible by arguing that it is friendship that renders exchange impossible. The question, then, is whether or to what extent Shakespeare represents Montaigne’s ideal in Timon. That Timon himself degenerates into total misanthropy indicates that he is unable to establish true friendship.  Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship” in Essays, trans. John Florio, ed. Percival Chubb (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005): 91–107 (101, 100–101); hereafter cited in text as OF. 15

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Contrasted with this failure, however, Shakespeare constructs a dramatic counterpoint exemplified by the community formed by Timon’s servants, whose friendships among themselves and with Timon appear to indicate at least progress toward the attainment of true friendship. Interpretations of the play that focus on the theme of service tend to dismiss the loyalty of the serving class depicted in the play as aristocratic nostalgia. In contrast interpretations within what I have referred to as the ethical tradition, such as Schalkwyk’s, shift the focus to foreground the servants’ “moral rectitude” and, in Knight’s interpretation, the ways in which their love and fidelity bind them to one another and to Timon in friendship.16 Nowhere in the possible sources for Timon of Athens do the servants function to develop the theme of friendship; their incorporation into Timon as the moral agency sustaining ideals of friendship is a uniquely Shakespearean alteration of the basic story. Of these characters the steward Flavius is the most developed. As a steward his role is to manage household economy, which makes him important in Shakespeare’s exploration of an aneconomic community. Before Timon’s financial dissolution he is a voice of prudence and aligned with purely economic and “unfriendly” transactions. In soliloquy he expresses his frustration that Timon is “so senseless of expense” and “takes no account/How things go from him.” Flavius regards Timon’s generosity not as virtuous but as foolish: “to be so unwise to be so kind” (2.2.1; 2.2.3–4; 2.2.6). Early in the play Flavius confronts his master regarding his excessive gift-giving, which, as a prudent steward, he would regard as prodigality: “When for some trifling present you have bid me/Return so much, I have shook my head and wept; /[and] prayed you/To hold your hand more close” (2.2.140–43). But why does he weep? For Timon? Because of Timon’s now bankrupt status? That is unclear. Timon’s retort implies that, at least for Timon, Flavius weeps over lost fortune: “Why dost thou weep?­/Canst  Tom MacFaul, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 92. See also Laurie McKee, “Giving and Serving in Timon of Athens,” Early Modern Literary Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 1–22 (1–3). David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 142–63. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1989), pp.  247–49. First published in 1930 by Oxford University Press. For an extended discussion of the ethical role of Flavius see Ellorashree Maitra, “Toward an Ethical Polity: Service and Tragic Community in Timon of Athens,” Renaissance Drama 41 nos. 1–2 (2013): 173–98 (184–91). 16

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thou the conscience lack/To think I shall lack friends?” (2.2.177–78). Timon contends that if he appeals to his friends’ “hearts by borrowing, / Men and men’s fortunes could I frankly use” (2.2.183–84). In the second half of the play, however, Flavius abandons concerns for financial discretion as he comes to represent an ethical drive toward an aneconomic friendship modeled on Montaigne’s ideal. In the scene following Timon’s withdrawal to the wilderness the servants congregate in their former master’s house. Though they themselves share in Timon’s ruin they nonetheless pledge service to Timon. In the words of the Third Servant, “Yet do our hearts wear Timon’s livery; /That see I by our faces.” They pledge to one another as well: “We are fellows still, /Serving alike in sorrow” (4.2.18–20). Before they disperse Flavius offers what remains of his money: “my wealth I’ll share amongst you. /Wherever we shall meet for Timon’s sake, let’s yet be fellows” (4.2.24-26-25). This gesture accords with Montaigne’s idea that friends share alike in all, in this instance in their sorrow for Timon and in their poverty. Significantly, when Flavius offers his money some “hands” refuse to open: “Let each take some./[Gives money] Nay, put out all your hands” (4.2.28–29). The servants’ refusal does not originate, as it would in the anthropological reading of gift as potlatch, in an attempt to avoid inferior debtor status. It would imply instead what Montaigne sees as the very impossibility of any exchange within friendship, for true friends “can neither lend nor give out to each other” (OF, p. 101). After his fellow servants depart Flavius remains on stage to deliver a soliloquy lamenting Timon’s misery for having lived “But in a dream of friendship” (4.2.35). If the servants’ fellowship progresses toward true friendship it nonetheless sounds a tragic tone. The stage directions note that they “embrace, and part several ways” (4.2.30, s.d.), intimating their future isolation. And indeed, except for Flavius, none of the servants will appear again in the play. Perhaps the strongest barrier to the servants’ realizing true friendship within Montaigne’s ideal lies in the problem of number: how many friends can you have? Here Plato, Cicero, and Seneca are silent. Aristotle, though, addresses it in the Nichomachean Ethics. Although most of his brief comments focus on friendship in terms of the polis and on the lower forms of pleasure and utility, he concludes that “it is impossible to be many people’s friends for their virtue and for themselves. We

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have reason to be satisfied if we can find even a few such friends” (NE, p. 151; 1170b). For Montaigne even a “few” is too many. He would view the servants’ friendship as not true but “common friendships” that “may be divided.” In contrast, “this perfect amity I speak of is indivisible; each man doth so wholly give himself unto his friend, that he hath nothing left to divide elsewhere” (OF, p. 102). In Act 4 one more opportunity to establish just such a friendship of singular duality presents itself in the moral climax of the play, in the penultimate encounter between Timon and Flavius. When Flavius arrives to offer to continue serving as steward, Timon immediately suspects a purely economic motive, “subtle, covetous, /A usuring kindness, and, as rich men deal gifts, /Expecting in return twenty for one” (4.3.513–15). But he quickly recognizes the gesture as sincere when Flavius offers what appears to be a pure gift, which is an immaterial extension of goodwill: “For any benefit that points to me . . . /I’d exchange/For this one wish: that you had power and wealth /To requite me by making rich yourself ” (4.3.524–27). Nonetheless, despite Flavius’ emphasizing the disinterested nature of his gift, it remains inextricably bound to “exchange.” He offers all, but for Timon to accept all is precisely the requital Flavius’ gift demands. Flavius’ gift of friendship is pure in refusing reciprocity, yet it remains impure in that it simultaneously and paradoxically requires reciprocity. In a dramatic irony, unknown to Flavius, Timon has already reacquired wealth. Digging in the ground to secure his diet of roots he had uncovered a great quantity of gold, which he now offers to Flavius as a perverse countergift. But Timon’s offer is not at all a gift as it is not freely given, but is “conditioned” upon Flavius’ promise to “Hate all . . . show charity to none . . . Give to dogs/What thou deniest to men” (4.3.531–32; 4.3.534–35).17 Timon’s final interaction with Flavius ends all possibility of the gift, and consequently the possibility of friendship itself, and Montaigne’s ideal of two souls in one body is tragically unrealized.  In this exchange Shakespeare drastically departs from the parallel scene in Lucian. In Lucian’s version Timon does not offer his gold to Laches, the Flavius character. Instead Laches urges Timon to use it as a means to be “reveng’d of thy false friends.” See Bullough, p. 333. Lucian’s Laches, like Flavius, epitomizes the loyal servant, but Laches’ vengefulness contrasts profoundly with Flavius’ goodwill. 17

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Timon’s failure to establish friendship is, however, not a moral failure. Despite its impossibility the drive to friendship persists as a moral imperative. Here Kant’s analysis of friendship proves useful. In contrast to Montaigne, where friendship is possible only between two persons, for Kant friendship is impossible among any finite number. While limiting friendship to one or a few others is a “laudable” impulse, it works to confine itself to a “charmed circle” rather than extending as it should to all of humanity. As such, insofar as friendship is particular, it is a sign of moral imperfection, for it “tends to harden the heart against . . . those outside the pale . . . and to close the heart to all but a selected few is detrimental to true spiritual goodness.” Yet for Kant friendship is a valuable ideal despite its signaling moral imperfection. As an ideal it serves to reveal the defects inherent in human relationships but at the same time to point to the moral necessity of cultivating love for all humanity. It is partially though not wholly good, for “friendship is not of heaven but of the earth.”18 In the character of Flavius Timon of Athens presents at least a glimmer of the ideal of true friendship.

 Immanuel Kant, “Friendship” in Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1930), 206, 206–07. 18

5 Kant and Frankenstein: On Purity, Contingency, and “Patchwork” Morality Paul Firenze

In the midst of his five formulations of the categorical imperative in the Second Section of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant cautions against succumbing to the temptation of using experience and empirical motives as a grounding for moral principles, arguing that the result will be, not “virtue in her proper form,” but “some bastard patched up from limbs of quite varied ancestry and looking like anything one wants to see in it….”1 To readers in our time, this image of a being composed of limbs of varied ancestry might bring to mind that monstrous “bastard” of Romantic literature, Frankenstein’s creature. Looking at this passage from Kant in its immediate context within the Grounding, and in the broader context of his moral theory, this essay will mark Kant’s obsession with the purity, unity, and autonomy of morality, and of the persons who are bound by its laws. The essay will then read  Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd ed., trans. James W.  Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 34 n.19 (hereafter cited in text as G). 1

P. Firenze (*) Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_5

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Kant’s moral theory alongside Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, discovering along the way compelling analogies between the “patched up bastard” Kant sees as a dangerously deceptive form of morality and Victor Frankenstein’s disastrous patchwork creature. At first sight, both cobbled-­ together creations represent a hope for unity for their creators. But in both cases, these hopes are dashed when the creature turns on its creator and seeks to become its master. The essay ends with an alternate reading of the novel as a critique of Kant’s purifying moral project. In this reading, it is not the creature’s patchwork nature that brings disaster, but rather Victor’s rejection of his own creation, a rejection based primarily on aesthetic grounds of the kind Kant favors.

1

Kantian Moral Purity

To see how Kant’s image of the “patched up bastard” corresponds to his overall project in the Grounding, it will be helpful to quote the passage in full, and then discuss the context in which the image gains significance: [E]verything empirical is not only quite unsuitable as a contribution to the principle of morality, but is even highly detrimental to the purity of morals. For the proper and inestimable worth of an absolutely good will consists precisely in the fact that the principle of action is free of all influences from contingent grounds, which only experience can furnish. This lax or even mean way of thinking which seeks its principle among empirical motives and laws cannot too much or too often be warned against, for human reason in its weariness is glad to rest upon this pillow. In a dream of sweet illusions (in which not Juno but a cloud is embraced) there is substituted for morality some bastard patched up from limbs of quite varied ancestry and looking like anything one wants to see in it but not looking like virtue to him who has once beheld her in her true form. (G, 34)

Kant’s rejection of empirical influence on morality comes from what he sees as a mistake moral theorists make regarding the possibility of acting from duty as opposed to self-interest. In the first paragraph of the Second Section of the Grounding, he admits that these theorists have good reason

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to believe that “there cannot be cited a single certain example of the disposition to act from pure duty” (G, 19). But this lack of evidence for actions from duty, says Kant, is not a strike against a theory of morality grounded on duty, but is rather a justifiable lament “as to the frailty and impurity of human nature,” which should be guided by reason, but instead has relegated reason to an instrumental role of “[looking] after the interest of inclinations” (G, 19).2 In fact, Kant argues, looking at actions themselves to see if they are performed from duty can never reveal such a motive, because “when moral value is being considered, the concern is not with the actions, which are seen, but rather with their inner principles, which are not seen” (G, 19). Grounding morality on examples drawn from what has been done and what humans are like (human nature) leaves morality open to accusations of emptiness from those who see morality as something merely manufactured by the human imagination. If morality is to command unconditionally, as Kant feels it must (otherwise it could give only councils of prudence), morality must appeal to something equally unconditional within us. That something, says Kant, is our free (undetermined) will. This means morality must be purified of all contingent and relative content and must be derived from principles that “have their source completely a priori in pure, but practical, reason” (G, 20). Kant hopes that purifying moral theory of empirical examples will bring order to confused, popular conceptions of morality, first by uncovering the moral principle found by pure practical reason, that is, the “grounding of the metaphysics of morals,” and then by gaining for this grounding “a popular character after it has been firmly established” (G, 21). To work in the opposite direction, from popular conceptions to moral principles, produces “a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles” (G, 21). One need only look at the current state of moral theory, says Kant, to see what chaos is caused by proceeding from examples. It is “an amazing mixture” based on, at one time, “the particular constitution of human nature…at another time  Kant concurs with these laments regarding the “frailty and impurity” of human nature: see his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George Di Giovani (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 52–55, where he lays out three degrees of weakness of the human will, including “frailty,” “impurity,” and “depravity.” 2

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perfection, at another happiness; here moral feeling, and there the fear of God; something of this, and also something of that” (G, 21). This moral philosophy, a mixture of incentives and rational concepts, “must make the mind waver between motives that cannot be brought under any principle and that can only by accident lead to the good but can also lead to the bad” (G, 22). So far, Kant’s arguments leading to his enunciation of the moral law (the categorical imperative) have followed closely his argument that appears in a more condensed form in our featured quotation. Empirical examples are detrimental to the purity of morality. A good will is necessarily a free will, and therefore must be undetermined by contingent influences. Such influences are a real threat to morality due to the “lax” and “mean” modes of thinking prevalent in popular thinking about morality. Identifying universal, unconditional moral principles is difficult work, but we must not allow ourselves (or others) to rest on the “pillow” filled with personal incentives and moral feelings, a pillow which is no doubt quite soft and conforms rather nicely to our weary heads. We must resist such a temptation to rest there and instead press on past imperatives for action that might be grounded on even such seemingly universal ideas as happiness or well-being. Even this is contingent, because to will one’s own happiness one must know with certainty what will make one happy, but “he is not able on any principle to determine with complete certainty what will make him happy, because to do so would require omniscience” (G, 28). Here again, empirical examples may give us guidelines for how to act (counsels of prudence), but not the unconditional laws for action necessary to appeal to (and thus to command) our free will. For the imperatives to be moral imperatives, they must be categorical, not hypothetical. Unlike a hypothetical imperative, which has its content determined by the condition set out for its fulfillment, a categorical imperative will contain only an unconditional universal law. Thus, a categorical imperative will be purified of all content, providing only the form of this universal law. For this reason, Kant says, “there is only one categorical imperative and it is this: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (G, 30). Kant then reformulates this imperative a number of times. The next formulation

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follows closely upon the first: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature” (G, 30). The difference between these formulations is slight, but the second formulation deals with the effects produced by making the universal law into an imperative of duty. In this formulation, the will of the actor proposes that the action become a universal law of nature. Transgressions of duty show that we cannot will that our actions become a universal law of nature, because we have made ourselves an exception to this law, and thus find a “contradiction in our own will, viz., that a certain principle be objectively necessary as a universal law and yet subjectively not hold universally but should admit of exceptions” (G, 33). The fact that we will to make ourselves an exception to the law in this case shows that we are aware of the law and of our violation of it. The example of making oneself an exception to the universal law demonstrates, for Kant, that only categorical imperatives, derived a priori, and not from our own inclinations, can demonstrate that duty has “real legislative authority for our actions” (G, 33). To derive such a priori imperatives we must purify our moral principles of all specifically human inclinations and propensities. Philosophy enters the picture here with the difficult task of authoring a moral law that can command our respect, “even though there is neither in heaven nor on earth anything upon which [this law] depends or is based” (G, 34). The respect commanded by the law is derived from the fact that the source of the law and the authority of the law are the same, and thus the will that obeys the law does so purely from a sense of duty to the law, not from any inclinations derived from human nature (earth), nor from any divine commands (heaven). Without a law determined completely a priori, rational beings (in this case, human persons) cannot be said to have identified the law for themselves, and thus they would be following a law they have not given themselves by identifying it through their use of reason. Because this law would then come from “elsewhere,” obeying such a law would “condemn man to self-contempt and inward abhorrence” (G, 34). At this point, we pick up our featured quotation, which begins, “Hence everything empirical….” This quotation stands at an important juncture in Kant’s explication of the formulations of the categorical imperative, for here he makes

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the transition from the “formula of the law of nature” to the “formula of the end in itself,”3 from the relationship between the actor and the law to the relationship between actors, or, more importantly, to how this relationship between actors shows how these actors are worthy of moral respect. Kant’s argument moves from the passage about the “patched up bastard” who does not resemble virtue to the question of whether it is a law itself that rational beings must determine if the maxim of their actions could be willed as a universal law of nature. For this to be the case, the law must be connected, a priori, to the will of every rational being, so that each of these beings will be able to identify the law for themselves, “insofar as [the law] is determined solely by reason” (G, 35). The ground for determining the will is called an “end.” But when this ground is determined by inclinations or material conditions it is a subjective end and cannot provide properly moral principles. To provide a ground for a categorical imperative, there must be something that is an end in itself. For Kant, “man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself ” (G, 35). Whereas objects of the inclination have only conditional value, “a rational nature is an end in itself ” (G, 36). Therefore, one’s existence, and the existence of every other rational being, is an end in itself. Thus, we have the next formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means” (G, 36). At this point, we can begin to see how Kant’s personification of the “patched up bastard” fits into his transition from the “law of nature” formulation to the “end in itself ” formulation. The law that all rational beings must test their actions toward themselves and toward others for compliance with the universal law of nature is connected to our recognition of the rational “humanity” of the person as an end in itself. A contingent being, toward which we bring only a composition of inclinations, will be of only contingent value to us. If our current inclinations were somehow to be removed or changed, the value of the being and its ability to command our respect could likewise disappear or change. This is why the composite being “look[s] like anything one wants  The terms in quotations are given by Ellington, the translator, in footnotes to Kant’s text.

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to see in it but [does not look] like virtue to him who has beheld her in her true form” (G, 34). To this passage Kant then appends a footnote, which is also important to quote in full, describing what he takes to be virtue in her true form: To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing other than to present morality stripped of all admixture of what is sensuous and every spurious adornment of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses all else that appears attractive to the inclinations can be easily seen by everyone with the least effort of his reason, if it be not entirely ruined for all abstraction. (G, 34 n.19)

In the body of the text, Kant has told us what morality should not look like. In this accompanying footnote, he attempts to give a glimpse of what it should look like, although even here his image is constructed as a series of absences: virtue is “stripped” of sensuousness and adornment, revealing only a pure form. This is why empirical examples cannot show us what true morality is like. It bears emphasis again that Kant does not believe that, as “natural creatures,” human beings can somehow fully transcend their contingent nature and successfully fulfill the dictates of the moral law. As he says in the second Critique, the moral law “as an ideal of holiness…is not attainable by any creature but is yet the archetype which we should strive to approach and resemble in an uninterrupted but endless progress.”4 Kant argues only for purification of intention, although he believes this too is impossible. But Kant is more confident in our ability to purify the moral law itself of all “admixture.” As rational creatures we are inherently “mixed” beings (in a way, like Kant’s “patched up bastard” and Frankenstein’s creature). But it is a mistake, says Kant, for our moral theories to be of such a mixed nature, for then they lose their ability to achieve the strength of “attraction” provided by the moral example he personifies in the purified virtue. He seems particularly to object to the kinds of “mixed messages” he sees produced by  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 71. 4

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morality based on human inclinations and self-interest, in particular in the arena of popular morality, where a “lax and mean” way of thinking invites distraction and subsequent errors. Kant’s elitism notwithstanding, when we look at his moral philosophy in the light of Shelley’s novel, and pay particular attention to the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his creation, we get a better view of why Kant sees a morality based on contingent inclinations as a threat to the purity of morality. One important aspect of this reading of Kant’s moral philosophy alongside Frankenstein is the analogy between Kant’s image of the figure with “limbs of quite varied ancestry” and Frankenstein’s creature on the one hand, and Kant’s personification of virtue and the human person on the other. That is, as the “patched up bastard” stands in relation to virtue in Kant’s moral philosophy, so the creature stands in relation to the human being in the world of the novel. In this sense, the novel can be read as a Kantian warning against the project of “utility” that produces only a patchwork morality based on the contingency of what “works” in a given instance. In another sense, explored in the third section of this essay, the novel can be read as a warning against Kant’s purifying project that operates by reason alone, divorced from any natural or human context.

2

Frankenstein as Kantian Warning

In the analogy pursued here, Victor Frankenstein represents the moral theorist who seeks to ground morality on contingent experience and empirical motives, and Victor’s creature is the product of that attempt, the “bastard patched up from limbs of quite varied ancestry.” As Kant might well have foreseen, Victor’s inclinations are consistently contingent on his circumstances, and Victor has, in Kant’s words, relegated reason to the instrumental role of looking after the interests of these inclinations (see G, 19). From early in his life, Victor associates his moral duties with being “useful to my fellow-beings.”5 This desire for usefulness carries over  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, eds. David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), p. 71 (hereafter cited in text as F). 5

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into his treatment of others. He approaches the study of anatomy and physiology as the study of raw materials, diverse parts out of which to fashion his own desired ends. The human body parts he uses in his experiments are mere means, no longer part of a unified person who would be an end in themselves with a moral significance beyond their individual parts. Victor summarizes his instrumentalizing attitude toward these human remains when he says, “In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors….a churchyard was to me merely a receptacle of bodies deprived of life…” (F, 33). His use of the word “supernatural” here can refer not only to his lack of superstition surrounding spirits or ghosts, but also to Kant’s hypothesized transcendental subject (the person) who is worthy of respect. Yet Victor’s cool detachment is matched by an even more overwhelming enthusiasm for accomplishment and discovery that so often marks the universalizing project of the Enlightenment, and shows how easily this worldview can slide over into Romantic egotism. Recalling his triumphant discovery of the secret of life, Victor exults in his potential contributions to society and at the same time indulges his own hubristic fantasies: “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (F, 37). The natural, contingent order of creation will be overcome, and he will produce progeny who will owe their existence solely to him. There is no thought here of the members of this new species having their own needs or desires. They are not thought of as persons in their own right, but rather as role players in Victor’s grandiose, world-transforming pageant of exploration and discovery. Victor’s education in a science which, according to Professor Waldman, “‘penetrate[s] into the recesses of nature, and show[s] how she works in her hiding places’” (F, 30), has built on his already contentious relationship with the human body’s frailty and contingency, most notable in the events that precede his education at the University of Ingolstadt: the death of his mother from scarlet fever while caring for a similarly afflicted

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Elizabeth (F, 25–27). But because for Victor the body is the all-in-all of human existence, the solution to his problem can only be found in discovering the secrets of the body’s contingency and overcoming it through the application, and we might almost say the reversal, of its own principles. And it is clear, at least in the beginning, that Victor sees his endeavor as an enterprise in “perfecting” the imperfect order of nature and purifying it of its contingent deficiencies. He will bring “light into our dark world,” his creations will have “happy and excellent natures,” and he even assembles his creature with an eye toward the “beauty” of its features (F, 42). What contingent nature has been unable to achieve, Victor seeks to bring to perfection. This is the attitude of Kant’s ill-fated moral theorist who works from contingent examples to moral principles. And, indeed, as soon as the creature comes to life, Victor realizes he has “given birth” to a monstrosity. Rather than perfecting nature’s inadequacies, he sees his creation as an abomination against both nature and human beings. Despite his best efforts to make the creature’s varied elements cohere, they produce only disharmony and revulsion. While the individual parts may have been beautiful, their mixture is unbearable: His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips. (F, 42; emphasis added)

The horror produced by looking at the creature is a response to the endangerment of our own integrity, Kant would say our own autonomy, as subjects. This is analogous to Kant’s horror at contingent moral theories made of laws that we do not give ourselves, but rather find in the empirical realm, and thus we cannot willingly and freely obey them without becoming heteronymous. The creature is an affront to our unified subjectivity, just as contingent moral laws are an affront to our freedom as transcendental subjects. The creature is a composition, like any being formed from a composition of inclinations, which can be of only

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contingent value to us if these inclinations should change (see G, 35). The creature does not cohere into a unified whole, and because it partakes of the human form only incompletely, Victor’s immediate reaction is revulsion. The creature’s own actions and self-image reinforce Kant’s warning against a moral system based on the contingency of inclinations. The creature’s first experiences with human beings consist of confusion, pain, and terror (for the human beings and the creature). When the newly-­ revived creature reaches out to the first human being he sees (his creator, Victor), that human recoils in horror, and recalls the smile on the creature’s face not as a gesture of friendship or need, but as the “wrinkled grin” of a “miserable monster” (F, 43) Like his creator, the creature’s behavior is driven by the contingency of his circumstances. He is moved by the human compassion shown among the members of the De Lacey family, whom he watches from the safety of his hovel attached to their cottage. When his hopes of being integrated into this human community are dashed because of his frightful appearance, he declares “‘everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me…’” (F, 114), and after the family flees from their cottage, he burns it to the ground. But the beautiful weather the next day tranquilizes the creature and he decides to petition Victor to create a companion for him, as he knows he will never be accepted into the human family. His arguments for why Victor should help him demonstrate the degree to which the creature sees his actions and inclinations as a product of his empirical experience: “‘I am malicious because I am miserable’” (F, 120; emphasis added). One of his petitions for Victor’s help reads like an example of everything Kant would deem backwards about morality based on conditionals: “‘Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous’” (F, 80; emphasis added). The creature’s self image shows how much he has internalized his own “disunified” nature. The creature is only familiar with the seemingly integrated human forms of the members of the De Lacey family: “‘I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!…and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of

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despondence and mortification’” (F, 93). The creature’s self-hatred is also directed at his creator, and the obviously inadequate job Victor did in fashioning him. Victor is his “accursed creator,” and the creature laments, “‘God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of your’s [sic], more horrid from its very resemblance’” (F, 108). As the creature sees his own inadequacies by comparison with the “sublime” human form, so anyone, argues Kant, who has seen virtue “stripped of all admixture” would realize the inadequacies of the “bastard patched up from limbs of quite varied ancestry.” Frankenstein’s creature is a “bastard,” in that by his society’s standards his parentage is illegitimate. Kant’s figure is also a bastard in that his lineage is equally illegitimate. He has been born not of reason, for Kant the sole legitimate parent of morality (virtue), but from the contingent inclinations of his creator. He is a patchwork of parts. At one time, he is composed of “the particular constitution of human nature…at another time perfection, at another happiness; here moral feeling, and there the fear of God; something of this, and also something of that” (G, 21). In the novel, this patchwork approach to what should be a unified whole manifests in a divided self (Victor/creature), where the creation eventually seeks to become the master of its creator. The patchwork morality to which Kant so strongly objects likewise allows the creation, moral principles contingent upon empirical examples and human nature, to become master of the rightful creator of moral laws, the autonomous, rational person. For Kant, this is the very essence of heteronomy. When the creature becomes master of the creator, mutual destruction seems the only possible means of escape. Having seen the human body as an object composed of purely contingent matter, Victor brought his creature to life, but revolted at the offense it represented to the unified human subject. The creature’s existence was contingent on Victor’s creative desires, allowing Victor to reject the creature when his desires change after seeing the creature stir to life. The creature, too, becomes aware of this offense and turns on his creator, at first attempting to force Victor to do his bidding, but failing that, destroying everything that brought Victor joy. For Kant, only the unified, autonomous self that gives itself universal laws to obey, grounded on reason, can avoid the mutual destruction inherent in the composite, divided self.

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Like the moral philosophers of whom Kant is so critical, Victor thinks he can produce good (whether happiness, benefit, welfare) by piecing together what he sees as the best parts in just the right way. For Kant, this is his mistake. Any good produced here will be contingent, and it is equally possible that bad will be produced instead (G, 22). Once one follows contingency as the guide to moral action, contingencies pile upon contingencies, with potentially no foreseeable stopping place. Victor encounters this problem most obviously in the creature’s request that Victor create for him a “companion” (F, 120). The creature created for contingent purposes comes to have his own contingent plans and desires, which Victor admits to feeling compelled to fulfill, for, as he says, “did I not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?” (F, 121). Victor’s internal debate over whether to create a second creature—whether it would be a remedy to the harms done by creating the first creature, or a compounding of these harms—shows the slippery slope onto which we can step when we try to build our moral principles on the contingencies of circumstance and inclination.

3

Frankenstein Against Kantian Purity

While these analogies between Kant’s “patched up bastard” and the composite creature of Mary Shelley’s novel can illuminate a possible source of Victor’s troubled relationship with his creation, the novel can also be read as a rejection of Kant’s purifying moral project. In both of these readings, Victor is the source of (the creator of ) the creature’s monstrosity, but in the reading critical of Kant’s morality, Victor’s negative reaction to his creation is not a legitimate realization of his creature’s illegitimate lineage, but is instead a regrettably short sighted rejection of the potential for moral personhood in the creature, and thus an abnegation of Victor’s obligations to guide his creation in the appropriate direction. To read the novel as a Kantian warning against a patchwork morality assumes the creature’s monstrosity is a necessary product of its method of creation. In her own meditation on Kant and Frankenstein, Barbara Freeman ties Victor’s judgment of the creature’s “monstrosity” to its physical ugliness, and she sees this reaction as analogous to “Kant’s conviction

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that beauty is the ultimate symbol of the good.”6 Recall that Kant claims the patched up bastard will not look like true virtue to anyone familiar with the proper method of seeing virtue. And that method, of course, starts with identifying the pure form of the moral law, not from combining contingent examples into a system that gives the temporary illusion of beauty to the creator. Victor himself fell prey to this illusion of beauty as he composed his creature. Only when the creature gained a life of its own did the full force of its ugliness (its supposed lack of virtue) become evident to Victor. Throughout the novel, Victor’s judgments regarding the value of things he encounters depend largely on aesthetic criteria. Although Victor accepts the verdict of Professor Krempe regarding his prior, wasted study of the alchemists, he rejects Krempe’s suggestions for a new direction of research, in part because Krempe is “a squat little man, with a gruff voice and repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favor of his doctrine” (F, 29). Professor Waldman is more to Victor’s liking, displaying an “aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence,” and a “voice the sweetest I had ever heard” (F, 30). Victor eagerly pursues Waldman’s plan of study, even though it lacks the grandiose appeal of the alchemists. The revulsion that Victor shows toward his creature as it stirs to life recurs when he is later confronted by the creature on the glacier near Montavert. In fact, Victor finds the creature’s physical appearance so repulsive that he is unable to concentrate on the creature’s speech while looking at him, to the point where the creature reaches out and covers Victor’s eyes, saying, “Thus I relieve thee, my creator…thus I take from thee the sight you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion” (F, 82). Even after the creature’s sympathetic tale, Victor cannot fully overcome the creature’s appearance: “I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (F, 122–123).  Barbara Freeman, “Frankenstein with Kant: A Theory of Monstrosity, or the Monstrosity of Theory,” SubStance 16 (1987), p. 25. Freeman is referring here to section 59, “Beauty as the Symbol of Morality,” of Kant’s Critique of Judgment [trans. James Creed Meredith, ed. Nicholas Walker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)]. 6

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Later, while assembling the creature’s companion, Victor sees the creature peering through the window. While the creature may simply have been expressing pleasure with the progress, Victor sees in the creature’s grinning face only “the utmost extent of malice and treachery” (F, 140). The creature’s self-loathing is fueled by the sight of his own mangled visage in a pool’s reflection, especially when his appearance is compared with the “perfection” of the cottagers. The creature intuits that the alternately terrified and violent reactions of the human beings he has encountered have been sparked by the “unnatural hideousness of my person” (F, 110). This understanding leads him to plan to speak to the elder De Lacey in the absence of his children, realizing that the blind man will lack the bias brought about by sight. And, in fact, De Lacey tells the creature, “I am blind and cannot judge your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere” (F, 112). Only the untimely return of De Lacey’s children foils the creature’s plan to persuade the old man of his worthiness of compassion and protection. But while Victor and Kant take this lack of attractiveness as an indication of moral failure, it is more plausible that the patchwork creatures’ shortcomings are the result of a lack of continued care and concern on the part of its creator, and not a function of the creation’s origins. Frankenstein’s creature shows enough glimpses of virtue to reckon that he (and the many others with whom he came into contact) could have benefited greatly from more (or indeed any) care on the part of his creator to ensure the inculcation of a more virtuous disposition. The creature is certainly a quick study. After stealing from the cottagers’ store to feed himself, the creature learns that the De Lacey family suffers from the evil of poverty, and “when I found that [theft] inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained” (F, 90). The creature even begins to aid the cottagers, providing them with fire wood and food. The creature’s relative patience and forbearance with the continuous indignities visited upon him by the human beings he encounters is in many ways admirable. He recognizes that he thinks and feels similarly to the cottagers he observes, but he has been accorded none of the upbringing within the networks of human relations that give their lives meaning and joy: “where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if

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they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing” (F, 100). He realizes his creator has endowed him with the faculties to desire and appreciate human companionship, but “then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind” (F, 114). His final lament to Captain Walton, in the presence of his dead creator, illustrates the tragedy of Victor’s rejection of his progeny: “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal” (F, 185). Victor’s real error, then, one that can also be assigned to Kant, is thinking that a proper lineage will necessarily manifest in beauty and thus assure goodness. This belief seems to be confirmed in the novel, as the hideous, monstrous creature is vengeful and murderous. The analogous “bastard” creation Kant describes also suffers from serious defects which Kant ties to its contingent origins. It is true that like all human creations, moral philosophy will eventually be found lacking. But rejecting this human creation because of its origins is insufficient grounds for neglecting its needs, especially its needs for improvement. Victor’s creature could have been better if Victor had taken responsibility for his creation, tended to his needs, and corrected what was in error. Likewise, moral theorists learn from mistakes, that is, they learn from human experience, and then strive to do better by revising their new creations into more perfect (but never completely perfect) versions of their previous creations. * * * Frankenstein is a multivalent creation, with ambiguity regarding the role of reason at its center. A more rational, less fanatical approach on Victor’s part might have avoided, or at least minimized, the monstrosity of his creation by paying less attention to his own contingent desires (for glory or discovery) and more attention to the duties a creator has to its creation, and to the wider world that will interact with that creation. But the type of pure (practical) reason Kant favors, one obsessed with formal perfection and dismissive of the contingent world in which human beings

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try and fail, and try again for improvement, ensures the monstrous inadequacy of that which is created, a kind of self-fulfilling loathing of the contingent creation that cannot help but come to devour itself in a vicious (not virtuous) cycle of ever greater immorality. Victor had hoped to free humanity from the contingencies of suffering and death, but instead created a monster that brought suffering and death in its wake. However, the creature’s monstrosity is not a necessary result of its illegitimate lineage and horrific appearance. The creator’s negligence of his creation and the care this creation needs in order to demonstrate virtue is the real monstrosity in the novel, as well as in Kant’s own metaphysics of morals. It is no wonder, then, the self-loathing creature turns on its creator, and the novel ends with the mutual destruction of both creator and creature, not in a raging chaos of violent mutual bloodletting, but in the frozen, lifeless, purified emptiness of the polar ice.

6 Plights of Mind and Circumstance: Cavell and Wallace on Scepticism Paul Jenner

The significance of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy for David Foster Wallace’s writings remains something of an under-explored topic, certainly by comparison with the substantial body of scholarship tracing the influence of Wittgenstein upon Wallace.1 Cavell’s work on Wittgenstein and on scepticism, I suggest, offers a new perspective on the preoccupation with interiority that runs throughout Wallace’s writings. Drawing on Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon”, I argue that this preoccupation is best understood not as reflecting a settled epistemological scepticism or solipsism, but rather as an exploration of questions of separateness and exposure, questions that are also at stake in Cavell’s Wittgensteinian portrait of scepticism as a permanent existential possibility and threat.

 Jon Baskin makes this point in “Untrendy Problems: The Pale King’s Philosophical Inspirations,” in Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 143 n6. 1

P. Jenner (*) Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_6

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In his review of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Wallace rehearses the late Wittgenstein’s taking “as paradigmatic of the language with which philosophers ought to be concerned not the ideal abstraction of math-logic, rather now just ordinary day-to-day language in all its wooliness and charm”.2 A brief footnote praises Stanley Cavell’s early essay “Must We Mean What We Say?” and J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words as both offering “very cool elaborations” of this shift.3 Cavell’s essay is not mentioned again, and readers might assume that the first of the three epigraphs with which Wallace’s review begins, attributed to Cavell but not specifying a particular text, is also from “Must We Mean What We Say?”. In fact the epigraph, which expands upon the topic of philosophising from ordinary language, is from a lecture Cavell delivered some thirty years later, “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture”: “But what other philosopher has found the antidote to illusion in the particular and repeated humility of remembering and tracking the use of humble words, looking philosophically as it were beneath our feet rather than over our heads?”4 Although Wallace turned to the later lecture to help signpost a meta-­ philosophical moral of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Cavell’s earlier essay already, and characteristically, allowed some broad thematics to emerge amidst its methodological defence of ordinary language philosophy’s appeal to what we say. These thematics anticipate and resonate with concerns underway in Wallace’s work. The opening paragraph of “Must We Mean What We Say?”, for instance, wonders aloud whether the ultimate counsel of ordinary language philosophy might be “that we sit quietly in a room”.5 The context for this surprising reflection, with its allusion to Pascal, is Cavell’s working through of ways in which the new method of ordinary language philosophy might feel “oppressive”:  David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” in Both Flesh and Not (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2012), p. 109. 3  David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” p. 109 n38. 4  Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1994), p. 34. 5  Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.  2; hereafter abbreviated “MWM.” 2

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s­ eemingly tying philosophers to ordinary usage; disappointingly diagnostic rather than productive of new answers to the philosophical “questions that possess us”; metaphysically tongue-tied rather than speculative (p. 2). This perception of confinement is returned to at the end of the essay. It is understandable, Cavell suggests, that philosophy will envy the excitement of the invention taken to characterise science and poetry: “No wonder the philosopher will gape at such band wagons. But he must sit still” (p. 42). The twin images bookending Cavell’s essay – sitting quietly in a room, sitting still  – help to align his work at its outset with problematics of attention at stake in Wallace’s fiction and non-fiction, from “This is Water” to The Pale King. In so doing, they also serve to isolate the restlessness that their work has in common, both as attribute and topic. In “Austin at Criticism”, Cavell’s enthusiastic reception of ordinary language philosophy is itself couched in terms of disciplinary restlessness, with Austin’s work deemed compelling to anyone “forced into his impatience with philosophy as it stands (or patience with the subject as it could become)”.6 The restlessness figured by our inability to sit quietly in a room, further, becomes a central strand in Cavell’s reinterpretation of scepticism, now as a narrative about “philosophy’s chronic flight from the ordinary”.7 To adopt a line of thought characteristic of the essays collected in Must We Mean What We Say?, if ordinary language philosophy spoke to Cavell’s disciplinary restlessness, it did this partly by allowing restlessness itself to emerge as a philosophical topic. A further quotation from “Must We Mean What We Say?” will help to foreground the topic of interiority: “Talking together is acting together, not making motions and noises at one another, nor transferring unspeakable messages or essences from the inside of one closed chamber to another” (“MWM,” p. 34). The last picture Cavell sketches here, wherein talking to one another seems to require a next to impossible breaching of closed chambers, is recurrent in Wallace’s fiction. “As if ”, the protagonist  Stanley Cavell, “Austin at Criticism”, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 98. 7  Stanley Cavell, “Silences Noises Voices,” in Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-­ Century Philosophy, ed. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 355; hereafter abbreviated “SNV.” 6

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of Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” reflects, “we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.”8 So recurrent, in fact, as to motivate the conclusion that despite Wallace’s familiarity with Wittgenstein and the private language argument, his work is characterised by Cartesian notions of interiority and ultimate solipsism.9 Wallace’s emphasis on interiority can seem to leave his work caught, perplexingly, in the very epistemological scepticism and solipsism that his philosophical influences should have alleviated.10 My suggestion here is that, read in terms of Cavell’s Wittgensteinian analysis of scepticism, the undoubted emphasis upon interiority within Wallace’s work becomes less anomalous. To help make this case, I will turn to Cavell’s engagement with other-mind scepticism in his cornerstone essay, “Knowing and Acknowledging”.11

 David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” in Oblivion (London: Abacus, 2005), p. 178. Hereafter abbreviated GN. 9  Robert C. Jones, for example, finds Wallace’s assumption in “Consider the Lobster” that pain is a “totally subjective experience” to reflect “intuitive, pre-theoretic notions of pain – that access to my own internal pain states is a solely introspective affair involving private, subjective experiences about which my epistemic judgments are immune to error and about which I cannot be wrong” (p. 91n16). I take Jones to be responding here to the Cartesian quality of Wallace’s work. Robert C. Jones, “The Lobster Considered,” in Bolger and Korb, eds., Gesturing Toward Reality, pp. 85–102. 10  See for instance Patrick Horn, “Does Language Fail Us? Wallace’s Struggle with Solipsism,” in Bolger and Korb, eds., Gesturing Toward Reality, pp. 245–70. Horn sees a “deficiency” (p. 248) in Wallace’s understanding of the Investigations. Horn’s Wallace misses the point that late Wittgenstein does not set out to provide arguments as such and so does not offer an argument against solipsism. Rather, Wittgenstein shows that the problem of solipsism is logically muddled and lacks sense. “Wallace thus accepted the sense of a problem that Wittgenstein tried to show could never be sensibly stated” (p. 247). A touchstone for Wallace’s concern with solipsism is his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery. Wallace contends there that although the Investigations offer a “beautiful” argument against solipsism, its vision of language eventuates in a linguistic solipsism of communal language games  – leaving us less alone but no nearer to extra-linguistic referents. David Foster Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery, in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 2012), p. 44. Stephen Mulhall has cautioned that Wallace’s understanding of Wittgenstein is complex and cannot be reduced to linguistic solipsism and/or determinism. See Stephen Mulhall, The Self and its Shadows. A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The biblical characterisation of external world scepticism as “a real Book-­ of-­Genesis-type tragic fall” in Wallace’s remarks to McCaffery owes a debt to Cavell’s discussion of scepticism as a secular Fall (p. 44). See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), pp. 51–52. 11  Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 238–266; hereafter abbreviated “KA.” 8

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In their interview with Wallace, Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk describe his “habit of lightly striking the back of his head with an open palm, a habit which, Wallace noted, descends in a direct line from his father, a philosopher at the University of Illinois Champagne/Urbana; through his father’s teacher, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein’s last student; back to Wittgenstein himself ”.12 Without claiming to trace such neat genealogies, it is noteworthy that Malcolm’s “The Privacy of Experience” is one of the representative targets of “Knowing and Acknowledging”.13 Cavell contests Malcolm’s premise that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations provide a direct refutation of other-mind scepticism. The premise encourages the perception, which Cavell also rejects, that ordinary language philosophy involves an inherently anti-­ sceptical defence of common sense. On that premise, other-mind scepticism is said to depend for its outcomes upon misuses of ordinary language. The sceptical suggestion that I cannot have the same pain as another (and therefore can never know whether they are really in pain) is deemed to be incorrect, for example, because I can have “the same” pain in the only sense appropriate to sensation terms, descriptively rather than numerically the same. The very notion that someone “knows” they are in pain is similarly deemed a misuse. “Knowing and Acknowledging” questions this approach, bringing in to focus ordinary language philosophy’s signature but under-explored account of philosophical error as a matter of philosophers misusing words. Cavell’s understanding of the relevance of ordinary language philosophy to scepticism is distinctive in its suggestion that the sceptic’s words, even where they depart from ordinary usage, do so in order to record a genuine insight or fact. Ordinary language philosophy’s work in responding to scepticism should thus become hermeneutic, aiming “to discover the specific plight of mind and circumstance within which a human being gives voice to his condition” (“KA,” p. 240). This embodiment of scepticism in the figure of “the sceptic”, an earnestly experiencing subject  David Foster Wallace, “Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 2012), p. 12. 13  Norman Malcolm, “The Privacy of Experience,” in Epistemology: New Essays on the Theory of Knowledge, ed. Avrum Stroll (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 129–58. 12

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undergoing a specific “plight of mind”, repackages scepticism from academic exercise to something experientially fundamental. And this commitment to disclosing experiential truths within philosophical disputes is an affinity with William James, Cavell’s misgivings about pragmatism notwithstanding. In “Austin at Criticism”, Cavell describes “the impatience and doubt which begin modern philosophy” as having been “emasculated…into academic subjects”.14 More than a potentially strained effort to revivify stale epistemological puzzles, though, hermeneutic consideration of the sceptic’s subjectivity reflects a methodological constraint. The sceptic cannot simply be assumed from the outset to be misusing words, and such a dismissal amounts to a problematic claim to expertise about ordinary usage on the part of the ordinary language philosopher. Cavell does not try to stop scepticism from getting started, or stated, but seeks instead to show how the sceptic’s words misplace an otherwise genuine insight or truth, and aims to find words that better record what the sceptic sees. The other-mind sceptic, on Cavell’s diagnosis, is struck by an experience of our separateness. This insight, however, is then deflected into an impossible demand. The sceptic shocks us with the conclusion that we cannot know what another person feels because we cannot have their feeling: “we must refute him, he would make it impossible ever to be attended to in the right way. But he doesn’t begin with a shock. He begins with a full appreciation of the decisively significant facts that I may be suffering when no one else is, and that no one (else) may know (or care?); and that others may be suffering and I not know, which is equally appalling. But then something happens, and instead of pursuing the significance of these facts, he is enmeshed – so it may seem – in questions of whether we can have the same suffering, one another’s suffering” (“KA,” p. 247). The problem is not that the questions enmeshing the sceptic are wholly confused or nonsensical; rather, the sceptic’s words try but fail “to capture my experience of separation from others” and are “much too weak, as if words are in themselves too weak to record this fact” (p. 260). This experience of separateness Cavell characterises in terms of powerlessness: “I find that, at the start of this experience, I do not want to give  Cavell, “Austin at Criticism,” p. 109.

14

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voice to it (or do not see what voice to give it), but only point (to others, or rather to the fact, or being, of others) and to gesture towards myself. Only what is there to point to or gesture towards, since everything I know you know? It shows, everything in our world shows it. But I am filled with this feeling – of our separateness, let us say – and I want you to have it too. So I give voice to it. And then my powerlessness presents itself as ignorance  – a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack” (p. 262). The relevance of Cavell’s analysis of scepticism for Wallace’s work, then, is that Cavell’s Wittgenstein does not dispute the phenomenological intuitiveness of the sceptic’s focus upon the interiority or privacy of sensations, “some terrible or fortunate fact, at once contingent and necessary, that I am not in that position”, the position of another (“KA,” p. 259). Much of “Knowing and Acknowledging” is devoted to unpicking ways that Wittgensteinians had been led to deny such privacy, in their attempts to shut down scepticism. John Cook’s “Wittgenstein on Privacy”, for instance, describes “the idea that sensations are essentially private” as confused.15 Hoping to establish the incoherence of the sceptic’s insistence that I cannot have another’s sensations, Cook contends that the sceptic mistakenly “makes out the difference between first- and third-person statements [about sensations] to rest on a matter of circumstance (like being unable to see my neighbour’s crocuses)”, whereas Cook’s Wittgenstein helps us to see that this difference is internal to our language game (p. 291). Cook’s garden analogy Cavell deems inadequate as a diagnosis of the impression scepticism aims to express: it captures the sense that “I am sealed out; but it fails to capture the impression (or fact) of the way in which he is sealed in. He is not in a position to walk in that garden as he pleases, notice the blooms when he chooses: he is impaled upon his knowledge” (“KA,” p. 261). A striking upshot of Cavell’s analysis is that the sceptic’s truth, the discovery of our separateness and finitude, amounts as it were to a discovery of the obvious or ordinary. This truth is then deflected both by the  John W.  Cook, “Wittgenstein on Privacy,” The Philosophical Review Vol. LXXIV (1965): 281–314; reprinted in Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, ed. George Pitcher (New York: Doubleday Anchor Original, 1966), p. 323. Quotation from reprint. 15

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sceptic and by Wittgensteinians hoping to refute scepticism, the latter issuing false compensations for (and thereby indulging) the former’s impossible demands. Characterising scepticism as a discovery of the obvious, however, is not meant negatively because, as such deflection suggests, discovering the obvious is difficult (as difficult as sitting quietly in a room). Cavell’s philosophical mode, further, is itself difficult, in the sense that its conjuring of broad thematics (separateness, powerlessness) out of otherwise focussed debates can seem disappointingly tangential to the disciplinary norms and comportment of a problem-solution approach. Cavell’s moral imagination, his pre-postmodern sieving of humanistic truths from philosophical argumentation, risks eliciting something like the response Wallace imagined awaiting a new generation of post-­ postmodern fiction writers. Turning away from irony and endorsing “single-­entendre principles”, Wallace felt that these writers would encounter “the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, […] accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness”.16 Readers of “Knowing and Acknowledging” might feel that Cavell’s care not to answer scepticism on its own terms is a failure to answer scepticism at all. This is partly why his taking up of Hamm’s remark in Endgame, “you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!”, placing the emphasis on cure, can be seen as key to Must We Mean What We Say? as a whole, and not just the essay interpreting Beckett’s play.17 Cavell describes the implied reader of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations “as not being motivated to join an intellectual quest because of some solution it holds in store” but as “responsible for finding the journey’s end in every step of the road, in one’s own gait”.18 “Knowing and Acknowledging” hinges not on a suggestion that acknowledgement solves scepticism through the provision of a more powerful form of knowledge, thereby closing the gap between persons, but precisely on the way acknowledgment captures something of our separateness and powerlessness, without deflecting such metaphysical  David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), p. 81. 17  Stanley Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 129. 18  Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 17. 16

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finitudes into intellectual puzzles. Rather than dismissing them as nonsense, “acknowledgement” finds a sense for the sceptic’s words. The intertwining of philosophy with questions of separateness and finitude persists in Cavell’s work and becomes if anything more explicit. For all their distinctiveness, it is hard to imagine any of the essays in his first book determining that “in ordinary language philosophy the ordinary is the scene and recognition of one’s own death” (“SNV,” p. 354). On Cavell’s reading, the outbursts of philosophy traced in the Investigations arise out of and return to silence. The silence with which philosophy begins involves the self ’s lostness to itself, taking the form of an insistence on empty words, wanting words to do more than they humanly can, denying human responsibility for speech. The silence and “inconsequential peace” with which philosophy ends acknowledges this responsibility and reorientation (p. 353). The “hard news” is that, in the absence of an independent ground that would absolve me of responsibility for my words, my reaching the end of the words I do find is consonant with “being at the end of life, exposed to death”, which is to say exposed to and exposed unto death. Returning us as if from exile to an ordinary we are yet to inhabit, Cavell’s Wittgenstein discovers philosophy as “learning how to die, learning my separateness” (pp. 353–54). Cavell’s work, then, is mindful of “philosophy’s requirement, hence I suppose of any serious writing, to incorporate death (you might, more decorously, say finitude) into its reflections” (“SNV,” p. 357).19 My rehearsal of the way “Knowing and Acknowledging” incorporates finitude by claiming an experiential kernel to scepticism has brought to the foreground formulations echoing Wallace’s preoccupation with interiority. It might be felt, for instance, that for many of Wallace’s protagonists their ‘plight of mind’ just is their circumstance. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace describes the fiction reader as “like all of us…sort of marooned in her own skull”, and goes on to connect this separateness to questions of finitude:

 Here as elsewhere in Cavell that “hence” can seem a stretch, a ground implied by a leap, but at a minimum it registers Cavell’s premise that since “philosophy is what thought does to itself ”, it is not esoteric. Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game,” p. 126. 19

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You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self ), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.20

Wallace’s dreads and sub-dreads of separateness suggest a way of describing Cavell’s analysis of scepticism. In Cavell’s portrait, the sceptic aggravates but does not allow us to countenance our sense of entrapment and death and loneliness, approaching them not as metaphysical finitudes but rather as intellectual lacks, as if soluble by cure or by steeple-fingered theoretical solution. Wittgensteinians seeking a solution or cure for scepticism through refusing to find sense in the sceptic’s words, moreover, avoid “what we want to deny”: our separateness. In Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon”, the protagonist Neal’s specific plight of mind and circumstance find him consumed with self-­ accusations of manipulative fraudulence, leading him to take his own life. The vocabulary with which Neal articulates his unhappiness suggests deflection, with separateness understood as an intellectual lack. If Cavell’s “Knowing and Acknowledging” works to unearth experiential morals within specialist epistemological debates, Neal somewhat reverses this, recounting his unhappiness through a philosophical lexicon closer to mathematical logic than to the woolly charm of ordinary language: “paradox”, “inconsistencies”, “logical contradiction”, “validity”, “cardinality”, “ordinality”, and so on. These terms displace a potential competitor vocabulary, that of psychoanalysis, with Neal assessing his analysis sessions with Dr. Gustafson in logical rather than psychological terms (“he thought he’d caught me in some kind of logical contradiction or paradox” (p.  146); “I’d been right in predicting what his big logical insight was going to be” (p.  155)). Neal does recruit psychoanalytic vocabulary to  Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” p. 32.

20

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diagnose Gustafson, but this seems less a case of faith in their efficacy than the poetic justice of analysand analysing analyst. Otherwise, his final assessment of the conformist tendency and value of psychoanalytic language is witheringly faint (or strictly neo-pragmatist) praise: “it did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way” (p. 142). Neal understands his unhappiness in terms of a “basic logical paradox” he terms the “fraudulence paradox”, which he claims to have “discovered more or less on my own” in a class on mathematical logic: “the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside – you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likeable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were”. He recalls the mathematical logic course as resembling its topic, “clean and mechanical as logic itself in that if you put in the time and effort, out popped the good grade at the other end”. The fraudulence paradox suggests that the complexities of human relationships are not soluble in a similarly clean and mechanical fashion. Neal recognises that identifying the “vicious infinite regress” of fraudulence should lead him to change his behaviour. Its failure to do so does not seem to shake the hold over Neal’s imagination of the pertinence of logic to life, since he expresses his very failure here in terms of another, “higher order paradox, which didn’t even have a name – I didn’t, I couldn’t” (p. 147). The apparent limits encountered by Neal (“I didn’t, I couldn’t”) do not produce a recognition of the powerlessness and passivity constitutive of being-with-others of the sort arrived at in Cavell’s “Knowing and Acknowledging”. Instead, Neal understands his powerlessness not as a metaphysical condition but as a limitation to be overcome with sufficient cognitive “firepower”, to use his repeated formulation. Neal concludes that Gustafson “didn’t have anything close to the firepower I’d need to give me any hope of getting helped out of the trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I’d constructed for myself ” (p.  154). The assistance Neal requires, moreover, is with the “fraudulent, calculating part of my brain firing away all the time” (p. 145), and he determines that Gustafson lacks

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“anything in his mental arsenal that could actually help me” (p.  168). Gustafson aside, even “logicians with incredible firepower” can end up “beating their heads against the wall” from the strain of trying to solve paradoxes (p. 167). The militaristic violence inherent in Neal’s imagination of knowing as a matter of “firepower” chimes with Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love”, which further develops (and dramatically extends) the significance of acknowledgement by considering North American violence in Vietnam, in terms of acknowledgement, as a denial of separateness.21 There is however another reason for Neal’s fixation with logical language, to do with the way Wallace’s story “incorporates death”. Tantalisingly, Neal explains not only why he killed himself but also “what happens immediately after a person dies” (p. 143), insisting all the while that the narrative centre of his story is the impact his death has on another character, David Wallace. Neal describes death by extrapolating from “another paradox”, this time concerning the orthogonal relationship between inner and outer temporalities thematic to several of the stories in Oblivion: many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-­ word-­after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. – and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English […] to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outline of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. (p. 151)

 See Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially pp. 344–346. 21

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Or, to put this in a Cavellian register: must we say everything in order to mean anything? Neal’s words contend that our inability to express the inner exhaustively at any particular moment, given its temporality and scale, undoes our talking together entirely, rendering the outer a matter of mere appearance and show (those unimpressed by this line of argument might feel that it renders the outer…outer). Talking together, on this account, has come to resemble “making motions and noises at one another […] transferring unspeakable messages or essences from the inside of one closed chamber to another” (“MWM,” p. 34). Death Neal describes as affording a temporal dilation whereby the inner becomes fully expressible: “Think for a second – what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or passage of time in which to express or convey it, and you don’t even need any organised English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets?” (p. 178) The reason for the proliferation of logical terms within Neal’s narrative is that logic is the closest approximation to this open-doored state, because “totally abstract and outside what we think of as time” (p. 167). Thus far, the ideas arrayed in “Good Old Neon” seem to signpost a sceptical conclusion, exemplified by Neal’s suggestion that ordinary language “can’t really do it” (p. 152) when it comes to approximating the inner and its felt temporality. Seen in this light, the story provides further confirmation of the view that Wallace’s emphasis in Oblivion (the collection of stories to which “Good Old Neon” belongs) is on the impossibility of overcoming solipsistic subjectivity. For Marshall Boswell, Oblivion’s stories “yearn for escape, for a release from the prison-house of interiority, but offer no exit”.22 Read in Cavellian terms as a study of deflection, however, Wallace’s story emerges neither as a statement nor a refutation of scepticism. Rather, the story explores what Cora Diamond identifies as  Marshall Boswell, “‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 168. 22

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one of Cavell’s central concerns: the relationship between scepticism and “the multifarious forms in which we take in or try to take in or resist taking in that difficulty of reality that he refers to most often as separateness”.23 Neal’s preoccupation with his feelings of fraudulence and his companion reflections on the speed of “what goes on inside” speak of this difficulty. The way that the stakes of Neal’s narrative escalate from habitual feelings and instances of fraudulence to an account of human interaction as such as inherently, metaphysically fraudulent or charade-like is a deflection, whereby a condition (separateness) comes to be perceived as a limitation. Wallace’s story shows the pull of scepticism and solipsism, but they are not the last word. Neal’s account of death’s overcoming of the disjunction between inner and outer resists rather than confirms the inevitability of a sceptical conclusion: “The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it is what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinites you can never show to another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock” (p. 179). Wallace’s story’s imaginary of an ‘open-doored state’, then, returns its reader to the ordinary difficulty of separateness. If the distinction between the inner and outer allows for the possibility of fraudulence, it is also constitutive of the self and the self ’s freedom (or to put it in Cavellian terms, of the self ’s voice). What will feel in some moods like a limitation – an inability to express more than a fraction of the inner – emerges as a condition or finitude which need not be deemed a lack in the light of an impossible ideal of full or unconditioned expression. As with Cavell’s analysis of scepticism in “Knowing and Acknowledging”, potentially (or challengingly) banal humanist truths and experiential morals underlie the story’s taking up of issues of interiority and exteriority. These truths centre upon questions of expression, and to help develop this I turn to a passage from Cavell’s The Claim of Reason, which considers inexpressiveness in the context of a discussion of Wittgenstein’s private  Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 65. 23

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language argument: “So the fantasy of a private language, underlying the wish to deny the publicness of language, turns out…to be a fantasy, or fear, either of inexpressiveness, one in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known; or one in which what I express is beyond my control”.24 Returning to this passage in a later work, Cavell identifies these fantasies as “of suffocation or of exposure”.25 These fears and fantasies are habitual concerns of Wallace’s fiction. Infinite Jest’s opening scene, for instance, is one of suffocation, Hal Incandenza unable to make himself understood and his “familiar panic at feeling misperceived…rising”.26 The gap between inner and outer has widened for Hal to an alarming extent (“I am not what you see and hear”).27 In “Good Old Neon”, Neal’s statue dream suggests fears both of exposure and suffocation: I was in the town commons in Aurora, over near the Pershing tank memorial by the clock tower, and what I’m doing in the dream is sculpting an enormous marble or granite statue of myself, using a huge iron chisel and a hammer the size of those ones they give you to try to hit the bell at the top of the big thermometer-like thing at carnivals, and when the statue’s finally done I put it up on a big bandstand or platform and spend all my time polishing it and keeping birds from sitting on it or doing their business on it, and cleaning up litter and keeping the grass neat all around the bandstand. And in the dream my whole life flashes by like that […] meaning I’m condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue. I’m not saying it was subtle or hard to figure out. […] Much of the nightmarish quality of the dream […] was due to the way the sun raced back and forth across the sky and the speed with which my whole life blew by like that, in the commons. (pp. 160–61)

The dream is precipitated by a sense of exposure, expressing Neal’s dawning recognition of being known, or at least seen through, by his meditation instructor. The dream’s nightmarish affect moreover is attributed not  Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 351. 25  Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), p. 43. 26  David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 1997), p. 8. 27  Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 13. 24

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just to an accelerated temporality but to exposure, to a life lived “in the commons”. Fears of exposure and suffocation combine in the dream as none of the friends or acquaintances walking by the statue “ever look over or say anything” (p. 161). In Contesting Tears, Cavell situates issues of expressiveness and inexpressiveness in relation to Peter Brooks’ claim that the “desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode”.28 Readers of Cavell and of Wallace might recognise something of a “desire to express all” in these writers’ prose. Since the desire is unrealisable, the question becomes how both writers conceptualise and manage this impulse. “Good Old Neon” ends with the David Wallace character saying to himself, “almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’” (p. 181). What the story describes as one “part” of this David Wallace (“realer, more enduring and sentimental”) is commanding silence from another part (hypersensitive to cliché, apt to send lines of thought into inbent spirals). The attempt to imagine what led Neal to suicide, this Wallace feels, demands quietening his awareness “that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid”. Tellingly, Wallace’s ability to command this silence is said to have developed after “years of literally indescribable war against himself ”, from which he has emerged “with quite a bit more firepower”. The narrative echo of “firepower” here, the firepower hoped for by Neal and attained by the Wallace character, reflects the way “Good Old Neon” engages with scepticism not as a fixed position but as a standing threat; it suggests that an acknowledgement of separateness and passivity will be countered, perennially, by the sceptical wish for a stronger connection to words and others. Cavell develops Brooks’ observation by emphasizing “the condition that I find to precede, to ground the possibility and the necessity of, “the desire to express all,” namely the terror of absolute inexpressiveness, suffocation, which at the same time reveals itself as a terror of absolute expressiveness, unconditioned exposure; they are the extreme states of voicelessness. […] As a characterization of solipsism, this crisis of expression is for me a characterization of what has become of human exchange as such” (p.  43). “Good Old Neon” suggests that Wallace’s thematic foregrounding of interiority explores a defence against a terror of exposure as much as a wish to  Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 43.

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overcome a suffocating privacy. The felt privacy of interiority can also be seen as a refuge from (and a further expression of ) the “sense of corporate immersion” intuited by Wallace.29 Seen as such a refuge, the problem with (or of ) privacy in Wallace’s work is that it isn’t private enough. In “Good Old Neon”, as with the other stories in Oblivion, the crisis of expression characterising human exchange concerns worries over demographic averageness. Neal is finally driven to suicide by a plight of mind involving a form of extreme voicelessness: despair that his very despair is a yuppie cliché. What emerges is that Cavell and Wallace approach solipsism in ways that co-implicate philosophical and cultural concerns, with solipsism now becoming as much a cultural as a philosophical condition. Solipsism therefore begins to resemble a cultural-philosophical event (what has become of human exchange), the outlines of which are indicated by a passage from Cavell’s The World Viewed, in the context of a discussion of modernist painting: “At some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became isolation. The route to conviction in reality was through the acknowledgment of the endless presence of self ”.30 Cavell’s narrative, whereby representation comes to require an acknowledgment of subjectivity in order to elicit conviction, has clear affinities with Wallace’s intuition that the work of literary fiction is to aggravate, and thereby have us countenance, our sense of subjective isolation.  Paul Giles, “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), p. 18. 30  Painterly expressionism for Cavell stops short of such an acknowledgment, because it represents our response to this subjectivity (“our terror of ourselves in isolation”) rather than representing this “condition of isolation” from within. On this account, expressionism would “not be a new mastery of fate by creating selfhood against no matter what odds; it would be the sealing of the self ’s fate by theatricalizing it. Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art. Apart from this wish and its achievement, art is exhibition.” Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 22. Although it stems from a very different context, the contrast here between the achievement of selfhood and the theatricalization of the self ’s condition finds a certain purchase in “Good Old Neon”. It is not just that Neal is caught up in theatricalization, but also that his supposed fraudulence and self-perpetuating worries about fraudulence stop short of a “granting of otherness”. I find a comparable dynamic in Cavell’s practice of Wittgensteinian dialogue; rather than granting otherness, Cavell’s anticipations and voicings of his reader’s responses risk a pre-emptive effect. 29

Part III Virtue and Vice in a Modern World

7 “The Devils Territories”: Nature, the Sublime, and Witchcraft in the Puritan Imagination and Robert Eggers’s The Witch Miranda Corcoran and Andrea Di Carlo

The Puritan imagination was haunted by the wilderness that encircled their fragile settlements. The dark, foreboding forces of the unknown continent seemed eternally massed at the borders of villages whose flimsy wooden structures appeared as though they could, at any moment, be engulfed by the darkness of impenetrable forests. For America’s earliest European settlers, the wilderness seemed forever poised on their doorstep, battering at their windows and howling down chimneys. The omnipresence of a seemingly hostile nature is encapsulated in the first act of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), where he describes the prominent role that the vast, unknowable American landscape must have played in kindling the fires of witchcraft hysteria: “The edge of the wilderness was close by. The American continent stretched endlessly west, and it was full of mystery for [the Puritans]. It stood, dark and threatening, over their

M. Corcoran (*) • A. Di Carlo University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_7

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shoulders night and day, for out of it Indian tribes marauded from time to time […]”.1 Yet while it may have provided cover for indigenous insurrection and its verdant depths may have sheltered hidden predators, the dark, threatening wilderness was far more than a source of physical danger or practical concern. Instead, for the Puritans who settled in the wilds of New England, the landscape proved to be a site of inconceivable awe and terror. A cursory glance at the writings produced by America’s early colonists provides sufficient evidence that to these seventeenth-century exiles the strange new continent overwhelmed their senses and evoked transcendent emotions consistent with philosophical constructions of the Sublime. Reading through Puritan descriptions of the New World, it is possible to discern echoes of the first-century CE philosopher Longinus who defined the Sublime, in relation to rhetoric, as that which not only elicits emotion, but also appeals to “an invincible power”.2 According to Longinus, the Sublime goes beyond mere wonder and enters the realm of the transcendent: “For what is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay, and prevails over what is only convincing or delightful, since persuasion, as a rule, is within everyone’s grasp: whereas, the sublime, giving to speech an invincible power and strength, rises above every listener” (Longinus quoted in Bod, p. 68.). Drawing upon this definition of the Sublime as that which transcends our pre-existing aesthetic and conceptual categories, this paper seeks to investigate the seventeenth-century Puritan construction of the New World wilderness. In doing so, we will contend that America’s earliest literature, primarily composed of religious tracts and descriptions of the natural world, constitutes a distinct manifestation of the philosophical Sublime. In our analysis of works by influential Puritan thinkers such as Cotton Mather and John Winthrop we will explore how these early American documents evince a uniquely Puritan Sublime in their construction of the new continent as simultaneously godly and demonic, a source of delight and terror which challenges existent aesthetic categorisation and frustrates conventional powers of expression. Although the Sublime is  Arthur Miller, The Crucible (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015), Act I.  Longinus, On the Sublime (circa 1 CE), quoted in Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 68. 1 2

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often associated with Enlightenment thinkers, and is most closely identified with Edmund Burke’s eighteenth-century work Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, we maintain that the Sublime emerges as a powerful organising principle within Puritan discourses on the New World. As such, this article accords with David Sedley’s assertion that the Sublime is “the preeminent modern aesthetic category”3; its reach extends far beyond the narrow parameters of Enlightenment thought. Indeed, Longinus’ theories on the Sublime had, as Gustavo Costa notes, become a significant component of aesthetic discourse by the sixteenth century,4 with significant Latin editions appearing in 1554 and 1560, and an English translation having been printed in 1652 (Cheney, p. 9) Notions of the Sublime, although most cogently and persuasively articulated in Burke’s treatise, had therefore existed as an influential aesthetic concept long before the advent of the Enlightenment. Even Cotton Mather himself explicitly referenced Longinus’ figuration of the Sublime when he mentioned in his Manuductio ad Ministerium: directions for a candidate of the ministry (1726) that even a pagan such as Longinus was forced to admit the sublimity of the Christian scriptures.5 The Sublime can thus be identified as an inherent component of the Puritan understanding of nature in general and the American wilderness in particular. Foregrounding the manner in which New England Puritans constructed the wild spaces of America as both God’s kingdom on Earth and the terrifying abode of the demonic, this article traces the language of awe and terror that defined seventeenth-century Puritan rhetoric and uncovers within it the potential for a fundamentally sublime aesthetics that portrays nature as immense, numinous and incomprehensible. Moreover, in addition to excavating the sublime aesthetics at the heart of Puritan depictions of the New World, this article also seeks to chart the influence of this sublime conception of the American wilderness through an analysis of the images of natural immensity and New World terror in  David L. Sedley, Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 153. 4  Patrick Cheney, English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: The Fictions of Transport in Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 10. 5  Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium: directions for a candidate of the ministry (London: R. Hindmarsh, 1789), p. 105. 3

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contemporary American horror texts. In particular, we will focus on Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch, a work whose visual aesthetic is heavily influenced by the Puritan construction of nature as Sublime. In doing so, we will explicate how the Sublime is an aesthetic concept that extends far beyond the speculation of pre-Romantic philosophers and exists as an integral part of the Puritan understanding of the New World. In the first tumultuous centuries of European settlement in the New England colonies, the infinite landscape that stretched across the American continent exerted a powerful influence over the spiritual and imaginative lives of colonists. For the Puritans, in particular, the wilderness was a contradictory space, at once a bountiful paradise and a terrifying, hellish vista. In its complexity, its status as both benevolent Promised Land and treacherous perdition, America was elevated to the realm of the divine and enfolded within a discourse of transcendence that elided conventional modes of representation: the land itself was spiritual, preternatural, numinous. The horror and amazement that attended the first Puritan interactions with the unknown American landscape in its elevation of the physical landscape into the domain of the transcendent thus echoes constructions of the Sublime that were already existent in the seventeenth century. As already noted, though the most important modern discourses on the Sublime were articulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke in his Enquiry and Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment, significant considerations on the Sublime had already been put forward between the sixteenth and seventeenth century by theoreticians as diverse as Torquato Tasso and Matthew Parker, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury after the Elizabethan Settlement. Moreover, the Sublime, as outlined in the introduction, owes its origin to the first-­ century CE thinker Longinus, who maintained that the Sublime is a power that cannot be vanquished, because its aesthetic strength is rooted in its being able to elicit emotions; it evokes a sense of wonder and dismay, something that frightens but marvels listeners or viewers. The Sublime is therefore a power capable of engendering two distinct but interrelated responses: fear and amazement. Exploring the earliest writings of America’s Puritan settlers, it is clear from their rhetoric that these overlapping sensations of fear and amazement in the face of incomprehensible immensity are characteristic of the

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Puritan response to the New World. Upon confronting the vast, unexplored territories of the New World, the colonists found themselves overcome by both wonder and dismay, marvelling at the seemingly infinite American continent yet fearing its unknown, tenebrous reaches. In the 1620s and 1630s, after the first Puritan migrations to the New World, America was conceived of primarily in idealistic, utopian terms. For these earnest religious exiles, America was an empty space, a blank canvas, where they could finally lay the foundations of a New Jerusalem. Its inconceivable immensity provoked wondrous, enraptured speculation that it would be God’s kingdom in the boundless American wilderness. Crossing the sea from a Europe they viewed as falling before the powers of sin and corruption, the Puritans hoped to build a new civilisation, what one seventeenth-century clergyman described as a “New English Israel”.6 The Puritans thus envisioned the wilds of America as virgin territory, a place where they could construct a more pious community; a community that would be a shining beacon of God’s glory illuminating the darkness of a sinful world. As John Winthrop, the third governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reminded his band of ardent exiles in 1630, “wee must Consider that wee shall be as Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us”.7 Having imbibed rigid Calvinist notions of predestination, the Puritans saw it as their “patriotic and spiritual duty to plant a godly English plantation in the New World”.8 Moreover, they fervently believed that the Lord was guiding them in their sacred mission, professing their faith that “He will graciously prosper our endeavour according to the simplicity of hearts therein” (Philbrick, n.p). Further emphasising this sense of utopianism, the Magnalia Christi Americana—an extensive ecclesiastical and spiritual history of New England published by the influential Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather in 1702—depicts the settling of the New World in decidedly prelapsarian terms, through the bucolic metaphor of the “Garden of God”.9 In his  Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (London: Orion Publishing, 2015), p. 60.  Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (London: Belknap Press of Havard University Press, 1956), p. 11. 8  Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Voyage to War, Ebook (London: Harper Perennial, 2014), n.p. 9  Sacvan Bercovitch, “New England Epic: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana,” ELH 33 (1966), p. 344. 6 7

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rapturous descriptions of the first settlements to grow up along the rugged New England coast, Mather describes how “the settlers purified by the ‘wilderness-condition,’ transformed the ‘desart’ into a second Eden” (Bercovitch, p.  345). Here Mather’s language suggests a conflation of physical and spiritual space, as the deep forests and rolling hills of America are transformed by the power of faith into a new Eden, a Promised Land for the elect. In this juxtaposition of the natural and the numinous, Mather’s rhetoric anticipates what David B Morris defines as the central function of the eighteenth-century religious Sublime as it attempted to address the theological questions unleashed by the development of Empiricist philosophy: “Unable to argue that man is born is born with a knowledge of God, eighteenth century thinkers increasing sought to derive assurances of God’s existence from human experience. Mountains, seas, and other sublime objects of immensity became for many […] ‘images of God’s being constantly before human eyes’.”10 The tabula rasa upon which the Puritans aspired to construct a New Jerusalem, the mythic “Citty upon a Hill”, appeared, at least initially, as a manifestation of God’s incomprehensible immensity and unrestrained power. However, despite the pastoral imagery that defines Mather’s reflections on the foundation of the Puritans’ godly community, there was a much darker facet to their utopian project. The virgin land upon which they sought to build their earthly paradise not only proved itself already inhabited, but it also displayed a darker, crueller face, a brutal nature which the new settlers could not subdue. Of course, while the landscape itself was far from the innocent pastures envisioned by the Puritan exiles, they themselves also possessed a more sinister aspect. As Nathaniel Philbrick notes in his account of the first Puritan exodus aboard the now mythic Mayflower: Like all Puritans, these English exiles believed that the Church of England must be purged of its many excesses and abuses. But these were Puritans with a vengeance. Instead of working for change within the established church, they had resolved to draw away from the Church of England—an  David B. Morris, Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in eighteenth-Century England (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 3. 10

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illegal act in Jacobian England. Known as Separatists, they represented the radical fringe of the Puritan movement. (Philbrick, n.p.)

Believing that the Reformation had not been fully realised and that the Church of England was still corrupted by papist practices and hierarchies, the Puritans left Europe not to escape persecution, as we so often imagine, but rather to establish their own community based on a rigorous and dogmatic Calvinism. Indeed, Philbrick notes that these much mythologised founders of the United States “had more in common with a cult than a democratic society” (Philbrick, n.p.). In the same sermon during which he constructed the fledgling Puritan settlements as a gleaming beacon illuminating a world oppressed by darkness and sin, Winthrop stated that “It is by a mutall consent through a specially overuleing providence, and a more than ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ to seeke out a place of Cohabitation and Consorteshipp under a due form of Government both civill and ecclesiasticall” (Perry Miller, p. 5). Winthrop’s words conjure up, then, the image of a community that was perhaps more authoritarian and oppressive than utopian. As such, despite the ubiquitous rhetoric of an incandescent city on a hill, a gentle garden of God, America’s founding was defined by the darkness of fanaticism and religious repression. The innocence projected onto the immense North American continent was, even before its settlement, corrupted by a strain of zealous theocracy that immediately undermined the mythic newness of America. Likewise, in much the same way as the illusory pureness of New England was from the beginning overshadowed by the zealotry of the newly arrived pilgrims, so too did the Edenic figurations of its landscape fall prey to the omnipresent terrors of the wilderness. Indeed, the New World rather than a ripe and pliant territory proved instead to be a harsh and unforgiving space. The first English colony, Jamestown, established in 1607, saw 70 of its 108 colonists perish within its first year; while the brutal winter that followed led to the deaths of 440 out 500 settlers over a six-month period (Philbrick n.p.). The continent onto which the Puritans projected their imagined utopia was cruel and unforgiving. Even as the seventeenth century progressed, and settlements such as Plymouth and Boston appeared to thrive, the pilgrims and their descendants could

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not escape the brutal vacillations of the continent’s untamed nature nor the terror evoked by its immensity. In a stunning evocation of the unbridled power of the natural world that constituted the New England frontier of the seventeenth century, Stacy Schiff observes how “Even the colony’s less isolated outposts felt their fragility. A tempest blew the roof off one of the finest houses in Salem [Massachusetts] as its ten occupants slept. A church went flying with its congregation inside.” (Schiff, p. 7) Moreover, Schiff observes how the New England wilderness was characterised by a darkness so profound that it transcended pre-existing aesthetic categories and appeared instead to enter the realm of the supernatural: “The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black it could be difficult to keep to the path, so black that a line of trees might freely migrate to another location or that you might find yourself pursued after nightfall by a rabid black dog, leaving you to crawl home, bloodied and disorientated, on all fours” (Schiff, p. 8). In her construction of nature as animated by the sinister forces of supernatural, Schiff highlights the manner in which the Puritans themselves conflated the wilderness and the diabolical. Indeed, within in much Puritan theological writing, the wilderness was not a mundane space, but rather the eerie abode of the preternatural. Its inconceivable darkness and the boundless immensity challenged both the New Englanders’ capacity for understanding and their ability to fully represent the wonders of their new home. As such, the tenebrous vastness of early America appears to embody Kant’s maxim that “the sublime can […] be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness, either [as] in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality.”11 Moreover, like Kant’s Sublime, the American wilderness evoked a terror that verged on awe and wonder, a sensation that “contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a negative pleasure” (Kant, p.  98). For Cotton Mather, America was a “Howling Wildnerness.”12 Its expansiveness and rugged topography defied the  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 98. 12  Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World. OBSERVATIONS As well Historical as eological, upon the NATURE, the NUMBER, and the OPERATIONS of the DEVILS (London: Benjamin 11

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l­imitations of the human imagination. As such, Mather and his fellow exiles could articulate their impressions of the New World only through the language of spiritual transcendence. The unpredictable manoeuvrings of America’s natural phenomena, its harsh weather and the obsidian depths of its endless forests were thus imbued by the pious settlers with a sinister sentience, a vitality that originated not in the glory of God, but in the inscrutable machinations of the Devil. As Mather observes in The Wonders of the Invisible World, his notorious 1693 explication of demonic activity and witchcraft in America: “We are poor Travellers in a World, which is as well the Devils Field, as the Devils Gaol; a World in every Nook whereof, the Devil is encamped with Bands of Robbers, to pester all that have their Face looking Zion-ward” (Mather, Wonders, p. 30). Thus, as Mather goes on to explain, “The New-Englanders, are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devils Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was Exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus That he should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession” (Mather, Wonders, p. xii). The boundless nature and diabolical terror of the wilderness described by Mather should not, therefore, be dismissed as a mundane account of the New World as the Puritans had confronted it upon their arrival in America, nor should it scorned as the delusions of religious fundamentalists in the process of establishing a theocratic regime. Instead, the transcendent figurations of nature and the American wilderness that emerge in the writings, sermons and records of Mather and his cohorts can be seen a vital part of a well-articulated philosophical programme. As previously discussed, both Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant cogently described the Sublime as a central philosophical category in the eighteenth century. In their respective treatises, both Burke and Kant argued that the Sublime is something boundless and ineffable. Such ineffability can be attributed to natural phenomena, like a stormy sea or the splendour of the Alps (it should be borne in mind that Friedrich’s Wanderer and Shelley’s Mont Blanc perfectly fit into this aesthetic category). Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Harris, 1693), p. 42.

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the Beautiful, defined the Sublime as that which “excite[s] the ideas of pain and danger”13; it induces the most powerful emotions possible and ultimately engenders a sense of “astonishment …horror, terror”, as well as related, though lesser, sensations such as “admiration, reverence, and respect” (Burke, p. 96). Like Kant’s assertion that the Sublime is limitless and boundless, Burke’s Sublime is also characterised by “greatness of dimension”, a great yawning infinity (Burke, p.  127). It is intimately associated with that which is vast, rugged, rough and untamed. Yet perhaps the defining trait of the Sublime is, as Milton’s disciple John Hall wrote in 1652, that it must “have somewhat I cannot tell how divine in it”, it must transcend the human capacity for understanding because “there must be something Ethereal, somewhat above men” within it (quoted in Cheney, p. 10). The Sublime, therefore evokes terror, as well as wonder because it transcends the physical plane and identifies itself as an aspect of the divine or the spiritual realm. Likewise, for Mather, as for many of his Puritan cohorts, the American landscape was terrifying and threatening, not just physically but also spiritually. The wilderness had a dual nature. It possessed the potential to be a new Eden, but it was also the domain of the Devil. Nature existed not merely as a resource to be conquered and subdued, it was also a vast, incomprehensible and perhaps even malevolent force: it was the domain of the Devil, and it was also the conduit for his wickedness. The insidious sentience that Mather ascribes to the wilderness is also apparent in the manner in which he constructs America’s indigenous peoples as emissaries of the Devil, conflating them with both the Devil himself and the natural world. Indeed, Mather notes that the Devil, commonly identified at this time by the racially-charged moniker of the “Black man”, is said to resemble “an Indian” (Mather, Wonders, p. 100). Mather’s association of native populations with the Devil and his wilderness territories reflects a broader seventeenth-century discourse, wherein indigenous peoples were seen as a part of the natural world, an extension of its darkness and volatility. In the wake of violent uprisings by native tribes, for example, colonists often reported a sense that the natives operated alongside and as part  Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1761), p. 58. 13

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of nature, that “nature itself seemed to contrive with the Indians to work the destruction of the colonists […]”.14 In the Puritan imagination nature thus transcended the mundane physicality of mere biological or topographical materiality: it was vital, spiritual, imbued with otherworldly potency. In his many writings, Mather expanded upon this association between nature and the supernatural, framing witchcraft as a diabolic inversion of Christian rites, one that necessarily takes place in the darkness of nature rather than in the luminous, sanctity of the church. In the Magnalia Christi Americana Cotton quotes his uncle Samuel Mather who articulated this opposition when he warned that the devil “rules by his Antichristian Ceremonies in the Kingdom of Darkness, as the Lord Jesus Christ doth by His Own Ordinances, in His Church, which is the Kingdom of Heaven”.15 Nature, as the abode of the demonic—a place of darkness, temptation and evil— therefore posed a challenge to its early Puritan inhabitants. As the seventeenth century progressed and the sinister immensity of the howling wilderness eviscerated the gentle fantasy of the God’s garden and a pure American Eden, the Puritans were forced to reconsider the New World, acknowledging that while it might not be the paradise they initially envisioned, it might nevertheless be the path to paradise. The vastness of the new continent therefore forced the Puritans to ultimately conclude that “New England was perhaps a permanent and hideous wilderness” (Heimart, p. 382). Unable to abandon their belief that they were God’s chosen people, set out to fulfil a glorious destiny, the Puritans reconfigured the howling immensity of American nature as a divinely preordained series of hardships, trials to be endured and conquered on the way to the New Jerusalem, a utopian space still thought to reside somewhere within the far reaches of the unexplored continent, or perhaps in some intangible, godly world yet to come (Heimart, p. 282). The Puritans thus began to view themselves as analogous to the Israelites wandering in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land (Heimart, p.  376). Describing the trials endured by the New England settlers, Mather  Alan Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” The New England Quarterly 26 (1953), p. 371. 15  Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New-England (Hartford, Connecticut: Silas Andrus & Son, 1858), p. 51. 14

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admonishes them in Wonders of the Invisible World that “The Wilderness thro’ which we are passing to the Promised Land, is all over filled with, Fiery flying serpents” (Mather, Wonders, p. 29). Again, nature is conceived of by Mather as violent, threatening and demonic; his flying serpents are not merely the unknown species of the strange American landscape, they are also the biblical serpent in the garden. Yet, Mather is also clear in his warning that this earthly realm and the wilds of New England are impermanent and transitory. The pilgrims are temporarily passing through this hellish landscape on their way to the Promised Land. For the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers, then, the American landscape—with its harsh weather, impenetrable forests, and uncanny inhabitants—was never simply an undiscovered country or a topographical reality. Its unfathomable darkness and endless inhospitable vistas were always more than manifestations of an alien ecosystem. America to them was a transcendent, numinous space. Whether conceived of as a utopian New Jerusalem, a demonic wasteland or a godsent trial to be endured en route to paradise, the American wilderness posed a representational challenge for the pious New Englanders. Evoking both awe and terror, defined by incomprehensible vastness and inconceivable darkness, the America in which the seventeenth-century pilgrims found themselves violated pre-­ existing aesthetic categories; conventional visual and verbal modes of representation seemed inadequate in the face of a land that was at once an embodiment of God’s favour and a manifestation of an omnipresent diabolism. Not only is this idea of a diabolical nature present in seventeenth-­century theological treatises, but it is a conception of the natural world that continues to endure, particularly in the realm of contemporary horror cinema. Released in 2015, Robert Eggers’ period horror film The Witch is defined by a similar preoccupation with the notion of a transcendent terror. The film engages both thematically and iconographically with emotions and sensations that resist representation and elide articulation. Opening in an austere Puritan meeting house, The Witch begins with the trial of family-patriarch William for an unnamed offence. While the nature of William‘s transgression is never made explicit, the suggestion is that his personal interpretation of the Gospels is considered profane by the Puritan authorities, and, as such, has ventured beyond the narrow

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limits of Puritan doctrine. His unspoken crime and his blasphemous understanding of church dogma can therefore be aligned with broader notions of the Sublime, as the nature of the misdemeanour is conceived of as fundamentally unrepresentable. However, while The Witch often links the Sublime to acts of human transgression, sublimity is most evident through the film’s portrayal of nature. William, along with his wife Katherine, his adolescent children Thomasin and Caleb, and his young twins Jonas and Mercy, are exiled from the safety of their small New England settlement to the wilds of the American woodland. In this moment, the vision of the natural landscape that dominates the film becomes that of an immense, preternatural space. An expansive frontier delimiting the fragile boundary between civilisation and wilderness, the forests of 1630s Massachusetts into which the family venture are figured as an unsettling, eerie space. Indeed, as the cinematography foregrounds the alienating, imposing heights of trees that reach to the sky and the impenetrable depths of endless forests, The Witch imbues the landscape with a sinister vitality reminiscient of Cotton Mather’s claim that the New England landscape is the Devil’s territory. After their expulsion from the settlement, William and his family set out in search of a new Zion. The initial narration describes the disillusionment that plagued many Puritan settlers who had fled their homes and severed family ties in hopes of building a new, more perfect church in the ostensibly idyllic space of North America. However, as the family journey onwards, they appear jubilant. Cheerfully singing a hymn, they give the impression of pilgrims setting off for the Promised Land, seeking to build their own utopian “city on a hill.” Yet for all their buoyant rejoicing, there is a continuous sense of unease. The glow of evening light illuminates the landscape with a ghostly luminesce, and the small band of exiles disappears into the immensity of the crepuscular New England vista. Later that same night, the family sit, shrouded in darkness, by the warmth of a tiny, struggling campfire. They endeavour to illuminate the obsidian blackness of the unknown New World; yet, the shadows are oppressive, and the family is engulfed by the night-time forest. Echoing the iconography of Romantic art, their tiny, vulnerable figures are diminished by the sublimity of unconstrained nature.

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The mysterious forests of New England thus exemplify a sublime construction of the natural world. Terrifying and awesome, the wilderness is a liminal space located on the border between overwhelming fear and inexpressible wonder. As Bonnie Mann observes in her summation of Kant’s writings on the subject, the Sublime is experienced when displeasure and contiguous emotions, such as terror and regret, are not only transcended but also transformed into the opposing sensations of astonishment, awe and pleasure.16 Thus, Mann argues, “the sublime feeling is not any of these, but is precisely the border and the movement between them” (Mann, p.  47). The natural world as it is encountered by both William’s exiled family and the early Puritans as a whole is gargantuan, immense and oppressive, but it is also wondrous, transcendent, numinous. Once the family locate a new area in which to settle, they get down on their knees and kiss the earth. The power of nature commands worship and creates astonishment. The family remain silent as they bow before the magnificent woodland; the sublime expanse that stretches into the mysterious forest beyond frustrates their powers of expression. Not only does the forest evoke an anxiety about the unexplored lands and unknown dangers that inhere within the wilderness, but it reinforces the liminal nature of this sublime space. The entry to the forest stands as the boundary between the known and the unknown; it is the border between the civilised order of the settlement and the unbounded chaos of nature. Indeed, even as the earnest pilgrims lie prone in supplication before the forest, the sinister music that scores the scene indicates an unease, a profound anxiety, about the forces residing within the woods. Echoing Cotton Mather’s description of the New England forest as the domain of the diabolical, The Witch also presents the woodland enlivened by the powers of the preternatural. This intermingling of nature and the supernatural is foreshadowed in the final moments before the family leave the Puritan settlement, as they notice two members of an indigenous tribe passing behind their cart. The sinister framing of two silent, solemn Native Americans casts them as malevolent spirits, recalling Mather’s condemnation of native tribes as “horrid Sorcerers, and hellish  Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 47. 16

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Conjurers, and such as Conversed with Daemons” who operate within and as part of the natural world.17 Likewise, as the film progresses, we see that the forest is indeed the abode of a predatory witch, a sorceress who not only resides within the woods but also appears to be part of it. Moving in sync with the rhythms of nature, she is an aspect of the forest; she fuses with it and becomes a personification of the uncontrollable power of nature. Her mysticism is a facet of the occult powers that Mather and his Puritan contemporaries associated with the wilderness. Reflecting the early-modern belief that witches utilised broom handles and poles slathered in hallucinogenic herbs as a means of inserting flying ointment into their bodily orifices, the witch appears to masturbate with a stick, taking the woodland into her. Later, she seduces the adolescent Caleb with an apple: the fruit of the forest and symbol of a lost Eden. The wilderness is thus constructed as a place of transgression, occult practices and transcendent terror. Moreover, The Witch depicts the wilderness not merely as a supernatural realm, but also as a power so sublime that it cannot be mastered or contained. Each human attempt to tame nature, to bend it to the will of man, turns out to be futile. William, the family patriarch and head of the household repeatedly fails to exert control over the natural world as each attempt to force the land to yield crops or hunt wild animals for meat ends in disappointment. William can only impotently chop wood, but he cannot hold back the dense forest that threatens to encroach upon their fragile home. Similarly, William ultimately fails to subdue nature through the domestication of animals, as the family’s goat, Black Phillip, violently rejects domesticity and brutally gores him. In the film’s overtly horrific denouement, the animal is revealed to be the devil, hiding in a mundane albeit familiar form. Again, the supernatural is conflated with a natural power that cannot be dominated. In his battle against the forest and the indomitable wilds, William exemplifies not only the failure of Puritan utopias but also the archetype of the frustrated patriarch. Within the context of an early seventeenth-­ century New World settlement the desire to dominate and subdue nature is a signifier of an ordered, authoritarian patriarchal system. Within the  Richard Godbeer, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 193. 17

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broader scheme of early-modern thought, notions of culture, rationality and civilisation are constructed as inherently male, while nature, irrationality and chaos are figured as inherently feminine traits. The Witch, therefore, is largely preoccupied with the patriarch’s failure to subdue and constrain the sublimity of the wilderness. Yet, as the film ultimately demonstrates, such attempts to control and rein in the Sublime are futile. The dramatic conclusion of the film highlights the impotence of patriarchal power structures in the face of the sublime wilderness, and, as such, The Witch presents us in its closing moments with a radical reconceptualisation of the wilderness and a vision of the Sublime which eschews the patriarchal authoritarianism of the Puritan Sublime and embraces instead what could be viewed as a sort of feminist Sublime. When viewed through the lens of a patriarchal discourse that seeks control and dominance, the wilderness is distant, threatening and filled with awe. What viewers can palpably appreciate throughtout the film is Thomasin’s dissatisfaction with her family life. There is no wonder she ends up developing a Machiavellian personality whereby she simulates her dissatisfaction through her piety and devotion. Thus, pledging her allegiance to the demonic Black Phillip and embracing witchcraft is the only way Thomasin can regain her bodily and mental authonomy. She rejects her family’s previous commitment to subduing nature through farming and faith. Instead, the newest convert to Satan’s cabal finds herself becoming one with nature. Leaving the family home behind her, abandoning religion, society and domesticity, Thomasin enters the depths of the forest, where she discovers a massive bonfire with witches dancing ecstatically around it. Yet, rather than appearing remote and terrifying, the clandestine gathering in the forest is framed as intimate and communal. The assembled witches do not fear nature because they are part of it. The sublime rhetoric of terror and awe which the Puritans associated with nature was drawn from an essentially male perspective that sought to dominate and control the wilderness. Conversely, for these women, nature is not something they need to possess or dominate; instead, it is a source of freedom from the fundamentally patriarchal structures of early-modern civilisation. The Witch thus bears out Bonnie Mann’s contention that “[…] there are modes of sublime experience that depart radically from dominant accounts of the sublime and contribute to our efforts to articulate ‘the

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emancipatory aspirations of women’ in epistemological and political terms” (Mann, p.  131). In stark contrast with William and Caleb’s encounters with the natural Sublime, Thomasin’s engagement with the immense alterity of nature allows her to experience a transcendent freedom. Whereas the masculinist Puritan response to the vast, incomprehensible Otherness of nature is embodied by the urge to “dominate,” “appropriate,” “colonize,” “consume,” and “domesticate’”, the feminine encounter with the Sublime is demarcated by a sense of unity, a freedom derived from the vastness of the wilderness and its refusal to be constrained by either patriarchal civilisation or its attendant aesthetic paradigms (Freeman quoted in Mann, p. 131). In the final moments of The Witch we are confronted with a subversive, even feminist, construction of the Sublime in which the awesome power of the wilderness is confronted not as a supplicant to be dominated, but rather as a liberating, unconstrained facet of the self. Drawing upon and ultimately subverting Puritan figurations of nature as diabolical and threatening, The Witch presents us with an image of the Sublime that transcends patriarchal or theological constraints; instead, it embodies notions of transgression, liberation and community. By undertaking an analysis of both Puritan conceptualisations of the natural Sublime and later remiaginings of this seventeenth-century theological and aesthetic paradigm, this article ultimately seeks to redefine the phenomenology of the Sublime. As we have demonstrated, the Sublime is not merely a pre-­ Romantic notion, but it is a concept central to Puritan theological discourses of the natural that were produced throughout the seventeenth century. This article also maintains that the Sublime is not simply an intellectual, philosophical construct, but it is suffused with complex theological significance, as well as providing a new means through which to understand issues of gender and sexuality. While it is young Caleb who falls prey to the seductive powers of the forest and its witch, thus embodying pervasive Puritan anxieties about the diabolical nature of the wilderness, it is Thomasin who provides us with the most fascinating insights into the Puritan understanding of the Sublime. As her name suggests, she is the one who is most sceptical about her family’s piety, and it is this very piety she finds suffocating and obliterating. What she ultimately resolves to do is to embrace witchcraft in order to liberate herself from religious

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and cultural constraints. Moreover, Thomasin embraces witchcraft not simply by signing her name in Satan/Black Phillip’s book, but by giving herself over to and becoming one with the vast darkness of the American wilderness. In doing so, she does not lose herself to terror and alienation; instead, she finds a sisterly community deep within the immensity of a space that transgresses social and patriarchal control. In this context, the Sublime can be seen not only as a concept that, as a mainstay of Purtian imaginings of the wilderness, anticipates post-Enlightenment philosophy, but it can also be understand an aesthetic category that threatens to undermine the rigidity of Puritan dogma and its demonisation of the awful wilderness. In The Witch, the Sublime is a category, a mode of being, that once embraced, can provide a means of liberation and self-fulfillment.

8 The Ethics of Betrayal: Seduction and Initiation in Dangerous Liaisons Peter Y. Paik

It used to be said that pain is the best teacher, presumably because it is hard to take to heart or value deeply any lesson that we have come by if the personal cost of gaining it is low or if the efforts it makes of us are slight. But while this adage has fallen on hard times with the ethic of sensitivity that currently prevails across the liberal West, the poets and philosophers of classical antiquity took for granted that the act of gaining wisdom and insight, while it may ultimately lead to tranquility and harmony, entails pain and grief. In the most familiar and gruesome instance, Oedipus gouges out his eyes when he learns the truth about his origins – that he had in fact murdered his father and married his mother. Plato provides a less grotesque but no less paradigmatic example in the allegory of the cave, in which the prisoner who is set free and carried out to the outside world must first undergo the shock of being blinded by the light This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (NRF-2010-361-A00018).

P. Y. Paik (*) Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_8

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of the sun before he can become capable of seeing the real world with his own eyes. Outside the Western canon, we find the dictum of Confucius that there are three methods to acquire wisdom – reflection, imitation, and experience – of which experience is said to be the bitterest. Pain, it would appear, is an unavoidable element in the attainment of knowledge, and perhaps it might be fitting to say that the more profound the understanding one seeks, the greater the pain one undergoes in acquiring it. For Nietzsche, the aversion to pain plays a great role in keeping ourselves ignorant and oblivious about our own nature and personality. In Human, All Too Human, he observes, “[m]an is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitred and besieged by himself.” What we do normally see of ourselves are only the remote “outer walls” of our psyche, while the “actual fortress” of our character remains “inaccessible.” The only way that we can enter this fortress at all is if “friends and enemies play the traitor” and lead us inside “by a secret path.”1 It appears to be impossible to gain self-knowledge without undergoing the pain and anguish of betrayal. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, the only way to penetrate into the deepest reaches of the psyche and bring to light what resides there is the wrenching experience of trauma and affliction. We are tempted to dismiss such a principle as an exaggeration – surely it must be possible to uncover important and essential insights into one’s character without having at the same time to subject oneself to the anguish of uncovering malice in the hearts of those one loves and trusts. When we find ourselves deceived by a confidant, we feel as though that the ground has fallen out, as it were, from under the feet of our psyche. One of the most devastating aspects of suffering a betrayal is gaining the awareness not only that what one has understood as being solid and trustworthy is in fact hollow and treacherous, but also that the meanings which one had permitted to accumulate around the figure of the betrayer were in truth erroneous and fraudulent. Nevertheless, there is something about the act of betrayal which lends itself to the formation of narratives that are distinguished by a high degree of suspense and succeed in carrying off dramatic reversals that are artistically satisfying. For the insights that can  Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 179–180. 1

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drive one to alter fundamentally one’s perspective or the intuitions that enable one to make a shocking discovery about oneself and others arise not from truths that are, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, “revealed,” but rather from those that are “betrayed.” For the sting of betrayal underwrites their “involuntary” and irrefutably necessary character.2 What one loses, however, in being a victim of such duplicity is the coherence that makes for leading a harmonious existence. Such coherence arises from the narratives one has constructed in one’s mind in relation to one’s friends and intimates. When such narratives unravel, it is by creating an alternative narrative, one which is faithful to one’s experience of victimization and integrates it into a new orientation toward the future, so that one may recover from the pain and anguish caused by betrayal. For such an ordeal compels us to tell a new story about our lives, one that would be deeper, more truthful and thus more durable, than the one which the shock of betrayal exposed as illusory and fragile. In the realm of the novel, the process of rewriting the narrative of one’s life can take the form of the decision to alter one’s very mode of existence, such as by retreating into a monastic existence or by allowing oneself to be slain in a duel, to cite two of the courses of action elected by the characters in Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The fact that the act of betrayal lends itself to bringing the action of a narrative to its decisive turning-point leads one to wonder if it is possible to make the same case for being the victim of a betrayal that René Girard makes for the experience of overcoming envy and rivalry in Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Girard argues that the painful renunciation of pride by the protagonist, whereby he gives up the goal of self-apotheosis, serves to bring about the unity of the character and the author. By overcoming the hallmark spiritual malady of modernity, metaphysical desire, which is the desire to imitate the ambitions and yearnings of one’s rivals, the hero “becomes capable of writing the novel” in which he appears.3 Might one say the same thing of the experience of betrayal? Do the psyches of the characters who  Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 95. 3  René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 297. Italics in the original. 2

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recognize that they have been betrayed coincide with those of the authors who narrate their fall into the trap and portray their painful recognition of the bitter truth? In Dangerous Liaisons, a pair of ruthless and manipulative aristocrats, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, hatches plots and lays snares to seduce and corrupt unsuspecting victims and to punish those who have crossed them in the past. The Marquis, bored of the easy conquests available to him in the debauched and jaded social circles of the nobility in Paris, turns his attentions to the virtuous, devoutly religious Présidente de Tourvel, the conquest of whom he regards as a challenge worthy of his gifts, while the Marquise seeks to enlist his help in avenging herself against the Comte de Gercourt by deflowering the girl to whom the latter has become engaged. But early on in the novel it becomes apparent to the reader that the cooperation between the pair is marked by rivalry even as they write to each other with unusual candor about their emotions and experiences. Merteuil at the outset pours scorn on Valmont’s project to seduce the pious Tourvel, expressing surprise that the legendary rake could be attracted to such a dull and prudish creature in the first place. Chaste and devout women, according to Merteuil, never really grow up, and if they do feel sexual pleasure, they are incapable of letting themselves go to experience the “entire abandonment of self, that delirious ecstasy where pleasure becomes purified by excess.”4 Valmont in his response writes at length of the charms and attractions of the reserved and modest woman, who is lacking in any pretense and remains wholly unpracticed in dissimulation. The secret of her attractiveness, he insists, lies in her modesty, which conceals a depth of feeling that is all the more forceful and overpowering because it goes untapped. Valmont rebukes Merteuil for belittling the target of his machinations – “Her face, you say, is without expression. But what should it express in the moments when nothing speaks to her heart?” he asks (Laclos, p. 21). He then enthuses over the immense delights his conquest of her will bring him:

 Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons, trans. Helen Constantine (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 19. Abbreviated hereafter as Laclos. 4

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I shall take her away from the husband who defiles her. I shall dare to ravish her even from the god she adores. How delicious to be both object and conqueror of her remorse… Let her believe in virtue, but let her sacrifice it for my sake; let her be terrified by her sins but unable to prevent herself committing them; and, agitated by a thousand terrors, let her be able to forget and overcome them only in my arms. May she say, with my consent: I adore you. She alone of all women will be worthy to utter those words. I shall indeed be the god she worships before all others (Laclos, p. 22).

It is hard to read this passage without experiencing a sinking feeling of dread and alarm. To Valmont, the keenest source of delight consists of compelling another to betray her deepest beliefs. The sight of a beautiful and pious woman plunged into the deepest suffering and anguish, in which the desire for her lover alternates in her soul with terror over the punishment of her transgressions, is for Valmont the source of the sweetest pleasures. He enjoys not only the enjoyment of Tourvel when he takes her in his arms but also the torments she undergoes because of the sin she commits. There is something diabolical in Valmont’s choice of victim, for the sufferings of those who are already corrupted cannot produce such exquisite delight. Only an exceptional and extraordinary woman, endowed with beauty and a natural nobility of the spirit which leads her to cultivate a devout faith, can provide him with this most potent of pleasures. Only a woman who is capable of falling from such a great spiritual height can produce the intense sensation of total domination sought by Valmont. But Valmont himself is not fully aware of the ramifications of his quest to topple someone from the greatest heights, for to bring about the fall he imagines as inconceivably delicious and gratifying, one which will confirm for him his identity as the supreme seducer, he must ascend these very heights himself. Merteuil, by contrast, reveals an awareness of what Valmont himself does not see. Her stern reprimands, as well as her efforts to provoke him by praising her former paramour Gercourt as a superior lover, not only reflect her irritation with what she regards as his lapse into insipid and immature fantasies, but also betray her alarm that Valmont might actually come to lose interest in the sexual power games that the two of them have managed to play together so well. She belittles the

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character of Tourvel because she realizes that the pious and dutiful wife is capable of awakening in Valmont such intense transports of joy as to make him give up altogether on his serial pursuit of seduction and conquest. Such a change of heart would remove Valmont from her orbit and from her control, either by making him the devoted lover of Tourvel or by turning him into a lovestruck fool. The imagination of Merteuil, who is able to approach almost every matter with the dispassion of a philosopher, is so comprehensive and exacting that she is able to recognize the allure of pleasures that she will never attain because of her own lack of piety and naiveté. Indeed, her anxiety about Valmont’s pursuit of Tourvel reveals the secret of her success as a seductress in Parisian society: her impressive high-wire act of illicitly gratifying her sexual desires without suffering the blemish of a bad reputation arises from the fact that she has forsworn, with an almost inhuman rigor, true happiness and authentic pleasure. The view that a successful seducer is incapable of attaining intense happiness is set forth by Stendhal in De l’Amour (translated as Love). Stendhal contrasts the figure of Don Juan, marching interminably from one bed to another, with that of Goethe’s Werther, who is overwhelmed by his passion and pines away for his one true love. But while the Werthers of the world often find their passions thwarted and frustrated, nevertheless it is they and not the Don Juans who are able to enjoy love. For Werther, “realities are shaped by his desires,” whereas the desires of his more carefree counterpart are “imperfectly satisfied by cold reality, as in ambition, avarice, and the other passions.”5 Don Juan is either numb to the “bewitching reveries” produced by amorous longing, or too prudent to give himself over to them. He is thus compared by Stendhal to a “general” whose energies are almost entirely absorbed by his strategies as well as to a “dishonest merchant,” who, “in the great market-place of life,” “takes all and pays nothing.” The rake accordingly emerges as a miser calculating the maximum return for his outlays, “destroying all the other joys in life” except his sexual gratification, whereas the romantic Werther “multiplies” these delights a “hundredfold.” Stendhal however accounts for this difference in terms of egoism as well, in that the greatest pleasures are to  Stendhal, Love, trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 206.

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be found where there is elevation. Indeed, he implies that it is more likely for a Don Juan to tire of his conquests than for a Werther to give up his passion. Thus, Valmont is driven by his passions to betray his former lover and co-conspirator Merteuil, although he does not recognize this compulsion as such. Indeed, his lack of self-knowledge  – and Merteuil’s superior knowledge of him and of other men – leads him to succumb to her ruse and to ruin the bliss he experiences with Tourvel. For Valmont does not fully comprehend the stakes involved in tiring of his role as a prodigiously successful libertine. Just as he stumbles into betraying Merteuil, Valmont is also not quick enough to recognize that he will have to sacrifice his pride and vanity if he is to go on enjoying the pleasures of his affair with Tourvel. By appealing to the image he maintains of himself as a great seducer and a superior man who is never dominated but always finds a way to dominate others, Merteuil persuades Valmont to break off the liaison. She accuses Valmont of being in love with Tourvel, belittling her as an “ordinary woman” for whom the earthly appetites have dissipated her lofty and devout spirit. But Merteuil is then undone by the excessive completeness of her victory over Valmont. It is her turn to succumb to an irresistible temptation when she crows over her victory to Valmont, rather than keeping the knowledge of her triumph to herself. She writes to him a blistering letter where she boasts to Valmont that the real object of her scheme was not to gain favor for herself over Tourvel in the eyes of Valmont. Rather, her objective was to win a triumph over Valmont proper: “You are going to think that I put a very high value on this woman I formerly thought so little of. Not a bit of it! It is because it is not over her that I have the advantage, it is over you. That is what pleases me, what really delights me” (Laclos, pp. 351–352). In the passage that follows, Merteuil provides a candid and merciless account of how she induced Valmont to give up the greatest pleasures he will ever know: Yes, Vicomte, you did love Madame de Tourvel a great deal and as a matter of fact you still do. You are mad about her. But because I amused myself by making you ashamed of it you bravely sacrificed her. You would have sacrificed a thousand more rather than be laughed at. Look where vanity leads

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us! The Sage [Rousseau] is right when he says that it is the enemy of happiness. (Laclos, p. 352)

What leads Merteuil, who prides herself on her analytical insight and powers of anticipation, to tease and humiliate Valmont in such a sadistic manner, thereby all but insuring that he will retaliate by exposing all their cruel and depraved schemes to the light of the world? If Merteuil, a formidably clever woman, were wiser still, would she not have kept her victory to herself, and allowed Valmont to return none the wiser to his old ways as an unregenerate rake and to his role as her partner-in-crime? David McCallam, in “The Nature of Libertine Promises in Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” argues that Merteuil spurns Valmont out of her superior dedication to the libertine’s code, which calls for breaking the promises the libertine makes to those who desire the libertine. The libertine does so less from the desire for advantage but more out of a strict devotion to principle that nevertheless despoils advantage itself. Indeed, it is the lesser degree of “rigour” demonstrated by Valmont in adhering to this code that fatally diminishes him in the eyes of the Marquise.6 For while he betrays the women he seduces, he fully expects the Marquise not to betray the promise that she has made to him, or to put in even more pathetic terms, the promise that he believes she has made to him. At the same time, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the self-admiration that Merteuil experiences in her victory over Valmont, which shatters her feelings of respect and admiration for him, also threatens her pleasures and delights as well. When the angry Valmont insists that they either resume their old relationship as lovers or become enemies, she responds with a single sentence at the bottom of his letter, “very well, then, war!” (Laclos, p. 369). Merteuil, as a proud and haughty woman, is averse to being connected intimately to a man she has succeeded in humiliating – in her eyes, it is a stain that Valmont will never be able to overcome. Yet her view of Valmont as a pathetic and unworthy dupe sets in motion her own undoing when Valmont hands their correspondence to his rival, the

 David McCallam, “The Nature of Libertine Promises in Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” The Modern Language Review Vol. 98, No. 4 (October 2003), p. 862.

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Chevalier Danceny, to distribute among the aristocratic circles they frequent. Reviewing the scorecard of treachery in the novel, we find that Merteuil betrays Valmont and her other lover, Danceny, by convincing Valmont to sleep with Cécile de Volanges, with whom the Chevalier is in love. Valmont betrays Tourvel and Danceny, whom he pretends to mentor in the ways of Parisian society, but most importantly, he betrays his own passion. Tourvel betrays God and her husband, and pays the price for her transgressions by going to her death in a convent. Danceny, after Merteuil has informed him that Valmont has stabbed him in the back, challenges the older man to a duel and stabs him in the front, dealing him a mortal wound. Is there any character among them who emerges as the one who could be the author of the novel, in the sense described by Girard? Danceny in his final letter to Madame de Rosemonde, the aged aunt of Valmont, declares his intention to withdraw from secular affairs and to take up a monastic life on the island of Malta. What he has learned in becoming the pawn of Merteuil and Valmont and in falling in love with a girl who was at the same time being debauched by Valmont makes him want to “forget” his experiences and separate himself from the world (Laclos, p. 404). Similarly, Madame de Volanges, the mother of the young Cécile, observes that the fate of Madame de Tourvel “makes a mockery of all human prudence” (Laclos, p. 385). Although comforted by the presence of her confessor and her friends, Tourvel dies in sorrow, as does Valmont, who in his final breaths magnanimously embraces Danceny and commands all those present to respect his adversary as a “just and worthy man” (Laclos, p. 383). Cécile, the beloved of Danceny, retreats into a convent and pleads with her mother not to press her for an explanation. A case of smallpox fells Merteuil, who loses sight in one of her eyes and flees to an inglorious exile in the Low Countries. But do any of the characters in the novel emerge with a knowledge that redeems them and their experiences and thereby enables them to assume the perspective of the author? If, like Danceny, they learn something about the ways of the world, it is a knowledge that in his words only “saddens and deadens” the soul (Laclos, p. 404). One is reminded here of Jean Baudrillard’s stern formula regarding seduction: “To be seduced is to be turned from one’s truth. To seduce is to lead the other from his/her truth.

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This truth then becomes a secret that escapes him/her.”7 We find a devastating instance of the knowledge that voids meaning in the anguished discovery of Tourvel that Valmont never loved her, a second and more grievous blow that follows on the heels of her initial recognition that Valmont has ceased to love her (Laclos, p. 333). The novel doles out an additional dose of cruelty in that she dies without learning that Valmont loved her after all, and came around to loving her fully after her death. Even the attempt by one of the characters to turn the novel’s deceptions and betrayals into a cautionary warning fails to yield the moral and creative fulcrum hailed by Girard as necessary to write the work. For this conclusion takes the form of a severe and unforgiving platitude that would undo all the actions and events which serve to give the narrative its particular shape: “If we know what our true happiness consists in, we should never seek it outside the limits prescribed by the law and religion” (Laclos, p.  398). In the eyes of Madame de Rosemonde, some experiences, like those in which the virtuous die in torment and the guileless are reduced to depravity, are simply not available for redemption. Of course, the novel is written in an epistolary form, being drawn from a collection of letters that have been selected by an anonymous editor (rédacteur), who at the end of the book adds a note informing the reader that he will not give a further account of the lives of Cécile and Merteuil after the former has retreated into a convent and the latter has fled Paris. The abrupt end that the editor’s intervention gives the narrative would underscore the absence of the coherence, formal and spiritual, that underpins Girard’s idea of ethical conversion. But if Dangerous Liaisons lacks a global and definitive turning-point that for Girard gives the form of the novel its providential shape, it nevertheless maintains a structure that we could still identify as initiatory. For example, after Cécile has lost her virginity to Valmont, whom she has allowed into her room at night in the hopes of receiving a letter from Danceny that the rake has in his possession, the girl reaches out to the Marquise in anguish and desperation. But instead of words of comfort and solace, she receives from Merteuil a sharply worded rebuke, upbraiding the girl for her emotional  Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p.  81. Abbreviated hereafter as Baudrillard. 7

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incontinence and childish immaturity. The Marquise feigns outrage over Cécile’s unwillingness to relish the attentions of a masterful lover, but also reminds the teenager that in being upset at having lost her virtue to Valmont, she dwells only on the “pain of love” while losing sight of its pleasures (Laclos, p. 254). The girl’s horrified realization that her “actions” in enjoying the physical act of sex did not reflect her “words” protesting Valmont’s embraces the Marquise waves away as so many lies and rationalizations. But Merteuil also exhorts the teenager that, were she to be “sensible and reflect for a moment,” she would conclude that she ought to “congratulate” herself at having been chosen by such a renowned seducer, rather than persist in feeling ashamed at the loss of her honor (Laclos, p. 255). The Marquise then takes it upon herself to offer Cécile a few lessons in the ways of the real world. Love is not an exalted passion to be reserved only for one’s partner in a relationship of mutual devotion but a game in which one must deceive one’s loves if one is to be happy. Feelings of shame are destined to wither and fade with further experiences of carnal pleasure. When torn between the conflicting obligations of love and duty, the only way to fulfill them both is by undertaking a third project. It is the man who typically makes the first move, but the second move is reserved for the woman. The older woman even strikes a subtle blow at Cécile’s image of Danceny as a steadfast lover when she mentions that the only place where she would not have to worry about the possibility of rivalry is the convent (Laclos, pp. 255–256). The reply that Cécile sends to the Marquise demonstrates the efficacy of Merteuil’s advice and the weakness of Cécile’s character. The teenager confesses that the thought of the lovesick Danceny occasionally fills her with pangs of sorrow, but she admits that these painful emotions fade easily since she now welcomes the nightly visits to her room by Valmont. Cécile expresses gratitude to the Marquise for providing her with wise and worldly counsel, in which she places her unquestioning confidence. But the girl’s relief, respect, and admiration are not reciprocated by the teachers responsible for her corruption. In her letter to Valmont, Merteuil speaks in no uncertain terms of her contempt for Cécile, who has revealed herself to be wholly unfit for the role of “subsidiary” (“subalterne”) that the Marquise had imagined for her (Laclos, p. 259). Her “silly ingenuousness” (“une sotte ingénuité”), manifested in the ease with which she

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assents to everything that the older woman tells her, is the sign of a dull spirit who is obstinate without being firm, and is resistant to any genuine education. The Marquise goes as far as to say that the sophisticated and even profound knowledge of human passions and frailties that she and Valmont could impart would ultimately be wasted on a girl who consents so readily to her own degradation. The teenager would grow into nothing more than a common “woman of easy virtue” (“une femme facile”), unsuited for a career of “intrigue” cultivated by the likes of Merteuil and Valmont. On this score, Danceny turns out to be more promising material, as he finds himself charmed by the Marquise and ends up in her bed. The ever-ardent youth writes an effusive letter to her after spending the night with her, declaring that she has ignited a passion in him that will bring them both the most intense delights. It is clear that Danceny was taken in by Merteuil’s playacting, in which she performed the part of a modest and refined woman succumbing to deep affections of which she herself was not aware, so it is painful to read how completely he misreads the situation from having fallen under her spell: “neither of us knew love until we emerged from the intoxication into which this god has plunged us” (Laclos, p. 358). Merteuil’s seduction of Danceny stokes the ire and jealousy of Valmont, who becomes infuriated at the presence of the young man in Merteuil’s house when he seeks to make a reckoning with the Marquise. But the pattern of couplings – Merteuil and Danceny, Valmont and Cécile – suggests the outlines of another resolution that might have taken hold had the elders in the pairings not turned on each other. For the younger members might have reached an understanding with each other through their experiences of mutual disillusionment and betrayal, and continued to live on in society, sadder and more sensualistic. While Danceny and Cécile could never have matched the malevolence and magnificence of their corrupters’ duplicities and stratagems, the jaded pair might well have gone on to become fixtures in the sybaritic social circles of the pre-­ Revolutionary French aristocracy, engaging in further love affairs while occasionally casting brief, wistful glances at the guileless infatuation they had once shared in their youth. But the initiatory schema implied by the narrative, in which the innocent and youthful would receive the knowledge that would bind them to the deceitful and disillusioning ways of a

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fallen society, falls apart thanks to the conflict that erupts between the teachers. For all their ruthless cunning and penetrating intelligence, Merteuil and Valmont prove incapable of perpetuating the system that has enabled them to enjoy myriad sexual affairs as well as to bask in the glow of their superiority to their rivals and conquests alike. In the case of Valmont, it is by falling in love with the Madame de Tourvel that he falters in the seducer’s role and comes to abandon it. But what drives Merteuil to act in such a manner in which she ruins her own interests and finds herself banished from the social circles she exploited, leaving behind damning evidence of her career that are firmer than mysteries and rumors – the revelation of her carefully-guarded secrets? In spite of her downfall, Merteuil nevertheless remains the one character who successfully manipulates and triumphs over all the others. Her knowledge and insight into the passions are unrivalled and border on clairvoyance, as when she is able to explain to Valmont what emotions have him in their grip before he is able to understand them himself. Arguably, the most fascinating passages in the novel concern not Valmont’s devious pursuit of Madame de Tourvel or any other of the sexual affairs of the characters, but rather the Marquise’s own account of the path she took to become an extraordinary seductress and supremely skilled manipulator. Her first step into the world of sexual intrigue was taken almost out of thoughtless curiosity, when, not having had any experience of lovemaking, she decided to confess to a priest that she was guilty of “having done all that women do” (Laclos, p. 182). Although Merteuil was more interested in knowing what sexual pleasure was rather than experiencing it herself, the shocked reaction of her confessor made her realize that the delights of the flesh must be “exquisite.” Thus, did her “desire for knowledge” pass into the “desire for gratification.” To become skilled at obtaining this gratification, the Marquise put herself through an exacting and arduous process of self-fashioning. To prepare for a life of pleasure and to exercise near-absolute control over herself and others, she poured over the works of the “strictest moralists” in order to learn “what they demanded” of men and women, so that she would know how to appear in the eyes of others in order to deceive and manipulate them (Laclos, p.  184). Her rigorous study of books was preceded by a no less exhaustive training of her demeanor and gestures, through which she acquired an astonishing

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level of mastery over her emotions and appearance, In every situation, she is able to exhibit the appropriate emotion that will enable her to profit from it: “From that moment on my thoughts were for my benefit and mine alone, and I only revealed to others what I found it useful to reveal” (Laclos, p. 181). Yet, it is not in an entirely instrumental or mercenary spirit that Merteuil carries out her study of men, morals, and society or subjects herself to an arduous physical discipline. She may inflict pain on herself while making her features convey a look of delight in order to gain complete control over her emotions, but she also reveals a genuine love of learning in the cultivation of her gifts and abilities, even if she will deploy them for ends that are cruel and malicious. For the Marquise’s astonishing self-discipline and ruthless manipulation of those around her arise from being capable of looking “deeply” into her “own heart” and into the hearts of others (Laclos, p. 185). By subjecting herself and others to honest and scrupulous examination, she came to understand that everyone conceals a “secret” that would bring disgrace and ignominy were it to become known to others. One might say that Merteuil learned to read herself and others as texts of which the principle of their construction is concealed or occluded, but her mastery of reading the human psyche pays off in the practical knowledge of when to break off an affair or spread unsavory rumors about a jilted lover. Her virtuosity as a seductress and libertine, however, stems from the absence in her soul of any inclination toward love, which she seeks only to “inspire” in others while “feigning” in herself its tell-tale signs (Laclos, p. 184). The transports of love are not for the Marquise, who prefers as her vehicle of apotheosis the cold and disconcerting gratifications of playing god: “I am like the Deity, receiving the opposing wishes of blind mortals, and not changing my immutable decrees one whit” (Laclos, p. 132). She describes herself thusly in revealing that she has become the confidant of both the worried mother and the daughter who seeks to disobey the former’s authority. The Marquise thus emerges as something close to a philosopher and sage, taking a passionate interest in knowledge, regardless of whether or not it places her in a better or more flattering light. Her willingness to see people as they are, to size them up and to divine their fears, strengths, and moral fiber, is placed in the service of deceiving and dominating those

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around her to advance her own pleasure, which for her is primarily the pleasure of charming others while exercising her powers of insight and strength of will over them and only secondarily the pleasures of sexual intercourse. Yet, even if it is ultimately not for its own sake that she carries out the search for knowledge, it would be erroneous to conclude that Merteuil is driven by a wholly selfish concern for personal gain and advantage. Rather, she regards libertinage as a game whose gratifications and fulfillments are especially potent because it involves the risk that one may lose the game and suffer as a consequence the worst of all social fates. The Marquise fully accepts the possibility of defeat, which is a sign of her noble spirit, for it is plebeian, and moreover onanistic, to imagine that one could experience genuine pleasure in playing a game that one can always win. Thus, while Merteuil is undeniably cold, selfish, and sadistic, it is impossible to say that she is in addition self-absorbed or guilty of affirming herself in a manner that denies the experience of otherness. Indeed, her desire to demonstrate over and over again her superiority over others whom she cuts down in the game of intrigue reflects the drive to make contact with the otherness that contains the possibility of bringing about her destruction. It is also in the realm of integrity that the Marquise has no equal. It is, however, this integrity that is the source of her downfall. For she is in her own terrible way a complete being, one who has mastered the lack and insufficiency that would otherwise open her to love or prepare her for her own initiation. Indeed, it is proof of her formidable spirit that she does not need love in order to seek out the experience of otherness that brings about her doom. For although she is able to betray all, she herself is betrayed not by an individual but by writing itself. As Baudrillard points out, seduction operates in the realm of appearances, despoiling discourse of its “sense” and twisting it from “its truth” (Baudrillard, p. 53). Yet the seductress herself cannot resist the temptation to produce “meaningful discourse,” namely the sort which “seeks to end appearances,” by committing her methods, her education, and her plans and intentions to paper (Baudrillard, p. 54, italics in the original). For only a “meaningful discourse” can do justice to the fullness of her splendor, which would otherwise remain concealed to victim and stranger alike. Her “fabulous” powers of deception arise from her knowledge of the “secret of

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appearances,” but these powers are only effective so long as they are kept concealed, along with the extraordinary talents of the one who wields them with such alarming virtuosity (Baudrillard, pp. 70, 66, italics in the original). The frank account she gives of her practice of libertinage is the closest she comes to performing a gesture of friendship, in a moment of communion that seals her fate while winning our admiration for a remarkable being about whom we should feel grateful never to encounter in our own lives. For perhaps the best protection against the powers of such a formidable seductress is a deep and abiding respect for her skills and talents.

9 Sade’s Psychopath as Prototypical Man of the Enlightenment Manuel Carabantes

1

Moral Insanity

In the rise of the nineteenth century, physicians began talking about an intriguing mental disorder to which they gave the meaningful name of moral insanity.1 One of the first descriptions of this disease is that of the English physician James Cowles Pritchard, who stated of it: “The intellectual faculties appear to have sustained little or no injury, while the disorder is manifested principally or alone in the state of the feelings, temper or habits. In cases of this description the moral and active principles of the mind are strangely perverted and depraved, the power of self government is lost or impaired and the individual is found to be incapable of conducting himself with decency and propriety”.2 The  Michael Craft, Ten Studies into Psychopathic Personality (Bristol: John Wright, 1965), p. 7; David Cooke, Christine Michie and Stephen Hart, “Facets of Clinical Psychopathy”, Handbook of Psychopathy, ed. Christopher Patrick (New York: The Guildford Press, 2006), pp. 91–106. 2  James Pritchard, A Treatise on Insanity (New York: Hafner, 1835), p. 15. 1

M. Carabantes (*) Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_9

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description of this same pathology made on the other side of the Atlantic by the American psychiatrist Benjamin Rush3 matches in every essential point with Pritchard’s. Anyone who knows the literary work of the Marquis de Sade will notice when reading Pritchard and Rush that their symptomatic descriptions of moral insanity fit perfectly with the personality of the most famous characters created by the French writer: deceptive, manipulative, selfish and of normal or even remarkable intelligence that is used to satisfy their desire, which frequently involves habits that society rejects as immoral. However, what Pritchard, Rush and other researchers of the mind did in the nineteenth century was not describing the personality of literary characters, but a new psychopathology that over the centuries has changed its original name of moral insanity to be known as psychopathy. It is evident, therefore, that at first sight the psychopath and Sade’s prototypical characters share personality traits. This is the intuition that guides our argument, which consists in the following three premises: first, Sadian characters are an accurate portrait of the prototypical man of the Enlightenment; second, those characters have a psychopathic personality; and third, the traits that determine their psychopathic personality are essential and not accidental. If we prove these three premises, they will lead us to this conclusion: the prototypical man of the Enlightenment is psychopathic. Or, said the other way around, the psychopath is a prototypical man of the Enlightenment. As arguments to prove the first premise we refer to those given by Horkheimer and Adorno in the excursus II of Dialectic of Enlightenment.4 To prove the second premise, we will apply to the Sadian characters the PCL:SV, a methodologically valid tool to diagnose psychopathy only on file review and without the need for interviews. Finally, to prove the third premise, we will indicate several places of Sade’s literary work where those psychopathic traits appear recurrently.  Benjamin Rush, Medical Enquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia: Budd & Bartram, 1812), pp. 262 and 356–357. 4  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). See also Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Lloyd Henry, Sade’s Philosophical System in its Enlightenment Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Tyrus Miller, “Perversion and utopia: Sade, Fourier, and Critical Theory”, College Literature 45, no. 2 (2018), pp. 330–359. 3

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Before we take up this task, as we are aware that it sounds strange to state that the prototypical man of the Enlightenment is psychopathic, we will preliminarily clarify this. Here we will understand the Enlightenment in its broader sense given by Horkheimer and Adorno, namely: the great emancipatory project of the human being that begins with the myth and reaches actual techno-science.5 The outcome of that process, says Horkheimer, has been paradoxically that “reason has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral and religious insight”.6 Therefore, the truly Enlightened man is exclusively guided by the subjective or instrumental reason, which is the one in charge to calculate the most economical means to an end, while ignoring any hypothetical command of the objective or practical reason, which is the one that judges the fitness of the actions to moral rules, that is, rules that are prescriptive by themselves, not on behalf of the utility for something else. The Enlightened man is oblivious to morality, and psychopaths were given two centuries ago the name of moral insanes; thus, our assertion that the Enlightened man is psychopathic begins to be understood. The reader can see that the philosophical interest of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, there is the intrinsic interest for philosophy in understanding the psychopath, because of the core thesis of this work, namely: that the psychopathic personality is proper of the successful men of our time, those who run the destinies of our nations, societies and economies. And on the other hand, we perform a task that is consistent with the methodology of the authors of the concept of Enlightenment we are adhering to. This methodological consistency is, in turn, twofold. First, we are using psychology for philosophical purposes, which is something Adorno also did—see the F-scale test he co-designed to measure the authoritarian personality. And second, like Horkheimer and Adorno in the aforementioned excursus II of Dialectic of Enlightenment, we are using literature for examining a moral phenomenon, which is a way to proceed that lies on the same claim of this whole book of many authors, i.e., that literature, from the distance of fiction, is a legitimate way to philosophically penetrate into moral reality.  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 1.  Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 56.

5 6

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Definition of Psychopathy

Psychopathy is scientifically defined as a personality disorder characterized by interpersonal, affective and behavioral symptoms.7 In the interpersonal dimension, psychopaths are grandiose, egocentric, manipulative, dominant, forceful and cold-hearted. In the affective one, their emotions are shallow and labile, show incapability of forming long-lasting bonds with anything or anyone, and lack empathy, anxiety and genuine guilt or remorse. Finally, in the behavior sphere, they are impulsive, addicted to sensation-seeking, and have a tendency to break social rules. This definition is enough to preliminarily understand what psychopathy is and to remove from this concept two false traits that people commonly attribute to it, namely: that psychopaths are crazy8 and that they are all murderers.9 Both statements are false. To complete our introductory description of psychopathy, there are two more relevant features we must highlight: its genetic etiology and its dimensional nature. Starting with the genetic etiology,10 it is the cause of its chronicity, that is, its persistence over time. The world’s leading expert on psychopathy Robert Hare holds an interactive model of biological and social factors to explain the causes of this disorder.11 According to this model, social factors “help to shape the behavioral expression of the disorder”.12 That is to say, depending on the circumstances experienced during childhood and adolescence, the psychopath will express their personality traits as an adult in one way or another. Thus, psychopaths raised in socially depressed environments tend to become prosecutable offenders, while those born to wealthy families are more likely to become  Stephen Hart, Daniel Cox and Robert Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, 1995), p. 1. 8  Robert Hare, Without Conscience (New York: The Guildford Press, 1999), p.  5; and Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, 5th ed. (Saint Louis: Mosby, 1988), p. 339. 9  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 4; and Hare, Without Conscience, p. 113. 10  Robert Hare and Craig Neumann, “The PCL-R Assesment of Psychopathy: Development, Structural Properties and New Directions”, Handbook of Psychopathy, ed. Christopher Patrick (New York: The Guilford Press, 2006), pp. 58–88. 11  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 166. 12  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 174. 7

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s­ uccessful psychopaths, that is, white-collar criminals. In any case, Hare says, social conditioning is never enough to reverse the typical symptomatology. We have to point out that not all of Sade’s evil characters have a chronic evilness, because most of them behave immorally after a process of learning and critical reflection, as it happens to Juliette. However, this difference does not affect us, because we do not claim that Sade’s evil characters are perfect psychopaths, but that they have a very high degree of psychopathy, and therefore the prototypical man of the Enlighment also has—as it is what those characters intend to describe. To state such a thing we will track the psychopathic traits in Sade’s evil characters through a diagnostic test, but not with clinical purpose, but philosophical. What interests us about psychopathy is its mental and behavioral profile, which serves to clarify how the human being produced by the Enlightenment is. It can be said that the goal of our comparison is the opposite of that of Hervey Cleckley, the great pioneer of psychopathy in the 1940s.13 Cleckley said that he used literature “to gain understanding of the by no means simple riddle of the psychopath”.14 Today psychopathy is quite well understood, and therefore its scientific understanding can help us to gain understanding of the by no means simple riddle of the prototypical man of the Enlightenment. By the way, it is worth mentioning that Cleckley, by stating this, somehow adhered to the core thesis of this book; as we, philosophers, claim that literature is a legitimate way to explore ethical issues, Cleckley, a psychologist, claimed that literature was also a legitimate way to explore the issue of psychopathy from the scientific standpoint of psychology. Regarding the non-categorial but dimensional nature of psychopathy,15 the latest edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) explains in its introduction to the Personality Disorders section that according to the categorial approach personality disorders are  Drew Westen and Joel Weinberger, “When Clinical Description Becomes Statistical Prediction”, American Psychologist 59, no. 7 (2004), pp. 595–613. 14  Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, p. 317. 15  Robert Hare, “Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (2nd Edition) (PCL-R)”, Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law, Vols. 1 & 2, ed. Brian Cutler (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2008), pp. 348–350. 13

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“qualitatively distinct clinical syndromes”, whereas the dimensional perspective considers that these disorders “represent maladaptative variants of personality traits that merge imperceptibly into normality and into one another”.16 That is to say, that applied to the case, the categorial approach is the binary of being or not being a psychopath, while the dimensional one holds that all individuals have a certain degree of psychopathy. It is important for us to point out the dimensional nature of psychopathy, since what we intend here is not to categorically diganose Sade’s evil characters as psychopaths, but to do it in a dimensional way to show the high degree of psychopathic personality of these characters.

3

Diagnostic Methodology

Turning now to the question of methodology, to diagnose the psychopathic personality there are several procedures. They can be classifed into three groups17: structured diagnostic interviews, self-report questionnaires and inventories, and expert rating scales. In this paper, structured diagnostic interviews, such as SCID-II (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV) and IPDE (International Personality Disorder Evaluation), are impossible to apply, since the objective is to evaluate characters depicted in texts. With the self-report questionnaires and inventories, this is also the case, so tests like PAI (Personality Assessment Inventory), MCMI-III (Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory), or the famous and versatile MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), have to be ruled out. The only methodology, therefore, suitable for the format of this work is the evaluation of the psychopathic personality through expert rating scales. Because of reasons not explainable here for the sake of brevity,18 the  American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5 (Washington: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), p. 646. 17  James Hemphill and Stephen Hart, “Forensic and Clinical Issues in the Assessment of Psychopathy”, Handbook of Psychology, Vol. 11: Forensic Psychology, ed. Alan Goldstein and Irving Weiner (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), pp. 87–107. 18  See Hemphill and Hart, “Forensic and Clinical Issues in the Assessment of Psychopathy”, p. 88; Hare, Without Conscience, p. 24; Hare, “Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (2nd Edition) (PCL-­ R)”, p. 349; Hare and Neumann, “The PCL-R Assesment of Psychopathy: Development, Structural 16

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most appropriate methodology for assessing psychopathy in this paper is particulary one rating scale: the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL). Developed by Robert Hare and his fellow colleagues in the 1980s, the PCL in all its versions proceeds on the basis of a semi-structured interview and the review of file information available on the patient. With the data from both sources, the evaluator must score 20 items, which are nothing else than 20 essential features of the psychopathic personality, on a scale of 0, 1 or 2 points depending on whether the item does not apply (0), it applies to a certain degree (1), or it fully applies (2). When it is not possible to conduct the interview, then the PCL can be applied only on the file review,19 which makes it the appropriate tool for our needs, since we cannot interview Sade’s characters. However, 20 items are too many for the extension of a paper, and that pushes us to replace the PCL by its abbreviated version: the PCL:SV (Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version). Published in 1995, the PCL:SV has a number of very interesting advantages over the PCL-R20: it reduces the number of items from 20 to 12, excludes the items defined in terms of specifical deviated social behaviours, and broadens the population spectrum on which it can be applied by removing references to criminal records in the definition of some items. At the same time, the PCL:SV is conceptually and empirically linked to the PCL-R.21 The 12 items of the PCL:SV, which are nothing but traits of the psychopathic personality, are22: (1) superficial; (2) grandiose; (3) deceitful; (4) lacks remorse; (5) lacks empathy; (6) does not accept responsibility; (7) impulsive; (8) poor behavioral controls; (9) lacks goals; (10) irresponsible; (11) adolescent antisocial behavior; (12) adult antisocial behavior.

Properties and New Directions”, p.  61; Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p.  6; and Hemphill and Hart, “Forensic and Clinical Issues in the Assessment of Psychopathy”, p. 94. 19  Hare and Neumann, “The PCL-R Assesment of Psychopathy: Development, Structural Properties and New Directions”, p. 66. 20   Stephen Hart and Catherine Wilson, “Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV)”, Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law, Vols. 1 & 2, ed. Brian Cutler (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2008), pp. 350–351. 21  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 13. 22  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 22.

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The in-depth definitions, of ostensional nature,23 will be explained in the following section, in the thread of the identification of each item in Sade’s characters.

4

Analysis of Sade’s Characters

Before the diagnosis, it is necessary to make four preliminary considerations: on the veracity of the testimonies, on the sexual relations as a metaphor, on the unity of the characters and on the choice of these. In the first place, on the veracity of the testimonies, it is usual in Sade’s literary work that the characters reveal their most intimate feelings, something that does not fit the profile of the psychopath, who rarely verbalizes his motivations and, when he does, is likely to lie. However, the loquacious veracity of the Sadian characters must be considered not as a personality trait, but as a narrative cunning to disclose the true nature of the Enlightened man.24 Secondly, on sexual relations, famously abundant in Sade’s literature, they must be understood as metaphors of all human relationships: “Hence, their pre-eminent role can coexist with a realistic purpose”.25 They should be not interpreted, therefore, in a literal way,26 so it would not be right to say that Sade’s characters are traited mainly by an addiction to sex. In sexual relationships one should look for the relational structure among individuals beyond the intercourse, and this structure is determined by Sade’s pessimistic view of the human being: “Man is a machine driven by selfish desires that wants to persevere in itself, be satisfied, get pleasure and, in order to achieve it, establishes relationships with others”.27  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 19.  Víctor Méndez, Sade (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1998), p. 25. 25  Méndez, Sade, p. 19. 26  For some interesting interpretations of Sade see Guillaume Apollinaire, L’oeuvre du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Collection des Classiques Galants, 1909); Maurice Heine, Le Marquis de Sade (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); Simone de Beauvoir, Faut-il Bruler Sade? (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); and William Allen, Without End: Sade’s Critique of Reason (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 27  Méndez, Sade, p. 19. See also Jan de Vos, “From La Mettrie’s Voluptuous Man to the Perverse Core of Psychology”, Theory & Psychology 2, no. 1 (2011), pp. 67–85. 23 24

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Third, about the unity of the characters, we will consider them as instances of the same prototypical personality. That is, our philosophical diagnosis will be done here by treating several characters as if they were one. Of course, we will do it only with the proverbially Sadians, that is, the evil ones, leaving their victims out of the analysis. This synthesis of characters is justified by the argument provided by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely: because, although it is under different faces and names, Sade’s purpose is to describe the feature of a single personality, that of the Enlightened man who, free of ideologies, is ruled only by provable principles from the point of view of the only reason that has prevailed after the critical examination of the Enlightenment against all prejudices, that is, the instrumental reason. And fourthly, given the limited space of the present study, we must limit the analysis of Sade’s characters to the main ones of his most outstanding works: The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine and Juliette.28 These three books are usually considered as the most representative of Sade’s novels, and that is why we will limit ourselves to analyze the personality of the characters in them. Not a coincidence, in the excursus II of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Sade’s most mentioned works are these three, Juliette being the main one. About Justine, we must point out that we will use the first version of it, entitled The Misfortunes of Virtue, which is the version where Justine adoptes the alias of Sophie.

Factor 1: Interpersonal Item 1: Superficial. “This item describes an individual whose interactional style appears superficial (i.e., glib) to others. Usually the individual tries to make a favorable impression on others by ‘shamming’ emotions, telling stories that portray him/her in a good light, and making unlikely excuses for undesirable behaviors. He/she may use unnecessary—frequently inappropriate—jargon. Despite its superficiality, the individual’s  We will refer to these editions: Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968); The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, trans. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and The 120 Days of Sodom, trans. Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn (London: Penguin Books, 2016). 28

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style may be considered engaging. Alternatively, the individual may try to impress others by appearing sullen, hostile, or ‘macho’. Still, the key aspect is that this presentation appears affected and superficial”.29 Hare adds that his excellent communication skills allow him to pretend to be someone trained in a wide variety of subjects to gain the admiration and respect of the audience.30 This ability for seduction or intimidation serves the psychopath to get what he wants. Throughout Sade’s literature, the evil characters usually show this dual ability to seduce their victims and to intimidate them once they have fallen into the trap. From The Misfortunes of Virtue we can bring the example of the currency forger Dalville, who, after being helped by the unfortunate Justine in a road ditch, convinces her with a nice speech to go with him to his castle. He will employ her, he says, as a maid for his wife. But the truth is that, once there, Justine is enslaved for manual labor and to suffer the abuses of Dalville. In The 120 Days of Sodom we find superficiality as a rule imposed in the regulations of the four libertines, when they say it is a must at all times to intimidate women and boys with rudeness, while with the sodomizers they should behave in the opposite way. Or the case found in the same novel of the Duc de Blangis, who was used to giving an image of himself and excusing his biggest flaw, cowardice, with the absurd argument that because this is a desire to preserve oneself, it is not right to reprobate it. Finally, in Juliette it is remarkable to note the imposing introduction that Madame de Clairwil makes of herself before Juliette to impress her. Item 2: Grandiose. “Individuals who score high on this item are often described as grandiose or braggarts. They have an inflated view of themselves and their abilities. They appear self-assured and opinionated in the interview (a situation where most people are somewhat reticent or deferential). If they are in hospital or prison, they attribute their unfortunate circumstances to external forces (bad luck, the ‘system’) rather than to themselves. Consequently, they are relatively concerned about their present circumstances and worry little about the future”.31 Concerning this  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 22.  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 34. 31  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 22. 29 30

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trait, Hare points out that psychopaths have a narcissistic vision of life: “See themselves as the center of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules [...] They love to have the power and control over others and seem unable to believe that other people have valid opinions different from theirs”.32 Sadism consists precisely of this: selfishness and arrogance. Sade’s evil characters believe that they have the right to everything, including the subjugation of others and disposing of their lives. In The Misfortunes of Virtue, we find Dr. Rodin, who believes himself to be such a good researcher of the human body that he, together with a colleague, claims the right to kidnap a girl to practice a vivisection, which is something that according to him the society prohibits only by false scruples. The speech of the Duc de Blangis on the first pages of The 120 Days of Sodom is another example of haughtiness from the beginning to the end. Also, it is worth mentioning from Juliette the infinite vanity of Saint-Fond, an essential character of the novel who declares not to believe in that foolishness of equality between men, and who confesses to consider himself as a star in the sky, casting light over the world without ever descending to it. Item 3: Deceitful. “People with this characteristic commonly engage in lying, deception, and other manipulations in order to achieve their own personal goals (money, sex, power, etc.). They lie and deceive with self-­ assurance and no apparent anxiety. They may admit that they enjoy conning and deceiving others; they may even label themselves ‘fraud artists’“.33 Hare underlines: “Their statements often reveal their belief that the world is made up of ‘givers and takers’, predators and prey, and that it would be very foolish not to exploit the weaknesses of others”.34 “There are the strong and the weak, there are classes, races, and nations which dominate and others which are subjected”,35 say Horkheimer and Adorno about the universe according to Sade and Nietzsche. We have already mentioned Dalville’s trap to enslave Justine but, to give another example from The Misfortunes of Virtue, let’s remember the  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 38.  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 22. 34  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 49. 35  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 77.

32 33

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very good image that, according to the sex slave Omphale, the monastery of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois had in the nearby towns thanks to the permanent imposture of the evil friars who ran it. Note that this story also serves to support the superficiality item. Another manipulative and deceptive man of God is the bishop of The 120 Days of Sodom, who was said to have lied about the last will of a man to seize an inheritance destined for his children and for the poor. Finally, in Juliette we find several deceptions, probably the most terrible one being perpetrated by Juliette herself when she makes her newly discovered biological father believe that she forgives him for his years of absence with the hidden purpose of putting him in a trap that will result in incest between daughter and father and his death in the midst of a farce.

Factor 2: Affective Item 4: Lacks remorse. “High scores on this item are given to individuals who appear to lack the capacity for guilt. It is normal to feel justified in having hurt someone on at least few occasions; however, high scorers on this item appear to have no conscience whatsoever. Some of these latter individuals will verbalize remorse but in an insincere manner; others will display little emotion about their own actions or the impact they had on others and will focus instead on their own suffering”.36 Hare quotes a few words from the famous psychopath and serial killer Ted Bundy that make clear what these individuals think about guilt and remorse: “‘Guilt?’ he remarked in prison. ‘It’s this mechanism we use to control people. It’s an illusion. It’s a kind of social control mechanism—and it’s very unhealthy’”.37 This opinion on remorse is shared by Dubois, a key character of The Misfortunes of Virtue. In the final summary lesson, she speaks to Justine on how to behave in life: “Remorse is an illusion. It is nothing but the witless grumbling of minds too weak to dare to stop its voice”.38 According to her, remorse is caused not by an action itself, but by breaking a rule  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30.  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 41. 38  Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, p. 124. 36 37

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that forbids the action. However, rules are relative to each place and each time, and therefore it makes no sense to feel guilty. In The 120 Days of Sodom the Duc of Blangis also gives a speech against remorse: “I do my choosing without hesitation, and as I am always sure to find pleasure in the choice I make, never does regret arise to dull its charm”.39 Finally, from Juliette we can rescue that moment in which a man named Cloris, who is about to be raped and executed along with his family, tries to comfort his wife by telling her that remorse will tear the soul of their executioner, Saint-Fond, who replies: “Remorse will never reach my heart!”.40 “To be free of the stab of conscience is as essential to formalistic reason as to be free of love or hate”,41 say Horkheimer and Adorno when commenting a scene from Juliette. Item 5: Lacks empathy. “This item describes individuals who have little affective bonding with others and are unable to appreciate the emotional consequences (positive or negative) of their actions. As a result, they may appear cold and callous, unable to experience strong emotions, and indifferent to the feelings of others. Alternatively, they may express their emotions, but these emotional expressions are shallow and labile. The verbal and nonverbal aspects of their emotion may appear inconsistent”.42 We must point out here, as Hare does, that the psychopath is able to put himself in the place of the other in the sense that he has theory of mind, and therefore can predict how others will perceive the consequences of his actions; but only in a purely intellectual way.43 That is, he knows that his victim will suffer, but he does not empathize with that suffering because he is totally oblivious to others’ emotions. It is significant that the lack of empathy, which is the fundamental factor involved in psychopathy,44 is also the main feature of Sade’s evil characters. Indifference to other’s feelings is the key in the interpersonal relationships of Sadian literature that makes all the atrocities possible. In The Misfortunes of Virtue, let’s remember the speech that the currency  Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom.  Sade, Juliette. 41  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 75. 42  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30. 43  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 44. 44  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 6. 39 40

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forger Dalville gives to Justine when she begs for mercy: you do not empathize with your fellow human being when he is merely an object for you. However, as we say, it is known that the other suffers, and that suffering is enjoyed. In The 120 Days of Sodom we also have the case of the total lack of empathy of the Président de Curval, who orchestrated a macabre scene to enjoy the virginity of a girl in her mother’s arms and reach the orgasm just at the moment when both witnessed the public execution of their father and husband. Finally, in Juliette, the main character reveals an absolute lack of empathy. During a famine in Paris, she amused herself by denying charity to the weeping mothers holding their starving children. It was almost as pleasurable as sex, she says. Item 6: Doesn’t accept responsibility. “People who score high on this item avoid taking personal responsibility for their harmful actions by rationalizaing their behavior, greatly minimizing the consequences for others, or even denying the actions altogether. Most of their rationalizations involve the projection of blame (or at least partial blame) onto the victim or onto circumstances. Minimizations usually involve denying that the victim suffered any serious or direct physical, emotional, or financial consequences. Denial usually involves claiming innocence, that is, that the victim lied or the individual was framed; alternatively, he/she may claim amnesia due to substance use or to physical or mental illness”.45 In this regard Hare warns that psychopaths, because of their aforementioned eloquence of item 1, have a great ability to distort reality “even when they know that others are aware of the facts”.46 Sade’s characters give plenty of arguments to justify their immoral behaviors, since it is the author’s way of exposing through them the Enlightened philosophy that frees man from everything that is not rational. In The Misfortunes of Virtue, Monsieur de Bressac, who plans to murder his mother to inherit her wealth, tells Justine: “To your unphilosophical eye, two crimes are involved: the destruction of a fellow human being and the circumstance that the death concerned is of one’s own mother. As far as the destruction of a fellow being is concerned, Sophie, you can be clear in your own mind that it is an illusion. The power to destroy life is not  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30.  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 106.

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given to man who at most has the power to change its forms, but not the ability to obliterate it. Now, all forms are equal in the eyes of Nature. Nothing is lost in the immense melting-pot where endless variations are produced [...] So of what concern is to Nature, endlessly creating, if a mound of flesh which today has the shape of a woman, should reproduce itself tomorrow as countless insects of different types?”.47 A similar speech is given by the Duc de Blangis in The 120 Days of Sodom to justify his evilness. According to him, since nature has given him certain inclinations, it would not be sensible to repress them. And, finally, from Juliette we can remember the moment when Dorval justifies his network of prostitution and robbery arguing that he is doing nothing but taking advantage of the gifts he has received from nature, which created men unequal so that the strong could abuse the weak.

Factor 3: Lifestyle Item 7: Impulsive. “This item describes people who act without considering the consequences of their actions. They act on the spur of the moment, often as the result of a desire for risk and excitement. They may be easily bored and have a short attention span. Consequently, they lead a lifestyle characterized by instability in school, relationships, employment, and place of residence”.48 The psychopath, adds Hare, does not give much importance to the future or the past.49 He lives in the present time in an almost diachronic way, challenging the Heideggerian temporal ecstaticity in which the Dasein is. Sade’s characters are impulsive: they constantly get carried away by the sudden desire with the aim of experiencing extreme sensations and without thinking about the consequences. To provide an example: when Juliette, excited by all the extreme evilness she is discovering in Clairwil, decides in an outburst to arm herself with two pistols and go out to kill someone. About impulsiveness, we should not be deceived by the fact that the evil Sadians often impose a rigid order on their victims, because  Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, p. 40.  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30. 49  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 59. 47 48

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it is something that does not usually limit their impulses. It should be noted that rules are a way of dominating the victims, but they do not restrict the impulsive appetites of the offenders. In the end, what decides the course of events, says the slave Omphale in The Misfortunes of Virtue, is their will.50 When the rules imposed by the wicked affect their own desires, it is always in order to increase their pleasure or to avoid their harm. The first case is that of the norm agreed by the four libertines of The 120 Days of Sodom by which they are prohibited from deflowering their young victims before certain planned dates, in order to increase the voluptuousness of “the desire inflamed without ceasing and never satisfied”. The second case, in the same book, is that of the prohibition of abusing cooks and their assistants, since that would harm the pleasure of eating, and replacing their skilled labor would be difficult due to the isolation of the castle where the action takes place. Item 9: Lacks goals. “High scores on this item are given to those who do not have realistic long-term plans and commitments. Such people tend to live their lives ‘day-to-day’, not thinking of the future. They may have relied excessively on family, friends, and social assistance for financial support. They often have poor academic and employment records. When asked about their goals for the future, they may describe far-­ fetched plans or schemes”.51 As seen, this is a feature closely related to the previous one. Someone with a lack of goals does not necessarily have to be impulsive, but whoever is impulsive will hardly have realistic long-­ term plans. If they are rich from birth, the evil Sadians tend to live for the pleasure of the moment without worrying about the future. A clear example is Monsieur de Bressac in The Misfortunes of Virtue, who was said to have refused to work because he would rather live devoted to enjoyment at the expense of his mother’s fortune. And if they are not born to wealthy families, then they have plans to become rich, because money is for them the means to satisfy their desires without limitations: such is their only true goal. To enrich themselves, some draw well-crafted plans, as is the case of the forger Dalville, but the general rule is that their plans are unrealistic.  Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, p. 79.  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30.

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A good example of this is Juliette, who leaves school at the age of fifteen with the idea of becoming rich by being a prostitute. Although her plans work well because vices are always rewarded in Sade’s literature, the truth is that it is an unlikely project. In any case, the dominant note that reveals the lack of goals in Sadian characters is the contempt for future. As Dubois tells Justine: future is only an illusion. Item 10: Irresponsible. “This item describes people who exhibit behavior that frequently causes hardship to others or puts others at risk. They tend to be unreliable as a spouse or parent; they lack commitment to relationships, fail to care adequately for their children, and so forth. Also, their job performance is inadequate; they are frequently late or absent without good reason, etc. Finally, they are untrustworthy with money; they have been in trouble for such things as defaulting on loans, not paying bills, or not paying child support”.52 Hare clarifies this trait stating that psychopaths “do not honor formal or implied commitments [...] Psychopaths are not deterred by the possibility that their actions may cause hardship or risk for others”.53 This item does not fully apply to Sade’s characters, because they are responsible on the one hand, but not on the other. They are responsible when it comes to fulfilling the deals they make to abuse their victims: for example, the oath under penalty of the most severe punishments that the four libertines arrange to share their wives and daughters, or the statutes of the Sodality of the Friends of Crime that Juliette subscribes. However, it is clear that they are irresponsible with respect to all others’ commitments that when broken do not harm them, and this is on the core of the definition we just gave of responsibility: behavior that harms or puts others at risk. On parental irresponsibility, Monsieur Dubourg explains in The Misfortunes of Virtue that a father cares only for the affection of his children if in exchange he gets help. And even more irresponsible are the four libertines of The 120 Days of Sodom, who agree to abuse their daughters and wives as common goods.

52 53

 Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30.  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 63.

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Factor 4: Antisocial Behavior Item 8: Poor behavioral controls. “This item describes people who are easily angered or frustrated; this may be exacerbated by the use of alcohol or drugs. They are frequently verbally abusive (e.g., they swear, insult, or make threats) and physically abusive (e.g., they break or throw things; push, slap, or punch others). The abuse may appear to be sudden and unprovoked. These angry outbursts are often short-lived”.54 Hare summarizes this trait as an easy irritability: anything can provoke anger and its consequent violent reaction.55 Sade’s characters are also very irascible: the slightest gesture of their victim that bothers them can be enough for verbal or physical aggression. In The Misfortunes of Virtue we can remember the moment when Justine is reluctant to obey the order to undress given to her by one of Dubois’ henchmen. The reaction of the criminal is blatant: insulting and punching her. In The 120 Days of Sodom we find that the Duc of Blangis fits perfeclty into this trait because he was not only irascible, but alcohol also increased his fury, which meets the criterion of exacerbation due to consumption of substances. And, finally, from Juliette we can recover the moment when Clairwil gets angry with a new sex slave for not answering as she expected. There is no need to transcribe the insults and the physical punishment. Item 12: Adult antisocial behavior. “This item describes people who frequently violate formal, explicit rules and regulations. They have had legal problems as an adult, including charges or convictions for criminal offenses. Their antisocial activities are varied, frequent, and persistent”.56 Hare explains this item pointing out that: “Psychopaths consider the rules and expectations of society inconvenient and unreasonable, impediments to the behavioral expression of their inclinations and wishes”.57 Surrounding the definition’s last statement, he says: “Even within prison psychopaths stand out, largely because their antisocial and illegal ­activities  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30.  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 59. 56  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30. 57  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 67. 54 55

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are more varied and frequent than those of other criminals. Psychopaths tend to have no particular affinity, or ‘specialty’, for one type of crime but tend to try everything”.58 Most Sadian characters are also like this: criminals who explore as many types of crime as the circumstances demand to satisfy their wishes. In The Misfortunes of Virtue we have Dalville, who, in addition to counterfeiting money, has committed several crimes that include kidnapping, rape, torture and murder. In The 120 Days of Sodom it is said that the Duc de Blangis, the bishop, and the Président de Curval had also committed the most varied misdeeds. Finally, in Juliette, Saint-Fond stands out as a versatile criminal. Item 11: Adolescent antisocial behavior. “People who score high on this item had serious conduct problems as an adolescent. These problems were not limited to only one setting (i.e., occurred at home, at school, and in the community) and were not simply the result of childhood abuse or neglect (e.g., stealing food when it wasn’t available at home). Such people frequently were in trouble with the law as a youth or minor, and their antisocial activities were varied, frequent, and persistent”.59 We left for the end the item of antisocial behavior in adolescence because it has a particularity, and it is that, as we have already explained, according to some researchers of psychopathy60 this disorder has a genetic etiology which implies the early appearance of antisocial behaviors. At this point Sade takes distance, because he thinks that the extreme evil we observe in pathological personality profiles such as psychopathy is not a consequence of a biological peculiarity that affects only a few, but it is in the essence of every human being. Sade is a misanthropist: “Man is a machine driven by selfish desires that wants to persevere in itself, be satisfied, get pleasure and, in order to achieve it, establishes relationships with others”.61 The reason, however, that men do not generally behave in an openly evil way, Sade says, is because they have been educated in the deceptions of law, morals and religion.  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 68.  Hart, Cox and Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version, p. 30. 60  Robert Hare and Craig Neumann, “The PCL-R Assesment of Psychopathy: Development, Structural Properties and New Directions”, p. 83. 61  Méndez, Sade, p. 27. 58 59

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Some people always live under these burdens, as does Justine. Meanwhile, others are freed from them through philosophy, as is the case of Juliette, and some others do not even need to be freed because they are naturally impermeable to the internalization of social conditioning. This would be the case of the psychopath, and also of some Sadian characters such as the Duc de Blangis—Sade’s Übermensch. On the Enlightening function of philosophy, we should remember Dubois’ words.62 Similar speeches can be found in many other characters, such as Delbène in Juliette: “Philosophy, whose clairvoyance penetrates error, dissipates myth, and to the wise man leaves nothing standing but the fundamental inspirations of Nature. Well, nothing is more immoral than Nature; never has she burdened us with interdictions or restraints, manners and morals have never been promulgated by her”.63 It is the philosophy of Enlightenment, destroyer of unprovable beliefs, that illuminates characters like Juliette, and at least tries with others like Justine, to show them that law, morals and religion are inventions that only serve to keep them from satisfying their desires and subjecting them to the domination of other human beings. The only true laws are those of nature, with the law of the strongest on top, not because it has an imperative value, but because it has the advantage of actuality64; the laws made by men, on the other hand, lack intrinsic reality, as shown by the fact that they can be violated.

5

Conclusion

Attending to the high degree of psychopathy on Sade’s evil characters that we have found out through the application of the PCL:SV, it has been proved here that Sadian evil characters are psychopathic, and that their psychopathy, as it emerges from recurrent personality traits in the literature of Sade, is essential to the object that the author intended to portray through them: the prototypical man of the Enlightenment. Of course, this holds true only if Adorno and Horkheimer are right, and that  Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, p. 124.  Sade, Juliette. 64  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 78. 62 63

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portrait is accurate.65 We do think it is accurate, and we also have backed their practice of using literature to gain insight into an ethical issue by taking it to a place where philosophy, psychology and literature itself converge. About the degree of psychopathy of the prototypical man of the Enlightenment, we must only say that it is very high. Knowing how much is a matter of scoring the items—an exercise that we have omitted to avoid the impression that this paper is psychological, when it is in fact philosophical. The usefulness of this paper lies in the fact that it sets a foundation to the addition of psychological research on psychopathy to the philosophical effort to understand the mental and behavioral profile of today’s prototypical man. The prototypical man of our time is not, unlike in the past, the one who lives according to values such as humility, brotherly love, justice and humanity,66 but the one who acts liberated from these old products of objective or practical reason because he has discovered that they are just ideologies. Enlightenment has revealed to him that the claim that “justice and freedom are better in themselves than injustice and oppresion is scientifically unverifiable and useless”.67 His only guide of action is, consequently, the subjective or instrumental reason, which is, as we defined at the beginning, the one that maximizes the relationship between means and ends without judging the fit of either to moral norms. This is the way of the psychopath and Sade’s evil characters. The philosophical importance of understanding the psychopath in our time is pointed out by Hare in this sentence: “If I were unable to study psychopaths in prison, my next choice would very likely be a place like the Vancouver Stock Exchange”.68 He talks about Vancouver because he is Canadian and is commenting a local newspaper story, but it suffices any stock exchange of the world.69 The question of interest that Hare is underlining here is that the psychopath has the perfect traits to succeed  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 23. 67  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 16. See also Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 68  Hare, Without Conscience, p. 119. 69  For a good insight into psychopathy in white-collar businesses see Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 65 66

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in a free market economy like ours. The reason is that our economic system is nothing more than a sublimation of the natural state of total war of all against all, and in this scenario the supreme law that rules is that of the strongest: the only law that the psychopath observes; and along with him, Sade’s evil characters. That is why we say that they are exemplar men: because they are better equipped than anyone to achieve success. Whoever wants success at all costs should look to them as an example. The ability to seduce others (item 1), the arrogance that pushes them up to the top (2), the ability to lie constantly for their own benefit (3), the absence of remorse (4), the lack of empathy (5), the tendency to justify one’s own misdeeds (6), putting one’s desires over anything else (7), not caring about harming others (10), being capable of breaking all of the rules (12): there is no better way to succeed in the stock exchange taken as a symbol of the places where the elites dominate the rest of humanity. In short, to understand the psychopath is to understand the personality of those who, like Saint-Fond, rule the world in the age of the robber baron.

Part IV Ethical Presuppositions, Reconsidered

10 “A Kind of Purity”: Inanimacy, Disability, and Posthumanist Prefigurations in John Williams’ Stoner Jan Grue

1

Introduction

William Stoner: as the protagonist of John Williams’ Stoner nears death, he reflects upon the difference between ideals and actuality. “He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality.”1 The difference exists between spirit and body, though at the last, the two are united. “There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.” (287). What he had been is a noble failure; in work, in love, in life. Stoner’s last moments are passed unaccompanied, in contemplation of an object: his single published book. As he himself becomes an object, it falls, in the  John Williams, Stoner (New York: Viking, 1965), 285.

1

J. Grue (*) Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_10

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novel’s final words “into the silence of the room” (288). It is an apotheosis of sorts, in that Stoner achieves the integrity of objecthood, of inanimacy. The burdens of animacy – of complex embodiment and human entanglements – are finally laid down. Thinking about animacy and inanimacy means thinking about “the precise conditions of the application of “life” and “death” [and] life and death’s proper boundaries”,2 an enterprise for which Stoner provides rich and unusual raw materials for this endeavor. Animacy hierarchies conventionally descend from subjectivity and integrated animacy down towards “matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise “wrong””,3 and therefore ontologically troubling. Stoner inverts this dynamic, linking inanimacy with purity and aspiration, and locating the origins of trouble in embodied, unruly life – human life framed as lacking, imperfect, and therefore impure, what Kristeva has termed zoe,4 life embedded in time. The aesthetic appeal of Stoner, manifest in its eponymous protagonist, are linked to the stillness and quietude of ruins – as represented by classical academe, both metaphorically and literally. “Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass; he had learned that these columns were the remains of the original main building of the University, destroyed many years ago by fire. Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god.” (14). The ideal here expressed through inanimacy concerns the ethical and philosophical imagination as well as aesthetic appreciation. It provides a code of conduct as well as a standard of judgment, in which external and internal qualities are inextricably linked. In other words, a world-view, embedded in and expressed through fiction.

 Mel Chen, Animacies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 1.  Chen, 2. 4  Julia Kristeva et al., “Cultural Crossings of Care: An Appeal to the Medical Humanities,” Medical Humanities 44, no. 1 (September 2018): 55–58, https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2017-011263; Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt / by Julia Kristeva ; Translated by Ross Guberman, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 2 3

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This essay is an attempt to do three things. First, to explore how the ethical/aesthetic ideal of inanimacy and the world-view expressed in Stoner, finds narrative expression. Second, to understand how it resembles and prefigures a particular strain in posthumanist thought, which emerged roughly around the time of Stoner’s publication. Third, to chart how this ideal, as exemplified in Stoner, is contingent upon a particular and problematic representation of human embodiment.

2

The World-View of Stoner

Some basics. John Williams’ Stoner was originally published in 1965. It enjoyed something of a renaissance from the 2000s onwards, after being republished by New York Review Books. The story centers on William Stoner, a farm boy from whose parents send him to the University of Missouri to major in agriculture. Stoner, whose first name differs by only one letter from his author’s last name, discovers literature at the university, and then devotes his life to it. This is due to an epiphany brought on by close reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, which, amongst other things, thematizes aging, loss, and impending death. Williams wrote four novels, Stoner being the third. His style is simple, verging on laconic, as shown most clearly by the novel’s first paragraph. I quote it here in full, since it serves multiple functions – epitaph for the protagonist, exordium for the narrative, thematic encapsulation and central image of human beings concerned with books: William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted and instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to

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the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.” (1)

Stoner’s life is here; this might, on the one hand, be considered enough. This is the narrative, in pure and simple form, though not without metaphoric/metonymic elaboration (Stoner is the medieval manuscript; he himself belongs and leaves his only trace in the Rare Books Collection). Then, of course, the novel expands upon and complicates the narrative. We are told of Stoner’s courtship, his marriage, the birth of his daughter, and, perhaps most importantly, of the course of his professional life. The story does not go well; it does not end well. Stoner is thwarted in his desire for scholarship and peace by the unruly bodies of others. First among these is his wife, Edith, wicked and frigid in the most Victorian senses. There is also is Stoner’s daughter, vulnerable to the world, who becomes his responsibility alone. There is also Stoner’s colleague Hollis Lomax, and Lomax’ protégé Charles Walker, both of them interlopers in the academy, false scholars, who not only threaten Stoner’s career, but also his personal integrity and the study of literature as an institution. They lack intellectual honesty, and their bodies match their moral character; Lomax is deformed, a “small hump raised his left shoulder to his neck, and his left arm hung laxly at his side” (93), while Walker is a “cripple” (140). The imperfect world suffuses them, constitutes them and their flaws. Stoner’s own body is masculine and pure, and remains in this state until he succumbs to the impurities of the world; when he contracts cancer, the disease acts according to the rules laid out by Sontag,5 simultaneously a foreign invader and insidious agent of corruption. The young Stoner, the farmer’s son, can endure physical as well as intellectual hardship because of his vocational call, his desire for purity, which he believes can only be realized through scholarship and teaching, in the academy. Stoner does not show ambition, does not play politics, and so does not rise in the temporal world. Stoner’s name could just as easily connote obtuseness or inertia, but within this particular novel the stone is construed as a more durable and reliable form of matter than the organic tissue with which it is contrasted.  Cary. Wolfe, Before the Law  : Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 5

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That it is also among the oldest known building materials, suitable for important, symbolic buildings, is underscored when Stoner first walks across the university campus, observing the columns that remain of an older building. He knows he is already living in the ruins of something, though he does not yet know what, and when he discusses the role of the academy with his two contemporaries, Dave Masters and Gordon Finch, they conceive of it as an asylum, a refuge, a space outside the changing world. Bodies matter in Stoner, in ways that entwine aesthetics with morals. Perhaps the most readily available reading of the antagonistic relationships that structure the narrative (Stoner and his wife, Stoner and his academic enemies) is of the prosthetic kind pioneered by Snyder and Mitchell,6 wherein the marked bodies of Edith (female, hysterical, frigid) and Lomax (impaired, traumatized, twisted) contrast with Stoner’s initially unmarked body. The antagonists are comprehensible and their actions explicable in a way that Stoner is not, and their motivations arise entirely from their bodies. This reading has considerable appeal, since it is supported by nearly every instance of physical characterization in the novel, e.g. the deployment of Gordon Finch’s robust, bluff and thoroughly embodied masculinity as a satisfactory explanation for his smooth and continuous rise in the university hierarchy, or Stoner’s first and only mentor, Archer Sloane, who, dry-skinned and white-haired, functions as the desiccated remnant of what the academy once was.

3

Posthumanist Prefigurations and Troublesome Animacies

1965 is at the cusp of the posthumanist moment,7 barely ahead of the original publication of Foucault’s Le Mots et les choses, the “locus growing more classicus by the day”8 of posthumanist thought. Famously, the book  Wolfe.  Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? What Is Posthumanism, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013). 8  J C Chatel and R Peele, “CONCEPT OF NEURASTHENIA,” International Journal of Psychiatry 9 (1971): 36–49. 6 7

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concludes with an image of a human face drawn in the sand, about to be erased by the waves, taking metonymically with it the contemporary notion of the human being, humanity, and the humanist tradition. Stoner prefigures that posthumanist moment, and its concerns. It is in many ways a death-seeking narrative, or a the very least a narrative with a teleology determined by inanimacy. It is also a narrative in which organic matter and vitality are both construed as tenuous, fleeting, and unreliable. Stoner’s family farm is hardscrabble to the point of barrenness, and his parents’ attempt to revive their fortunes – by sending Stoner to study agricultural science – results only in his deeper engagement with inanimate (albeit potentially fertile) matter in the form of books. The drive towards stillness and death envelops a range of characters, not only Stoner himself. Dave Masters, his intellectually vital colleague, is killed in the First World War, quietly offstage. The death Archer Sloane, chair of the English department, follows as a direct consequence. Lacking a new and vital generation to follow him, he declines, turns hollow, his skin becomes like “ancient, drying paper” (39), and he is eventually found at his desk, having died at his increasingly marginal post. By way of contrast, Stoner’s engagement with inanimate objects, with materials and tools, is suffused by mastery and satisfaction. He refurbishes a house, builds a study, creating both a living space and a working space. His capabilities for physical work mirror his intellectual capabilities, suggesting a meaningful life built as much on ideals of craftsmanship as on human relationships. Stoner’s ideals stem from his sense of working in the ruins, looking for scraps in a great tradition that is no longer vital but can nevertheless provide glimmers of meaning, and which deserves care for that reason. His scholarly ambitions are modest and linked to pedagogy rather than investigation; Archer Sloane anoints him not as a researcher but as a teacher. Hollis Lomax, on the other hand, assumes the part of villain by displaying ambition, verbosity, a penchant for theory, and, most importantly, inauthenticity. He is hired at Stoner’s university because of his academic reputation and proceeds to form a coterie, an intellectualist cult that stands in contrast to Stoner’s ecumenical approach to literature. In Stoner, humanism and its moral imagination dies with the First World War. What that entails is the extinguishing of a mystical,

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guild-­like tradition wherein membership is conferred from master to apprentice. This tradition, viewed by Sloterdijk as a “chain letter through the generations”,9 is threatened by the forces of scientistic modernity, certainly, but just as much by the moribund tendencies of the tradition itself, its inability to embrace life. Consider the book’s opening passage, which metaphorizes the posthumanist dilemma as viewed by Sloterdijk. Stoner is the medieval manuscript, committed to the Rare Books Collection, the archive, for all eternity; he will not be remembered, his works will not be read. His book – his only book – is a thick letter lacking a recipient friend, ultimately returned to sender. What comes after the death of the tradition  – what constitutes the posthumanist condition  – is unbridled intellectual competition and dynamic politicization of what was essentially a feudal (though never apolitical) realm. Stoner is offered the opportunity to join the new order, but he is incapable of doing so. He belongs to the humanist tradition and so cannot survive long after it is gone. Stoner displays an elegiac attitude towards humanism, casting its drive to inanimacy as inevitable, graven in stone. The infusion of new blood – new animacy – amounts not to an existential threat (the battle is already over) but to a profanation. Gordon Finch’s philistine vitality is one vector, infecting the administrative apparatus of the academy. The other vector is the damaged bodies of Hollis Lomax and Charles Walker; in both cases, unruly physicality enters what would otherwise be a sanctified, if dead, place. Posthumanist thought is sometimes thought of, by itself, as rhizomatic, anti-hierarchical, and egalitarian. That does not mean that it is free of anxieties regarding valuation, and the value of lives. Stoner prefigures, narrativizes and entwines certain enduring anxieties of the posthumanist age, perhaps most singularly the twin anxieties of unbridled vitalism and ontobiology.10 As pointed out by Chen,11 these anxieties are inextricably linked to those of animacies, of the (insensate) matter that animates  Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 1 (2009): 302. 10  Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 1991). 11  Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 1 (2009): 12–28. 9

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cultural lives. Although Stoner is remarkable for its staging of these anxieties in relation to the ideals and concerns of classical humanism, it is equally interesting (in the time of its revival) for its corresponding anxieties about masculinity and capability, i.e. gender and disability.

4

Animacy and Kalokagathia

It is in this way that Stoner prefigures posthumanist developments even as it is rooted in what Sloterdijk terms the final, artificial flowering of classical humanism. The aesthetics of this flowering provide existential justifications for the life of the novel’s protagonist, but only because it is portrayed in chiaoroscuro, contrasted with tropes of sexism and ableism, i.e. of descriptions and assessments that discredit various other characters in the story. This is of course an ancient and integrated part of humanist poetics. I take as my starting point the ancient Greek concept of kalokagathia, a physiological and moral ideal.12 Representing the unity of beauty, nobility and morality in human conduct, it also has an obverse side, i.e. “the idea of physical ugliness, human abnormality, deformity, illness and handicap which both is indicative of a corresponding character and mind and corresponds with social degradation”.13 What Weiler here terms inverted kalokagathia is inextricably linked with the political economy of ancient Greece, serving as a justification for the privileges of the upper classes and the oppression of outsider and slaves. It also has literary roots that stretch all the way back to the Iliad, where the character of Thersites, morally and physically ugly in equal measure, kicks off the action as the ideal foil for Odysseus.14  Stephen G. Miller, Arete : Greek Sports from Ancient Sources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13  Ingomar Weiler, “Inverted Kalokagathia,” Slavery & Abolition 23, no. 2 (2010): 14, https://doi. org/10.1080/714005237. 14  N. Postlethwaite, “Thersites in the Iliad,” Greece and Rome 35, no. 02 (October 7, 1988): 123–36, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500033027; W. G. Thalmann, “Thersites: Comedy, Scapegoats, and Heroic Ideology in the Iliad,” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 118 (1988): 1, https://doi.org/10.2307/284159. 12

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In recent years, the deployment of kalokagathia in literature (and in representational art more generally) has most originally been documented, explored, and critiqued within the field of interdisciplinary disability studies; it has been shown to be an all but constitutive part of the Western canon15 and the Hollywood canon16 alike. In other words, I will take here as a given the existence and ubiquity of moral characterization by way of physiological description: the phenomenon should be recognizable to anyone who has read or viewed Richard III, which perhaps more than any other single text exemplifies the narrative logic of kalokagathia, in which villainy and deformity are essentially two sides of the same ideological coin.17 Less obviously and a more interesting as a topic of inquiry is the relationship between kalokagathia and a deep-seated discomfort with animacy and embodiment as such. It is this relationship that runs as an discomfiting undercurrent throughout Stoner, providing the backdrop for its effects. This is fear of unruly life, of posthumanist, de-centered animacy. After the humanist tradition decays, chaos ensues. Under these circumstances, death is preferable. Stoner rejects the possibility of an affirmative posthumanism before the event. This rejection is notably directed at disabled, animalized bodies. Edith Stoner has an unspecified disorder with symptoms that overlap, within the time period in which Stoner is set, with those of neurasthenia.18, 19 This disorder manifests within the narrative primarily as an absence of human agency, as opposed to animal instinct. Particularly with regard to sex and intimacy, Edith is unable to enter into a reciprocal, human relationship, displaying sexual arousal only when procreation is at issue, otherwise exhibiting the passivity of prey.  Sharon L Snyder and David T Mitchell, Narrative Prosthesis : Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Corporealities (Ann Arbor; [Great Britain]: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 16  Martin F Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Disability in the Movies (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 17  P Rhodes, “Physical Deformity of Richard III,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 6103 (1977): 24–31; Isabel Tulloch, “Richard III: A Study in Medical Misrepresentation,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 102, no. 8 (2009): 315–23. 18  Chen, Animacies. 19  Simon Wessely, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Neurasthenia and ‘ME,’” Psychological Medicine 20, no. 01 (1990): 35–53, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291700013210. 15

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Edith’s fleshly passivity is fundamentally different from that of inanimate matter, since it manifests as resistance. She becomes Stoner’s antagonist because of her embodiment. In their home, her behavior is irrational but predictable, reminiscent in its compulsiveness and repetitive patterns of that of a trapped animal. Her motivations (beyond simple hostility and spite) remain opaque to Stoner, as no communication is possible in their non-reciprocal relationship. They engage with each other as with foreign bodies, forced into cohabitation by purely external constraints (though ultimately, of course, through Stoner’s attempt at romantic courtship, his embrace of classical agency). Hollis Lomax is another matter, as his intellectualism, his ratio, is not animalistic but posthumanist in the historical sense. He is a creature of Theory, which in Stoner equates with a lack of grounding in the empirical data, the true knowledge of literature. Lomax’ embodiment is reminiscent of Richard III himself (only of one of many Shakespearean allusions in the text; Shakespeare is here a touchstone of classical humanism of Harold Bloom-like sanctity) – and a melodramatic character to boot. The contrast between Lomax’ mind and body is underscored by his “matinee idol” face, which appears to float, disembodied, in space. He has a vulnerable, traumatized body, and his intellectualism is fully explained by this body, by way of childhood social isolation and ostracism. It is not, however, a form of vulnerability that engenders sympathy or identification. Lomax rejects Stoner’s overtures of friendship – since Lomax is as alien to human friendship as he is to human sexuality – and calcifies, nearly from the start of their acquaintanceship, as an antagonist. The crucial scene for establishing these relationship is a late-night encounter between Lomax and Edith Stoner, following a faculty party. Lomax, having displayed his autobiographical self-justification to the small gathering of colleagues, kisses Edith, with Stoner observing them: “It was the chastest kiss Stoner had ever seen, and it seemed perfectly natural.” (100). Being observed in this display of vulnerability is unacceptable to Lomax; his hostility is rooted in this encounter – an exercise in performative vulnerability, quite a ways removed from the rooted, everyday intimacy of normal human relationships. Edith accepts the kiss passively, much as she accepted Stoner’s romantic overtures some time earlier, the

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implication being that she is more suited for the chaste, deathly attentions of Lomax than the human emotional life of Stoner himself. Their marriage is proclaimed a failure fairly early in the narrative; Lomax serves partly as a vector for explaining why this had to be the case. Despite, or possibly because of his un-integrated intellectualism, Lomax’ disabled body is also animalized. He is a Cartesian animal onto which a strange, machinistic ratio has been carelessly grafted. His reactions are construed as instinctive responses in the vein of fight-flight; he belongs, along with Edith Stoner, to the class of people who are intrinsically unable to align with the humanistic tradition and its precepts for, quite simply, being human. Stoner’s status as an elegiac novel stems from its implication that Lomax and Edith Stoner have a greater claim on the future than does William Stoner. His humanism, which is a spiritual praxis anchored in a tradition that is, if not dead, then certainly dying, cannot exert power either in his place of work or his family home. Lomax’ rudderless instrumentalism allows him to claim supremacy in the academic hierarchy, while Edith Stoner’s instinctual ruthlessness lets her claim her daughter and determine her daughter’s trajectory as a woman determined by external qualities, lacking a center.

5

Precepts of a Dying Humanism

Posthumanist thought contains temporal figurations that can be conceived as somewhat paradoxical. Our present day (a fuzzy determination at best, delimited perhaps by the end of the Cold Way, perhaps by the upheavals of the 1960s, perhaps by the cotemporaneous growth of digital technologies) is construed as peculiarly posthuman, while at the same time posthumanist tendencies are traced, in a deconstructive vein, to the origins of classical humanism itself. In terms of justification, the first approach serves to actualize posthumanism, while the second legitimizes it. The approaches are not intrinsically incompatible, but they generate a considerable amount of tension both on the descriptive and teleological level. If the posthuman stance is peculiar to this historical moment, its relevance to historical readings must necessarily be diminished, while emphasis placed on its deep historical genealogy will align it, rather, with

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a mere reinterpretation of the humanist tradition as it is already defined (and possibly also understood). Stoner takes a clear, even dichotomous position on this issue, presuming a definite end to a definitely pre-existing tradition. The First World War signals the ultimate demise of something that may have been on the wane, but still, like its embodiment Archer Sloane, had a pulse and kept breathing. William Stoner was initiated into the mysteries of this tradition, though he perhaps never proceeds to the level of enlightenment (a point that nevertheless needs to be discussed in greater detail). The simple dichotomous approach is dramatized by the narrative; nevertheless, the simple act of historicizing the narrative and its moment of publication serves to complicate the analysis. Stoner was published in the 1960s, and as such it is necessarily marked by the distance between the time in which it is set and the time during which it was written. There can be no answer to the counterfactual question of what Stoner would have looked like, were it written in the interwar period, and yet this observation cannot obscure the embeddedness of Stoner in its actually existing history. The role of the 1960s in the genealogy of gender as well as disability politics inevitably highlights the novel’s reactionary slant; it prefigures posthumanism ‘s troublesome relationship20 with these categories by way of a lament, an invocation of the barbarians at the gate. The relevance of these prefigurations to posthumanist thought can chiefly be found in their potential for articulating posthumanism’ affirmative potential. Strikingly, Stoner’s aesthetic (repeatedly and emphatically embraced by critics upon the republication of the novel) is one of negativity to the point of engaging mainly with thanatopolitics. Solon’s maxim  – that no man should be deemed happy until he is dead  – is applied, in Stoner, in a way that cannot wholly be described as ironic, but is certainly not intended affirmatively. William Stoner’s life can perhaps, and generously, be deemed authentic, but the value of his authenticity can only be authenticated, so to speak, relative to a framework of assessment that is consigned by the novel to the irretrievable past. As such the novel erects a memorial that is inert, lifeless, and ultimately archival – to be  Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom, and Katherine Runswick Cole, “Posthuman Disability Studies,” Subjectivity 7, no. 4 (2014): 342–61, https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.15. 20

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retrieved, if it is at all to be revived, only once the moribund tradition has been miraculously revived. (If there is intellectual kinship to be found in Stoner, it is with Allan rather than Harold Bloom.) There is no embraceable vibrancy in the humanities, no vitalism, because no such attributes can be found in a posthumanist universe, one in which the vibrant matter of leaky bodies serves to detract, rather than augment. By this reasoning, Stoner actually serves to entomb its ideological implications along with its protagonist; it lights the funeral pyre of humanism and stays just long enough to see the embers go out.

6

 oda: Elegiac Lessons C for Posthumanist Thought

Examined a half-century after the book’s publication, the relational architecture in Stoner appears reactionary, inviting, as such, a plenitude of critical and revisionist readings. The potential foci of such readings include representations of various stereotypical dichotomies such as masculinity/femininity, ablebodiedness/disability, and moral ­purity/impurity, all three of which are explicitly and implicitly interlinked in the narrative. This list is not exhaustive, but it provides a starting point, and a way of approaching the underlying question of late humanist/posthumanist value systems. First, a reappraisal of Edith Stoner might begin with examining her character as an expression of four classical tropes of villainous femininity. She is (a) void of sexual pleasure, or, rather of the ability to respond to and augment Stoner’s sexuality; (b) intellectually shallow and passive, with no interests outside the domestic sphere; (c) physically lazy and therefore unable to tend even to her domestic duties; (d) materialistic and covetous, forcing Stoner into debt. All four qualities are variations on the same theme, that of passivity and incapability – though, crucially, animalistic rather than inanimate. Second, that theme reappears in connection with Hollis Lomax and Charles Walker, both of whom exhibit a similar mixture of physical and intellectual incapability, and in Lomax’ case the same absence of

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authentic sexuality. The three characters are entangled in a matrix of femininity and disability, construed as morally toxic and detrimental to the fundamental masculine (farmer’s) values related to work and production. Those values are of course deeply entwined with the production of both femininity and disability in the industrial age. In the case of women, the segregation and gendering of public and private spheres is only one factor in the devaluation and masking of women’s work. As regards disability, industrialization has been articulated as a primary cause of the linkage between disability and lack of productivity.21 The moral value of work, i.e. measurable and recognized work, is thus deeply embedded in the capitalist system which generates the (de)valuations of female embodiment and bodily impairment that subsequently becomes codified as womanhood and disability. Being a woman and being a disabled person in this system equates with unproductivity and passivity in an economic sense, attributes that are viewed as direct consequences of biologically essential properties rather than social arrangements. There is significant differentiation between physical and intellectual labor, however, and although the exclusion of women and disabled people from both spheres of activity is comparable, the justification of this exclusion rests on different conceptions of biological incapability. Whereas physical labor can be seen as a scalar activity on which discrete boundaries are imposed (a worker must be capable of completing a factory shift, whether eight, ten or twelve hours), intellectual labor requires qualities that are not divisible, e.g. a capacity for disinterestedness and universalism – essential components of ratio. Disabled people and women are thus conceived as physically inferior by degrees, but morally and intellectually inferior in kind. Female bodies and disabled bodies, which by comparison with able, male bodies suffer from a biological deficit that in turn gives grounds for narcissism and intellectual particularism.22 In Stoner, these dual threats to the  Michael Oliver and Colin Barnes, The New Politics of Disablement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Brendan Gleeson, “Domestic Space and Disability in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne, Australia,” Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 2 (2001): 223–40; Deborah A Stone, The Disabled State, Health, Society, and Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 22  Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 21

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academy – the last bastion of humanistic ratio – are carried out by way of a pincer maneuver. The pram in the hall is mirrored by the wheelchair at the gate. For posthumanist thinking, the primary lesson from Stoner is that the anxieties that play out in the beleaguered citadel are inherently linked to the Foucauldian values of productivity and control, particularly over the inanimate, “pure” matter that is malleable through intellectual work. The leakage of animate matter through the vectors of gender and disability amount to an infection of a sphere that may no longer be vital or generative by dint of its own resources, but which could nevertheless be preserved as a monument to itself, an archival necropolis, were it not for the breakdown of the safeguards of the (late) humanist order. The challenge for posthumanist thinking is what implicit valuations of productivity and ability remains embedded in its assumptions. Although not a priori gendered or otherwise marked, such valuations are inevitably enmeshed in modes of embodiment, begging the question of what, if any, standards are applied. The decentering of specific conceptions of humanity, which remains a core item on the posthumanist agenda, does not necessarily entail a decentering of valuation hierarchies. Posthumanism remains split between approaches to the problem of hierarchies, with one line of inquiry leading to reappraisals of the members of marginal categories and their prototypical qualities and attributes, and another, more radical line leading to the questioning of the valuation of particular qualities as such. Neither lines have so far lead to satisfactory forms of affirmative posthumanism, however. The first risks a reestablishment of old hierarchies with slightly shifted boundaries, while the second leads, in many cases, to fuzzy holism. Stoner provides no answers; its moral imagination is filled with longing and ruins, not plans and blueprints. It simply demonstrates the need for an affirmative direction in posthumanist thinking, by demonstrating, albeit with considerable aesthetic power, the sterility and thanatopolitical direction in which late humanism believes itself to be headed. These tendencies predate (and prefigure) many key developments in posthumanist thought, providing it with targets – thought not, of course, the means by which to reach them.

11 The Curious Case of Normative Incomparability: Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of Comparisons Hartmut von Sass

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 3:19)

1

Introduction: “For All Is Vanity”

There can be nothing genuinely unique. Insofar as uniqueness entails the claim that something is either the only element within a particular class or kind, or that it does not belong to any class or kind whatsoever, the idea of uniqueness itself remains an empty set. To be the singular element within a class is self-contradictory because it is constitutive for a class to

H. von Sass (*) Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_11

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include more than just one single item; the very idea of being a class is bound to the plurality of its members or units. And the notion of being beyond every class is an equally confused conception since it is always possible to create a class to which the presumably unique item could belong. Classes and kinds are not “out there,” but are made up and created for heuristic arrangements. Incomparability seems to share the same fate as uniqueness because of its impossibility—not because the one presupposes the other, but rather because the arrangements allowing for a comparison are always available. It is always possible to find a particular avenue to compare A and B. This is at odds with the exclusive idea of incomparability, which means not only that A and B cannot be compared from the point of view of a T, but that there is no T at all by which A and B could possibly be brought into a comparative setting. But again, this idea leads nowhere or, at best, to an impasse. Nevertheless, uniqueness and incomparability have their place in our ordinary and less-ordinary speech: the incomparable character of a person’s performance, or the horrendous evil of a unique historical event. The incomparability of these extreme instances is an expression of deep appreciation, admiration, and love; or of horror, disgust, and indignation; but always a superlative in its best or worst sense. Given the tension between its structural impossibility and the fact of its everyday application, the language game of incomparability is not played on a literal, but rather (for lack of a better term) on an “expressive” level. It does not refer to a structural breakdown of potential comparisons, but signifies the withdrawal of an item from comparative arrangements. Therefore, speaking of incomparable instances is normatively loaded (or sometimes even burdened), since the reason for declaring an item to be incomparable is either rooted in an evaluative judgment or goes back to a moral reason. In all these cases, structurally speaking, a comparison is not excluded or impossible, but the comparative act itself has been put into question. It is not the technical possibility of a particular comparison that is denied here; rather—precisely when facing this possibility—the comparative performance and its implementation is taken to be normatively (i.e., evaluatively or morally) problematic, dubious, or even forbidden. This normative form of incomparability is based on the conviction, or

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sometimes even the moral duty, not to compare. It is a reaction to the predicament that a comparison is structurally possible, and yet for many evaluatively counterintuitive or morally untenable. Put technically: normative incomparability presupposes structural comparability. However, the range and concrete instances of normative incomparability are not self-evident or beyond dispute. On the contrary, a person might be deemed incomparable by one person, but not by others, because of the existence of totally different relationships to that same person. Instances of war, destruction, and injustice could be characterized as incomparable by some, or taken to be in line with similarly mundane events by others. Consequently, the claim that A is incomparable with B (in relation to T or any other regard) is not a judgment restricted to the item A, but represents an expression of a person’s relation to that A, an evaluation of A by someone according to taste, preference, or affection; or a determination of A’s moral status with reference to our obligation, concern and care, or commitment to A. Contrary to instances of structural incomparability, their normative counterparts are essentially based on a personal and hence, an indexical, as well as contextual, element. Without a normative assessment of A, the incomparability of A would not be reachable. Normative incomparability is, thus, bound to an individual or collective judgment that is either latent or explicit. This obviously has far-reaching entailments for a methodological approach to this kind of incomparability. Characterizing A as incomparable is not a reflection of an “objective” setting or of matters of fact, but it is itself a highly normative claim. Questioning A’s incomparable character in response bears witness to a deep disagreement—a gap between divergent, opposite, and most importantly, incompatible convictions regarding A’s status, as well as our different relations to A. Comparing A with other items stands then for an equally normative claim refuting the normatively incomparable character of A, but not necessarily its normative significance. In any case, what comes here to the fore is the moral dimension of the act of comparing item A as a claim about A’s status, as well as, more generally, the institution of drawing comparisons as a theme of ethical reflection. Leaving the merely structural difficulties of comparisons for the contextual embeddedness of normatively disputed comparative acts now

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forces us to confront the quest for comparative adequacy and the dangers of missing it. Again, whether one does (or does not) and what counts as “adequate” here is itself part of the discourse in which comparisons are either part of that semantic problem or an ingredient in (dis)solving it. To be able to give a philosophically satisfying account of normative incomparability, along with the debate about the precarious status of comparisons, calls, I think, for concreteness as opposed to hasty generalizations. This means doing justice to different takes on a particular case, instead of reducing ramifications within a complicated constellation, calling for “thick descriptions” instead of a merely technical vocabulary. In October 1997, John Maxwell Coetzee, future recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, was invited to give the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. The South African writer did talk about “human values,” but in an unexpected manner. He did not, as usual, present a philosophical talk with more-or-less abstract considerations on a topic of common and recently urgent concern, but instead gave two lectures that playfully mirrored the same occasion at Princeton that he had been invited to. Coetzee performed a reading of a literary text about his fictional character, an older and fairly successful writer named Elizabeth Costello, who was invited to give two guest lectures at a prestigious college somewhere in the US—clearly a mise en abyme. Both lectures by Coetzee were published, together with commentaries by Peter Singer and others, as The Lives of Animals, which is a fitting title for what Costello had presented—or rather, confronted—the audience with at the fictional Appleton College. Coetzee’s Costello is deeply concerned with our relation to and our treatment of animals, and she eagerly criticizes both the immoral lack of mindfulness towards these fellow creatures on a private, as well as political, social, and economic, level; and, in her view, the wrong-headed (yet philosophically prominent) accounts that already critically address that untenable situation for animals. In Coetzee’s lectures, there is a constant oscillation between literary fiction and philosophical allusion, including arguments, examples, counter-voices, and even some footnotes, an oscillation that later becomes more pronounced by integrating these two lectures into a longer piece (to avoid the term “novel”) simply called Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003. This book consists of eight “lessons” in which Coetzee’s Princeton lectures are

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republished as the third and fourth lessons (excluding the notes) and to which the author adds different scenes where Costello, as well as her concern for animals, plays a major role. We will return to Elizabeth Costello again later on for a more lengthy discussion, but by way of introduction, I shall focus here on one element that is particularly relevant to our theme. Early on in her first lecture and then from time to time again, the character Elizabeth Costello draws a precarious, yet not completely new, comparison: our treatment of animals, she claims, is like the treatment of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, in this case turning the Holocaust into a daily business. With what exactly are we, as readers and as potential addressees of Costello’s critique, confronted here? A fair, responsible, mindful comparison? An act of genuine moral concern tied to an adequate manner of expressing this concern? Or an exaggeration based on obliterating the categorical difference between human beings and animals by hinting at their potentially common features—“for all is vanity”? Or a comparative act to be met with indignation and protest in order to safeguard the incomparable character of what has been done to the Jewish people? Coetzee—himself both an author and a voice who has a highly peculiar relation to Elizabeth within the complex narrative structure—not only presents Costello’s moral insurrection, but also divergent and conflicting reactions to her eagerness to defend the lives of animals in her lectures, as well as during her stay at Appleton in general. On various levels, her account not only elicits reservations and objections, but also causes irritation and many misunderstandings. It is in particular the delicate comparison and its context within Coetzee’s lectures and “lessons” that gives rise to a ramified and intriguing debate which eventually combines three major issues: animal ethics as a general matter, literature that “hosts” this philosophical issue as a mode of approaching it, and the theme’s amplification by a severe comparative provocation that sets the framework for a quest for adequacy. And this quest leads to a plain conflict: comparing something with something else, or securing its status by declaring it as incomparable. The following chapter will draw on Coetzee’s Costello “lessons” not to answer the problem of normative incomparability (I do not even know what that could possibly mean), but rather to give a careful account of the difficulties, conflicts, and tensions in trying

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to find the adequacy of comparative acts and of meeting their limits, while ultimately touching upon the evaluative or moral impossibility of comparison in the first place, as well as the notion of what it means to belong to the realm of incomparability.

2

Meeting Elizabeth Costello

Elizabeth Costello is invited to give an honorary lecture on a topic of her choice at Appleton College. She is an Australian writer, best known for a James Joyce adaptation called The House on Eccles Street, and is now, late in her career, probably expected to reflect on her work and development as an artist at this honorable occasion created on her behalf. However, not only the theme chosen, but also the way in which she approaches the topic is surprising, if not irritating, to the audience. Under the heading The Lives of Animals she gives a two-part lecture, narrated by Coetzee with the title “The Philosophers and the Animals” and then, for the following day, “The Poets and the Animals.” Nothing in her work prepares her readers and listeners for this ramified issue, while Costello herself is also described as slightly unprepared both thematically and emotionally. It becomes increasingly obvious that Costello is deeply concerned, even frustrated and outraged, about the treatment of animals, not only about the industry built around meat production—which includes the imprisoning, fattening, and finally, slaughtering of animals—but even more so, about the ordinary devaluation of animals as our fellow beings, as sensitive and often suffering creatures. And this engagement with the topic ultimately amounts to a presentation that is not distanced, balanced, fluent, or well argued, but it does testify to her real involvement und true concern about “the lives of animals,” even though she appears unsure about how to approach the issue. In her lectures, and even more so in the following discussions and encounters at Appleton, Costello is characterized as vulnerable and sensitive. In her responses to critical, but mostly benevolent questions, she

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appears almost rude, uncertain in a manner that exhibits impoliteness, latent aggression, and finally, a lack of “self-insight,” as her son John says.1 John plays a major role within the architecture of both “lessons.” He is a professor of physics at Appleton College; however, his mother’s invitation has nothing to do with his position there. From the beginning of the narrative, it is quite clear that Elizabeth’s relation to her son, as well as to his wife Norma, is tense, distanced, burdened by missed chances in the past, and maybe even characterized by a lack of genuine love—or a love that had been eventually substituted by a superficial sense of duty that one might suppose to be part of familial commitment. This is not to say that there are no scenes of tenderness and care—Coetzee demonstrates a concern that John feels for his mother in a few instances, yet leaves it unclear as to how Elizabeth really feels about her son—but the gulf between the two characters dominates their relationship. Here, Coetzee creates a telling contrast between her awareness of animals and their lives, and her latent, and sometimes explicit, ignorance towards her human fellow beings. At times, one gets the impression that Elizabeth simply forgets, or is even ignorant of the fact, that the young man accompanying her is her son. In particular, John (but also Norma and some of the other figures who appear in the course of the events at Appleton) serves as a counter-voice to Costello’s claim that our relation to animals and their ethical status, as well as our moral duties towards them is in tension with our factual behavior towards nonhuman animals of all sorts. Hence, objections, hesitations, and reservations, as well as alternative accounts of Costello’s activism, are put into the mouths of John, Norma, and others. Often enough, they represent well-known and prominent positions that have actually been defended by philosophers and animal activists, past and present, including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Midgley, and, in a different respect, Thomas Nagel. Here again, the demarcation between fiction and the realities of an ongoing debate becomes blurred in interesting ways.

 John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Penguin Books, 2003, 113; all page numbers in brackets refer to this book. 1

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So, does Elizabeth Costello have a general message? To ask this straightforward question invites the danger of neglecting the setting which Coetzee has prepared for his central character and his readers. As much as Coetzee himself has refused to give a standard talk at Princeton, Elizabeth Costello also does not give us a detailed argument, a well-worked-out treatise, a message to be easily taken home. Rather, Coetzee seems to have created a resonance chamber constituted by Costello’s attempts to express her deep concerns and by the divergent reactions to those concerns. Both her lectures and the various responses to them are literary offerings to which we, as readers, might respond without necessarily adopting one single stance. Coetzee, as well as Costello, both remain writers, authors in the fictional genre, not theorists under the consistent pressure to have intellectual clarity. The clarity that literature in fact provides is the capacity to reflect on the irreducible difficulty of taking sides in these debates, as well as on the conflict between divergent and (potentially) equally appalling or appealing standpoints—which may eventually involve the reader in this struggle to the point that it becomes his or her own, if it is not already. Despite this polyphonic constellation, one can still pin down several aspects within Costello’s ramified and somewhat meandering speech and responses to questions—aspects that seem to be essential for appreciating her concern, and for understanding her impatience and dedication. The major thread running through Costello’s remarks on animals is the cruelty against them; she alludes to the abattoirs and the industrialized animal farms that she had to pass on her way to Appleton College. However, Costello is even more concerned with the reasons behind our constant neglect of the reality of ongoing violence against animals, as well as their functionalization. It is this context in which Costello repeatedly comes up with the comparison of our treatment of animals with Nazi concentration camps like Treblinka (63)—combined with the desperate and exasperated question of how it had been possible to be blind to the disappearance of Jewish people, to have allegedly not known about the camps these people were transported to, to not have smelled their burning bodies. Costello states that these ignorant people, mostly Germans, “lost their humanity” (64), and then adds: “The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals,” while the thrust

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of her comparison is based on turning this “accusation” upside down by seeing animals as subject to the same treatment as prisoners in concentration camps (65). Without a doubt, Costello’s comparison—and we will return to it in greater detail in due course—is the peak of her talk and, at the same time, its main source of irritation, anger, and even resentment. However, Costello’s comparative performance belongs to a longer tradition (along with severe critiques of it) in which the reference to the Nazi past and the horrendous evil perpetrated against Jewish people has been placed into the context of our dealings with animals. The term holocaust is itself connected to the significance of animal sacrifices given to God, a historical and semantic background that might even help to elicit this comparison and its terminology.2 Moreover, there are several prominent predecessors to Costello who have used this specific comparison to underline, in their view, the unacceptable industrial, but also experimental, treatment of animals. This group includes the Jewish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as Jacques Derrida who reflects on the “pathetic” self-evidence of this comparison, along with the pictures and images it provokes.3 There are also voices without a Jewish background that rely on that comparison and the reference to genocidal mass murder. In the words of the philosopher and animal rights activist Tom Regan: “Do we dare to speak of a Holocaust for the animals? May we depict the horror they must endure, using this fearful image of wanton inhumanity, without desecrating the memory of those innocents who died in the death camps?”4 Regan replies to this rhetorical question in the affirmative, as many others do.5 Nevertheless, this comparison remains, for some, objectionable, whereas it seems for others to be “potentially useful and illuminating, and may help to underline the gravity of our  See Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, New  York: Continuum, 2000, 156–157; Timothy M. Costelloe, “The Invisibility of Evil: Moral Progress and the ‘Animal Holocaust’”, in: Philosophical Papers 32:2 (2003), 109–131, 110. 3  Cf. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, in: Critical Inquiry 28:2 (2002), 369–418, 394–395. 4  Tom Regan, The Struggle for Animal Rights, Clarks Summit: International Society for Animals Rights, 1987, 76–77. 5  See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, New York: Harper Collins, 1975, 102. 2

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oppression of nonhuman animals,” as the philosopher and descendent of Holocaust survivors David Sztybel aptly states.6 In this context, it is not without relevance who it is that is drawing this comparison. Besides Costello’s controversial comparison, there are further salient critiques in her lectures and replies. To begin with, Costello is highly critical of the idea that justifying our concern for animals lies in specific features common to human and nonhuman animals. Among the prominent candidates are reason, sensitivity, self-consciousness—all of which Costello is ready to refute by stating: The question to ask should not be: Do we have something in common […] with other animals? (With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitled to treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonoring their corpses.) I return to the death camps. The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims […]. (79)

Critically, Costello distances herself from the logic of shared features for the obvious and often repeated reason that this line of thinking necessarily excludes every being not possessing the feature in question. Human beings—children, mentally-challenged people, people suffering from dementia—could easily drop out of moral concern.7 The second part of that passage leads to an additional aspect in Costello’s account: “… the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims,” she says. This is at the core of her diagnosis, as well as her demand on us which is derived from this diagnosis: to think oneself into the place of someone else. It is a kind of relocation of oneself “into the place of ” someone else. It is an intentional act of cognition (“to think”), but apparently also of acknowledging, discerning,  David Sztybel, “Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?”, in: Ethics and the Environment 11:1 (2006), 97–132, 130; cf. also 99. 7  Cf. Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People”, in: idem, The Realistic Spirit. Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, Cambridge, MA / London: MIT Press, 1991, 319–334, esp. 319–320. 6

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understanding, feeling.8 The “crime against humanity” consists here in a refusal to perform that capacity for sympathy and empathy. It is Costello’s conviction that this capacity for empathy is far less limited than usually assumed. In an almost deprecatory response to Thomas Nagel’s seminal paper “What it is like to be a bat?”9 Costello explains that it is her task as a writer to think herself into characters that have never existed in order to infer from this imagining “what it is like to be (…)” and that it is also open to our imagination to think oneself into an animal. Thus, she states: “If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.” (80). Here, Costello is in danger of reactivating what was previously criticized, namely that the fact of sharing something with an entity that one tries to think oneself into is also the condition of doing so successfully. And it remains unclear and vague what this “substrate of life”—allegedly shared by bats, apes, marine animals, and human beings alike—really is. However, what becomes clear is Costello’s interest in a completely different approach to the “lives of animals” that is not dictated by the Western rationalism connected to the names of Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant (all of whom have their appearance in Costello’s talk and are targets of her critique, esp. 67). This approach hints at the possibility of what she calls “sympathetic imagination,” which has more to do with the abilities of the “heart” than with the capacities of our reasoning (80).  One could also claim that Costello’s way of putting the matter here—namely, that it is a question of thinking into the existence of someone else—is terminologically inaccurate, since “thought” is still too similar and close to reason, which she otherwise repudiates as an inadequate source for our sympathetic dealings with animals. A similar problem can be found in Wittgenstein’s discussion of a particular “way of thinking” (Denkweise) since what he is really after is a mode of wider expression, articulation, and even feeling. The same problem can also be found in Ludwik Fleck’s notion of a “thought style” or “style of thinking” (Denkstil) because what is meant here is not restricted to thinking either, but includes preferences, habituation, taste; see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Part I, 3rd edition, ed. by G.E.M.  Anscombe and Rush Rhees, transl. by G.E.M. Anscombe, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973, 1–172, § 597 inter alia; on Fleck (with several references) Babette E. Babich, “From Fleck’s Denkstil to Kuhn’s paradigm: Conceptual schemes and incommensurability”, in: International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17:3 (2003), 75–92, 81. 9  See Thomas Nagel, “What it is like to be a bat?”, in: idem, Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 165–180, esp. 169 and 172. 8

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All these hints are really not more than hints. These three aspects of Costello’s concern—the comparison between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust, the refutation of the notion of shared features as a justification for our moral duties towards others (including animals), and the attempt to change our thinking about animals through regarding this kind of “thinking” as a matter of “heart,” and not primarily of reason— will accompany us in the sections to come.

3

A Delicate Comparison and Its Aftermath

First of all, it is disputed whether Costello’s references to the Holocaust, concentration camps, and the Nazi past really constitute an actual comparison—and not just another trope. A few commentators suggest that, instead, we are dealing with a metaphor of persuasion in passages like the following in which Costello claims: “We are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.” (65) The South African philosopher Ward Jones comments on this: Elizabeth Costello is here redescribing the animal industry by way of a metaphor: the animal industry, she says, is a Holocaust. A metaphor works by claiming that a target object is susceptible to the properties of a new, introduced object. In saying that the animal industry is a holocaust, Elizabeth Costello is inviting us to take the moral attitude appropriate to the Holocaust—that of moral horror—and to apply it to the animal industry that surrounds us.10

There are different possible reactions to this characterization. One could insist on Costello’s claim that we are in fact dealing with a comparison here without denying the metaphorical element within it, insofar as— such as in the Aristotelian tradition—every metaphor entails, or is based  Ward E. Jones, “Elizabeth Costello and the Biography of the Moral Philosopher”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69:2 (2011), 209–220, 214–15. 10

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on, a comparative act.11 In this case, one should be ready to explain which exact sense this metaphorical element, that presumably goes beyond the comparative act, consists in. Alternatively, if one does not want to commit oneself to this explanation, one could, generally, refute Jones’s interpretation. Then, however, one must accept another commitment, namely to at least circumscribe the way in which a metaphor works and to take a stance within the wide field of theories on metaphors and metaphorical meaning in order to pin down why the above passage is not metaphorical. For the sake of the argument, there is a less difficult way out of this bind: by not refuting Jones’s take and in regarding, heuristically, Costello’s claim as a comparison—a modest approach that will be justified in the course of subsequent interpretation and by the aspects and details it brings to the fore.12 A similar move might prove useful for the alternative claim that Costello does not present a comparison or a metaphor, but an analogy.13 One could, in response, deny that Costello’s reference to the Holocaust entails an analogical element, but then we confront a problem similar to the one encountered in the case of metaphors: due to the close relation between comparisons and analogies, one would be committed to elaborating on the structural differences between both tropes—an obligation that again serves to separate us from the initial issue under discussion. Hence, I will stick to the comparative claim as heuristically fruitful without necessarily repudiating an analogical dimension. And there is another, simple reason for this focus on Costello’s comparison between our

 See Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, 6 and 10–11. 12  This is, however, not to say that I think Jones is correct in characterizing Costello’s claim as a metaphor. Insofar as metaphors extend the meaning of a term and, hence, are not fully reducible to a nonmetaphorical expression, it is not easy to see where the metaphorical element lies when Costello relates the fate of animals to the Holocaust. But this refutation requires more space that would, given the context here, lead us astray; see Max Black, “Metaphor”, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 55 (1954/1955), 273–294, esp. 282–83. 13  See Marjorie Garber, “Reflections”, in: John Maxwell Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, 73–84, 74; see also Andy Lamey, “Sympathy and Scapegoating in J.M.  Coetzee”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 171–192, who speaks of Costello’s “wild analogy” between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust (173). 11

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treatment of animals and mass murder: it is her who presents this as a comparative act while being aware of its ambivalent status (62 and 65–66).

Costello, Kafka’s Red Peter, and the Holocaust Now, what does Elizabeth Costello’s comparison look like? First of all, there are two crucial comparisons at play. Right at the beginning of Costello’s first lecture we find Elizabeth comparing herself to Red Peter in Kafka’s “Report for an Academy,” an ape named Peter who conveys his life story before the members of a learned society. Peter adopts the behavior of a human in the attempt to gain his freedom from conditions of confinement, eventually claiming that he is no longer capable of feeling like an ape (a fact which indicates that his transformation had been, in a way, successful, since Peter seems to be content with his achievement).14 Elizabeth, also standing in front of a learned audience, alludes to this “Report” by stating that she feels like Red Peter. However, it remains vague what she means to express by that surprising opening. Is she referring to Peter’s transformation and the loss of his animal existence and experience? Then, Peter’s development might be mirroring the ontogenesis of every single human being—something which may be considered “successful” if an animal has become human and is no longer able to feel the animalistic existence anymore, or return to it. Or is Costello’s introductory remark a critique of the suppression of our existence to rules, customs, and standards that are alien to us, and hence, by effect, alienating? A passage that indicates Costello’s pervasive criticism of rationalism and reason might be taken to confirm this reading. She quotes Kafka’s Peter: “Do I have a choice? If I do not subject my discourse to reason, whatever that is, what is left for me but to gibber and emote and knock over my water glass and generally make a monkey of myself?” (68) Costello describes Red Peter as a “branded, marked,  Although the “report” remains ambiguous, Peter says, “If I review my development and its goal up to this point, I do not complain, but I am not content. […] On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I wished to achieve. You shouldn’t say it was not worth the effort. In any case, I don’t want any human being’s judgment. I only want to expand knowledge. I simply report.” (Franz Kafka, “Report for an Academy”, available under: http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/kafka/ reportforacademyhtml.html) 14

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wounded animal”—exactly how she sees herself while speaking to her audience. From the start, her lecture is enigmatic not only because she leaves it to her audience to discover the comparison’s payoff, but also because of the status of her comparison. She comments on this status as follows: “I did not intend it [the remark that I feel like Red Peter] ironically. It means what it says. I say what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean.” (62). She means what she says—she feels like the ape in front of an academy. Elizabeth is the “branded, marked, wounded animal” whose existence thus far had been a kind of preparation for playing a human being not only in its mode of constant pretense, but also for playing a human being to the point where no return to animal life is possible. Her “second nature”? However, apart from both standing in front of an academy, the comparison between Peter and Elizabeth begins to dissolve, and differences emerge that Costello just ignores or suspends. Peter’s journey is an attempt to gain the freedom to eventually experience freedom’s ambivalences,15 while Costello stands at Appleton because of an invitation she has freely accepted. After all, Peter leads a human life that he reports in some detail to be fairly happy and not at all similar to that of a “wounded animal.” He intentionally underlines, at the end, that he just “reports” to the academy. This is the final sign that the mere report cannot be just that (a report), since underlining the name of the genre is not part of the genre of a report, but functions on a different level. Costello seems to miss the absurd irony in Kafka’s short story that either narrates an impossible gathering between a monkey and the silent members of an academy, or that all participants in that scene are animals struggling to become human, surrounded by other animals, nonhumans, or no-­longer-­ nonhumans. In any case, contrary to Costello, Red Peter cannot only mean what he says; there is much more to it, and not giving space to this

 Red Peter explains, “I do not mean this great feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, I perhaps recognized it, and I have met human beings who yearn for it. But as far as I am concerned, I did not demand freedom either then or today. Incidentally, among human beings people all too often are deceived by freedom. And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime.” (ibid.). 15

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surplus shows Costello to be lacking the humor required to appreciate the joke in all its seriousness. The question is now whether (or to what extent) this one-sided first comparison touches on the more prominent and dangerous second one. Some of the passages in which Costello presents the comparison between our treatment of animals and the Holocaust have already been quoted. This comparison appears repeatedly. Here is another passage taken from a later chapter of the book called “The Problem of Evil”: “The massacre of the defenseless is being repeated all around us, day after day […] a slaughter no different in scale or horror of moral import from what we call the Holocaust; yet we choose not to see it.” (156) It is obvious that Costello is referring primarily to industrialized animal farms that function as slaughterhouses for effective killing. She intentionally only hints at this industry that everyone is at least somewhat familiar with in order to make the impression even stronger by calling upon everyone’s imagination (63). She also uses the comparison to react critically to objections against this comparative act. She states: And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its victims are dead, after all, it does not burn them to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our homes) is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been—pardon the tastelessness of the following—to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with. (66)

Costello shows here that she is very aware that she is entering into a precarious zone by admitting the “tastelessness” of what her comparison has to offer. Immediately after this passage she reflects on this polemical move and its “cheap point-scoring”; although, the coolness of philosophical expression, “the language of Aristotle and Porphyry, of Augustine and Aquinas, of Descartes and Bentham, of, in our day, Mary Midgley and Tom Regan” is “available” to her (66). After all, she speaks not as a

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member of philosophers, but as a writer. And a twist in the comparative act belongs to the heated polemic of that intellectual guild by not only relating a concentration camp to an “animal farm,” but also by using the difference between them precisely to amplify the initial comparison: accordingly, the fact that the killing of animals is part of our food production is, Costello implies, by no means the justification for this institution of industrial killing. If this means-ends logic were truly valid, the utilization of dead bodies killed at places like Treblinka would at least soften the horror of mass murder and destruction.16 The “tastelessness” of this suggestion is supposed to strengthen the adequacy of comparing Treblinka with these farms —with a blunt, but consistent conclusion: “Each day a fresh Holocaust” (80). In sum, Costello wants first to bring awareness to this killing industry by comparing it to a past that elicits moral horror, anger, shame, and disgust—in order to generate the same reaction in the case of animals, regarding their lives and deaths. Secondly, Costello admits to trying to consciously and intentionally chastise people, not for primarily failing to engage their thoughts and reasoning, but rather their “hearts” (79; see also Sect. 4). The “wounded” animal is not part of a deductive argumentation, but the embodied result of a perverse system, while these oppressed and maltreated corpses bear an evidence that eventually leads to similar reactions and “reactive attitudes” as it does in the case of Nazi concentration camps. It is a transfer of moral evidence. Thirdly, this hope is nothing more than a hope, and not a reality yet. Comparing the treatment of animals with mass killing also entails its comparative inversion: our blindness and ignorance regarding the lives and suffering of animals reminds Costello of the blindness and ignorance of the people living in close proximity to these camps and, allegedly, not knowing—or being unable to “afford to know”—what was really going on there (64). Not knowing is then a way of being guilty too. “Only those in the camps were innocent,” Costello concludes (ibid.). This is a fourth aspect, namely that the expectation that this wrong-doing will be punished by being “inwardly  See also Karen Dawn and Peter Singer, “Converging Convictions. Coetzee and His Characters on Animals”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 109–118, 116. 16

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marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance” remains unfulfilled, as it does when it comes to our wrong-headed practice of treating animals—although, “we cannot accept that people with crimes on their conscience can be healthy and happy” (65; cf. also 80). Stirring up, changing, and reforming our attitude and moral stance concerning animals and our relation to them cannot leave our real actions untouched. Here, the truthfulness of a belief and conviction lies in its consistency with the deeds derived from it.17 Accordingly, Costello not only points to a perverse system and our neglect of it, but also alludes to the effects of giving up our ignorance: having an awareness of, wanting and “affording” to know about, the treatment of animals; and by implication, feeling guilt in terms of our wrongdoing in the past while not being able to live “healthy and happy” without that change of “heart.” There are more practical effects as well that are important to Costello: obviously, the protest against the inhumane practices of factory farming in all its forms; moreover, vegetarianism as consequence of refusing to “put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal”; and to really find it “nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds.” (83) In a conversation after her lecture, Costello uses this response taken from Plutarch’s moral essays to underline the awkward differences we are ready to implicitly draw in regard to our dealings with fellow humans and animals, dead and alive.18 This is, for Costello, an inconsistent way of acting, whereas her way of presenting this inconsistency is, for her son John, who is standing next to her and listening to her already well-known “Plutarch response,” an unnecessarily harsh way of putting the matter. “Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper. […] He wishes his mother had not come.” (83). Red Peter and the Holocaust—is there any relation between both comparisons presented in her lectures? It is fair to say, I think, that there is some tension here. While Kafka’s “Report for an Academy” reflects ironically on the development of a particular being towards his second  This is not advocating behaviorism but rather underlining an important element related to it; see Dewi Z. Phillips, “On Really Believing”, in: idem, Wittgenstein and Religion, Basingstoke / London: Macmillan, 1993, 33–55. 18  See on Costello’s (and Coetzee’s) plea for vegetarianism Marianne Dekoven, “Guest Column: Why Animals Now?”, in: PMLA 124:2 (2009), 361–369, esp. 364. 17

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and, more-or-less, human nature as a gradual loss of his animalistic preexistence, these potential transitions are not among Costello’s most critical issues. Rather, our irresponsibility towards animals, given our dominance and power, is the target of her severe admonition. She might feel displaced, standing there in front of her academic audience at Appleton; Red Peter, however, does not appear as the “wounded animal” that Costello considers him to be—despite his long, dangerous journey from the “Gold Coast” to a music hall in Hamburg. Hence, if one wants to defend Costello’s comparative reference to the Holocaust, one must disconnect it from the fact that she misinterprets Red Peter’s story, as well as from—as we shall see later—other problematic aspects within Costello’s speech and personality. Costello, as we have already seen, is not unaware of the precariousness of her comparisons, especially between animal industries and the Holocaust. She is also aware of addressing her audience as irresponsible, since those sitting there in front of her are the ones who are in danger of becoming similar to all the ignorant people who neglected the reality of mass killing during the Nazi era and willfully deceived themselves in remaining passive.19 Costello’s comparison does not only concern past atrocities, but contemporary ones too; her audience resembles those living around Treblinka. Stephen Mulhall comments on Elizabeth’s comparative suggestion as follows: “But what wounds her most deeply is not the likelihood that her comparison and charge will be thought morally incompetent and intellectually disreputable to the point of insanity; it is the fact that the position into which she places herself by making both is one that makes her seriously contemplate the possibility that she is going mad [...].”20 In following Mulhall and by evaluating Costello’s comparisons, one should pay attention to two different dimensions at play here (that are, of course, not completely separable from each other), namely the factual adequacy of Costello’s advocacy for the “lives of animals” and the personal involvement of herself, as well as her audience, who turn out to be some of the comparison’s addressees. The first dimension dominates  Cf. Timothy M. Costelloe, “The Invisibility of Evil: Moral Progress and the ‘Animal Holocaust,’” in: Philosophical Papers 32:2 (2003), 109–131, 123. 20  Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal. J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 56. 19

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the comments on and reviews of Coetzee’s novel (although it has often been denied that Elizabeth Costello belongs to this genre of novel),21 and I shall begin with this “factual” layer as well.

Three Objections The comparison between our treatment of animals and the killing of Jews in concentration camps has encountered three basic objections that touch on the general legitimacy of that comparative act: for one, there is a serious danger, some argue, of playing off one sort of “difficulty of life” against another.22 Comparing A and B is then tantamount to a certain kind of “play-off” totally inadequate to the status of both relata A and B. It is not the comparison as play-off that is the problem, but the character of the items to be compared with one another seems to prohibit that comparison. The concern consists, in this case, in the impression that Costello is already committed to this play-off by simply relating A and B comparatively. However, that charge is based on far-reaching assumptions concerning the comparative intention and turns out itself to be inadequate because it does not leave any space for the possibility of underlining aspects in A—precisely on behalf of B.  What Costello is really doing then, is not mutually playing A off B, but reciprocally amplifying aspects of both items. The second objection underlines crucial differences between animals and victims of inhumane treatment, differences that are in danger of being neglected in the act of comparing as equalizing. At Appleton Professor O’Hearne is the one who expresses this reservation. According to him: “Animals live, and they die: that is all. Thus to equate a butcher who slaughters a chicken with an executioner who kills a human being is  Jennifer Flynn calls Elizabeth Costello a “novella” (see her “The Lives of Animals and the Form-­ Content Connection,”in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 315–333, 317); See also Robert Pippin, “The Paradoxes of Power in the Early Novels of J.M. Coetzee”, in: ibid., 22–23. 22  This problem is discussed at some length by Stephen Mulhall who is consistent in his claim that this charge is then not only to be directed at Costello, but also at those who raise objections against her in the name of the singular character of the Holocaust; see Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal, 70 and 72. 21

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a grave mistake. The events are not comparable. They are not on the same scale.” (109) The point here is not so much the technical question of whether comparability really presupposes scalability (in fact, it does not) or what it exactly means to say that both events are truly “on the same scale.” The point here lies rather in our different reactions to the butcher and executioner. I do think that these “reactive attitudes” are telling and important for an open debate about this issue. However, it is questionable that these differences justify the inference from the gap between A and B, to the incomparability of A with B, as O’Hearne seems to suggest. Comparisons are, after all, not identifications. The most prominent concern is the charge of undermining the unique and singular character of the Holocaust—a character that removes this event from every comparative setting and declares it to be incomparable. The claim is not that the Holocaust could not be technically compared to other items or relata; in this sense, singularity is compatible with comparability (since singularity might even be considered to be a result of a comparison). The claim is rather that no comparison can do justice to that particular event and to those involved in it. It would, as Abraham Stern, another character in Coetzee’s “novel” and also a professor at Appleton, states in his response to Costello’s lecture, “insult the memory of the dead” (94). Stern is invited to join the dinner after Costello’s talk. Instead of doing so, he writes a letter to her stating that she “misunderstand[s] the nature of likeness” by inverting the initial comparison: the fact that Jews had been treated like animals does not, Stern holds, allow for claiming that animals are now treated like those imprisoned in concentration camps. Assuming that A is like B does not automatically allow for assuming that B is like A. This again presupposes a certain attitude to the Holocaust and its horror, as well as its victims. The inversion does not necessarily imply “blasphemy,” as Stern puts it; rather, it might underline and highlight the horrendous character of the Holocaust—and in presupposing this character, she turns her attention to another instance of moral collapse. It is quite the opposite of denying or belittling anything; on the basis of the gravity of the Holocaust, something else—that entertains particular similarities with that event — becomes the focus of our attention. Costello does not react to Stern’s

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letter. The critique remains unanswered—and maybe unanswerable (cf. 117).23 Critically, the historical integration of the Holocaust into a chain of events might, then, already be regarded as an expression of relativizing it.24 This is, of course, a real danger—but by no means a historiographic necessity. Constructively, to dissolve the triad of integration, comparison, and potential relativization, one might argue for a specific, “ontologically” extraordinary status of the Holocaust, either to justify its ­incomparability, or to severely restrict the items to which the Holocaust could possibly be compared. This second version can be found in what Robert Nozick has to say about the Holocaust. This event, he claims, is “so momentous” that it is almost impossible to grasp its “full significance.”25 Hence, the uncertainties when it comes to the question of how to react to it today—remembering, forgiving, forgetting? Nozick adds: “I believe  Cf. Ido Geiger, “Writing the Lives of Animals”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy, 145–169, esp. 153.—There is a historical Abraham Stern, a rather dubious figure; on this topic see Andy Lamey, “Sympathy and Scapegoating in J.M. Coetzee”, 185. 24  This has been debated in the so called “Historian’s Dispute” starting off with Ernst Nolte’s 1986 newspaper article “The Past That Will Not Pass” (“Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will”). In Nolte’s view, the decisive event of the twentieth century had been the Russian revolution in 1917, while causally connecting the Gulags with the Nazi concentration camps; his perspective is, for example, expressed in the following passage: 23

It is probable that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the ‘White Terror’ also committed terrible deeds, even though its program contained no analogy to the ‘extermination of the bourgeoisie’. Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an ‘Asiatic’ deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be the potential victims of an ‘Asiatic’ deed? Wasn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ more original than Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the ‘racial murder’ of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler’s most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass? Available under: https://www.staff.uni-giessen.de/~g31130/PDF/Nationalismus/ErnstNolte. pdf (the German original stems from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986); see also Stefan Berg, „Vergleichsweise orientiert. Eine orientierungstheoretische Betrachtung des Vergleichens“, in: Andreas Mauz / Hartmut von Sass (eds.), Hermeneutik des Vergleichs. Strukturen, Anwendungen und Grenzen komparativer Verfahren, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011, 277–303, esp. 294–299.—Admittedly, this dispute deserves more attention than I am able to give it here, and, surely, it would provide alternative material to elaborate on normative incomparability. 25  Robert Nozick, “The Holocaust”, in: idem, Examined Life. Philosophical Meditations, New York / London: A Touchstone Book, 1990, 236–242, 236.

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the Holocaust is an event like the Fall in the way traditional Christianity conceived it.“26 As a consequence, “the Holocaust has shut the door that Christ opened,”27 and it changed the situation of mankind altogether. Christ might have died for all our sins—but not for this one, not for what happened in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and all these places whose names are engraved into a history that has “ruined the reputation of the human family.”28 Nozick, a layman in theology, draws two major conclusions from this: one, what Christ has done for us, is something that humans now have to do for themselves; two, the death of a particular person can still be a true tragedy, but after the Holocaust there is no further tragedy and additional loss to be found in the death of humankind.29 What Nozick is presenting here is not necessarily the claim of full-­ blown incomparability regarding the Holocaust. Rather, he seems to refer to a very limited range of items that have the status to be comparable to the Holocaust: the mythological fall and the reconciliation by Christ. This is itself a comparison insofar as Nozick is not intentionally giving a doctrinal statement, but is rather comparing the status of the Holocaust with the status that both events have for Christianity and its dogmatic company. However, Nozick leaves room for two readings: either he merely sticks to a comparative mode by stating that the Holocaust has a similar weight in a secular age as the Fall and the work of Christ have had for the Christian tradition—which is in fact a claim for the singularity of the Holocaust (insofar as the Fall and Christ’s work are of no existential significance outside of Christianity); or Nozick maintains that the Fall and the work of Christ both had an exclusive status—and the Holocaust is the third event “enjoying” that “ontologically” transformative privilege (which is indeed a theological statement). Thus, either he claims the Holocaust to be truly incomparable (precisely by using comparison), or he severely limits the comparative range and restricts the incomparable status to this range.  Ibid., 237.  Ibid., 239. 28  Ibid., 238. 29  See ibid., 239 and 241; for a different account cf. Johann Frick, “On the survival of humanity”, in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47:2–3 (2017), 344–367, 360–362. 26 27

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Both readings are, indirectly, challenged by Costello’s comparison. Obviously, she does not restrict incomparability to certain quasi-­ theological items, nor does she think that the Holocaust is incomparable, hence the question of whether the comparison she presents is factually defensible. There are several possibilities for potentially fruitful comparisons between the Holocaust and our treatment of animals that are based on different suggestions for comparative regards: for instance, “degradation and destruction” (vivisection, skinning, displacement from homes), a particular “apparatus” (secrecy, namelessness, bureaucratization), “forms of agency” (ordinary perpetrators, disowning of responsibility, conditioned indifference), etc.30 Elizabeth Costello herself is not explicit when it comes to these possibilities, at least not in this structured way of scrolling through the tertia comparationis, but it is in line with her intention, and some of the listed comparative regards do play a role in her lecture. Is this list of any help in assessing the Holocaust’s incomparability? Those presenting these suggestions think, of course, that it is helpful in maintaining (referring to Costello) that, for her and in certain significant respects, comparisons between the Holocaust and what one might refer to as the oppression of animals can be delivered. This, one could add, is for Costello not a means of lowering the Jews, but rather of raising the animals to their level, as one commentator has it.31 But again, this repeats the initial problem, rather than dissolving normative concerns. Professor Stern might still be convinced that—whether by lowering or raising them—bringing the Jewish victims and the maltreated animals to a shared level is insulting to (the memory of ) these dead humans. We can at least specify the incomparability claim to mean not only that a comparison between A and B is (technically possible, but) normatively prohibited, but, more precisely, that (despite the partial adequacy of certain comparative regards) by bringing certain similarities to the fore, the overall comparison is, nevertheless, not justified. This can be expressed in the following manner:  I am following here David Sztybel, “Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?”, in: Ethics and the Environment 11:1 (2006), 97–132, esp. 107–120; Sztybel lists 39 regards in four groups for a comparison between the Holocaust and the cruel treatment of animals. 31   See Timothy M.  Costelloe, “The Invisibility of Evil: Moral Progress and the ‘Animal Holocaust’”, 127. 30

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(i) there are some comparative regards that are inadequate for A or B; and in sum, the entire comparison between A and B then turns out to be inadequate; (ii) even if all comparative regards for A and B were normatively unproblematic, an overall comparison between A and B is still not allowed. (i) stands for a logic of addition, meaning that if one or more (how many?) comparative regards are inadequate for A or B, then the overall comparison itself becomes inadequate. (ii) represents, in contrast, the logic of emergence, meaning that the overall comparison is, in any case, inadequate, independent of the (in)adequacy of particular comparative regards. While in (i), cases of adequate comparison are possible, this is excluded in (ii). The claim that the Holocaust is incomparable follows the logic of emergence.

Costello’s (Un)belief At the end of Sect. 3.1, I distinguished between the factual adequacy of Costello’s advocacy for the “lives of animals” and the personal involvement of herself as the one who compares. It is this second aspect that will occupy us in the following section. This brings us to the relation between the person as subject of the comparative act and its potential impact on the comparison’s adequacy. Here, we encounter two telling, almost disturbing, elements in Coetzee’s narration, namely Elizabeth Costello’s character as shown in her relationships to her family members and to her colleagues at Appleton, and her far-reaching critique of reason and a “Western” notion of rationality. If one generally categorizes ethical approaches into those focused on a person’s actions and the effects of those deeds, on the one hand (action-­ centered), and on the other hand, those concentrated on the personality of a particular moral agent (agent-centered), then it is not difficult to guess which program Costello would prefer. The latter account is often enough identified with virtue ethics, being concerned not with acting and its consequences, but rather with its precondition, the person and his or her character. This has enormous consequences not only for what ethics

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engages with and might be reacting to, but rather, and more fundamentally, for what ethics itself really is. Obviously, Costello is not interested in these methodological labels, but what she has to say about our treatment of animals and our particular kind of moral failure refers to one of the most central issues in virtue ethics, namely character formation. “Ethical knowledge” is then not primarily about the righteousness of a particular act, but about the “possession of a good character.” It is not about acting correctly, but about becoming a virtuous person. Hence, the moral flipside of this approach lies in the more fundamental criticism that falling short of attaining goodness is not just a mistake among others, but a vice informing (or even infecting) the entire personality.32 Elizabeth Costello is not merely addressing our deeds and misdeeds in her talks, but also our personal lack of awareness for the “lives of animals.” She points to our moral blindness to their being, our ignorance that is, to her, comparable (and similar) to its counterpart in Germany during the 1940s. Although Costello is aware of her own inconsistency in her dealings with animals, she lacks an equally acute sensitivity when it comes to her immediate surroundings, her family, and work life. She criticizes herself for her own inconsistency in advocating vegetarianism while accepting the “obscenity” of using products made of animal skin (89); in contrast, her behavior towards other people shows traces of misanthropy, bordering on contempt and disdain.33 Given the importance she attaches to “sympathetic imagination,” it is remarkably infrequent that we see it at work in her interactions with others. It is not an exaggeration to say that Coetzee portrays his main character as an unlikable person in almost every scene in which the reader encounters her. She regards her own childhood as a rather sad period (4–5), and her relationship with her sister (a whole chapter is dedicated to indirectly exploring that theme) is highly distanced and reserved (117). Costello’s Appleton stay is plagued by latent, and sometimes explicit, tensions, along with arguments with her son John and her daughter-in-law, Norma (59–60), and Costello seems unaffected by the fact that her  Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation, Cambridge, MA / London: Harvard University Press, 2002, x and 13; see also G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy”, in: Philosophy 33:1 (1958), 1–19, esp. 14. 33  Cf. Ward E. Jones, “Elizabeth Costello and the Biography of the Moral Philosopher”, 216. 32

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grandchildren have to eat at a separate table since they get meat for dinner (60). Moreover, there is almost no attempt on her part to stop this cascade of self-isolation. On the contrary, the disputes, especially with John, lead to impasses or a burdened silence, preventing any true closeness with her son, which is particularly visible during the scene in which they meet again after two years of absence, and in the instance where she claims that her sister Blanche is “merely a sister in blood. The others are truer sisters, sisters in spirit.” (126) Coetzee, however, does not merely portray Costello’s isolation as plain distance; he also creates scenes of open impoliteness and irreconcilability in which others are hurt. In her discussion following the talks at Appleton, her colleagues try to reach out. This might be part of the usual academic small talk, but it is also an attempt to better understand her position. Costello, however, reacts almost rudely by refusing all overtures from the other side to explain her position and by answering their questions with even less clarity. The dean asks her if her advocacy for animals is based on moral grounds. She refutes this laconically, adding that she wants to save her soul (89). In her reference to Red Peter, Costello states that if he “had any sense, he would not have any children” (75). Apart from the difficulty of combining this statement with her general account of the status of animals, this claim must be more than irritating for her son, given her initial identification with Red Peter.34 Costello’s actions are not always well-considered. Seeing Norma and her kids, Costello says to herself: “Everyone comes to terms with [life], why can’t you? Why can’t you?” (115) and comes to the point where she considers the thought that she herself might be truly mad. And it is an intriguing move by Coetzee to present some of Elizabeth’s reactions to others as indications of a deep tension in herself, which show the inconsistency between her actions and judgments, and, eventually, even provide the reader with more pleasant glimpses into her character. In a letter to her sister who espoused a form of religious conservatism in a talk that Elizabeth also attended, Costello wrote something that might just as easily apply (if not more so) to her own advocacy for animals: “Blanche,

34

 See Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal, 55.

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Blanche, Blanche, who would have thought you would end up such a hardliner? “(133) Costello has become a hardliner herself. She not only criticizes our treatment of animals, but also the dominant mode of thinking about them. First, she repudiates the prominent tradition of philosophical rationalism in the wake of Descartes and Kant (112). Then, she extends this critique by attacking reason in general, and declares: “Both reason and seven decades of life experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking.” (67) While her audience does not react to this sweeping blow, it is Norma who hints at this contradictory gesture: “There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgement on reason.” (93) The criticism of reason and rational thinking presupposes what is refuted by that very critique. Costello does not end with reservations against reason and rationality, but even goes on to express doubts about thinking and believing, a criticism that remains obscure and vague. “I don’t know what I think, says Elizabeth Costello, I often wonder what thinking is, what understanding is. Do we really understand the universe better than animals do?” (90) This last stage of refusal is the main theme in the Kafkaesque final chapter of Elizabeth Costello. In a dream-like setting adapted from Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” Costello is asked to write down what she believes in. In several attempts, she radicalizes her doubts concerning belief. Either the refutation of reason also applies to beliefs: “she no longer believes very strongly in belief ” (39); or she distinguishes between having a belief and the belief in believing: “I have beliefs but I do not believe in them,” she concludes (200). Her unbelief might also be nothing other than a belief, but in the end, she wants to get rid of that propositional state by giving space to our feelings and “heart” (39 and 203).35 She not only lacks  On this general and anti-rational doubt, see Anton Leist, “Against Society, Against History, Against Reason. Coetzee’ s Archaic Postmodernism”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 195–220, 209 35

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certain required beliefs, but she seems to be incapable of belief itself; she wants beliefs without belief, and aims at persuading others without reasoning. This is the unresolved conflict of Elizabeth Costello, her tragedy, if you like.36 What is the point of both aspects—Costello’s isolation and her anti-­ rational “hard line”—for the quest for comparative adequacy? Is her engagement on behalf of animals challenged or even undermined by her latent, and sometimes, explicit disengagement from her fellow humans? Is it authentic to deny a crucial, or even categorical, difference between animals and human beings while continuing to treat both creatures differently (here turned upside down in her calling for awareness for animals and yet being insensitive towards her son, her sister, her colleagues)? Is it not hypocritical to call for sensitivity despite one’s own vast personal insufficiencies? And how should we deal with Costello’s bizarre confession of disbelief, her all-encompassing skepticism concerning reasoning, rationality, and understanding? Is this just a reminder of all the shortcomings of Western rationalism in favor of the “heart” as an alternative site for our moral sense, or rather, a self-contradictory announcement only justifiable by exactly that institution that has been attacked before, reasoning? And, in the end, is not Costello’s comparison of our treatment of animals harmed and damaged by her twofold unbelief? Comparing is an activity and a practice performed by someone, and the comparison’s adequacy does not—at least, within Coetzee’s setup— seem to be totally independent of and disconnected from the person standing behind that comparative performance. The delicate comparison  Michael Funk Deckard and Ralph Palm, “Irony and Belief in Elizabeth Costello”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 335–354, 347 and 350.—This also sheds light on the widely discussed relation between Coetzee and Costello. It is true that there are several biographical details that both have in common, and in that sense, they are indeed close, especially in regard to criticizing the treatment of animals. Nevertheless, all this does not allow for identifying both figures as lacking—a point underlined by Elizabeth becoming a hardliner—what Coetzee calls “self-insight” (113); cf. Karen Dawn and Peter Singer, “Converging Convictions. Coetzee and His Characters on Animals”, 109–110; Martin Woessner, “Coetzee’s Critique of Reason”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 221–245, 237; Derek Attridge, “Coetzee’s Artists; Coetzee’s Art”, in: Graham Bradshaw and Michael Neill (eds.), J.M.  Coetzee’s Austerities, Farnham / Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, 25–42, 31; Barbara Dancygier, “Close Encounters: The Author and the Character in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year”, in: ibid., 231–252, 233. 36

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referring to the Holocaust gives an example of this link: it does not come as mere accident that the major objection levelled against Costello’s comparison is presented by Abraham Stern, a Jew. If this Jewish background does give his critique additional weight, then Costello’s lack of awareness and empathy for her surroundings, as well as her whimsical (or at least, whimsically presented) disbelief in belief and reasoning, have to equally be given critical attention. Accordingly, it is interesting to see how difficult it becomes now—given the constellation created by the author—to appreciate Costello’s comparative reference to the Holocaust. If one, nevertheless, sticks to the initial comparative arrangement, the hurdle to be overcome for defending the delicate comparison is essentially raised— and so is its significance and pertinence. In this sense, Stern’s objection and Costello’s personal withdrawal and (anti)intellectual skepticism do not exclude the comparison’s adequacy; rather, they allude to its embeddedness in a highly ramified and truly complicated context that has to be fully taken into account in order to appreciate the real weight of comparing our treatment of animals with what happened in German concentration camps. Simple and simplistic responses are no longer in sight here—and Coetzee tells us why this is so.

4

On Extending Our Sense of Possibilities

Is there a connection between a claim X and the person P representing and eventually defending X? Coetzee does not answer this directly, but he uses a narrative detour for his affirmative reply by making the main objection against Costello’s comparison come from Stern’s mouth. This connection might seem less plausible in the framework of an action-centered ethics that tends to uncouple X from P, while an agent-centered account relies on a P-bound X-claim in mirroring the contextual ramifications in which claims like X and non-X—including the assumption that a comparison is possible, as well as the opposite claim that an item is incomparable with others—have their sense and weight. In consequence, individuals involved in the relevant debate come into focus, particularly Elizabeth Costello herself who claims to feel like the ape Peter. From here, it is not far away to suggest, as Robert Pippin does, that her stories,

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parables, and comparisons are indeed about the “lives of animals,” while we, the humans, are the animals at issue—given what we do to other animals and what these deeds and misdeeds do, conversely, to us.37 There are, of course, further aspects to the relation between human beings and animals that inform and complicate that very relation: diachronically, the historicity of our attitudes toward animals38; synchronically, the divergent responses to animals that are far from any universal consensus, as Norma underlines (87–88); moreover, the mostly implicit differentiations we make between different groups of animals; and also, the impact of religious (or other) convictions on our treatment of animals, reaching from sacralization to contempt and disdain, as John maintains (104)—while animal sacrifices can represent both extremes.39 It is a common move within animal ethics to justify the peculiar moral status of animals by referring to certain features shared by animals and human beings.40 The catalogue of these features is long and includes reason, shared sensory modalities, self-consciousness, or the ability to suffer41 (a derivative position based on this idea of shared properties is used by the animal rights movement).42 However, it belongs to the logic of “sharedness” that animals fall short of the sufficient criteria and rights as  Cf. Robert Pippin, “The Paradoxes of Power in the Early Novels of J.M. Coetzee”, 38, footnote 10.  Cf. Agustin Fuentes, “The Humanity of Animals and the Animality of Humans: A View from Biological Anthropology Inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello”, in: American Anthropologist 108:1 (2006), 124–132, 129. 39  See Cf. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, 410–412; Elizabeth Susan Anker, “‘Elizabeth Costello,’ Embodiment, and the Limits of Rights”, in: New Literary History 42:1 (2011), 169–192, 185. 40  This concerns either a set of relevant features, or amounts to refuting the (ontological) human-­ animal divide in general—as in Bruno Latour’s critique of “modernism” or Donna Harraway’s blurring the binary of human/animal by paying heed to a third party, namely cyborgs and artificial intelligence. 41  Cf. Richard Rorty stating: “If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis.” (Philosophy and Social Hope, London: Penguin Books, 1999, 86); see also Louis Tremaine, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee”, in: Contemporary Literature 44:4 (2003), 587–612. 42  A highly critical response to animal rights accounts (such as the ones by Peter Singer and Tom Regan) is given by Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People”, in: idem, The Realistic Spirit. Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, Cambridge, MA / London: MIT Press, 1991, 319–334, esp. 321 and 325; a counter-critique is given by Elisa Aaltola, “Coetzee and Alternative Animal Ethics”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 119–143, 137. 37 38

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soon as they do not possess or lose the feature(s) in question.43 The same goes for human beings, especially in the case of disabled people and babies (cf. 90). Elizabeth Costello also refers to this topic by indicating that most animals do not seem to have any sense of history, or that their being-in-the-­ world (to use Heidegger’s notion; 95)44 is a completely different mode of existence than ours, or that (to apply Derrida’s example)45 animals cannot be nude and know what nudity is. Costello asks rhetorically what one should conclude from animals lacking a particular feature. She says: No consciousness that we could recognize as consciousness. No awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished? (90)

Costello refuses this logic of shared features. Instead, she puts the stress on overcoming one’s personal ignorance by stating: they [the “killers” in concentrations camps and those of animals] closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the ‘another.’ (79)

This is not a “self-contradictory plea for an archaic animal ethics,”46 as some commentators would have it, and it is not about humanizing animals either.47 It is also not about a stable structure, securing an equally  See Alice Crary, Inside Ethics. On the Demands of Moral Thought, Cambridge, MA / London: Harvard University Press, 2016, 125. 44  On this Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962, §§ 74 and 76. 45  Cf. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, 373. 46   Anton Leist, “Against Society, Against History, Against Reason. Coetzee’ s Archaic Postmodernism”, 215. 47  See Marianne Dekoven, “Guest Column: Why Animals Now?”, 366. 43

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stable status—features to be uncovered, or rights to be formulated. Rather, it is about creating, eliciting, and invigorating a “faculty” of the subject. And this sympathy does not belong to the realm of deductive arguments and “reason,” but to the “heart” as an ability to emotionally respond to a being and to be affected and touched by it. Hence, Costello envisages a kind of moral sense, based not primarily on ethical deliberation, but on emotional responsiveness.48 In another, thematically related novel, Disgrace from 1999, Coetzee describes the development of such a responsiveness to animals through following the main character David Lurie. He experiences a sort of spiritual transformation from being an arrogant humanist, as well as a sexual predator, to a decent human and, yes, a human animal that has lost almost everything that was once meaningful to him. Regarding his relation to animals, especially to dogs, he goes through different stages, from a severe lack of care and a deep ignorance, to a growing love and real compassion. Eventually, Lurie is able to see himself and his disgraced condition reflected in these dogs. It is a growth of understanding by gradually beginning to recognize—while the reader is invited to grasp that understanding along with David—that he himself has an animal vulnerability as well. If this is a return to the logic of shared features—here, the attribute of being vulnerable—then it is not a feature that is just “out there,” as something that has “to do with the object,” but rather something that has to be endowed or even created by being exposed, in reality or in the reality of literature, to the “lives of animals.”49 Literature—i.e., being involved in and captured by the act of reading, as well as being exposed to a peculiar, sometimes even alien, constellation and its characters—can enable such a growth in understanding by extending what we take to be possible, meaningful, and relevant for ourselves and others. To examine our example again, David Lurie is rather unwillingly exposed to animals, their lives, and deaths, and for him it is this  Cf. Elizabeth Susan Anker, “‘Elizabeth Costello’, Embodiment, and the Limits of Rights”, 172 and 177–178. 49  See Alice Crary, Inside Ethics, 227 and 229; Adriaan van Heerden, “Disgrace, Desire, and the Dark Side of the New South Africa”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 43–63, esp. 60—who also highlights the South-African background and historical, i.e. Apartheid- and post-colonial context informing Coetzee’s Disgrace. 48

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evidence of an undeniable experience that triggers a latent process of changing his attitude towards these creatures. There is no necessity for this silent, unlikely upheaval to occur. Coetzee’s narration is precisely about the manifold obstacles to such a personal change, embedded in highly peculiar—biographical, social, historical—circumstances. In contrast to generalizations by ethical theories, literature pays attention to particular cases. In this sense, the mode of argumentation and deductive reasoning is either replaced, or at least accompanied and hopefully enriched, by showing other possibilities for responding to, acting in, and mindfully discerning a particular situation. Literature, then, does not prescribe or provide advice about what one should do—it is not about alleged necessities; it unveils another way of doing things—and hence, it is about possibilities that may be uninteresting, irritating, or exciting.50 Literature is able to potentially touch and change the reader by participating in the nature of an experience by narratively circling around that very experience and eventually, by creating another, namely literary, experience with its own evidence. This is exactly what happens when reading Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. Far from being cowardly by hiding himself behind “mere” literature and its facades, or lacking the guts to bring to the fore what is philosophically at stake,51 Coetzee presents a tableau of divergent points of view that all are embedded in a concrete context that is either alluded to or made explicit. Costello’s claims and concerns can only be appreciated within that ramified setting, and that applies equally to the objections expressed by John, Norma, and Professor Stern. It is accurate to state that this is a precarious endeavor, since it “has everything to do with the subject”—and these subjects are obviously very different. Here, the reader has an important job to do as well, insofar as literature offers possibilities, but no ready-made conclusions.52 “Do you really believe, Mother,” John  Cf. Cora Diamond, “Having a rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is”, in: The Realistic Spirit, 367–381, 371–372; Martin Woessner, “Coetzee’s Critique of Reason”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 221–245, esp. 224 and 228; Alice Crary, “J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker”, in: ibid., 247–266, 252. 51  This is Peter Singer’s critique of Coetzee and his ‘narrative’ approach; see his “Reflections”, in: John Maxwell Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 85–91, 91. 52  See Jennifer Flynn, “The Lives of Animals and the Form-Content Connection”, in: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), Coetzee and Philosophy. Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, 315–333, 328. 50

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asks, “that poetry classes are going to close down slaughterhouses?” (103) It is not sufficient to answer in the negative, but it is still required to hint at the dangerous potential that literature possesses. Thus, Costello is right in stating at the end: “We can put ourselves in peril by what we write; or so I believe. For if what we write has the power to make us better people then surely it has the power to make us worse.” (171).53 As already noted, Costello wants to move beyond the point of sympathy. Additionally, she calls for thinking oneself into the existence of a foreign and alien being in order to fully overcome our ignorance and carelessness. It is a theme which runs through almost all her “lessons” that Costello has this imaginative capacity to think herself into very different beings, and that as a writer, she must do so. She claims that if she is able to think her way into the existence of a being that has never existed, then she must be able to think her way into the existence of “any being with whom I share the substrate of life.” Moreover, there are no boundaries to this kind of “sympathetic imagination.” (80; cf. 22, 98) By exploring this ambitious claim, Costello attacks “realistic” positions as being at odds with this unbounded imagination and defends a distinctive realm beyond our epistemic, as well as linguistic, grasp. Hence, Thomas Nagel’s depiction of the limits of sympathetically imagining “what it is like to be a bat” is then a major target of Costello’s critique.54 Not that she has an actual argument against Nagel’s position beyond referring to her own imagination in “sharing the substrate of life” (whatever that might mean); rather, she turns the argument upside down by claiming that neglecting this imaginative capacity for thinking (or, rather feeling?) oneself into someone else, has been and still is the root of ignorance regarding the weak and downtrodden, may they be in concentration camps or in animal farms. In both types of scenarios, we meet a dangerous, almost immoral refusal to exert this faculty, Costello suggests.

 In fact, the entire chapter 6 entitled “The Problem of Evil” is dedicated to the perils of literature; see EC, 156–182, esp. 160, 167, 173–174. 54  Thomas Nagel, “What it is like to be a bat?”; see, for instance, this passage: “My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat (and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat) one must take up the bat’s point of view” (172, footnote 8). 53

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F inally: The Curious Case of Normative Incomparability

Thus far, the line of argument has run from the delicate comparison between our treatment of animals and the Holocaust (as well as several objections to this comparative act), to the interrogation of different background assumptions concerning the status of human beings in relation to nonhuman animals, over to the debate about shared features and the relevant moral duties we have towards animals, to finally a debate about literature’s impact on the reader in creating a “sympathetic imagination.” It might now be clear that I did not try to finalize, end, or close the debate concerning our relationship to animals; or, put more precisely, that I did not aim at answering the question of whether Costello was “right” in referencing the Holocaust (or, for that matter, in which sense Professor Stern was justified in protesting against that move). Instead, I attempted to gradually make explicit what constitutes the concrete context—as well as the emotional, biographical, and intellectual surroundings—of the voices involved in this ramified conversation. Accordingly, I performed “close” and, sometimes, rather “distant” readings of relevant passages from Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace that exhibit the manifold connections between claims about comparative potential or their refutation in the name of incomparability, on the one hand, and the person presenting these constructive or critical claims, on the other. Insofar as there is such a link, Coetzee’s readers encounter several obstacles to appreciating Costello’s comparison and its adequacy, as well as David Lurie’s conversion and its authenticity. The major concern in this chapter has been to give a mindful account of what I have labelled as normative incomparability in contrast to its structural counterpart and its constitutive and indexical siblings. The first form of incomparability is a structural breakdown of a comparison that goes back to the relation between the comparative relata and their tertium comparationis. The relation between relevant items is such that a comparison is structurally impossible. I cannot give an example of this because there are no cases of this sort of incomparability that have been

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traditionally promoted and defended. Constitutive incomparability, however, goes back to a particular item that is to be compared with another one. Its incomparable character is due to the constitution of that item. For example, friendship is supposed to be constitutively incomparable with money because friendship is undermined at the moment of being integrated into a comparative setting, or because “friendship” as a concept is grammatically misunderstood when compared with money (or anything else, for that matter). The indexical element to it lies in the fact that most (if not all) constitutive instances entail a personal element, meaning that, for example, friendship is incomparable with money for someone confronted with this comparison. Hence, there is a tension between the “objective” aspect of incomparability, based on an institution or grammar that is independent of somebody’s stance, and the necessarily person-­bound perspective implying the claim that something is beyond comparison for someone, but not necessarily for others. This leads already to the normative version. Here, structurally speaking, a comparison is in fact possible, but nevertheless, there is another form of impossibility at work that literally forbids comparison. Either there are evaluative reasons (preferences, tastes) based on which a person refuses to actualize the comparative potential (for instance, comparing a loved one with someone else), or there are moral grounds that stand in way of performing a comparison (Stern’s protest against Costello belongs to this version). Normative (hence, evaluative or moral) incomparability is neither located in the comparative setting (the structure and relation between the relata and the tertium), nor in the relevant object (its constitution) or in the object’s concept (its grammar). Rather, the normativity here is about the subject (not) performing this comparison. Accordingly, structural and constitutive incomparability is “objective,” i.e., it can be discovered and is a matter of fact and givenness. Normative incomparability is, in contrast, “subjective,” i.e., it is an assertion and a matter of concern and commitment.55 Constitutive-indexical incomparability stands, as it were,  The contrast between “matters of fact” and “matters of concern” is—slightly differently—used by Bruno Latour; see his “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, in: Critical Inquiry 30:2 (2004), 225–248. 55

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between the structural and normative version by participating in aspects of both: it shares the “objective” element with structural incomparability, since the limits to compare are not primarily based on person-bound considerations, but on the comparative setting and the item itself; and it shares the “subjective” element with the normative counterpart, insofar as a comparison is not logically excluded—which is why the incomparable character of the relevant item has to be acknowledged by someone. Here, constitution and indexicality go hand in hand. To sum up: structural

constitutive /// institutional grammatical

indexical

normative evaluative moral

Obviously, Costello vs. Stern is a case of normative incomparability. Stern might be happy to call his protest “moral,” insofar as he regards the comparison between Jews and animals to be an “insult,” with an obligation or duty to avoid it. Costello, however, is not content with characterizing her stance on comparability as based on moral grounds (cf. 88–89), but it is not just an evaluative claim—in the sense of preferences and tastes— either. I assume that we might stick to calling it a genuinely moral stance, considering her reservation toward and uneasiness with generalized labels that belong to a philosophical tradition (a tradition already shown to be problematic in Costello’s view). The personal and, hence, indexical element in the claim that something enjoys the status of incomparability (or the refutation thereof ) explains why cases of (alleged) incomparability are often highly disputed. This is the reason for referring to literature as a “dense description” of such a severe dispute. This literary reference, I hope, provides an opportunity to do justice to conflicting—even incompatible—standpoints, as well as to show which contexts and divergent backgrounds inform these voices, counter-voices, and their normative weight. I tried not to succumb to the temptation of playing the judge to determine who is right or wrong, justifying Costello’s still delicate comparison against the deep concerns expressed by Stern, the Jew, with his particular

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experiences, expectations, and fears. And this hesitation might be applied to the philosophical business in general: is our primary task to decide between normatively loaded concerns in their peculiar tension, friction, and incompatibility; or is the task, rather, to give a thoughtful survey and “perspicuous representation” (Wittgenstein) of the irreducible choir of divergent, and possibly even convergent, voices? Asking that question is to entertain sympathies with the latter option. In the end, we are not only dealing with different standpoints; we are also dealing with ways of expressing them. If there is an ethical element to comparisons, it is not merely about the (lack of a) justification of comparatively relating items with one another; it is also about comparisons as tropes and prominent parts of our language. The question of whether Elizabeth Costello was “correct” in presenting her Holocaust reference to trigger our awareness of animals and their endangered existence then turns into the more subtle question of whether the language of comparisons was an appropriate choice for capturing the vulnerability of humans and animals. Here too, philosophy’s task is not to play the role of a referee, but rather, it is about illuminating—or even suggesting—different, useful, surprising, exciting, irritating, even alien ways of articulating oneself. This affinity to contemplating alternatives—instead of advocating just one of them—might itself be a moral demand on the philosopher.

12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication: Cora Diamond, Henry James, and the Space of Moral Reflection Garry L. Hagberg

1

From Robots to Sherlock Holmes

If the picture were an accurate portrayal, we would be, at least in moral life, not unlike high-end robots: we would face a circumstance, identify the relevant facts, place those particular facts into their general categories, pull down general imperatives or universal rules that tell us how to choose one of two or more possible courses of moral action, and then simply proceed – all in a sense (hence “robotic”) automatically. The descriptions of those facts would be direct and singular (that is, there would be one description for one fact), the categories to which they belong (a case of lying, or of cheating an unwittingly-overpaying customer, or of keeping or breaking a promise, etc.) would be clearly bounded and without ambiguity, and the principles or universal rules covering them would be clearly and succinctly propositionally encapsulated (where those principles are themselves descriptively singular). We owe a good deal to the work of G. L. Hagberg (*) Department of Philosophy, Bard College, Annandale On Hudson, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_12

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Cora Diamond for showing why this picture is interestingly hopeless, why that is itself morally instructive, and why seeing this with some intricacy is what it takes to achieve an intellectual liberation from (what Wittgenstein called) the grip of this picture. In Diamond’s rich discussion in her paper “Missing the Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum”, she writes, Moral attention is our topic: the other side of it is moral inattention, obtuseness, and denial. Professor Nussbaum began with a quotation from Henry James’s Preface to What Maisie Knew, that “the effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.” James was speaking there of a particular kind of obtuseness: the moralistic dismissal of art, of the novelist’s art, expressed in the criticism of What Maisie Knew as a morally disgusting work.1

There are multiple connections already in play: the kind of moral criticism, the kind of unthinking moral dismissal, that James was lamenting was that of a formulaic kind; that is, of general condemnations generated by facile categorization followed immediately by principle-based judgment – the kind of judgment robots could make. The effort to “really see” requires, well, effort: it is not a matter of a direct single-description perception of facts (we will explore this point at length in what follows). Nussbaum, quoting James, sets Diamond here in motion, with all three having seen something deep about moral awareness and the comprehension of complexity that the robotic picture misses. And for all three,  Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (MIT Press, 1991), pp. 309–318; this passage p. 309. The quotation from Henry James is in: Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York, 1934), p.  149. The paper Diamond is discussing is Martha Nussbaum, “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination”, in A. J. Cascardi, ed. Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore, 1987), and is reprinted in Nussbaum’s collection Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford, 1990). To my knowledge Nussbaum is the first to identify and situate improvisation in a prominent position in ethical thought. To my way of thinking this itself represents a major step forward in bringing what is too often the abstract world of ethical philosophy closer to our real moral world – the world that should be the subject of that philosophy. Appropriately to its subject, Diamond takes up the theme of improvisation and develops a new variation, a new rendition, of it; my attempt here – for jazz players, a new arrangement of a standard – is to further elucidate what improvisation is and to consider its role in literature as a mimetic portrayal of the complexity of moral life. A much shorter version of this essay appeared in Cora Diamond on Ethics, ed. Maria Balaska (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 1

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moral inattention is itself a form of immorality, and it is concealed within the very picture that presents itself as morally attentive. So what, to be more precise, is that picture? One of the ways to formulate it is as ethical deduction: one cannot accept both the major and minor premises of the deduction concerning the mortality of Socrates and then deny the conclusion. Similarly, it is thought, moral knowledge, knowing the right thing to do, would be ensured by establishing an accepted, or even irrefutable, major premise, linking it to a similarly accepted minor premise, and drawing the conclusion (All lying is wrong; this is a case of lying; ergo…). Diamond writes, I shall start with some obtuseness in philosophy: with a particular wild misunderstanding of a kind of moral activity. William Frankena, in a well-­ know introduction to moral philosophy, asks his readers, right at the beginning, to take as an example of ethical thinking Socrates’s reasoning in the Crito about whether to escape from prison. According to Frankena, Socrates has three arguments to show that he ought not to break the laws by escaping. Each has two premises: a general moral rule or principle and a statement of fact.

So on this quite standard view of ethical thinking or moral reasoning, one begins with a general rule prior to any consideration of the details of the case at hand. And on this broadly deductive or syllogistic model, it is the general rule – a case-transcending rule – that instructs. Diamond thus continues, The three arguments are then: first, we ought never to harm anyone, and if Socrates escaped he would be harming the State; secondly, we ought to keep our promises, and if Socrates escapes he will be breaking a promise; and thirdly, we ought to obey or respect our parents and teachers, and if Socrates escapes he will be disobeying his parent and teacher. Frankena comments that Socrates’s argument is instructive because it illustrates how a reflective and serious moral agent solves problems by the application of moral principles, and he goes on to raise questions about how a reflective moral agent can proceed to try to justify the principles themselves. Thus one sees what it is to be reflective about one’s working ethics.2  The Realistic Spirit, pp. 309–310.

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What Diamond shows is that this is the opposite of moral reflection, and that it closes down what I will call below the range of implication within which any such reflection could occur. On Frankena’s picture, the particular case is merely a site for the application of a general principle: what one might call the “noise” of the case are all the circumstantial details that are distinctive to that case, that append themselves as distortion to what is regarded as the “signal” of the case  – the direct single description of the fact that is like all other cases in its category. And if there is occasion for further moral reflection, that reflection will be about the justification of the general principle, not about anything concerning that “noise”. (Although Diamond does not say so directly or in these words, what she goes on to show is that, once free of the grip of this traditional picture of moral psychology, one has as much difficulty applying the phrase “serious moral agent” to this kind of schematic or automatic cognition as one would have applying seriousness to a robot.) Part of the intellectual liberation for which she is working is captured in the following: Frankena is convinced, in advance of actually looking at the Crito, that moral thought about a particular case consists of bringing principles and rules to bear on the facts of the case. He does not envisage as a possibility that any moral thinking goes on in what one takes to be the facts of the case, how one comes to see them or describe them.

That is to say: description is not, in and of itself, noticed to be anything other than a simple, direct, and one-to-one match of words to the world. The passage continues, He chooses as an example of moral thought one in which it is quite conspicuously the case that terrifically original moral thinking is involved in describing the facts of the case—describing them in such a way that they can be connected with familiar principles—and he totally ignores that. Facts are facts. Socrates says that his escaping would be breaking an agreement. If that is a premise in the argument, and it is not a moral principle, it must be a statement of fact—so that cannot be where any moral thinking is.

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And so we see here (in addition to what follows) the stultifying preconception of case-transcending moral principles or rules doing their blinding work: “breaking an agreement” is unreflectively presumed to be one thing, one action of a generic kind that is captured in one brief generic description. And so Diamond continues, That is how Frankena sees the case. And this is despite the fact that the moral originality of the description of the facts is underlined by Plato…. Crito has no idea how to answer, he does not understand the questions, does not know how to bring the terms of the questions into connection with the case before him. Socrates then by an exercise of moral imagination involving the personification of the Laws enables Crito to see the situation differently. All of which is regarded by Frankena as nothing to do with moral thinking. Facts are facts: describe them, and then comes the moral work: apply your principles.3

It is no secret that Wittgenstein understood philosophical work on himself, and philosophical work of a kind that will help others attain conceptual clarification, as a change in one’s way of seeing. And it is no secret (well, at least for some) that this was methodologically a major step forward in the history of the subject: conceptual analysis in search of necessary and sufficient conditions (for truth, beauty, justice, etc.) was not the only way forward, nor was it any longer the preferred or standard-­ setting way forward. Diamond, here shining a spotlight on what Frankena misses in considering the case of Crito (that is, the morally-imaginative tutelage of Socrates that brings about an illuminating change in his way of seeing), shows how things look when one brings to a moral case a fixed template or conceptual picture prior to that case. This is like the difference between a good and a bad detective: the bad one comes into the field of evidence with a calcified preconception that itself produces blindspots; the good detective comes in with, as Wittgenstein described it in philosophy, the ability to constantly change one’s stance, one’s position, so as not only to see everything actually available, but also to see the available networks of connections between things. (Sherlock Holmes, as a kind of  The Realistic Spirit, pp.  310–311. The text discussed is: William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963), pp. 1–3. 3

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analogue of an ideal person possessing the most acute moral perception, is fascinating not only because he sees facts of the case on the level of the most minute and hence most easily-missed detail, but equally because he sees connections between things that the embedded preconceptions of those around him systematically miss.) With the detective analogy in mind, we can better see why Diamond wrote the passage above, “He does not envisage as a possibility that any moral thinking goes on in what one takes to be the facts of the case, how one comes to see them or describe them.” This has quadruple importance for our understanding of Diamond’s contribution and for what I will discuss below: 1. The envisaging of possibilities, openings and potentials, and the ability to imaginatively see in the mind’s eye beyond the range of what is (or what we take to be) given in immediate appearance, are not only centrally significant for what we call moral vision, they are themselves constitutive of our moral being and so subject to morally evaluation accordingly; 2. What one takes to be the facts of a particular case is itself a matter of selection, of apparent or hidden patterns of acceptance and avoidance, of spotlighted attention, and a matter of what one might call perceptual style, so this itself, rather than being morally inert and prior to moral engagement, is already part of morality and also subject to moral evaluation; 3. How one comes to see them is not, or at least often will not be, a singular affair, so that any such single “stance” in Wittgenstein’s sense will prove anemic as moral perception and in need of the kind of sympathetic imagination that takes one out of oneself and one’s perceptual predispositions; and 4. Diamond’s phrase “or describe them” is especially important as it opens the way to removing a common presumption concerning ­language and its role in moral life, i.e. that it is secondary to the action, that it is taken to be “merely linguistic” or a matter of “mere semantics”, or as though the role language plays in moral perception and the cultivation of the moral imagination is passive – and thus, here again, not itself subject to moral evaluation or a matter of moral reflection.

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It is with these themes in mind that Diamond brings in Nussbaum’s observation that, for Henry James, there exists a direct link between the moral imagination in a life well lived and the creative imagination of the novelist. Words matter in a way that no simple bifurcation between words and the world could accommodate. And so consider Diamond’s further remarks bringing together the importance of the seeing of possibility and that capacity’s interwoven relations with language: Professor Nussbaum quotes James’s remarks about Adam Verver. “He had read his way so into her best possibility”; and we can use that remark to describe what Socrates aims at: he enables his friends to read their way into his best possibility. His imaginative description of his situation, including the personification of the Laws, is an exercise of his moral creativity, his artistry. It is as much a significant moral doing as is his choosing to stay rather than to escape, or, rather, it in fact goes to any full characterization of what Socrates is doing in staying: the story of his death includes the imaginative understanding of the death by his friends, the understanding to which they are led by his remarkable redescription of the situation.

And note: Diamond does not use the singular “the full characterization” or even “a full characterization”; she uses “any full characterization.” What constitutes a full characterization  – what we would, for circumstantially specific reasons, call a full characterization  – is not invariant across cases. It is not generic in such a way that a single description of a moral action or characterization can be employed irrespective of circumstantial detail. And so Diamond continues, Using the phrase that Professor Nussbaum quotes from Henry James, “to ‘put’ things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them”: to ignore how Socrates puts things, the very particular way he puts them, to leave that out of the doing, is to be ignorant of what it was he was doing, what he was making of his death in prison.4

If leaving the way – the very particular way – Socrates puts things “out of the doing” is tantamount to failing to see the what of his moral choice  The Realistic Spirit, p. 311. The James passage is in Henry James, Art of the Novel, p. 347.

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and action, then there is an internal relation between the way we describe and the way we understand – in Wittgenstein’s sense the way we see – the action. And also in Wittgenstein’s sense, the change to our way of seeing can be effected by a change in the structure and content of our descriptions. (This is true to an extent that we can ask if “description” is the right word – the term itself can re-enliven both the moral-deduction picture and the language-as-mere-additive picture.) A remarkable redescription redirects our attention, changing what we see and comprehend, and thus changing what we understand. What lies before us in a morally activated context is not a matter of simple seeing followed by simple or unmediating description. It is only an oversimplified picture that can make it seem that way.

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Socrates with Coltrane

Is there an organizing concept that brings this all together? A concept, or a new word, can function like a key in opening a passageway to a new way of seeing. Diamond writes, I want to look more at obtuseness, look at it in terms suggested by Professor Nussbaum. And I want to bring out some connections it has with two other terms important in her papers, improvisation and adventure.5

It is in examining the case of Maggie Verver (in James’s The Golden Bowl) that Nussbaum speaks of the improvisation of an actress who must, far more than someone going by an external script, be responsively alive to the other artists, to the evolving narrative, to the laws and constraints of the genre and its history. She must like an improvising musician, in contrast with one who works from a score, be actively responsive and responsible, a person who will not let the others down. The description fits Socrates: he makes his death part of an evolving narrative to which his earlier talks with Crito and other friends belong. He takes up themes of the earlier parts of that narrative, like  The Realistic Spirit, p. 309.

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his own theme that one must not treat people badly, a theme itself sounded earlier by Crito, who has accused Socrates of planning to do what will bring disgrace on his friends and harm his sons. He takes up that theme and makes something entirely unexpected out of it. He will not let the other players down, and this in a situation in which the other players were sure he was going to let them down. An extraordinary improvisation shows something to be possible that the others had not even imagined was there.6

The seeing, and enacting, of a possibility that others did not even imagine was there; taking up a theme and making something entirely unexpected out of it: this is improvisation with insight, with originality, with inventiveness. The deductive view, the principle-application model, keeps all this corralled within its blindspot. So I want to ask: how might we further bring out the significance of what Diamond has brought into view by insightfully and inventively riffing on a theme from Nussbaum and, as she has done in this powerful essay, making something unexpected out of it? When John Coltrane went into the studio in 1959 with his quartet to make his fifth studio album (his first with his new label, Atlantic Records), he handed to his players the chart for his now-classic composition “Giant Steps” (the title track of the album). This piece is famous throughout the jazz world for a reason that relates directly to what Diamond and Nussbaum are discussing: the structural steps of the harmonic progression – the chord changes – demand a kind of inventiveness, a depth of harmonic understanding, and a resourcefulness of musicality and melodic creativity that in its time (and actually is close to doing that to the present day) raised the bar of the entire artform. The chord structure is derived from descending major-third relations, in a way where one is constantly being shifted, just as one is almost comfortable for a moment in a key, to a new key a major third below. (This is not the far easier move to a minor third below or a major third above, the move to a relative minor or relative major  – those far more familiar changes do not require one to “uproot” one’s home key every few beats.) And Coltrane uses standard ii-V-I chord progressions, but here also in  The Realistic Spirit, pp. 11–12.

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ways that are constantly destabilizing in terms of the longer-duration key centers of more familiar progressions. But all of this, challenging as it is in terms of its harmonic realization on the piano and bass, is after all only the support for the person facing the real challenge, the soloist-­improviser. That player has to find a way through those changes (something like walking confidently and maintaining one’s stride through an earthquake) that makes melodic sense, that preserves musical-thematic coherence, that creates long-form flow over small-form disruptions. Although great players do this with confidence and musical integrity, no one thinks this is easy. So what are they, in connection with Diamond’s considerations, doing? And how do we say, in Diamond’s sense, the what of what they are doing? Coltrane’s own playing on this piece remains astonishing: he finds routes through this destabilizing sonic landscape not only that no one else played, but indeed that no one else perceived as possibilities, no one else had even imagined were there. By playing rapid-fire tightly structured arpeggios (major, minor, augmented, diminished, quartal interval stacks, everything) and linking them together without interruption, he found what seemed an impossible synthesis of vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic) considerations, meeting both categories of demands simultaneously. Adding rapid ascending and descending scalar passages (often diminished scales, which themselves display an internal harmonic ambiguity) to the arpeggios, and then positioning these materials into equally rapidfire sequenced or repeated short-form rhythmic motifs, Coltrane showed a way forward for an entire generation. It created, within those unprecedentedly severe demands, an evolving narrative in a way aware of but at the same time developing the laws and constraints of the genre of jazz and its history, performed interactively with constant responsiveness to and acknowledgement of the other artists, never letting the others in the ensemble, the tradition, or himself down. Again: “An extraordinary improvisation shows something to be possible that the others had not even imagined was there.” If we free ourselves from the deductive picture, if we see possibilities that such a conceptually entrenched picture precludes, we begin to see (here there emerges a way of saying the “what”) what it would mean to say that jazz (of this kind in any case) is a representational art. And we could begin to articulate the character or

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nature of the moral life, the moral psychology, of which jazz improvisation can be seen (changing our way of seeing for this purpose at this moment) as a mimetic depiction of inward life. With the Coltrane example in mind, let us then consider another passage of Diamond’s: And it is that connection between improvisation and possibility that I want to insist on. It is essential in contrasting Frankena’s view of what moral activity is, what moral thought is, with the view that is expressed in Martha Nussbaum’s paper. As Frankena sees moral thought, it goes on in a situation with fixed, given possibilities, the terms of choice, the alternatives, are something for which one has no responsibility (except so far as one has by one’s previous actions brought into existence certain now fixed elements of the situation). The moral agent must take these now fixed alternatives as they are and must determine which of them is supported by the strongest moral reasons.

Thus the presumed inertness of simple-fact description is conjoined to, or indeed generates, a picture of fixed, or in a moral sense frozen, possibilities. Against that entire picture, Diamond encapsulates the enlivening alternative, drawn from Nussbaum, that she is developing: The notion of improvisation signals an entirely different view of what is involved in moral life, in life simpliciter, in which possibility and the exercise of creativity are linked.7

The classical musician, playing from a score, working under a conductor, performs exclusively predetermined possibilities for which that player has no responsibility (the composer does), and in a way dictated by the external “principles” of the conductor. In short: Fixed elements of a circumstance or situation with a direct and straightforward description. Coltrane signals an entirely different view. But Diamond captures still more here: What is possible in Socrates’s story is something unthought of by his friends, and depends on his creative response to the elements of his situa The Realistic Spirit, p. 312.

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tion, his capacity to transform it by the exercise of creative imagination, and thus to bring what he does into connection with what has happened in his life. The idea of possibilities as fixed in advance and built into the situation located the moral agent’s responsibility and his freedom in quite a different place from where one sees it if one takes the capacity for improvisation as essential in any account of our moral life. The link that Professor Nussbaum makes between the task of the literary artist and the ethical task is implicitly denied when moral thought is limited to the direction of choice between fixed and readily grasped possibilities, with the idea that it is not for us as moral agents to struggle to make sense of things.8

It is not only that Socrates transforms the circumstance by the exercise of his cultivated critical imagination; it is also that he makes what he is now doing an enactment of who and what he is, making his present action resonant with, internally consistent with, and in a sense-making way connected to the characterological teleology of his life. This aspect of a lived-­ out moral decision, this aspect of moral psychology, is lost to the simple picture from which Diamond is working to free us, and it itself resonates with the famous and oft-quoted remark of another of our greatest jazz improvisers, Charlie Parker: “Man, if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” It was Coltrane, Parker, and so many other improvisers who showed, if in the mirror of the work of art, where our freedom was located. And – as so many jazz students have since 1959 struggled with as an artistic analogue (or instance?) of moral life – our responsibility, our duty to play that music well. But then what of the struggle to make sense of things? As another aspect of our moral lives that the improvisational analogy brings out and that the deductive model obscures, this is precisely what Coltrane does (and depicts) in “Giant Steps”. So we should look, if briefly, more closely. If the underlying rapidly changing chord progression serves as analogue of the ethical circumstance or situation, then it would seem, at a glance, to be fixed – and thus more consistent in that respect with fixity of the deductive picture. But as all chordal-instrument players know, it isn’t  – indeed, anything but. The chord chart describes the harmonic structure, but the realization of that structure is itself an improvisation:  The Realistic Spirit, p. 312.

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on the piano or the guitar, for example, there are countless ways to voice a given chord, countless ways to move or lead a chord’s individual voices or notes from one chord to the next, countless ways to move through registers on the instrument as the chords are voiced, countless ways to give the chords rhythmic definition, countless ways to create countermelodies on the top line of the voiced chords – and so on through countless combinations of all of these. Thus selection, within what one might call this atmosphere of possibility, is unto itself a strongly creative act. It stands as the perfect parallel to what Diamond described as the un-fixed elements of the circumstance. So just as improvisation is not limited solely to the single choice of action by the moral agent within an otherwise fixed situation, so improvisation within Coltrane’s improvising quartet on that recording date is not limited solely to the soloist. This is what she called “the moral originality in the description of the facts” in discussing Socrates above. And Coltrane moves, finds his original, insightful, often ingenious ways through the changes in, and not merely above, the ensemble. Like Socrates with his companions, Coltrane negotiates and renegotiates who he is, enacting who he is, as he races through that harmonic-rhythmic terrain. He makes sense of the ever-evolving challenges presented in that terrain, and he produces musical coherence through mastery, interactive creativity, acuity of vision, and intelligent and untiring, relentless, responsiveness.9 (As Stanley Cavell has noted, it was Socrates who, ever responsive to philosophy and never tiring, stayed awake after the symposium until dawn while others slept.) But in looking into musical improvisation to more fully appreciate the theme that Diamond is herself developing, by using this example of Coltrane I may have given the impression that the rapid negotiation of severe complexity is a precondition for the kind of insightful inventiveness and the acute perception of possibility to which Diamond and Nussbaum are directing our attention as, in Wittgenstein’s sense, a tool with which to pry loose the grip of a picture. The concept of  I discuss the improvisational practices here and the issue of ethical interaction in fuller detail in “Jazz Improvisation and Peak Performance: Playing in the Zone”, Culture, Identity, and Intense Performance: Being in the Zone, ed. Tim Jordan et al. (Routledge, 2017), pp. 143–159; and “Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections,” in Garry L. Hagberg, ed., Art and Ethical Criticism (Blackwell, 2008), pp. 259–285. 9

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improvisation is that tool (or, as I mentioned above, key), but it need not be seen in one way. Another example expands its significance for the understanding of moral life. In that same year, 1959, Miles Davis (with Coltrane in his group) went into the studio to record what holds fast as the most famous record in jazz history, Kind of Blue. This recording defined and stylistically solidified what is called modal jazz. In its way the opposite of Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” (and really of the entire album Giant Steps), the underlying harmony, the chord charts, of modal jazz often moved very slowly in what is called their harmonic rhythm (the rate at which chords change). For example one encounters eight-bar sections on one single minor chord followed by a repeat on that same chord of eight more bars, followed by eight bars on single minor chord one-half step up, followed by eight more bars on the first minor chord. Of course all the issues of improvised voicing are still in play, but the terrain the soloist traverses is not an earthquake that won’t stop; by contrast, these are sonic surfaces often with the smoothness of glass. And where there are changes, they are gentle and often more in the language of comfortable ii-V-I relations or twelve-bar blues forms. The soloist, the improviser, thus creates within more of a sonic atmosphere than on rugged and shifting ground, and so the nature of what Diamond has discussed as “Socrates’ creative response to the elements of his situation” changes accordingly. To put it one way: the soloist, in modal jazz, can (metaphorically speaking) more easily look up, out, and around, rather than down. (By “looking down” I mean focusing one’s attention on the chord changes moment by moment.) This itself encourages, within this compositional style, the close attention, the acuity in the responsiveness to others, and the capacity to truly see in the ways Diamond has emphasized. But the case of modal jazz improvisations does not only provide an illustration of these themes; it also teaches us something about some of the details of moral attention of the kinds she is investigating. In these open spaces (such as the 32-bar form, the four 8-bar sections I mentioned above), the improviser has more of an opportunity to consider long-form structure and the development and further articulation of themes across a span of time and musical space. Thematic development, including (a) thematic motifs and following out their unfolding logic, (b) the transposition of a thematic motif through

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different keys, registers, and melodic planes, (c) the compacting or compression of a melodic idea, (d) the expansion or stretching out of a melodic idea, (e) the dividing of a melodic passage and distributing it between two melodic planes (think of the classic song “The Shadow of Your Smile”), (f ) the fragmenting of longer melodic content into shorter elements and then treating those to all of the above, and numerous further types of melodic invention all come into play here. What we learn here is: each of these has an immediate counterpart in our world of moral interaction, and each of them can focus our attention on the sub-categories of creative, insightful moral responsiveness that the concept of improvisation, as the key to a new pathway, opens. But before moving to the next stage of this discussion, there remains one further issue concerning improvisation that I should bring into the examination of some of the content of this concept as it moves into the center of a non-reductive way of seeing ethical life. In the demanding process of learning to improvise, young jazz players often make for themselves written-out transcriptions of various improvised solos of the great players, or they study transcription books of those solos. Thinking through what Socrates has said, what he has done and is doing, and how he has cultivated a depth of comprehension and a new way of seeing in the minds of his compatriots shows us a great deal about moral understanding. (The very concept of understanding, as diamond’s work shows, is itself greatly reduced on the deductive picture.) Reading our way into the intricate circumstance of Maggie Verver and coming to truly fathom it and her within it, or the reading of Middlemarch, or the reading of the Oedipus plays or countless others, does not give us direct knowledge of what to do in life in any directly prescriptive way. That is, we do not learn what to do if we are a young American heiress with a widowed art-­ collector father, getting married to an impoverished Italian aristocrat with the father getting married to a friend, each of whom were passionately involved with each other in the past. Or what to do if we kill a man who turns out to be our father and unknowingly marry our mother. Or again, countless other things. That we all know this to be the case is obvious; why it is the case is perhaps less well known. In studying both the circumstances – that is, the precise details of a most particularized kind that literature always affords

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and philosophy so rarely does – and the thoughts, words, and deeds of a character we come to know who is living and thinking inside those circumstances, we come to grasp precisely the dimensions of moral attention that Diamond is pursuing. We see the features Diamond has named: the exercise of moral imagination; the enabling of people to see differently; to realize how little there are of blunt facts, simply described, of any interesting case; to see the power of description and redescription in moral life and how important it is to “put” things, as Henry James observed; to find possibilities others did not even imagine were there; and, more broadly, to uncover the riches of life contained within the struggle to make sense of things. The student of jazz improvisation, making and studying transcriptions, is doing all this within the world of melodic invention. If they play, on the stand, the exact solo as transcribed of, say, Charlie Parker, they are offering a quotation from a master; they are saying precisely what Maggie Verver did. In such a case they are not, of course, improvising: they are saying what someone else already said. But when they do begin improvising, they in a sense take all that with them (for example, all the varieties of melodic treatment listed above – along with much, much more); they do not go out there alone. It is in this sense that literature does not send us out there alone.

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 n Our (Conceptually Re-orienting) O Ability to Know What’s Not Right

But what can we say about that content we are sent out with? We can certainly sense it, and is readily apparent when it is present or absent (in jazz as in life), but to say it, to articulate it, is trickier. But as we shall see, there is a good and fitting reason for this difficulty. In her paper “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle”, Diamond writes, …it may seem puzzling that we can guess at the solution of a riddle, and puzzling, too, that we can reject something as the solution without knowing what the solution is. For if it is the finding of something we are willing to recognize as the solution that fixes the sense of the riddle-question, how can we reject anything before we have the solution? I could put the prob-

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lem this way. Whoever is asked the Sphinx’s riddle has the answer before his eyes, as it were. But if the solution to a riddle can be something that is before your eyes and you still not recognize it, how are we able to say of anything that it is not the solution? If in a sense we do not know what we are looking for, how can we say “This isn’t it”? And yet it is clear we can.10

And yet it is clear we can. Precisely. We know we can make such judgments, and we can readily tell the difference between our having such a sense of things and not having that sense of things – yet we cannot say in any succinct form what it is we know, or (when that sense of knowing is absent) what we don’t know. Part of the problem here is a unitary or essentialistic conception of what it is to know something; Wittgenstein provides the examples of knowing the height of Mont Blanc, knowing the taste of coffee, and knowing the sound of a clarinet for this reason (we too easily model knowing on the Mont Blanc type of case where we deliver in a few words a singly-correct answer in singly-verbalized language and, with that one-­ sided diet, forget the others). But that is not the entirety of the problem. If the young jazz improviser is asked backstage, just before going onstage, what it is she learned from studying Charlie Parker transcriptions with the expectation of being able to articulate that in a compact sentence, that player will probably say something like “um, well, I guess I learned a language, sort of ”. In fact, the answer will probably have a question mark after it, indicating that this is an almost guessing attempt to answer a query reductively about content that does not allow reduction. The question, “What did you learn when you learned German?” is a similar question. One could probably answer with the kind of joke that shows the impossibility of the question – such as “Well, I learned that it is possible for our verbs to be at the end of our sentences put”, or something of the kind. But if the inquirer asked again, “but seriously, surely you learned something from learning German; what was it?”, this, instructively, would not be answerable. What I want to suggest is that capturing this something is like capturing the what of Socrates’ action.  Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle”, in The Realistic Spirit, pp. 267–289; this passage pp. 270–271. 10

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Diamond observed that Socrates effected a dramatic change in the way of seeing the entire issue in Crito. In cases where we feel a sort of half-­ articulate puzzle concerning what we know but cannot say, or can say that something is not the answer even though we do not yet know what the answer is, or (I would add) sensing that a given expression (say in writing a note of condolence) is not yet quite right but where we do not yet know what the right expression is, the answer, the resolution to this puzzlement, will not be found in elusive singly-phrased propositional content capturing what it is that we, like the jazz improviser, know. Rather, it will be resolved by changing, as in Crito’s case, our entire way of seeing the issue at hand. And to do this what is needed is to be reminded of the ways in which implication in language, in speech, in communication, works. There is, strictly speaking, what we say  – the exact words we have uttered  – and then there is what we, as persons, are doing with those words, what we mean by them. In a court of law the mafia don is accused of ordering a murder from inside prison; the defense says “All he said to his underboss was ‘It is time to weed the garden’”. The defense, “He cares so much about his backyard”, is laughably unconvincing because we know who he is, what he has done, what kind of person he is, the kind of organization he is running, the history of his actions, and, broadly speaking, the trajectory of his character. Knowing who, and what, he is strongly inflects our knowledge of what his words mean.11 But suppose he speaks enigmatically and we do not yet know what he means. Still, we can, like the case Diamond has described, know in advance of knowing what he means how to judge a number of candidate interpretations, how to exclude some, consider others as outside possibilities, and fix on still others as the leading possibilities. And then, when a piece of dispositive linguistic evidence emerges, we know our way forward. All this is possible, indeed common, in our language because we live, linguistically, not within a world of direct reference, invariant semantics, and singular atomist word-meaning, but rather within ranges of  I offer a fuller discussion of this in, “A Person’s Words: Literary Characters and Autobiographical Understanding”, Philosophy and Autobiography, ed. Christopher Cowley (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 39–71. 11

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implication. The jazz player has learned in this sense what follows from Parker’s improvisations, what they in this sense imply. And when she decides to play in the style of Parker (but without quoting any of Parker’s solos), she plays within that range of implication. When the great jazz guitarist Mike Stern toured with Miles Davis during his fusion phase, although Stern is able to play the most demanding bebop in the postParker idiom as well as anyone, Davis walked up to him and said “No, man; play like Jimi.” Every guitarist knows what he meant – and Stern’s conception of what he was doing in that ensemble on that tour changed dramatically (the result was one of the high points in the history of jazzfusion guitar). Crito’s mind changed, through the introduction of a way of seeing, suddenly discerning a set of possibilities that he had not realized were there. And so here again (like the question about learning German), if someone asked Stern what precisely he learned from Miles’s comment, and what he had learned as a younger player from the work of Hendrix, there would not be, nor could there be, any succinct answer of a Mont Blanc kind. But the range of implication – the range we usually live in within the dynamic world of linguistic action and exchange, is such that he would be able to tell what kind of playing was central to it, what was on its periphery, and what was outside of it. Improvisation, as conceptual key, tells us something about meaning (or in Wittgenstein’s sense, reminds us), and about implication, as well. Diamond invites us to consider thiskind of question in mathematics. If I am asked “What fraction, squared, gives 2?’ I can recognize, even before I have a system which gives me a way of deciding all such questions (and in that way fixes their sense), that 1.4 is not the answer. But what it is not, is only as yet a form of words. The rejection of an answer, like the question itself, seems not quite to grasp its own sense (see PG, p. 455), seems to exist, as it were, on borrowed sense, on an advance from the solution of the problem.12

These words, this way of saying what this phenomenon actually is, is at once powerfully insightful and to my mind a perfectly accurate  The Realistic Spirit, p. 271; “PG” refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 1974). 12

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description of our psycho-linguistic experience in such cases. The rejection and the question itself do not grasp their own sense; they borrow their sense, on advance from the solution we do not yet directly possess. The borrowed meaning in play here is of a kind that direct and succinct propositional assertions cannot repay. A jazz chart, the chord-and-melody chart that awaits ever-changing improvised realization, demarcates the range of musical implication. In a classical score, that range is closed down to a minimum; the composer already made most of the choices in that world of possibility. In a jazz chart, the range is opened to a maximum. The interpretation of the piece, the given performance, develops or unfolds within that opened space of musical implicature. Description and redescription in language – and so in literature – work in the same way.

4

Back to James: The Nature of Obtuseness

Henry James’s second novel, The American, was published in 1877 when he was thirty-four years of age. It was then thirty years later, with most of his life’s work, including the masterpieces of his late style completed, that he substantially revised the text for the summative New York Edition. By all accounts this book received by far the most extensive rewriting of any of his work included in the New York Edition, and it has been taken as the best example we have of the older mature writer commenting on the work of his younger self, in such a thorough way that the younger is brought up into the older.13 It is certainly that, but I want to suggest, it is also more than that. And what that “more” is we can better see by keeping the considerations brought out by Diamond in mind. The plot is not difficult to encapsulate: the protagonist, Christopher Newman, is a very successful American businessperson who, having amassed his fortune while still in his thirties, travels to Europe in search of a culture that reaches well beyond the confines of his life in American  Henry James, The American: the Version of 1877 Revised in Autograph and Typescript for the New York Edition of 1907, Houghton Library Manuscript Facsimiles (London: Scolar Press, 1976). Page numbers in the following text are to the page numbers of this volume, not to the page numbers (also present in the volume) of the 1877 printed text from which James was working. 13

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business, in search of enriching aesthetic experience, and, primarily, in search of a woman to marry. Through various chance connections he meets a woman, a young widow and part of a socially elevated, old-money family that is concerned far more with social standing than individual human happiness, and Newman struggles against the class-prejudice and social exclusion (at which they are well-practiced experts) from other members of her family. Newman befriends the one good member of the family, the woman’s younger brother, who later dies in a duel, and, with his proposal finally accepted and the wedding planned, Newman is ultimately told that he is unfit to marry the woman owing to his commercial background along with other nuances of personality that clash with their self-image and that the wedding is called off. He learns their terrible and long-hidden secret (the mother and older brother deliberately caused the death, years back, of the husband and father) and plans to use it against them, but realizes that this is beneath him (so James shows where the true superiority lies), and he leaves for San Francisco. But unable to forget the woman, who has since gone into a convent, he returns, only to gaze at the large and forbidding front wall of the convent, there realizing that she is lost to him forever. With unfinished business now, in its broken, partial way, finished, he departs, a forever-changed older, and wiser, person. But what I want to pursue here, again, in light of all the preceding, is not a philosophical reading of the story, but rather a philosophical reading of the rewriting. On the first page of the original version, James, in introducing us to Newman (strolling in the Louvre), writes “The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly passed his handkerchief over his forehead with a somewhat wearied gesture” (p.  1 and following lines). The rewrite has: “The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly, with vague weariness, passed his handkerchief over his forehead”. The concept of vagueness, subtly introduced within our introduction to him, awakens slight connotations of unconscious yet still motivating mental content. (If mental content were transparently available to introspection vagueness in the first-person case would not be intelligible – and it plainly is.) This hint is then strongly confirmed in what follows: the original has, “And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the

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sort of vigour that is commonly known as ‘toughness’”. Revised, we get the psychologically very different, and much more acute, “…long, lean and muscular, he suggested an intensity of unconscious resistance.” Physical feats in his past, we learn, caused him far less fatigue; in this case he has developed “an aesthetic headache” (p. 2) from looking at paintings so closely and reading his Badeker guide so assiduously. So we see, by this revision of a few words, into a mind more deeply in the revision than in the original. And we see a person acting on the clear and obvious intentional decision to go see paintings in the Louvre, and yet harboring a resistance to continuing and manifesting itself in weariness that he himself has not formulated to himself. Again, this is on the first page and the picture of robotic decision-making based on direct propositionally encapsulated courses of action is already destabilized. Similarly, the notion of simple, singular, and straightforward description of a person’s state of being is similarly destabilized. (That we know, and thus readily accept these things when we see them in literature, is obvious, but we forget them when under the spell of a philosophical picture; this is one reason that throughout Diamond’s work she measures philosophical progress by the degree of liberation from the forms of philosophy, from imposed philosophical pictures and conceptual templates, that would distort our perception and comprehension of what lies before us in moral life.) Shortly later Newman, in discussing the possibility of learning French from the father of a young woman he meets who is painting a copy in the Louvre, says simply: “Oh yes, I should like to learn French” (p. 12 and following lines). Revised, James has him say, “I should like to converse with elegance”, James now intimating that the way or the style with which a given thing is said is important to the composition of a person’s identity, but more importantly, originally Newman continued, “with democratic confidingness”, where now the narrator tells us “giving his friend the benefit of any vagueness”. This of course continues James’s theme of vagueness just above, but it simultaneously introduces another theme that runs throughout the novel: conversation opens lines of development, ranges of implication, within which interpretation lives. And James shows how we, although with amorphous borders, can sense when the limits of implication, the limits of a language-game in Wittgenstein’s

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sense, are near or have been transgressed: Newman, reflecting on a comment, in revision has the words added, “I seemed to feel it too far off.” James draws a contrast between a form of aestheticized detachment and the perception of the real also early on in the novel, and this sets the stage for his contrast between Newman and the stultifying self-image of the French family. Having met an old friend, Mr. Tristram, in the Louvre, the friend originally exclaims, “Hang it, I don’t care for pictures; I prefer the reality!” (p. 18). Revised, he says, “Hang it, I don’t care for inanimate canvas, for cold marble beauty; I prefer the real thing!” Within the range of the idea James here has seen a better way to prepare us for the battle Newman has coming, against a family governed by a mother and elder brother made of “inanimate canvas” and “cold marble”, their “beauty” of a kind that is pure social appearance. These connotations do not flow with the same force in the original: redescription matters. Such connotations, or indeed verbal possibilities, sometimes flow across large expanses of narrative (Miles Davis), and sometimes they run in tightly compacted exchanges (John Coltrane): in discussing what he wants to see in Europe with his friend, James, rewriting, detects and delivers one such small-scale possibility resident within the language-game. Newman originally says, “I have great ideas about Venice”, his friend replying “I see I shall have to introduce you to my wife” (p.  27). Rewritten, Newman says, “I have grand ideas about Venice”, his friend replying “I see I shall have to introduce you to my wife. She’ll have grand ideas for you!” James captures what Diamond discussed as the effort of moral attention everywhere; it comes near the surface in the following passage originally, but in the rewrite it fully surfaces, powerfully and explicitly, in his description of Mrs. Tristram when they meet. What is originally one compact sentence is now expanded (stretching the melody in the improvisation) into: “Her observation, acutely exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman’s social service resides not in what she is but in what she appears, and that in the labyrinth of appearance she may always make others lose their clue if she only keeps her own” (p. 29). “Acutely exercised” requires effort and discernment; the content of what is observed is not given on the level of mere sensory impressions; what Diamond discussed as the comprehension of complexity is woven throughout the words that capture Ms. Tristram’s perception.

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Throughout the novel the rewrite seizes upon momentary possibilities to insert small variations on the theme of the large-scale relations between ethical and aesthetic language (“Your patience is very pretty”, p. 64), with the language of the one moving into the language of the other. So this theme, now in its way, further destabilizes the picture of simple-direct description in moral perception as prefatory to the application of a general principle  – as Diamond has claimed, this is where a good deal of ethically-significant work is done. The perception of dissimulation is often preceded by semi-conscious moral doubt (“I don’t think he’s as sincere as he at first seems”, p. 76), developing the motif of unconscious or semi-conscious content that we only slowly articulate as the effort of moral attention captures its complexity. And that reflection, of course, is part and parcel of our moral psychology and has nothing to do with a general principle to be applied, but rather to the richness of the morally significant encounters. And moral description is often delivered through analogy or simile, with such analogies often more acutely specified in the rewrite: “There is something in his genius that is like a beautiful woman” becomes “There’s something in the look of his genius that’s like the face of a beautiful woman. It’s as if she were coming straight at you, or standing very close” (p. 76). Both describe a fact of the case; the latter conveys what Diamond called the what of the experience. Description is not “mere semantics”, and James’s remark concerning what is “put” shows the depth of its relevance. Describing Newman’s perception of the good younger brother, the original has a short sentence; the revision situates a metaphor then extended. “But Bellegarde’s confidences greatly amused and rarely displeased him, for the garden of his young friend’s past appeared to have bloomed with rare flowers, amid which memory was a easy as a summer breeze” (p. 111). One could say: the original is a classical score; this is improvising on a chart. And it is the improvisation that captures so much more of the truth of our interactive perception. And then further: Diamond spoke of the moral originality of such descriptions. James here shows us, in addition to the openly expressive style of his friend, within Newman’s description, his own originality, his acuity, and the capacity he has to capture in his language both the character of the perceived and the intellectual style of the perceiver. Any moral philosophy that methodologically excludes all of this is anemic; if one then

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asks for the argument in support of that, one should look, not for explicit argument, but for long-form demonstration – precisely what the work of James so richly provides. Still another theme runs throughout this novel (and indeed the rest of James’s life’s work) that uncovers another aspect of moral perception of the kind Diamond is protecting and the kind that deductive moral theory systematically misses: it is our response to, and intricately nuanced perception of, facial expressivity. In promoting his case for marriage with the widow, James’s narrator in the original says, “The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed out of her face, and it illuminated with something which this time at least, Newman need not have been perplexed whether to attribute to habit or to intention, to art or to nature” (p. 137). The mature James, possessor of the keenest vision concerning expressive facial nuance and the finest language to capture it, writes, “The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed out of her face, and it had submitted itself with a kind of grace in which there might have been indeed a kind of art.” And he continues with the much-revised phrase, “She had the air of a woman who had stepped across the frontier of friendship and looks round her a little bewildered to find the spaces larger than those marked in her customary chart” (p. 137). Newman sees this in her face, and knows this – yet it is knowledge of a kind that he perhaps cannot articulate as can the narrator. This kind of case also challenges the unitary conception of knowledge considered above: this is closer to knowing the sound of a clarinet than knowing the height of Mont Blanc. What it is to know something, especially in moral philosophy, should include what we know in these ways. Facial expressivity is a part of meaning (“glances seem to say”, p. 200; “M. de Bellegarde’s [the mother] face looked to him now like a mirror, very smooth and fine glass, breathed upon and blurred; but what he would have liked still better to see was a spreading, disfiguring crack”, p.  368). But then also: “submitted itself with a kind of grace” captures the way an emotion such as embarrassment subsides, where the emotion itself seems to have its own volition (and so can submit itself), as James’s phraseology conveys. That can be something we also know, which would be added to Wittgenstein’s list challenging the unitary conception of knowing and the picture of the direct relation between knowing and saying. And “might have been indeed a kind of

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art”: a morally significant expression is not either all genuine, all unmediated, or all artifice, all calculated deliberateness. The clarity of singular categories would falsify the subject investigated; layers and blends are possible and are subtly expressive in a way constitutive of meaningful human interaction. And James sees that moral qualities can reside within or interweave with immorality; there can be honor among thieves (“whether any one else can trust them or not, they can certainly trust each other”, p. 439). But then more still: James, in the rewrite, has captured the phenomenology of suddenly, by stepping across a frontier, perceiving a constellation of possibilities that heretofore remained hidden. And using a spatial metaphor, she is a little bewildered to find the spaces around her – the space of possibility – that is now larger than “the customary chart”. We change the world that way, and the envisaging of possibility is one component of moral understanding. Crito suddenly moved into a world of possibilities, of an understanding, to a way of seeing, previously unthought, and he did so on hearing, and responding to, the words of another. Part of the moral thinking that is (or should be) constitutive of moral philosophy is what has been illuminatingly called the working out of the logic of our souls.14 The rewrite of The American could be studied at length in this one respect alone; as I mentioned above Newman experiences the vagueness within that quickly subverts any direct-­introspectionist picture and the model of direct propositional description that goes with it.15 Newman, indeed, reasons with himself about his own inner contents; in one case we get (in a ten-page insert that James added), “His theory of his relation to her was that he had become conscious of how beautifully she might, for the question of his future, come to his aid; but this left unexplained the fact that his confidence had somehow turned to a strange, muffled heart-ache. He was in truth infinitely anxious, and when he questioned his anxiety, knew it was not all for himself ” (p. 191). A theory of his relation; becoming conscious; left unexplained; had somehow turned; questioned his anxiety: these are all phrases of  See Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1998. 15  This is of course a fairly large matter; I offer a discussion in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14

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self-­investigation, and they represent a process that, against the model of necessary-and-sufficient condition analysis in philosophy mentioned above, show how philosophical progress is often genuinely made. He is here, precisely in Diamond’s sense, struggling to make sense of things, and James has him trying his level best to be his own Sherlock Holmes – importantly, both with respect to himself and with respect to those around him. In short, James is here portraying a process of inward inquiry that parallels Wittgenstein’s intense struggle for conceptual clarification – what Wittgenstein called on a few occasions his dialogues with himself. There is one point, more significant than it may initially appear, when James crosses out a passage (in reference to his now-deceased young friend), “helping to pay the last earthly honours to” – here the cross-out in non-erasable ink begins – “the best fellow in the world” (p. 341). James thinks of alternatives, rejects them, does not know the right answer but believes he has the wrong one, then reconsiders, sees that his original was in fact the right answer, and writes it, exactly as it was, back in. He is thinking within the implication-range of an idea, considering alternative formulations, and settles on quoting himself. (The creative psychology here would be miscast in a way parallel to the oversimplification of moral psychology if we were to say that this is exactly the same as the original.) It is as if Charlie Parker learned the transcription of his own prior solo. But that is only a point in passing. The next major step is what Diamond identified as the obtuseness, what I called the calcified moral perception and its blindspots, that serves only to block vision and understanding. In Newman’s exchange with the mother and elder brother after the funeral, James inserts passages concerning the “aftersense” and the “reverberation of the sound” (p. 365) of speech. This acute neologism and the appeal to sonic reverberation themselves tell us something we otherwise would have missed about the variety of our human or real engagement with moral language – we can experience, and thus, in the mind’s ear, “hear”, waves of later-appreciated significance like the aftershocks of a tremor. And these can be felt seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years after we hear the initial words. This too – one of the points of intersection between the philosophy of language broadly understood and moral comprehension – is part of the moral psychology that one wants to bring out of the picture-generated blindspot, from behind the veil of philosophical

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mischaracterization. Or to lift it out of, as J. L. Austin repeatedly warned about, oversimplification in the name of neat theory. But of the moral obtuseness: the power exerted by the elder brother and mother over their sister and daughter, the widow that it is Newman’s dream to marry, is hideous. One could write a separate article on James’s powerful rewriting of this section alone, but for the present a few features emerge most prominently. This mother-son pair are above all concerned with their social standing, their reputations, their place in French high society, and are thus motivated, never by love, by kindness, by thoughtfulness about the life and experience of any other person, but by fear. And that fear is the “bringing of dishonour on a great house” (p. 389). They have already long concealed their murder of their husband and father (by secretly depriving him of life-saving medication), so for them, appearance is everything. And so also for them, the blindspot is enormous: everything of real moral life, real human interaction, real human understanding, is lost on them. Then conjoined to this is their concern to preserve class-privilege by the systematic exclusion mentioned above; thus their calcified condescension to Newman because of the “commercial” rather than old-money source of his wealth. As killers, we know they are horrible. But the matter is more interesting than simply that: the description is more complex, and here we return to Diamond’s fundamental point above concerning the morally blinding principle-application model. They live in a world, a world of social elevation concealing within it monstrosity  – a world in which simple principles apply and moral deductions rule. Do not consort with anyone beneath your social station. Do not let anyone into your family that is not already at or above that station. If a member of our family agrees to marry anyone not already within that social order, “kill” the engagement and the relationship that led to it. And indeed: if the patriarch of the family wants to move in any direction other then their self-interest, kill him. These ugly inhumane principles are simple, succinctly propositionally expressed, and in specifying clear courses of action, directly followable. And the deductions are straightforward: Do not consort…; Newman is beneath…; ergo…. If a member…; our daughter and sister has agreed to marry…; ergo…. What James has shown here is what moral robots look like (indeed, they look like the dismissive critics of What Masie Knew: All novels about

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divorce and adultery are morally disgusting; What Maisie Knew is…; ergo….). It is the prescriptive moral framework that is clear, stable, straightforward, and hopeless. One could argue that this is the extremely negative case; what of cases where the principles are positive, such as “Respect and cultivate kindness,” etc.? The answer would be: missing everything to which Diamond has called our attention in moral philosophy, everything otherwise veiled behind a generalized architecture of principle-application, we would have good robots (although “good” would not mean what it does without all the foregoing kinds of issues webbed around it – this meaning itself would be anemic). Newman, in all his layered complexity of thought and language and considered experience, is not one. However, one should slow down here: It is an easy matter at precisely this juncture to make matters seem once again simpler than they actually are. The “good robot”, on reflection, is probably not in truth possible. The reason for this is instructive. In imagining a good robot just above, I imagined a being who applies general principles of the “Be kind to everyone you encounter” type and thus produces a life history of good, morally laudatory, interactions. That indeed sounds possible, and it would make room for the possibility of a Frankena-style individual who, proceeding through life in that way, yielded good results. But the room made here is illusory. In each interaction, that individual would have to think, to reflect, to consider, to reconsider, and to extend her moral imagination into the life and mind and heart and circumstances of the other persons with whom she interacts. Without that, the word “kindness” would have neither the breadth nor depth of meaning that it does. And if robot-­ goodness were possible, there would be no reason for us to take an interest in, or appreciate with humane subtlety, any particular kind act or thought or word  – precisely because (here returning to the “unitary-­ meaning” problem) the word “kindness” would mean one determinate thing across all cases of its usage. We would never really have to look at any moral case closely or in any sustained way  – precisely the kind of attention James gives to his characters. So to put the above point differently, a misconception of language would here be underwriting an oversimplification of moral psychology.

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But this point links directly to another issue. It might also be too simply thought that the improvisational conception of ethical engagement is at odds with, or indeed repudiates, a life that respects, or lives within, a moral tradition. That is, one might quickly (but erroneously) believe that the principle-application model supports moral tradition, while the view being developed here intrinsically opposes any such participation in tradition. This too is oversimplified, and again instructively false. One can live within a moral tradition (indeed just as a jazz improviser can and does live and create within a musical tradition) and in doing so enliven that tradition in the ways that Diamond’s and Nussbaum’s approaches emphasize. Mindless, unreflective obedience to a moral tradition can and does, alas, happen, but that is by no means what a moral tradition requires. Quite the opposite. What a living, humanizing, moral tradition worthy of the name calls for, rather, is all the creative, thoughtful, imaginative, intellectual and emotional resourcefulness for which the improvisational approach makes space. (One could say: that would be to live in a moral tradition, not to die in one.) Or put here again another way: a misunderstanding of what improvisation actually is (say as reckless, unguided, random, undisciplined sound-making) and thus what the word “improvisation” means would underwrite a false allegiance between the notion of moral principles and the notion of a moral tradition. The ways that James creates ethical circumstances and describes moral choice shows that he richly understands this. But before concluding, there is still one more issue. What does all of the foregoing mean for us as readers? What change can come over us as interpreters of texts once freed of an oversimplifying template of moral life? Henry James himself wrote simultaneously of the adventure that we can find in life and the parallel adventure we can find in literature. For James  – in deep consonance with everything so far considered  – this adventure is “no a priori, no … absolute and inelastic thing” (Diamond, pp. 314–315); that is, the word does not refer invariantly to one case-­ insensitive thing. Its presence emerges, rather, in our discernment of a situation in life or a passage in literature “that has added the sharp taste of uncertainty to a quickened sense of life.” Blind to this, both as persons in life and as readers in literature, “the most prodigious adventures…may

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show for nothing” – that is, we may miss them entirely without a hint of detection. Following Nussbaum and speaking of Isabel Archer’s (in James’s The Portrait of a Lady) experience, Diamond writes, What happens to her becomes adventure, becomes interesting, exciting, through the quality of her attention to it, the intensity of her awareness, her imaginative response. What happens, though, if we are bad readers? Two things joined together. We do not see what that is exciting happens to her. That passes for nothing with us; and we also do not see what is exciting, what is fine, what is secret and hidden in the book. A novel or poem, James says, does not give out its finest and most numerous secrets, except under the closest pressure, except when most is demanded from it, looked for in it; in other words, when what is in the book, through the quality of the reader’s attention becomes his own very adventure. The inattentive reader then misses out doubly: he misses the adventures of the characters (to him they “show for nothing”), and he misses his own possible adventure in reading. (pp. 314–315)

The characters, if richly understood within their passages, are understood in this way; the same is true for persons in their situations. And the phrase “adding the sharp taste of uncertainty to a quickened sense of life” captures with remarkable fidelity the experience of stepping up onto a jazzclub’s stage. And so: for James, the adventurous reader is one who delights in there being more in things than meets the eye, who delights in the invitation the tale offers to find, to make, adventure in reading. That spirit is linked by James with imaginative perception in life, the capacity and the wish to bring to what befalls one an attention that makes it adventure, with all the dangers that may bring. The greater danger is inattention, the refusal of adventure. The risk there, as Mallory puts it, is of drying up like a pea in its shell (p. 315).

The adventurous improviser – Coltrane, Davis, countless others in this ethically mimetic artform – find novel and inventive pathways through the changes that are more subtle, more intricate, than what initially meets the eye. The masters are masters not only because they play more, but also because they see more. This is imaginative perception; by contrast,

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inattention and the refusal of adventure will kill any improvised performance – obtuseness always sounds bad. And so? We readers are players too, and we can bring to a text what Coltrane and Davis brought to a chart. After the cancellation of the wedding Newman is not who he was. To understand this is itself morally complicated, and it is the kind of understanding that words the length of a novel can convey; certainly not the length of a few truncated propositions. James throughout his life as a writer showed this with exquisite descriptive care. In conversation with Tristram, Newman realizes he is different and so his relationships are moved to a different register: “never yet had he seemed to himself to have outgrown so completely the phase of equal comradeship with Tom Tristram” (p.  444). Of Newman (indeed “new man”) at this juncture, James originally wrote, “But even without the aid of Tom Tristram’s conversational felicities, Newman would have begun to think of the Bellegardes again”, followed by a brief sentence concerning his ability to forget them only when he forgot his loss. The older James, himself now a person of much greater experience, writes, “But even without the lash of his friend’s loud tongue Newman would have waked again into his bitterest consciousness. He could keep it at bay only when he could cease to miss what he had lost and each day, for the present, but added a ton of weight to that quantity” (p. 444). Thus to amplify Diamond’s fundamental observation: To attempt to capture what is morally relevant here in principle-application form would border on the barbaric. Newman’s few months away, back in the United States, fail to ameliorate his weighted sense of loss. When he returns to face the stark and forbidding wall of the convent, one way to express what he realizes is that he is now living, and will live, in the implication-range of his experience with her and with her family and, inseparably, in the words and their resonances that negotiated that experience. The tremors will continue.

5

A Brief Outro

So perhaps one could say  – while recognizing that the conjunction of these artists is unusual – Henry James is masterfully improvising within the range of implication opened and demarcated by his earlier sentences,

12  Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 

263

working like Coltrane with motifs to get through complex terrain, playing like Davis across long forms, and showing the real phenomenology, against reductive models, of our moral psychology. Or: James finds his way through the changes not of a score but of a chart, a plot structure, wherein his “voicings” capture much of who we are. Improvised music can serve as a mimetic depiction of our inner life, of our interactive moral lives with others, and indeed of language itself. The concept opens, for moral philosophy, a new way of seeing. And improvisational details can tell us where to look and how to describe otherwise obscured aspects of our moral lives: the methods of thematic development  – following out the logic of a phrase, transpositions, compression, expansion, fragmentation, counterpoint, antecedent-consequent or question-answer structures – run through the descriptions of and interactions between these characters. Although this claim could only be understood when seen against all of the background above, they show us the polyphonic ensemble improvisation we are all performing and awaken a sense of its adventure. Newman has moved from comfortable ii-V-I relations to what players call “Coltrane changes”. Understanding all that this means, we can imagine the expression on his face on being asked, “So what did you learn in Europe?” The American can thus be read, I think philosophically helpfully, as a study in the difference of moral outlooks – in a phrase, the difference between moralistic insensitivity and moral sensibility  – that Diamond’s work (in what I have considered here work that is itself inventively and perceptively riffing on themes introduced by Nussbaum) so deeply captures. James, rewriting, is simultaneously representing and enacting the improvisational dimension Diamond is rightly positioning at the imaginative center of both moral reflection and literary interpretation. It is because of work of this kind that, like Newman, we are not sent out there alone.

Index1

A

Acknowledgement, vi, 104, 105, 108, 112, 240 Adorno, Theodor, ix, 152, 153, 159, 161, 163, 170 Aesthetic, viii, 80, 92, 118–120, 124, 125, 133, 134, 176, 177, 179, 182, 186, 189, 251, 252, 254 Agent-centered, 215, 220 The American, xi, 250, 256, 263 Analogy, viii, 80, 86, 91, 103, 203, 212n24, 236, 242, 254 Animacy hierarchies, x, 176 Animals, x, 22, 94, 131, 183–185, 194–202, 201n8, 203n12, 204–211, 214–223, 214n30, 219n36, 221n40, 225, 226, 228, 229

Apology, 4, 16, 25 Aristotle, vii, 21, 61, 61n1, 64–66, 72, 74, 76, 206 Arpeggios, 240 Athenian Stranger, 7, 9, 17, 18 Attitude, 87, 88, 181, 202, 208, 211, 221, 224 Austin, J. L., 98, 99, 102, 258 B

Baudrillard, Jean, 143, 149, 150 Beauty, 25, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 139, 182, 235, 253 Belief/believes, 14, 24, 26, 28n12, 29n16, 32, 48, 49, 53, 81, 85, 94, 127, 131, 139, 142, 161, 162, 170, 178, 189, 208, 212, 218–220, 224, 225, 257, 260

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2021 G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3

265

266 Index

Betrayal, ix, 63, 135–150 Blues, 244 Bodies, viii, 8, 36n27, 74, 77, 85, 87, 88, 90, 97, 161, 175, 178, 179, 181, 183–185, 187, 188, 198, 206, 207 Burke, Edmund, 119, 120, 125, 126 Burke, William, 41 C

Cartesian, 100, 185 Category/categories, xi, 72, 118, 119, 124, 125, 128, 134, 186, 189, 231, 234, 240, 256 Cavell, Stanley, viii, 97–113, 243 Cervantes, vii, 20, 21, 22n7, 36, 37 Changes, 84, 89, 90, 107, 122, 140, 165, 202, 208, 224, 235, 238–240, 243, 244, 248, 256, 260, 261, 263 Character, vi, ix, x, 3, 4, 10, 17–22, 22n7, 27, 29, 37, 43, 46, 48, 54n19, 55, 57, 62, 65, 68, 75, 77n17, 78, 81, 108, 112, 136, 137, 140, 143–145, 147, 152, 155–172, 178, 180, 182, 184, 187, 188, 192–195, 197, 198, 201, 210, 210n22, 211, 215–217, 223, 227, 228, 240, 248, 254, 259, 261, 263 Christ/Christianity, 127, 213 Cicero, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 76 Coetzee, J. M., x, 191–229 Collective judgment, 193 Coltrane, John, 238–246, 253, 261–263

Comic/comedy, vi, 3, 9, 11, 17, 18 Complexity, 107, 120, 232, 232n1, 243, 253, 254, 259 Conceptual model, x Confucius, 136 Context, v, 29, 39n1, 57, 63, 70, 71, 79, 80, 86, 98, 110, 113, 113n30, 131, 134, 195, 198–200, 203n12, 220, 224, 226, 228, 238 Cook, John, 103 Cora Diamond, x Courage, 19, 22–34 Cowardice, 23–25, 34, 160 Creative/creation, 80, 86–88, 90, 91, 93–95, 144, 237, 241–245, 257, 260 Crito, 233–235, 238, 239, 248, 249, 256 The Crucible, 117 Cultivation, xi, 148, 236 D

Dangerous Liaisons, ix, 135–150 Davis, Miles, 244, 249, 253, 261–263 Death, 8, 27, 29, 33–35, 33n22, 87, 95, 105, 106, 108, 110, 123, 143, 144, 162, 164, 175–177, 180, 181, 183, 199, 200, 206–208, 213, 223, 237, 238, 251 Deduction, xi, 233, 258 Degradation, 146, 182, 202, 214 Delphic, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 17 Derrida, Jacques, vii, 62, 71, 73, 199, 222

 Index 

Desire, ix, 22, 25, 34, 69, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 112, 131, 137, 139, 140, 142, 147, 149, 152, 158, 160, 165, 166, 169, 170, 172, 178 Destruction, 90, 95, 127, 149, 164, 193, 207, 214 Detective, 235, 236 Devil, 71, 117–134 Dialectic of Enlightenment, ix, 152, 153, 159 Diamond, Cora, 109, 231–263 Direct reference, 248 Disability, 175–189 Disagreement, x Discourse, ix, 5, 119, 120, 126, 132, 133, 149, 194, 204 Disgrace, 223, 224, 226 Disorder, ix, 41, 151, 154–156, 169, 183 Divine, 4, 5, 12, 14, 15, 17, 83, 120, 126, 148 Don Quixote, 20–24, 36 Drama, v, 8, 10, 28–37 E

Eggers, Robert, ix, 117–134 Elizabeth Costello, x, 191–229 Else, Gerald, 4 Embodied, 63, 133, 176, 179, 207 Empathy, 154, 157, 163, 164, 172, 201, 220 Empirical, 79–83, 85, 86, 88–90, 184 Enlightenment, ix, x, 87, 119, 151–172, 186 Episode/episodic, 20, 21, 36, 63

267

Epistemic/epistemically, vi, vii, 4, 11, 27, 40–43, 45–50, 53–57, 225 Epistemic limits, vi, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 17 Epistemology/epistemological, vi–viii, 3, 4, 16, 39–57, 97, 100, 102, 106, 133, 225n54 Ethical deduction, 233 Ethically mimetic, 261 Ethical presuppositions, vi, x Ethical reflection, v–xi Excess, 6, 25, 36, 36n27, 73, 122, 138 F

Fact, v, xi, 9, 24, 26, 28n12, 30, 31, 33, 40n4, 44, 45, 49, 54–56, 80, 81, 83, 92, 93, 98, 100–103, 108, 135–137, 140, 141, 164, 165, 170, 171, 192, 193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 207, 209, 211, 212n24, 213, 216, 227, 231–237, 243, 246, 247, 256, 257 Fashioning, 90 Fear, 6, 32–34, 33n22, 46, 82, 90, 111, 112, 120, 130, 132, 148, 183, 229, 258 Feminism, viii, ix Fiction, v, xi, 40, 43, 99, 104–106, 111, 113, 153, 176, 194, 197 Foucault, Michel, 39, 39n1, 41, 179 Frankena, William, 233–235, 241 Frankenstein, 79–95 Friend/friendship, vii, 7, 48, 61–78, 89, 93, 112, 136, 137, 143, 150, 166, 181, 184, 227, 237–239, 241, 245, 252–255, 257, 262

268 Index

Hollywood canon, 183 Holocaust, x, 195, 199, 200, 202–215, 220, 226, 229 Homer/Homeric, 3, 5, 6, 12, 14, 15 Horkheimer, Max, ix, 152, 153, 159, 161, 163, 170 Housekeeping, 41, 43, 44, 48n16, 54 How to Do Things With Words, 98 Humanist, x, 110, 180–183, 186, 187, 189, 223 Husserl, Edmund, 40, 50

Improvisation, xi, 231–263 Impulse/impulsive, 67, 78, 112, 154, 157, 165, 166 Inanimacy, x, 175–189 Incomparability/comparability, x, 191–229 Insight/insightful, v, vi, 11, 101, 102, 106, 133, 135, 136, 142, 147, 149, 153, 171, 239, 243, 245, 249 Intellectual/intellectualism, 20, 21, 25–29, 28n12, 31, 33, 37, 102, 104–106, 133, 151, 163, 178, 180, 181, 184, 185, 187–189, 198, 207, 226, 232, 234, 254, 260 Intellectual labor, 188 Interpersonal, 154, 159–163 Interpersonal understanding, vi Ion, vi, 3–18 Irrationality, 23, 132 Irwin, Terence, 32 Isolation, 76, 113, 113n30, 166, 184, 217, 219

I

J

Ignorance, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15–17, 19, 21, 26, 33–35, 51, 52, 66, 102, 197, 207, 208, 216, 222, 223, 225 Imaginative entry, xi Imperative/imperatives, 6, 24, 36, 72, 78, 79, 82–84, 170, 231 Implication, vi, vii, xi, 3, 43, 185, 187, 208, 231–263 Implicature, 250

James, Henry, xi, 231–263 James, William, 102 Jazz, 232n1, 239–242, 244–250, 260 Joy, 67, 90, 93

G

Gender, 133, 182, 186, 189 Giant Steps, 239, 242, 244 Gift, 61–78, 148, 165 Gilead, 41, 42, 46, 53, 55 Girard, Rene, ix, 137, 143, 144 The Golden Bowl, 238 Good Old Neon, viii, 97, 100, 106, 109, 111–113

H

K

Kafka, Franz, 204–210, 218 Kant, Immanuel, vii, viii, 78–95, 120, 124–126, 130, 201, 218 Kantian, viii, 36, 80–95

 Index 

Killers, 162, 200, 206, 222, 258 Kind of Blue, 244 Knight errant/errantry, vii, 20, 24, 26, 34, 36 Knowledge, as virtue, vi Kristeva, Julia, 176 Kundera, Milan, vi, xi L

Laches, 28–37, 77n17 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, ix, 137–139, 141–148 Language, 42, 51, 52, 74, 98, 100n10, 103, 107, 108, 111, 119, 122, 125, 192, 206, 229, 236, 237, 244, 247, 248, 250, 254, 255, 257, 259, 263 Laughable, vi, 3–11, 9n8, 13–18 Laws, 4, 7, 8, 11, 17, 18 Libertine, ix, 141, 142, 148, 160, 166, 167 Lila, vii, 39–57 Lions, 21–25 Logic, 10, 15, 24, 47, 106, 107, 109, 183, 200, 207, 215, 221–223, 244, 256, 263 Logic of addition, 215 Longinus, 118–120 Love, 37, 64, 66–68, 70, 75, 78, 94, 136, 140, 141, 143–149, 161, 163, 171, 175, 192, 197, 223, 258 Lysis, vii, 61–63, 70 M

Markson, David, ix, 98

269

Mather, Cotton, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124–131 Meno, 19, 23–25, 29 The Merchant of Venice, 62 Message, 37, 99, 109, 198 Miller, Arthur, 117 Misery, 26, 76 Modernity, 137, 181 Montaigne, Michel de, 61n1, 74, 76–78 Moral calculation, xi evaluation, 236 imagination, xi, 104, 180, 189, 235–237, 246, 259 insanity, 151–153, 209 possibility/possibilities, 241, 242 psychology, 234, 241, 242, 254, 257, 259, 263 reasoning, 233 reflection, v, xi, 231–263 robots, 258 stance, 208, 228 Motif, 50, 240, 244, 254, 263 Mulhall, Stephen, 100n10, 209, 210n22 Murder, 164, 169, 199, 204, 207, 212n24, 248, 258 N

Nagel, Thomas, 197, 201, 225, 225n54 Name, 6, 9, 28, 30, 48, 49, 51–53, 55, 133, 134, 151–153, 159, 177, 201, 205, 210n22, 213, 226, 258, 260 Namelessness, 214

270 Index

Narrative, v, vii, 39–43, 39n2, 46–49, 50n17, 53, 55, 56, 63, 99, 108–110, 112, 113, 136, 137, 144, 146, 158, 177–180, 183, 185–187, 195, 197, 220, 238, 240, 253 Narrative expression, 177 Nazi, 195, 198, 199, 202, 207, 209, 212n24 Nehamas, Alexander, 25n8, 35 New England, 118, 120–124, 127–130 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 136, 161 Noise, 47, 99, 109, 234 Normative/normatively, x, 191–229 Nous, 24 Nozick, Robert, 212, 213 Nussbaum, Martha, xi, 29n16, 232, 232n1, 237–239, 241–243, 260, 261, 263 O

Oedipus, 135, 245 Offenders, 154, 166 Ordinary language/ordinary usage, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 109 P

The Pale King, 99 Paradox, 68, 106–108 Paradoxical, vii, 36, 185 Parker, Charlie, 242, 246, 247, 249, 257 Particularity, v, vi, 169 Pathway, 245, 261

Patterson, Richard, 7, 8 PCL-SV, ix Perception, v, xi, 44, 47, 56, 99, 101, 232, 236, 243, 252–255, 257, 261 Perplexity, 29, 30, 32, 36 Personality, ix, 132, 136, 152–159, 169, 170, 172, 209, 215, 216, 251 Phaedo, 8, 34 Phenomenology, 133, 256, 263 Philebus, 4, 6, 10, 13, 16–18 Picture, x, 83, 99, 199, 231–235, 238, 240–243, 245, 252–256 Pilgrims, 123, 128–130 Pippin, Robert, 220 Plato, vi, vii, 3–20, 19n1, 23, 29, 29n16, 32, 35–37, 35n24, 61, 63, 64, 64n5, 70, 76, 135, 235 Playing off, 210 Pleasure/pleasures, 27, 34, 36, 36n27, 64, 66, 72, 76, 93, 124, 130, 138–142, 145, 147, 149, 158, 163, 166, 169, 187 Poet/poetry, 3–5, 7, 11–17, 65, 66, 99, 135, 225 Posthumanist, x, 175–189 Presupposition, xi, 35 Principle-application, 239, 258, 260, 262 Private language, 100, 110–111 Progressions/progression, 239, 240, 242 Psycho-linguistic experience, 250 Psychopath/psychopaths, ix, 151–172 Puritan theology, viii

 Index  R

Realization, 43n13, 72, 91, 145, 240, 242, 250 Reason, 9, 13–16, 22, 24, 40, 47, 56, 72, 77, 80–83, 85, 86, 90, 94, 108, 109, 153, 156, 159, 163, 167, 169, 171, 172, 180, 192, 198, 200, 201n8, 202–204, 215, 218, 221, 223, 227, 228, 237, 239, 241, 246, 247, 252, 256, 259 Regan, Tom, 197, 199, 206, 221n42 Relations, each other, vi, viii, xi Religion, 132, 144, 169, 170 Representation, v, 7, 113, 120, 128, 177, 187 Resistance, 40–47, 43n13, 51, 54, 56, 184, 252 Responsibility, 94, 105, 157, 164, 167, 178, 214, 241, 242 Rewriting, xi, 137, 250, 251, 253, 258, 263 Rhapsode, 3–5, 11–16, 18 Robber baron, 172 Robinson, Marilynne, vii, 39–57 S

Sade, Marquis de, ix, 151–172 Scepticism, viii, 97–113 Self-fulfillment, 134 Self-ignorance, 15–17 Self-knowledge, ix, 4–7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 136 Semantic/semantics, 194, 199, 248 Seneca, 62, 67–70, 73n12, 74, 76 Sensibility/sensibilities, v, 263

271

Serious, vi, 4, 5, 7–11, 9n8, 13, 16–18, 94, 105, 164, 169, 210, 233 Sexual, 138–140, 147, 149, 158, 183, 187, 223 Shakespeare, William, vii, 61–78, 177, 184 Shelley, Mary, viii, 80, 86, 86n5, 91, 125 Sherlock Holmes, 231–238, 257 Signal, 186, 234, 241 Skepticism, viii, 219, 220 Sloterdijk, Peter, x, 181, 182 Socrates, vi, vii, 3–8, 9n8, 10–21, 23–27, 28n12, 29n14, 30–37, 32n18, 36n27, 63, 233–235, 237–248 Solipsism, viii, 97, 100, 100n10, 110, 112, 113 Soul/souls, 5, 6, 8, 12–14, 19, 26, 48, 49, 67, 74, 77, 110, 139, 143, 148, 163, 217, 256 Speech, 24, 26, 55, 92, 105, 118, 160, 161, 163, 165, 170, 192, 198, 209, 248, 257 Stern-Gillet, Suzanne, 14 Stoner, x, 175–189 Strange/strangeness, 7, 22, 47, 50, 54–57, 118, 128, 153, 185, 256 Subjective/subjectivity, x, 53, 55, 56, 74, 84, 88, 100n9, 102, 109, 113, 113n30, 171, 176, 227, 228 Sublime, viii, ix, 90, 117–134, 205n15 Superficial/superficiality, 157, 159, 160, 162, 197

272 Index

Sympathetic imagination, 216, 225, 226, 236 T

Terror, 89, 112, 113n30, 118, 119, 123–126, 128, 130–132, 134, 139 Thematic development, 244, 263 Theory of mind, 163 Thick description, x Thoughtfulness, 258 Time, ix, 11, 29, 33, 40–43, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 62n3, 63, 66, 71, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 87, 90, 107–109, 111, 112, 118, 126, 135, 136, 142, 143, 153, 154, 157, 160, 163, 165, 171, 176, 177, 182–186, 195, 199, 205, 222, 239, 240, 244, 248, 255 Timon of Athens, vii, viii, 61–78 Tragedy, vii, 4, 7–10, 9n8, 94, 213, 219 Transcend/transcendent, 41, 49, 51, 63, 74, 85, 118, 120, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133 Transcription/transcriptions, 245–247, 257 Transgression/transgressions, 83, 128, 129, 131, 133, 139, 143 Truth, vii, 13, 17, 39n1, 55, 102–104, 110, 135–138, 143, 144, 160, 235, 256, 259 U

Unbelief, 218, 219

Understanding, xi, 9n8, 11, 12, 19, 20, 23, 26–28, 34, 35, 42, 47, 52, 93, 100n10, 101, 119, 120, 124, 126, 129, 133, 136, 146, 153, 155, 171, 198, 201, 218, 219, 223, 236, 237, 239, 244, 245, 256–258, 262, 263 Universal law, 82–84, 90 Universal rules, 231 V

Value/values, x, 14, 34, 63, 67, 81, 84, 89, 92, 107, 113n30, 135, 141, 170, 171, 181, 186–189 Vanity, 141, 161 Vice, vi, ix, xi, 6, 94, 167, 216 Virtue, vi, vii, ix–xi, 6, 9, 10, 19–37, 64, 76, 80, 84–86, 90, 92, 93, 95, 139, 145, 215, 216 Vocabulary, 106, 107, 194 Voicings, 113n30, 244, 263 W

Wallace, David Foster, viii, 72, 97–113 Way of seeing, x, 235, 238, 241, 245, 248, 249, 256, 263 Western canon, 136, 183 Wicked, 23, 166, 178 Williams, John, x, 175–189 Windmills, 20 Wise/wisdom, 4, 6, 8, 9, 13, 16–19, 21, 24, 26, 26n9, 30, 32, 33n22, 34, 35, 35n24, 135, 136, 145, 170 The Witch, ix, 117–134

 Index 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, viii, 97, 98, 100, 100n10, 101, 103–105, 110, 201n8, 229, 232, 235, 236, 238, 243, 247, 249, 252, 255, 257 Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 98 Wonder/wondering, 36, 47, 48, 95, 98, 118, 120, 121, 124, 126, 130, 132, 137, 218 Words, 7–9, 12, 13, 18n20, 19, 21, 26n9, 30, 35, 40, 43, 49–53, 57, 62n3, 65, 70, 72–74, 76, 86, 87, 93, 98, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108–110, 112, 123, 137, 139, 143–145, 162, 170, 176, 183, 199, 234, 237, 238,

273

246–249, 252, 253, 256, 257, 259–262 Work, vi, viii, xi, 3, 7, 8, 9n8, 14, 16, 18, 26, 34, 36, 49, 62n3, 65, 68, 70, 73, 78, 81, 82, 86–88, 99–101, 103, 105, 106, 111, 113, 118–120, 127, 144, 147, 152, 153, 156, 158, 159, 166, 167, 175, 180, 181, 185, 188, 189, 196, 202, 203, 213, 216, 227, 231, 232, 235, 238, 242, 245, 248–250, 252, 254, 255, 263 Writing/rewriting, viii, ix, xi, 74, 97, 105, 118, 120, 124, 125, 127, 130, 137, 149, 248, 250, 251, 253, 258, 263